451

In that tertiary night, not nothing and not sleep,
or cousin of sleep, not even death, but there, in that,
as it was in the uterus, before there was a world or uterus,
what will I dream? You think you think you know. And say,
like a guest in a familiar house, this room must be for rest,
an antechamber parallel to dark oblivion. But you’d be wrong.

The song, after it ends, resounds. A syllable reiterates
intention’s far off origin. Handprints fossilized in rock
commemorate the urge in us that finally endures.

But what about a thing that used to be, once was the res,
the thing, out of its thingness, prepositionless, alone,
and loneliness no thing—the stone returned to stone?

Adam Penna lives in a rich man's house fronting a magic spring and on the edge of a murder gorge. He is a father to 6, and a husband to 1.