Audience of the Oracle

I do not know when these visions will pass

but please hold me, hold me, alas.

-Marc di Sacerio (2013). Sanatorium Songs 46.

I'm not ready to face the light

I had too much to dream

Last night

-The Electric Prunes (1966).

Thunder fades, so it must have an edge:

a brontopause where another sound can be felt

underfoot and the echo-clap can recede

back into the waves of a storm.

But if not, and the thunder travels forever,

then the boundary of every storm will collide

with the heliopause at the edge of our sun’s gravity prison.

That place must be the space where

the solar sound recedes and the terrestrial storm continues.

That is where Blake’s Ancient of Days made His prismatic cut.

I know it, but I do not want to know it.

The thunder shudders my ribcage when I breathe.

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Canadian farmer Terry Trowbridge's poems have appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Nashwaak Review, The Ex-Puritan, Studies in Social Justice, and ~200 more places. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding during the polycrisis.