XIV. La Tempérance

XIV. La Tempérance

Another discovered ossuary—Its neutralizing blessing was delirious

Since the afternoon, and dictated instead that food be offered—
If you wind in the strings, which strike gratingly against a sash; the silicon
Scattering a dirt floor with embers, you impend a supercontinent, Gondwana,
Where some notion of a ragged line winces to the tread of sintered carbonado
Rolling in streams—Or, wild trees, the class of fruiting conifers above the tree line—

Podocarpus elatus, particularly, the plum pine, a flute wood—Before tree lines,
When land masses arrived in their current positions—Earlier,  we were delirious,
Or so the Cretaceous bubbles in amber approximate; but black diamonds, carbonado—
We become the image with which we identify—Formed from an impact strike, offered
Up by hydrogen-rich interstellar space, from two sites—Hidden in the silicon-rich
Mantle of its own ruins in Ubangui and Bahia; separated by plate tectonics of Gondwana

The southernmost supercontinent—Why, not Laura and laurel, but Laurasia, Gondwana
Two briefly presented segments recognized by castaways?  How do these invisible tree lines
Circumscribe flightless birds, plum pines—Lines where you and I were first limed—Even silicon
Consolidated in stalks of Bermuda grass? Threading through the rough with bleeding legs, the delirious
Present company is relevant to the context of solitude, broad-ranged, or relictual—The carbonado,
Whose hardness has broken a hydraulic press, which of ourselves is not discussed, an offered

Rarity as something petrified—Lulled into contentment on shifting continents, yet the offerings

Thrown in the face of alterity are much cooler without the hearth and baked-in ash, the Gondwanan

Floras sumptuously printed long after their voiceless demise by shifting atmospheres; carbonados
Disrupted the proper place of surface isotopes of carbon; even before, a stardust’s fatal ride, tree lines
Extending from the orbit of Neptune mostly burnt up its repository of comets—All but delirious

Cosmological references to the present—Not bending to secular authorities, for the amorphous silicon          

Denied a malformed rodent, or cows straining renal calculi on dry pasture; grass consists of silica
Two-percent by weight, and entrapped otherwise like Narcissus—Crystalline slough is a poor offering
Integrally bound to connective tissues and bone—Each going about inner division, perhaps delirious

In each other’s arms, we stumble on the doorstep of conversion—Here, a slowly rafting Gondwana
Replete with supersized dragonflies and ground moss cover proves desire creates destiny, and tree lines
Where Chile's native forests were once joined with those of Queensland—Or where carbonados

Smelt the hardpan, or Phaëton mislaid a chariot; in either case, the location is broken up—Carbonados
Lack the arrangement of diamonds, yet they make up for their fewness gathered in mantles of silicon.
Returned pages from a book; such is the provenance of black diamond by spectral analysis, tree lines
Narrative complexity can not only fathom, with print-outs of constitutive elements, but recreate—Offerings
Of the kind, with tainted carbon good for incising drill bits, or characterized taxa of southern Gondwana

We stand at the very source of knowledge—In the life and performance of turf grass with silicon.

Coming into a manicured lawn, self-consciously concerned with pulled tea, not silicon or carbonados
After sorting so much gravel and tree lines at this latitude—In your hand, I dream of placing an offering,
Delayed by shaky confidence, to rival Gondwanan paleoflora from the recently demarcated tree lines.