The Albanian Canto

July 2022

I

Blue skies shimmer

Half border, all soft

And into the pillow lands we go.

II

Skyborn cotton seas

We leave behind.

III

The grid of the possible

Stretches laconic beneath.

Ancient secrets, modern woes

Make furdid journey-crossings.

IV

Glitter-castle crumbles

Into the purple slate of the sky

Its fire lights reappear

Second after second.

V

Floors wrapped in golden foil

And dusty redden rooves. 

Between the lacuna of views

Hearts jump, minds lurch 

And before sweet seconds have passed 

In the shadow peril of a holiday gone wrong 

The Greek has found his footing. 

VI

As soft as the touch of your skin

Meet ripples recede

Into bluegrey depths

The suede of salt 

- a boat cuts through

hoisted up onto limpéd metal legs

It flies close to flat, quivering grounds

The peaks recede

Lots in colours of air 

Wrinkled cloths draped over

Stony cheek. 

VII

The crags of a broken place

Boulder-hewn, peer up over the skyline

A dark, rich mass

of cuttlefish bo

rn.

Twinkles, once eerie

Now sing with the music

Arabesque, featureless fires

The riffs of abandon

Of a familiar mystery

Of a known unknown.

This is a warm country

A heartfelt country

A place where I can go

And toe the line between angst and lost

delusions of a time that was never mine.

I find moments, that peer through

Golden sun-sparkles on granite, littered patios

Pieces of a strange substance

That float in the Styx.

I find, on my back,

Enveloped in the eversoft waters

A quiet. A quiet that has not known me

Since I changed my name to Progression

Since I absolved and abstracted away, and now

When I lie in the sun and dream erotic dreams

The beads on my forehead are not trepid, but bliss

The shakes are mistakes, and not victories

My resolve is lateral, latent, yawning sideways

Across lazy hills

That plunge out of leary cityscapes

It is a cool sip

From the plumbox

It is a depth, a life,

A mental wander to an Atlantic,

Buried under virii.

VIII

Blue and yellow

Are the first colours. 

The liquid shade

Makes body, strength, growth 

Into softness. 

It dissolves away mountains

Buries rocks beneath sight

XI

The perfect curve

Of molten iron 

Complete, in the sky

Looks over the great sameness. 

With tiny traces, white flies

Skip across the water. 

The tree 

Cowers back 

From the yellowgray castle cliffs

Its stones scattered

Into spider lines. 

It was the fierce hum of energy

That found me. 

Amidst a kind of massive, empty vessel

Of people, of things, 

Of water and air 

That was all. 

It was the bleakness behind

Each day of the small. Every

Act which seemed only to flow from another. It 

Came and went behind the surface of the landscape 

Like the second lens in a camera, at one time close and at another focus, so so far. 

It was hidden in the minutia of details. There was no container. Only a vast thing which made everything. A 

Kind of energy in perception. It did not build not structure - for there was no space betwixt its mighty tresses. It only was. 

This was the place where lights lose dimension, becoming tiny odd sequins on shapen dress. The two mounds of the hills, bare of foliage, rose like breasts above the white jungle of the city. The peak of the most distant mountain rose like a nose. 

Here it was that I saw the great thing behind things. The simplicity of it all. The irreducible that finds its way into every rounded figure. That extra object that cannot be accounted for. We were standing right in it. 

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