by Adam Cornford

is a great primitive wasp
grandmother to ant-demons
and seraphic artisans of honey
she who crawls and leans
with a dancer’s delicacy
over the concentric crystalline
hyperspheres of reality

with compound-possibility eyes

and elongate metallic body
her abdomen sharp as a pen-nib
is charged with indelible ink
the tiny silvery eggs
she injects into our brains
we the ape-worms almost
as soon as we are born

So grows in each one of us

a sinuous sentence of reflections
that eats its way through leaving
its branching syntax tunnels
it devours in the proper sequence
the red lumps of the passions
until the drawn-out collapse
of the wrinkled and vacated skin

and the new imago emerges

from the mouth unfolding immense
wings transparently veined
with recursive awareness of selves
She pauses in silence before
flying gracefully away
toward the next universe over
its mind-flowers alight without

the cannibal mirror of words

for Bryan Serba—another crazy with the same notion
(English version by the author)

by Adam Cornford

The sky of April has collapsed / a bombed overpass
sodden cement-gray clouds have fallen onto the city

Now fog drifts are driven across below tower windows
tattering / moving slowly by like exhausted refugees

past the still skeletal birches and maples in the park
no birds / only the tuneless sound-slush of traffic

and the polyphonic hollow whine of distant machines
between blank staring cliffs of high-rise apartments

Elsewhere more northern fog is seared by detonations
rocket-shriek tearing the faces off cities like this one

while the wind-dragons wreathing the globe twist in agony
as slow heat stifles the air with bloated swags of vapor

Far below them cars slide to and fro in their routine tracks
like the lies we are still told by the Tar God’s priesthood

the lies of day by day pretending / as our days diminish
as the futures we were promised dissolve and boil away

by Albert Glover

        Sunday morning at  U. U. Church
                 Grasse River Players
                               were in service

           with a readers’ theater potpourri of bits & skits
                         many flavored and marvelous  for the congregated
               who were many and various as well.

       The pews in our Church are spacious and solid,
              comfortable as hardwood can be,   
                         carved and contoured to accept the body
                                  support it;
                                                      two rows in front of me
                    a couple, he on the aisle
                          she to his left, nothing remarkable

                                                   until a player began to sing
                      Joni Mitchell’s  “both sides now”
                                    and I sensed some energy light up in them,
                          a recognition, or a memory perhaps –
                                         something felt.

         He put his left arm around her shoulders
                   to hold the biceps of her left arm strongly, so
                          as the song went on, she slowly softened in
                    to his grasp until she laid her head upon his shoulder.
      Sunlight shone through amber glass directly then upon her hair
                                 which had been nondescript but now blazed
                        like burnished brass and radiated such beauty
                   that even the sound of song was swallowed up
                              by the light of human love made thus divine
                      by context and circumstance
                                        to open my thick heart at least
                           this public show of miracle & wonder.

            “Suddenly there is God,” and then
                 after that, as the music fades,
                        she lifts her head back onto her own shoulders;
                   and he, reluctant to let go,
                              must in time admit that
                                     eternity had given them back to time.

by Albert Glover

Hearing “breath” as “spirit”
as in Batch’s hymn
“Breathe on Me, Breath of God”

long after reading Olson’s “Projective Verse Essay”
and later John Coltrane’s 1957 statement
about his “spiritual awakening”

(more than twenty years after
Bill W’s: “I felt lifted up, as though
the great clean wind of a mountain top

blew through and through” which itself
echoes Lawrence: “Not I, not I, but the wind
that blows through me!”)

provided plenty of precedent
for anyone, as I was that Spring,
alone, down, and out

on the front lawn of my
No. Count. home waiting for
something to blow me away,

like the breeze which eventually did come
to release me from
much of what I owned.

And then all through the 90s
after my initiation into what
I’d only read about or

“understood” in some mental manner,
the idea of it became embodied
and autonomic as my heart beating.

The Source was present outside of me
until recently, at the Appleton golf course
in retirement sitting on a bench

under red pine boughs and allowing
the familiar air to reach me,
I felt the warmth of sun

absolutely equivalent in primacy
to breath and breeze
as I had come to know them.

Instantly the Source was inside also,
the same Source which I’d known
out there was equally

in here    complete
and wholly
singular.