Ouroboros
.
Desire returns, madness of the outcast
in the colonies, among the corridors,
library books like stone terminal weight,
like a monk praying inside his bones.
.
Scholar with dust on his glasses
squinting into the small type
dark little hollow of the card catalogue,
thumb smudges on the paper,
reluctant clutch stain of dead hands.
.
Robert Fludd put it all together
under one grand mosaic of philosophy.
I understand it while I write it out,
keep smelling the plague years
after I leave the building.
.
Skull mask and lovely flesh-marble scrolls,
heartache falling like an eyelash,
one shot free, lifting a head from hell-bent
geometries of an enfant terrible architect,
now a ghost wandering streets he dreamed.
.
The Specter of Brocken at Shady Grove
.
Stuck in the Takoma station,
flies and mosquitoes, crickets buzzing,
moth vain punching at a platform lamp,
nothing moving nothing.
.
The train that arrives has no destination,
no better reason to get on with reflections,
underground spiderweb machinations,
mist gathering at the cavemouth,
.
dreamers of gardens riding home in darkness,
station lights, eyes and layered faces,
flickering tunnels and black-out terminals,
and we awake at the bottom of wells
up which we rise into the night sky.
.
The Library
.
Reading room statues of the great eyes
that see nothing, books shuffled out
on conveyor belts, pneumatic tubes
coughing up rolled papers in triplicate.
Where is the poet laureate?
Where is the ghost in the institution?
Shades come and sit beside you
as you pour over pages yellow with age
in the nerve center, brain of the nation,
and it’s all here and just out of reach.
.
Douglas Cole has published six collections of poetry and the novel, The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. He is a regular contributor to Mythaxis, an online journal. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com/ .
North of Oxford 