Forthcoming from Unsolicited Press, August 2024.
Noctegeneis
I.
In this burned out forest, amongst the char pillars,
I make tribute to the ash with my urine.
II.
Sweeping back and forth, I wonder
what the ash was before the fire came
and broke that thing off from its form,
before I could have peed into it with such
moral impunity.
III.
The saddest thing I can imagine it having been
is a bird.
5.
I imagine how nature would evince the pain
of losing a bird: as a drop in temperature
or the sudden pause of a nearby rabbit; a regret
that sweeps through a distant unfired forest, causing
a single leaf on each tree to fold down the middle
exactly like a lonely hand trying to applaud the universe
for letting the bird go.
7.
I run out of urine. The ash is barely wet.
The parts of it that glisten as I shine a flashlight on them
don’t look like the remains of a bird or a person
or a tree. They look like someone has grabbed
a rock of pure darkness and crushed it into dust
and sprinkled it with small drips of moonlight
from which one supposes strange mushrooms
will someday rise, puncturing that layer of darkness
as all things do in the heavy world.
Inner Sanctumoaniousness
The mourning never ends. Once more I trot
the canine edges of the teeth along the shore. Breath
of snake!, overlooked wonder,
I command you into this poem! Yee lonely speck of
consciousness: No one ever thinks of what it feels like to be
breathed on by a snake.
Like a twig afloat on a sea of dirty towels, the feeling inside me,
laid out on the countertop of my soul, filleted and sweating in the
humid air. And yet, wonder eludes
the twirling gearhulk of my heart.
I bake a loaf of bread at ninety-eight point six degrees.
It is the worst loaf of bread I have ever seen.
When the Imperfect House of Your Body Contains the Knowledge of Perfection
Even then the joy inside you
remains on course to witness
the everlasting angle of its own ascent,
the self of the body
therefore always on the verge
of destruction, the self of the soul
always on the cusp of rising
from its cocoon. Unlike the worm
which gives up its body to become
wings for the butterfly, the soul
gives up its wings to become the body
of the universe. There is no despair,
there is metamorphosis, sacrifice,
expansion of the sacred edges,
a place where two roads converge
in the mind. On one walks a horde
of drunken angels, returning home
from celebrating God; on the other
a troop of sober demons
returning from the sulfur forges
where light is made. Life
to the angels is television, to
the demons it is toil. As they meet,
traditions break: love
ceases to be cleft into good and evil,
your darkness stops weeping,
it no longer bleeds its wonder
into the darkness of the other. There’s
no despair. There is what you
have forgiven, drive, purpose,
the half open hands on the back
of the soul grasping clawishly at
the air, the flowers they will become
when at last the body has risen.
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Philip Jason’s stories can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Hawaii Pacific Review, Palette Poetry, and Indianapolis Review. He is the author of the novel Window Eyes (Unsolicited Press, 2023). He has collections of poetry forthcoming from Unsolicited Press and Shanti Arts Press.
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