Passionate Ornithology: J. Karl Bogartte

Endless Reproduction of the Glance

From "The Wolf House"

To see is to mesmerize the membrane of sense into believing that there is more to be torn than meets the shape of it, more to the nearness that touches what isn’t apparent, more to taste and devour that slips pagan with light through your evidence. Rumors of unavoidable feasting make your mouth bleed, showing signs of a feverish pollination.

A tree of sight with seeing leaves, as luminous as the body relieved of its memory, unraveled by its tedious ancestors, or without sleep, its eggs spinning in the doorway. The bright air is bleeding slowly, like burning film when the dream interrupts a backward glance.

In phantom dimensions there are no rules less forbidding than the revenge of presence, and no lingering doubts analogous to the most sinister of solutions, sister-bathing, and the owl-table following you...

The Liquid of Thought is Glowing

From "Luminous Weapons" [a work in progress]

A fire of black ink with ancient birds mirroring the geometry of reflections fluctuating inside your body, deep in sinuous manes of a deserted courtyard, where the magnetic fields easily slide through with each germinating alignment of fragile attractions and endless threads... where you reach deep and spread yourself as thin as possible, as thin as a window touchingly fitted and calibrated by the exquisitely gloved hands of the mathematician, that angular echo, when he stumbles down the stairs, releasing nudes from their hiding places and pulling pigments out of each death and resurrection according to the degree of archaic abandon. Conscious thought is the moon in the jaws of the dragon’s tattoo. At 3am there is only the language of water, and she sleeps, guarding the night...

From your eyes through hers, a circle surrendered, an oval cracked open, a passageway blurred in wind, a death arranged in medieval times to reverse the refraction of light, a shadow cast across centuries like an obscure landing site that mimics the fog, a zero stained with acid and attached to a prism like an owl white as blood, like a phantom sensation that clings to you with love, a vessel of unorthodox gestures, a vessel of evening and a vessel of dawn, a vessel that covers your tracks and one that forges your hollow and radiant stone. She moves with you around the wedding night, bathing the birth of another light, another hour swarming with ocular pollination, growing hallucinations out of nothing lost, or forgotten. You follow her procession, a talisman of waking outside of yourself.

When the Veil Between Worlds is Lifted

The Perfect Crime

The prism trembles. The prism watches. The prism is grooming
itself... If you leave to others what form, however lovely or vile,
the prism will take, you will be deceived and the prism will kill you.

The sirens no longer afford the living any solace at all. They tremble with every leaf, and when the animals come near to bathe, as they often do now that the sun lingers a little longer into the nighttime, the living elect to dream themselves into invisible caverns - their shadows standing guard at the entrances.

The disordered enchantment of the world through which we prowl, effortlessly cast off from ceaselessly changing branches, nourished by ghostly roots that charm the most precious rains, is that which binds us together for reasons as different as the calm before the storm and the calm after it.

Less than transparent, when she sees herself less than perfect, she charges the atmosphere around her with the unexpected DESIRE FOR THE WHIRLWIND... When she talks in her sleep, there are slight tremors in the earth, enough to rustle the sheets, enough to wake me: the windows are haunted by owls...

In the forests, along the terraces, fires are still plagued by humans who have not yet learned the terrible knowledge that only fire can interpret dreams.

The astonishing difference between a bird of prey and a crystal is the sound of a woman's breathing after a making love...

Her spirit quickens under a veil of constellations, her breasts of shimmering space are hungry animals devouring time. At this moment, with all the Magic Arts thrashing at the outer door, she is etched with stars and her flesh is timeless.

Always: what was there before you? What will there be after you are gone? For the moment, primordial and far-reaching, swimming takes on aspects of a revelatory sign and becomes myth. Water is our language and the scintillating source of all our gestures. We gradually light up and become soluble at dusk...

In front of the mirror she enacts the historical seduction of the winds. The aching machinations of reflection spill out all their glowing tales... In the center of the city, an aboriginal tribe wanders among us, successfully resisting all efforts of the anthropologists to locate them - their powers of teleportation are kept secret. They are raptors of the wind...

The great indigo moth that resembles a forest fire does not look like the moon when it closes it's eyes.

The skeleton of a loved one is enough in itself to keep the very last spark from turning into a forest.

After the death of Abstractions, it became fashionable to build great cities inhabitable only by skilled somnambulists. It has likewise become mandatory to kill for the sanctity of love.

The wolf has taken the place of the sundial.