T. Zachary Cotler

A field of thistles, díscharging concentric waves of negative theology, on a mountainside, 2010, May 23rd (is Whitsuntide), would certainly suffice as a source of the ever-obtainable not enough sought state of subtle shock if he’d close this computer and walk up the summit road until the sea’s in view. And maybe in the southeast wind, in broadcast waveform data therein, microsystems stocks he has been checking, clicking all day like an addict gambler, will float up until red numbers cross the black horizon into green—two redtail hawks                                float up on a thermal— maybe even make some money while you’re up here— ask why is each second so charged with a feeling of living in freak Götterdämmerung days of live free radical notion or die into negative white on white sun pride burning away, but equally charged with utopian headlong longevity crowing— why can’t I be steady? Why is my only balance built of collisions and cancelings-out of such sharp spike-of-chaos moods? Field of thistles, red and green. Fields of dollars, thistles, solidi and yen and rand and rupees blowing off the curve of land.

Raking lace at the fringe of the tide, raking with fingers the English and cutwork and French of the froth, with the negative black dwarf sun in her eye echo eye mirror eye, she, taking his fingers, English and Hebrew bones, bobbin bones, to lace with her own, said love, if you like, but abyss of light.

On a brain-gray day, he lay on the hill-slanted solar array with a southern exposure, toes in the clover mixed in with what are these pentagrammatic sprays of pinnate leaves. No clover here has four leaves: to each one he says I have seen you before in the nuclear hazard symbol and then again (as again slants backward) before that, as nothing but clover when childhood was not yet over and everything was symbol therefore nothing was.

Tragedy began with a dance in the guise of goats , said Aristotle.