Calligraphy So many layers of silence wrap this dark it’s hard imagining a sound inside could work its way through them in just one night. Such quiet clears the mind, down to the stark and bell-shaped cavern where old phantoms hide no longer fit to frighten or take flight. Such clarity can’t last. Yet while it does it echoes with its silent ancestors in memory of brisk streams that cut through rock the flocks above on hillsides never heard. A summons to a world that never was can’t be resisted. Lush or barren shores, dense wood or desert, each confers that shock from outside saying something has occurred. We cannot do without the dark, the hush, the uncreated world, the undipped brush.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/
Amethyst Review 