| Here where all the
peculiar strands cohere
mind, plant, animal, mineral, machine,
fire, a conflagration erupting
like lesions on the faceless disk of the moon
a spreading fire
that travels through the gullet
of a snake
flicking out its tongut
to taste what has never been
reptilian snowflake melting
perpetual cataclysm
of the quiet ongoing bang we all fear
and build TV, tabloids
and talk radio to blunt
a mindlessness
that cannot say anything
for fear of undoing itself.
Sidewinding between
wormwood
and white roses
we recognize this newness
as ourselves
feel the tip of our tail
coil toward the tasting tongue
and know it has been this way
forever, the circuit completing itself
light blossoming as dawn coheres
on white petals
with just a streak of red
toward the center.
Robert Oberg serves
as director of the Olney Street Group, an independent poetry workshop
he founded in 1982. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Cottonwood,
Blue Unicorn, Green Fuse, Commonweal, Albatross, Cross Currents,
Chrysalis Reader, Worcester Review and other magazines. He was the
winner of the 1991 Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize, and has had poetry
included in a recent Oxford University Press anthology of world
poetry, featuring writers from the fourth century to the present.
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