|
Mental Status Exam
-Self-Administered at Mount Diablo
Climbing into a wind-hollowed cave,
I know better than to desecrate the sandstone
with more catastrophe. The season’s first rain
agitates an audience of opossums and jackrabbits
oscillating the summit like a tourniquet. Unkempt
as it may be, the Sierra Nevada (snow-capped
to the east) won’t unearth the catharsis
unless the lowland says so. Salamanders, tangential
while rambling the nuance, swallow larvae at will,
only for the paradox of prey versus predator
to coerce exoskeletons against the ecosphere.
I am stoic for a short second or two,
pacifying my hallucination’s half-life
before it spawns another doppelganger
out of sodium and neon. The mountain, not knowing
the worst is yet to come, explains how heliotropic stamen
reproduce anomalies without the suture
of outsiders. Such is short-term memory, euthymic
that a tarantula chases demigods at each autumn molt,
and black-tailed deer, ubiquitous as a costume,
are satiated by the buckwheat of an underbrush. But where
no flora, no fauna can fall too affectless, I laugh
at my masquerade, half of me tactile on a ridge,
the rest a tapestry warped to the riptide that was.
|
|
