25 April 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 1

Apocrypha #9

But her skin carries tatters. And from the window, from beneath, fossils press against the surface of the plains. The rock is moved upstream through an intricate system of pulleys and flesh. Those who are cast out. Those who bleed.

I would tell you this directly. I would assemble a presentation of Polaroids and morals, protract the particular angles of her refraction. Serve canapés and arias and make allusions to a definition rooted in shape: the deltoid, the ellipse.

Lacking an alphabet to appropriate this flexure (which is where she maunders): a fable whose protagonist is light, the outskirts of an oral tradition, these are anxieties indigenous to our region.

Arrested by steel, we heap salvation on the backs of unseen figures. The parallel. The symmetric. A tint through the sky to acknowledge this distance.

It is a practice of escape. We will harvest what we can from the ruins and follow the river when the sky is purple. Like us, she moves in increments. A refugee from the heat world led astray by photons and lungfish. A vision of magnetic intensities, I have outgrown this tourniquet.

To damage time is not an intentional act though it is often accompanied by piano, portrayed as interference, dismissed (in photographs) as over-exposure. There is no rule of threes here. There is a bridge. And there is an island.

If I am to describe this migration (over land, water, time) I will need the proper tools: a tiffin box filled with bones and tortoise shells. If I am to record: it is the dream that carries intention. The sudden utility of (dis)ease.

At the periphery lies the visible. The smaller realm of sight exists inside the unseen. It has always been hard for me to distinguish between progress and memory. The membrane here. Is it visible? What is visible? This is the naming of ghosts.

About the author:

Richard Froude was born in London and raised in the Westcountry. He has lived in the US since 2002 and is the author of the chapbooks Tarnished Mirrors: Translations of Charles Baudelaire (Muffled Cry), The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy (Catfish), and The Passenger (forthcoming from Minus House). More work can be found in a number of online and print journals. He lives in Denver.

For further reading:

Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 8, No. 1, where "Apocrypha #9" ran on April 25, 2008. List other work with these same labels: poetry, prose poem.

42opus is an online magazine of the literary arts.

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