#52 Fri (8/12/22) - [OW] the objects of dreams

My mind is haunted by objects, images, impressions;

The labyrinth, the clepsydra, the hourglass, the chessboard.

 

A secret longing, an unstated desire;

A game of nights and days played on a checkerboard

pieces, black and white, arrayed in line for battle,

a game of kings or gods, played on a table...

 

A need that remains unfulfilled, something stolen, 

but from long ago.  Unremembered, 

but still a vague awareness that something is missing...

 

There are some the things that appear to me, 

objects that populate my notion of eternity, and space.

 

The chessboard peopled with abstract kings and knights

wars fought on a checkerboard of nights and days;

 

A white sepulchral obelisk, rising in tiers

like the ziggurat at Ur or the Tower of Babel,

pointing skyward toward the black heavens,

bedecked with stars, on a reticulated plain

of onyx and ivory.

 

The music of the spheres, the Antikythera mechanism, an orrery. 

A clock in the tower of the Cathedral at Salisbury that

has been meticulously measuring the moments since 1386. 

The perpetual pendulum ratcheting its escapement

as the eons unwind.

 

The plan for the Gardens at Versailles.

The labyrinth at Chartres.

The prisons of imagination of Piranesi, dark scaffolds 

and arches, Catherine wheels, chains and medieval cranes.

 

The Gormenghast that exists in the mind of Mervin Peake.

The Great Wall of China, but Kafka's too.

The Libraries of Alexandria and Ashurbanipal.

The Chinese bridges built entirely without nails.

 

Las meninas.

The Quincunx.

The piazzas of De Chirico.

The screenplay of Dernier L'anee a Marienbad by Robbe-grillet and the painting within the movie by Alain Renais. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting.

 

The Magic Square and the steganograph.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

sator, arepo, tenet, opera, rotas 

hypnerotomachia poliphili



 

 



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