Edge Of The Desert

 

Screen Sublime

Your limpid, glowing screen

A televisual mirror, reflecting what you want -or fear- to see

Simplistically, undimensionally substitutes

For Luna's sweet argent light.

She is but a rock slab, dusty and cold

Showing a hard, unfeeling face to the world

(And only about half of it, at that.)

Yet the squared-off static luminescence before you is but a dim pall,

Lacking the quirk of phases, the Dance of Shadow-On-Sphere;

As if concocted beauty and forced agreement could ever replace

Chaos and glorious discomfort!

Do your liquid crystals wax, wane?

Turn from new to sliver to gibbous, heedless of schedule?

If so, embrace the malfunction!

And fear not the E-clipse!

Sail upon that darkened, glassy sea

Let it swallow mistake after mistake

And light the current with bellwhether dreams

As it nudges you along.

-But don't forget to save

Lest you end up 

Right back

Where

Your limpid,

Dig on Digs

Spade into the dead dry earth

Carve out a scattered skeleton 

Of some great deceased beast

Clean, inspect, assemble

The puzzling jigsaw of inferred anatomy

Publish or perish the thought

Clothe mineral mesh with imagined flesh

As those from before stripped the real for a meal

And left bitter pills for the ground to swallow.

How kind of them to anticipate scarcity

And offer means to excavate for laxity,

Never guessing that the golden age

When manna rained and plenty reigned 

Was already tarnished bone-white;

And the wrongs were left

For light to right.