Qualia

Qualia

J.M. Jordan

I

Green-gold, as if your eyes
contain a living glint of their own stuff -
of swamp and shade and noon-light burning through
the branches’ rippling high-upholded crowds.
Not, say, a certain wavelength to receptors
transmitting info along optic wires,
eidolon of translation done somewhere
in the ventral streaming’s dark hidden folds,
occult and only present here at last.
A secret of my own. Mine alone.

II

Fierce and clear, as if your cry
were woven bird-song, snarl and shouting Ave;
a call to crack stone, empty tombs and strike
chords that blast across the granite hillscapes:
clarion, irreducible. No, never just
a tremor in an empty vestibule,
behind a door dead-locked against
the silence of the hallway – merest message
caught outside a darkened window
that unseen hands left open.

III

Strong, as if your hand
were here in mine as fact of bone and muscle:
a heat to set my idols spalling, force
to hold the crashing day-lit hours at bay.
And not, instead, a thin cortical reading
of error-trending input, sense or signal -
dendritic whisper from a distant source
that cannot be confirmed. At last, at most:
unknown, unknowable thing out there,
ghost receding from ghost.

IV

Strike me, break me, make me know
that you are not a fable, you are not
a figment at the center of a maze,
a tattered shadow flickering on a wall.
Grasp me so hard, so fast I realize
that I would never break myself this way,
that I could never blind myself as such,
but find myself falling, falling,
through this black space no longer -
but caught up, at last, in the empty air
and set upon this rock to know
the light that shines inherent in
these eyes, this voice, these hands.

---

J.M. Jordan
Poet & Southerner

J.M. has been published in The Chattahoochee Review, Image Journal & Louisiana Literature

Photography by Fre Perez