matt pond PA

January 14, 2018

Silent Film Stars.

It is a silent film except for the crunching needle ice underfoot. Through the barren woods in jagged shadow and light, an amateur actor (playing the lumbering pioneer) struggles to lose track of a voltaic world.

Most puddles and ponds are fractured alabaster, embroidered with soil, rust-colored leaves, frosted twigs in mid-reach.

And yet, in the sunlight, a few bodies of water break from their frozen form. All glass. Where glimpses downward catch the face in full.

(Back in the mainframe, reflections are decidedly clearer than the objects they emulate, wayward visions that pretend to encompass and reveal more vitality than the real thing, through telephones that seldom sing.)

I throw rocks at my lazy twin. Maybe the splashes of my appearance will ring and intersect with the splashes of your appearance, the distortions forcing us to look up, to engage ginuwine skin, hair, mouth. Sure, another obfuscation of our multi-layered selves. But this one is close, as close as we’re going to get to that holy mountain of the mind.

An airplane above hides in the distance between light and sound. The engine howl echoes across the cold, under a descending sun. Liquid curls back into crystal crust. Meditative, shy winters.

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