GERDA STEINER & JÖRG LENZLINGER

FALLING GARDEN

Inspired by the artwork of the same title by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger, the myth behind it, and a plea for ecosense.



By Lindsey Warren

 

 

Unfastened, the letters from

the berylspell.

The ground transfigured

from the eternity-permeable cloud

inhales spores:

the expiration rips the seal

named Secret, the one rinsed

with see-

through dark.

 

 

 

 

 

Foresight marrowed

through the sylvansystem,

I tread nerves.

One glossdate

looks for another;

what is anointed

sneaks underloam,

the ember I touch

a tense between

time

and the dewloaf

it discarded.

 

 

 

 

 

The gaseous mane

of the Lion ruffles

from intra-

star gales,

perhaps

it is the god

of you:

in a corner

crystal-keen

Ones With Glowing Hair

obliterate the lines drawn on body

after body

with a glance.

 

 

 

 

What is prescribed as time

pulses around my head,

 

from an orange-peel-perspective

the globe gathers,

arcs,

 

the sky a splash

I mirror,

gasping into my veronica.

 

 

 

 

Sleepstoned between apostrophes,

 

that agate of strangeness

throbs against my

eyelid, ba-

 

dum, ba-

dum,

 

to be recognized, feeled,

behind the iris-marbled

redemption.

 

 

 

 

 

Find me in the isomers

of pomegranate

dark;

I drink of myself

to wavy behavior,

the topsoil lives toward axons

crackling along the briar-toe.

 

 

 

 

 

Crumbmoon

above the brine of night;

the saints that

release my buttons

atone to the holly:  there are

circles to be unocked

beyond the devotions.

 

 

 

 

 

What does not speak aureoles

in the babble whirl-

pooled between stonemouths:

what goes beyond prayer-

words transubstantiates its

tongue

into smoke.

 

Something, still, in the heart-

quarry, waits

to be mined.

 

 

 

 

 

The coin night-

minted

turns its face toward fate,

celery roots juggle

the gaze into the braincloud

born of the god’s

astonishment

that he fashioned the incomplete world.

 

 

 

 

 

Between the Dog Star’s

thumb and forefinger

I was rubbed

over the trash can,

 

then dangled,

tenderized,

meat thrown away

a North I could not

reach,

 

refused my hunger,

refuse my realm.

 

 

 

 

 

In the shadow

cast by my sleep

constellations depart martyrs:

I howl in the parched sky.

 

 

 

 

 

Chalcedony-knuckles

on night’s westfeet

count the amens,

the stardom through

her skin elucidates the wind

behind her spine, my

body a tree

in it,

the goose, too, grace-

drunk where light and

shadow equalize,

shakes there.

 

 

 

 

 

My limbs touch chest,

hair, teeth,

surface pink.

I etch a character in the darkness

that passes over me in quiet.

 

 

 

 

 

Veins in the xanthic

minerals that herald you

tingle, engorge

 

with choir,

your hooves slip through

Venushairstone thoughts,

 

between the hands of leaves

I yellow upon

your name.

 

 

 

 

 

Voidspume:  there are

considerations stroked

on air,

iridescent in eclipse rims

hummingbird earth,

trees emerge from a mind

whose true face

no one has seen.

 

 

 

 

 

Welkinsize the paper

on which the moon wrote

elusiveness,

expectations now milk-

clean,

 

in the wash

televisions sigh,

give out,

 

dials shut their

candied-

angelica eyes,

 

whoever in this thistle-

down hemisphere awakens

turns the loops

songbirdly

of the rosary

chance-beaded.

 

 

 

 

 

The hearings tintinnabulate silvery,

caterpillar-parentheseesed,

 

the chorus of honeysuckle

carries the heaven

of the earth.

 

 

 

Located in the bodyforest

I, swaying seaweed

in your brain.

 

Each step toward you

assumes a vertebrae

notched by air

that tunes itself visible:

 

my right side blessed

by my left:

 

I persist the variable

extended along your muzzle

at telepathy-

length.

