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    Nested Masks

    The center may seem near

    Waking to the sun a cudgel bludgeoning
    front-desk clerks and taxi drivers crumbling all
    to tenuousness even stone can’t remedy
    Impossible heat making concrete sweat and crack
    driving the most progressive town elders
    back under thatched roofs

    Waking to the inescapable mythological fall
    and rounded pyramid watchtowers on the white road
    unprecedented forms symmetry insisting upon green

    Steep white staircase like the skirt of an obstinate god
    animated by a voice at the top a face speculated
    by the crook of tree roots and the billowing
    behind closed eyes

    The center may seem near

    But masks nest within masks
    The face of every principality contorts
    and retreats to centerless chagrin

    Appearance is always folly here



    The Dance of the Million Veils

    Arrayed in the cosmic gossip of ornament
    civilization caresses as it thrusts upon us

    The dance of the million veils
    No culmination nor consummation
    only unfolding and arousal

    Wherever it withdraws
    the vacuum teems with angels
    with every divine mongrel
    we suspected ourselves to be

    Sphinx Satyr Gryphon
    None any more elaborate a fiction
    than the disguises we devise to enter
    this hurricane of specters

    and stare into the polyamorous eye
    of a great if perverse father
    who pleats curbs gutters ledges to leaves
    folds the veins of leaves to faces
    assigns the faces to saints and dragons
    and opens their mouths in awe or just to sing away
    a thousand years of rainwater

    Even the crushed leaves on honeycomb stones
    muster to lithe or haggard faces
    and cohere into characters

    But the apocalyptic tableau
    where the final ghost removes its final mask
    and unveils the one true name
    is just another plaza on a titillating meander

     

    Colin Dodds is the author of Another Broken Wizard, WINDFALL, and The Last Bad Job, which Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” His book-length poem, That Happy Captive, was a finalist for the 2015 Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award and the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, and his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semifinalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and daughter.

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