having been apprised, a fragment

by Mark Parsons

Having been apprised, the sheriff admits

how completely far off the mark our understanding of events

likely became in the progress of suppositions

that was necessary to follow our bogeyman to this bleak and featureless

windy overlook,

an executive-level survey right before

he jumped out of the world of dashboards and desktop notifications and updates

and into bottomless, breadthless azure,

the infinite, indirectly lit blue that gradually recedes until I find myself alone,

the world of information

like the gently battering, glinting dark

of a sardine bait-ball,

like aluminum measuring spoons

playing all over my body,

the kinetic metallic flutter of convexities

like the curved hemispheres of a beetle’s leathery forewings

beating helplessly, unable to fully open

in your cupped hands

but trying,

or the thousand bulging eyelids

that cover the thousand eyes of night inside my body,

that pulse and flicker in deep sleep

just under the skin

as the mind,

someone else’s by this point,

remains

late at its desk in the mind-school

or mind-office, hunched over, it’s slope-shouldered back

to the world—the world of bills, dates, automatic deposit slips, or important dates

you don’t get a notice for, except when its too late,

the chyron playing events the face I put

to the world can’t see, the producer’s voice in my ear, my eyes betraying

nothing—this other person’s mind, both dismissing that practical world but also deeply in it,

so deeply, and for it, also, that other world, for everything it turns its back to,

dismissing it, contemptuous, even, in the mind’s abstract dedication to the lines and letters and

numbers

on the butcher’s paper held down with glass ashtrays

and paperweights on the low pitch of the blond drafting table in the office,

under crumbly drop ceiling tiles and florescent lights

covered with opaque pebbled plastic panels like diluted milk and peppered

with the dry hulls of insects and accumulations of dust—

while you’re here, walking along a beach in the pacific, the tide

having recently gone out, the sun, too, out,

which means something entirely different, means here, so close to you

you can feel your browridges hardening under the palpable

heat and light, and beneath the low profile

of your neanderthal forehead, the niceties housed in your frontal lobe

getting compressed by the weight of its relentless glare,

consolidating the processes involved in feeling and language, while you step

from the smooth, rounded backs of rocks half-buried in the wet sand,

the pale backs of the stones showing the ebbing corona of damp as it withdraws to the sand-line,

the level of the water in small tide-pools left by the tide that went out—

Photo of Mark Parsons

BIO: Mark Parsons' poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ex Pat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, and I-70 Review. His books include Stills (Southernmost Books, 2023), Lake Tahoe is an Elegy (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Spiral (Anxiety Press, 2025), and The Kingdom of Middle Children (Southernmost Books, 2025). He lives in Tucson, Arizona. You can follow him on X @parsons_mfa or https://x.com/parsons_mfa