For, once sensed, once dreamt, invisible forces will conflate,
No longer stars glimpsed, but a galaxy, an aggregate
Of influence that graces breath’s shore and washes us through
Death’s gate to that Moment the seed of all old things made new.
~
Is there anything vaster, deeper or more resonant
Than the act of looking? Its text most would be hesitant
To meditate on as anything more significant
Than the stimulating distraction of a passing glance
Or the utilitarian signals between two ants.
But Raimonde felt that the looks the woman and he had shared,
Mere over-the-shoulder and through-a-window sparks, had snared
Him and her back into a mesh of eternal contract,
Not of the flesh, involving further physical contact
Beyond the grazing glancing blow and blow-off they had just
Known, but pact between souls to remind each other they must
Surrender all inner attitudes to assume the form
*
Conscious and active, expansive though circulatory,
Like that of keen dogs modulating, within blind households,
The cadences of games unnamed, of secrets left untold;
Dogs each with two eyes more like the all-forgiving Sun’s one
than like human eyes
~
Hard to relate second-hand what Raimonde believed he saw
In a flash: one can only hope to translate it from raw
Vision to a literary approximation’s hints
Of it, slower flashes tinted, tainted with fingerprints
Of the sketcher – just as any human bears those of his
Or her God.
(from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 