Nothing is never nothing
A message
written for a bottle with no ocean
The body atremble, the mouth a desert
Sirens so far away but still the jaws grind
Not even the dogs know what dogs always know
Hands thrust into what becomes a salivating mouth
Birds fall, frozen, from the sky to unyielding ground
Words without meaning
Ask the women, they all will tell you
An utterance shuts out objective meaning
Oxygen sucks the life out of a lying mouth
Not even the shadow knits truth from facts
The first page missing, the first line begins
. . . but that was long after Night arose from nothing
Chaos,
Dark void of space
counter-intuitively comprising Earth, Wind,
Water, and Fire, the gods both spirit and being,
but their answers illusory, begging the question
Something from nothing, they say
yet nothing was ever made of something
Chaos,
the first something from which gods appeared,
and from them, everything in the known world
A vacuum that yielded only luminous flashes
yet gave birth to Night and her brother, Darkness
And when Night and Darkness coupled, Night
gave birth to Light and Day, Sleep and Death
Time killed Space, his father
Night, hidden away in her cave, made oracles,
listened to drums, the raucous timpani, the tzils,
the celestial bodies’ thrum, as her daughter judged,
moving the universe in the rhythms of ecstatic dance
Time dreamed, prophesied the future, drunk on honey,
oblivious to Retribution that chained him within Night’s cave
A blank book
no longer wholly incomplete
Ink now scratched over ruled lines
filled with fragments, a two-lane highway
Leaves plucked from a boll of cotton
A vignette of tin roofs and stucco shacks
A stalk of bronze maize braided to the dusty green
An artist’s eye
no better than that of a witness in a court of law
Each untrustworthy as the basis for a just outcome
The mere act of observation will change the observed
Time lies incognizant of retribution yet prophesying still
With neither bottle nor letter, the world spins in a lonely sea
https://www.setumag.com/2019/02/western-voices-donna-snyder.html?m=1
