Saturday, February 24, 2018

Sunrise with Sea Monsters

by Joel Giroux


What am I but your own 
inhuman eye, blind to all 
but the red vision I am 
and am not, surrounded by 
an amber world only periphery — 
visible only from above, below; 
my ochre centre rattling the crux 
of a world you wish did not exist 
but expands, still, like a gas, 

an ephemeral non-thing, 
a transparent lid lifted 
by a blackened hand 
to reveal a red iris, a disease 
of vision bled into a broiling landscape 
that lacks the utter nightmare 
of me, gleaming like the rotten ideal 
of your dulled, inevitable horizon. 

Even in God’s bloody eye 
I don’t exist, I do 
in yours, and in the gold glare 
that borders my face 
growing slowly, approaching you 
from out a darkness disguised 
as everything the sun sees 
but does not speak of, ever 

out of immortal fear.