Brightness Falls by F.J. Bergmann

after Liviu Georgescu

You, rising through parted waters, grow like pain in the beautiful light. Illumination is the instrument that fractures on your arms and legs, scorches your feet, burnt, burning. The prism of silence gives birth to the celestial spectrum of music. Across the continuum, a field of oleander and thistles the color of trumpets surround the ruins where embellished memories linger like glass tears scattered on your face. There is no season like the present, no reason to count the broken dead. Leave me; abandon me to my verses before my astonished flesh evaporates in the cold air, my metal bones dissolve in the rivers of vacuum, my soul disappears in the emerging sun. I am pouring light through a sieve made of paper where words swirl on the sheet like gold dust. I have already forgotten the past. I walk toward the embrace the future holds for me.

F.J. Bergmann writes poetry and speculative fiction, often simultaneously, appearing in The 5-2 Crime Poetry, Black Treacle, North American Review, Postcard Poems, Pulp Literature and elsewhere, functioning, so to speak, as editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.