Controlled Hallucinations

X.

Always too late for unmaking,

an image passes through my eye

writhing in memory’s digestion,

conforming its shape to temporary norms.

With it the whole body shivers.

Skin is also a photograph.

And this photo unravels

in the story of older light-shapes,

when grass colored differently

and clouds did not rush

from the frame.

If the eye is a series of rooms

with changing dimensions

how to tell if this is still the bedroom—

the walls repainted,

that reliable rectangle of sky

now a circle,

the fixed image just captured

unable to settle on its film.

XVI.

Each house is built on a hill

sloping toward a growling unseen river,

ascending toward the lowest-reaching clouds.

Surrounding the house, high walls

scrawled in half-songs,

each composed in another’s blood

and half-dreams

and other unrecognizable things.

Which view have you chosen

for the bedroom?

Which gravity will you follow?

XXII.

I dimly remember

being

water

running from the gables.

I am sorry

but

the leaves

were on fire.

Their trees

on fire.

The grass

and, within,

our buried toes

on fire.

I am sorry

but

all summer

they had pleaded

for rain

together

in one voice

and my open hands

come with a flood of caveats.

XXX.

I fell into the Grand Canyon and broke

the rose in my eye

that I’d carefully planned to see through

when encountering such obvious

illumination.

XXXI.

“I was like a tunnel. Birds fled from me.”

- Pablo Neruda

In these small, broken lines

a thirst for order,

a gathering of original elements,

a house of words to hold them,

a kind of following—

the bird ahead of me moves left

then I move left

then down

and a hope

that all flight is logical

and safe

even without fixed destination.

Even without your small, broken kiss

I am like a tunnel

confined by light.

John Sibley Williams is the author of six chapbooks, winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the Pushcart and Rumi Poetry Prizes. He has served as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and Publicist for Three Muses Press and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Book Publishing. Some of his over 200 previous or upcoming publications include: The Evansville Review, RHINO, Rosebud, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, and Poetry Quarterly.