 

 

 

 

 

Caught in all the riddles

of one universe,

hero’d, the axis mundi yields

to ruby from the dung.

 

Through the timewise eyeglares

I am allowed to cross.

 

I pull at the claw

of sphynx space.

 

 

 

 

 

Phage-aligned, along my ribs

gels the witches’ butter

that feels for me the decomposition’s

soothsayer:

 

even the nightthunder river

trembles as it

silkens the futurestones.

 

 

 

 

 

One ear a heliotrope,

the other an enzyme enacted

snailward

as she freights

the comet of twilight over its

tailed geometries.

 

On the abacus

of the elderberry branch

I count the mouths open

toward the matins

 

stretched along

 

the delineation between

anima and dawn.

 

 

 

 

 

Melusine escapes her bath

to sense

her sees in the pre-word light,

 

her quantascales breed a Job

whose dreamgarbled mouth

cannot talk over

the incubus pledged

to his lip.

 

 

 

 

 

You, too, saint:

 

to you, stag:

 

and the transneuron wind

tears across you, orbit-

prayed, eon-full,

I earth myself as acorns

beneath the murmurmoss of the fallen

lauds you munch;

 

me, too, a saint,

 

ferns reach from my

clavicle,

starseeded,

in their ardors kindled only by loss

thread the fronds

that test your antlers.

 

 

 

 

 

You, transformation,

snaked beneath the testifying

fig, pour

 

yourself out;

prismed my hand

that remains light-

 

and-drop-

let-found:  earth

 

has been left

behind, the forest

in the sky, we cannot

 

help but

reach for it.

 

 

 

 

 

Sleuthed in this daybreak-quadrant,

the knock, knock against

the unanswered destiny:

 

when I witness the genuflecting

stars scrape their tusks

against the dankmatter,

the crystal

expands fertile, its eyes

motley, its perimeters

yeasted.

 

 

 

 

 

Gradients, fabric’d

scarlet, bittersweet, marmalade,

roaring from all curvature.

 

Where I come through the

tessellations of shade

on your hooves I,

sacrifice,

amber all over

worm-resurrection.

 

 

 

 

 

Genes pearl

inside impulse:

 

wept away is an

old world of frost,

 

dendrites balance

on a pig’s molar.

 

 

 

 

 

Lightlessness asks

for a name,

through the precognition of the amethyst

it is realized.

 

The roughmane bearded tooth

dispatches volts

that speak to the epoch that rumbled

before the Water Bearer velveted

the planet,

he himself unburied, in his

azure eyeball

I sprout.

 

 

 

 

The ghostberry

glutted with twilight

breaks against the earth,

an always offering,

mottling it with light-lacerations.

 

 

 

Strum the

gill-lyre:

 

accompaniment combs

the feeler-brights

 

and feeler-darks.

 

 

 

 

 

What darkness remains

decants,

 

I eat the gravity-

given,

 

the asterverb of my tongue

announces the spray

that sends cloudward the suds

 

of the soap-dish dawn.

 

 

 

 

 

Spun between toadstools,

the heavenslaw web:

 

upon the midrib of consciousness,

photon’d, aims

the tinselled beetle.

 

 

 

 

 

A branch bestows

a finger

gingered to the beyond,

 

an understanding

stipples through the hemoglobin

winterberry-celled.

 

 

 

 

 

Vespervowels vibrate in the rose quartz verse,

they did not

forget me.

 

The Furies

that hunt

my face

mistake it

for an eternity,

 

dig

and dig

the coronas.

 

What wants to be language

winds out

of my mouth,

little cursive bluejays,

nests in the forest’s

frontal lobe.

 

 

 

 

 

Around the pencil-tip

an intelligence winds,

darkness-

gathered, darkness-

loved:  hyphae writes itself

quick as miracle

through what survives debris,

garbage, forgotten language,

carboning the matrix

of blond thoughts,

 

pressing on underprescence,

exploding

in births.

