Silk Floss

Platinum itself is only a recent discovery. Its salt is white;
like so many other entheogens, cut into it, exhibit white.

The entheogenic interior of ergot is white & the fissured
bark of entheogenic sallows when a “witch” sifts it is white.

I think a thought about a salt of platinum so powerful
that even to think of it causes, in a single burst, all the white-

chevroned parakeets to depart the white mulberry, a shade
tree much beloved by late-afternoon support groups. Morus alba.

All the celebrities in the photos on the wall of the sanctum
which comes straight out of a 2055 doc on carpet are White.

A new & welcome development is the xeriscape gravel.
If only the white wall would think a thought not outright white

we’d be all set. It is only recently I learned that the community
center communicates with the Carpet Center via the wall’s white

brick ricocheting transmissions that first are sent upward
to regions where the marine layer “fluctuates & is white”—

cut into a nature poem, you find the marine layer—
the wall opposite bleached buff by decomposition of lime (white).

Conversations about salts occur in lots, as well as about
platinum. An even more recent discovery is that the white

burst is only the beginning of this afternoon’s dialogue
between iconic corner centers linked as ghosts of a white

mineral & that to continue the thought requires an epic
follow-up burst of hummingbirds whose upperparts are white.

Fortunato Salazar, who lives in Los Angeles and Berlin, has poetry/translation/fiction at Fence, Lana Turner, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, and widely elsewhere.