Written by Allen Caldiera
They have constructed the cocoon, sparkling, diamond-body, fecund sac of mottled clay, congealing in a formless flotilla, the dew pearl, a stamen for the light of moon. And the soul is ferried across the channel, a future fortress for the fire-brand ball balancing against the stem of mast, basking in the lake before the river before the castle, whose towers it will rest in, whose apses it will hover above while soldiers work alembics and furnaces, shelter windsacks and retorts, who press the ashes of a phoenix cooked in clay into the form of a future body, the form, homunculus, fed by the blood of seven kings and left to flower in the strike of daylight. And the body is breathed, astrologers operate breathwork automatons by the stars, which haul fireworks to the shoreline, which stoke the ember of an endless flame formed from sunlight in their stomachs, the priestesses and virgins flock against shores, against the weight of their hope, their longing for new days, for re-born kings, for the unfurling of the sail of the sun. And the king unfurls his fingers, tendrils of day, and embarks in the memory of chrysalis, the reconfiguration, molding of his body in a soup thick like sap, mutable like marble-mirrored light beams, hot as fire on a wrung-dry forest floor, cold as the shelterless northern wanderers in night. “And where had I been when I was there? How to know the body if it is reconfigured ceaselessly? How can one be himself when there are infinite one’s to become? Is there a spark is there a core? Is there any inkling of immutability anywhere in” And then a jolt –the merchants and soldiers, handmaids and schoolboys, priestesses and plum farmers, flower-haired, confetti-formed, waiting at the shore to ferry him home.