Two Poems
by Matthew Burnside
ALL OF TOMORROW’S RUST IS ELECTRIC
If in a dog’s eye a universe you find, follow it. Some secondhand sun to pocket. Chase what may a warmblink brings that knows no harm. Starflung, as nighttail is to twitching. As harp is to ear, ripe is to rind. As sin is to singing. Or how lovely the longingly of rain’s pretending, leaden even by some iniquity of clouds. Or, say, some fulsome feather swerving. Someone else’s sky of grief that you drag home whole &, in your teeth’s attics, furnish with formidable joy
YOUNG ESCHER RECONSIDERS THE HUMAN HEART AS A SERIES OF TESSELLATIONS UNSPOOLING TOWARD ETERNITY
Baby Escher sits disentangling the beveled edges of his pet mirrors, caressing their convexities. Counts the reflections that slither slipshod through the apertures of his peripheral drift. “What pretty symmetries you have!” he says, gathering them all into a terrarium for playtime, where he will use a Möbius strip for a rattle, Penrose spiral as pacifier.
Teen Escher, sporting an isosceles mohawk, clicks his lighter at the parabolic silence inside a keyhole. Contemplates the tyranny of time’s passage afforded through such a thin sliver’s portal while squeezing swans through the eye of an accordion. Cancels his date to ponder the loneliness of every parallel line fated never to meet each other.
Old Escher gambols through the garden of his precious polyhedra, counting ivies stippled, dripping drunk with despair under a mollusk-pink cubist rainfall. Dreams of spheres, skulls, sunken cathedrals.
Dying Escher considers the too-many names of the numinous: Chameleons in outer space, shadows slowdancing inside crystals, the spectral howling laughter of a prism. Everything eventually chiseled into being by love’s lithe lithographers, emblazoned like snowcrash. All the hands meant to hold. Every mouth made for singing. Infinity, at last, braided.
Matthew Burnside is a writer.
