Horizon

by Susan S. Keiser

Wings sweep over sun-splashed golden grids, against
a glowing cage that stretches east from Venice to Knidos.
These are early days
and if they oscillate in harmony, energy quanta
conformed to the edges of a single thought,
that thought is marked for infinite illumination;
we may find ourselves sinking/we've always been sinking
into its hidden contours, casting nets of silvered photons
in mockery of lesser light.

If no objections arise
when the pale moon weds Helios on such mornings,
or if improbable planes of
simultaneous reflection defy customary astronomies,
I don't think we will be at all surprised.

You know
it has always been that way,
and from any unsafe distance
we may choose to graze the Alps with curious fingers,
graze peaked edges grown solid,
our fingers tracing/racing,
tracing maps of tools and time on stones that stand
in now and former temples that have weathered well.

Of these, it was said, we would mark out truth,
ore wrested from subterranean forays into
strip-mined culture, its subtext forged from
illusion and the burnished metal of ancient myth,
its finite edges brittle and suffused with saffron
and irony.

Knowing this, we stand at precipice,
we stand at a high, stony lookout, over seas of
ancient treachery and faulty memory,
wing-fanned air, gentle against cheek and lash,
swaying in a silence made of wind, wave and breath;
and we look into the glittered distance, straining to know,
toward a vanishing point we seek when weary, for rest,
or perspective, for assurance.

In that sun-splashed morning,
nets of silvered photons cast outside our idea of it,
we look into the distance,
unblinded by simultaneous reflection,
we look to discover

no horizon,
no horizon,
there is no horizon
at all.