the fossil record

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Transparent Influences

The impressions that the ghosts have made
on one another remain, spooking sheets
thrown over office furniture. Faint lines
turn into vague passageways that time

and circumstances once, maybe twice, have
created from momentary points of ink.
What seems to be a great groove leads me
to calculate the slow trudge through

virgin snow to home, or it loops, dizzying me
beyond an idea within which I could live.
Many ruts and wrinkles that I have followed
haunt my cortex' s canals: Fog hisses;

a dog howls; curtains levitate. Transposing
dead languages loses to current events
through the pen of a hugger of left margins,
eager to craft today's tools from inverted Braille.

Rich Murphy