Daniel Adler
Under a Waxing Gibbous (2022)
When indigo falls like a caudal appendage,
The plane fails, and there is the rapid implosion
of difference.
The plane is infinite;
you can start again.
How many eons does it take for rival courtiers
Who spilled each other’s blood,
to become kin, to share it?
If I become a dog and can’t find a tail,
Do I have to fall back on being human?
My face is an haecceity,
A Daniel to go
the product of early snow,
these genes, my feels.
Tonight, when the full moon
passes into our shadow, what will end
besides that moment?
There will vanish a sense of knowing who I am
And a man in Sicily, in the town of Segesta,
After pondering the involutions
Of a ruined mosaic
Will hold his naked wife.