Tableaux Poem by Chris Robideaux

A bird rushes by the window:
Quick shadow through the room.
In the dream it was crucial that we chose
Just the right products from the
cosmic grocery store;
Now I think of those Neros with no art
To theirs and Rome’s demise;
Now the cats patter slowly to no tomb
And the wolf to no cave;
The inglorious ignorance of this calamity
Hides its vestiges less and less adroitly
But one day we will wake to a freedom
Concave and brilliant and edifying.

Gravity stokes the fire’s wheel
And plumbs the grand fiction as real
Its marble fables of postulated atoms
Its moons half-formed,
Its warming apocalypse
Taps at our door like furnace tics.
A bird in Spring snow
Darkens the tableaux
Upon each fractal leaf’s surmise;
The delicate hum of a colony’s orchard
Wings no spirited sting
Of ample conflation.
So?
We discover each mote of freedom
Upon the ready air: bird is free and
Has no written law.
The law of life lies in his breast
And wings that receive no grassy applause.
Shaken beneath this white deposit,
Our fibrous understanding posits
That the fallen angels are we who once flew
Where petulant, we cut off our own wings –
Or, allowed them to be.
We, the cut angels envy the distracted
Floaters of this groaning sphere.
Floridas of ice rapid come near,
At the feet of ogres who bring spoilage and fear
To every last crevasse and lea.
We give the winds over to new sight
Speaking of the ancient rise
Where pirates of nuisance and noisome debauch
Sunk on their own ships of avarice
Will have no future watch: saved it will be
For those who fought.

Where cloistered gluttony has had its day
Laid low amongst the ice-bell fray;
Where endearing histories, numenous,
Ravaged, echoing in the strata
Where the snow-queen’s ice blooms
In envious strands, her white hair frozen
Across the grievous land.
Where we may understand all languages:
Light language, magnetic quasar colloquy,
Formless photonic planetoid creeds:
Motility through time-space transom,
The gassy edges of being,
The local group phoned home,
The creatured dust paws a bone
In the hieratic trust,
Then sleeps.