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Zion Offramp 124.

The quest, should you choose to undertake it—

should you be chosen, deemed fit—

is in a dark place. Not underground,

not nocturnal. Nocturnal implies the return

sometime of the sunlight. A dark place,

under a dark or absent sun.

See, the sun has been painted out

of this picture. In the next image,

where Britomart rides boldly to her quest,

her horse steps over a landscape

that has never seen the sun. What music

comes out of these dark places?

There were bright flowers and petals,

and a fox that leapt to the top

of a fence, looked around, and scratched

himself. There was noise, in discrete movements.

The final movement is a relentless scherzo,

we dance as fast as we can, the darkness speeds by

as we foot it atop the rattling flatcars,

joined one to another like the silhouettes

at the end of Bergman’s Seventh Seal,

or one of those stretchy candy bracelets.

Your eyes have grown large and pale and luminous

in the dark, Father, they no longer close nor see.

My daughter, you were born without eyes

in this dark country, smooth ridges of skin

with only the roadmaps of circuitry

beneath your plucked and lovely brows.

There are motels in Jersey City advertising weekly rates,

fronting only on streets that are an endless flow

of trucks and battered taxis, their scratched carapaces

moving between walls of fancifully-painted concrete.

There is an ashram in Connecticut surrounded

by fiery autumnal foliage that can only be seen

by your Third Eye. They fitted me with green lenses

when I came to the Night Land, so that

the darkness took on an aspect

of phosphorescent, necrotic life. The ideograms

gleamed briefly, almost legibly,

as they waterfalled around me.

There are tiny flowers among the fallen leaves

out in the woods. I have photographic evidence.

In the dark country, the leaves are suspended

forever from their twigs or branches, or always

fallen. Should you be unable to avoid your quest,

your steed will trample them into the chilly mud.

Britomart is already halfway through her quest.

There is a smudged posy of tiny flowers

where her cuirass meets her gorget.

There are ridges of aluminum spikes

along her shoulder blades, where her wings

were once removed. Her armor, spattered

with blood and stippled with droplets

of the mire, has grown into her flesh.

Behind the smooth façade of her helmet,

she no longer has eyes in this dark place.

Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and critic; he lives in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan. His poems have been collected in Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres, 2022) and Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat, 2023). Zion Offramp 51-100 (asemic dub) is forthcoming. His most recent collection of essays and reviews is Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour, 2023). His The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007) was widely reviewed, and he is now at work on a group biography of the Objectivist poets.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx