Photography by George Cassidy Payne
Sitting on a stone bench
in a lost city- a bench that
somehow concentrates
photos with the addition of mass,
I find a pen in my book bag, next to
a pack of soft contacts lenses, a portable
solar Uniden cell phone charger and a
tie-dyed Bic lighter
that almost worked,
I remember an unsurpassable
truth and watch it submerge; it
went all the way
down, between the tides where
otters
go to be left alone.
Yet it also wanted to be spoken,
if only on the edges of my fingers,
those inventions of Mother Earth
that evolved to survive the blight,
they wanted to come back to the surface
to catch their breath, with tails and whiskers extending
like fine mycelial fans,
or curved fishing knives,
ropey
siphonophores glistening south
of the palm’s
sheltering bay.
The Broken Spear Vision 