 

 

 

 

 

Trapezed, the star

that thumbprints my vanish

into its voice sod-

toned

shuffles my sight

into diamond-formations,

I catch

each tremor from

their hundredthside.

 

 

 

 

 

Dawnstriates

doused, glyphosated, stalks fizz

in the corrupted rain, the silenced

cicadadrums announce

the breath held

through the invasion chromatin-

flanked, the field

slants to

its side.

 

 

 

 

 

Fog-threads, against

a wish of pollen,

in the boughs.

 

The poppy fulfills

its oracle,

the magnolia branch

comes-to

at the needing eye.

 

 

 

 

Whoever calls for me, the slime-

beatified, the bleeding-

heart-knot, whoever

places mine

among the names

must know

that the stipe blinks

through it, the greens do

not sieve through this lens;

whoever is night

 

eats my bones as an old

way of feeling,

thistledowned thoughts sniff

the mildewed icons,

darken under,

darken across.

 

 

 

 

 

The bloodsure

robin prays itself

on my tongue, over

 

the boarquill

borders;

 

crimson comes

through the oaks

and becomes them,

 

enacts its face, omnirayed,

through the curse

of discarded glass.

 

 

 

 

 

Loosen the clog of platelets

in the auroral drain,

here

I give it along

the hand of the eye

that sought me,

flush bears

the decree.

 

 

 

 

 

Horizon stretches

mud-navel’d,

my blue brother breathed

across it, starpenumbracolored his

emission, the constellated night the one

he created first,

loved much,

loved now;

 

the cardinal, zingly,

comes to where I grow

baobab-seed-bright,

 

brother, you touched

this earth on which

I will lie down.

 

 

 

 

 

At you,

my invisible,

I give gaze;

 

surrounded by

the thinking wood

we invoke each other’s

transparencies

 

as a frog chants the moon-

released halo,

you lean against idea,

lichens hear your ripples

propagate the cherub’s

tetramorphic sapphire.

 

I alleviate my tangle

of veins:

they hurry toward

their heart.

 

 

 

 

Down from the birch carbons storm,

sprawl rootward,

 

ants metabolize them

into their image,

 

eat it

in worship

beneath the clover that are the stars

that open like hands

 

in the stratosphere

of the inky cap.

 

 

 

 

 

Ozoning, the owl’s

snowy longing,

branches falling-star

through it to touch

the pilgrim’s forehead.

 

Mosaic of apricot shades

for the benediction,

for the god;

 

my name blooms sideways

from my lips.

 

 

 

 

 

The voice uttered

before death’s

homed in the emerald

talks over what

the bird bones knit,

I hear it

step over facets,

over the axis,

press presencely on the genius

of the mood ring sky.

 

 

 

 

 

Blueberry-smeared

I rise again,

collect my fruiting bodies

and go creeping:

 

my hand pours itself

through the thorns,

gleaming is

the light of lactose.

 

 

 

 

 

Found among the cattails, the ancestors:

 

each hour a parlor

in the house they make, ghosts tune

a tooth to the gum-drop-trail that attends

on the believing through the

believed; purple draws

 

its flower in latitudes; the dandelion hands

of the Nothing helixed

in the amino acids caress

their image in the remaining face, the one

that prays on the cardinal hearing

for the world

in the thinking forest.

 

What divines,

stag,

endures bodied,

exchanged between

lights.

 

 

 

 

 

I did hear

the beehive arrange

the future,

 

the elf cups open

their blue clothes,

 

I did hear the

convalescing red dwarf

strain its glowings,

keep them,

 

then discharge them over

 

the beetles of the departed

that feel root to root

for awareness, I heard

 

the darkening over

the nightbones, my

own, and the blood

that lived there

last, I did hear it

 

say.  This.

 

 

 

 

 

I eat the sugar soot

from the fire stroked

In cat-tail brush;

 

I carry the water

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