Orogenes His, by Tiffany Corley

The Golden Ratio in nature.

Orogenes His

For his journey he took with him
.
​
carbon, water,
andesite, dust, emotion and
colour complex
and igneous.
When convergence
calls

he forms crust in answer,

woozy in the
heat of transference,
shooting to the
surface
as glass
purified,
conchoidal,
amorphous.

​
How does he
surrender so
completely?

Emitting abstraction
and cadence, waves so easily
contained

that alien
undercurrent
birthing
continuously
the means to all
beginnings, too young
a fold to hold any one
formation, too old
a soul to desire

separation.
The words themselves aren’t golden,
nor the clast from which he
came undone,
obvious yet unknown,
rounded when worn.
Years pass.
His sills stretch and thin, joy and sorrow

distractions for
phone screen cataracts
blind to his being
passed out as data on sheets
not taken with them.
He doesn’t cling to forms,
as if each white dawn prints

another book of of poems,
untorn yet creased as
paper often becomes,
each bead of sweat a gas giant
swooning induction.
He is fusion holding
at the brink
for the pleasure of the
burning, honoured simply for

the chance
to be new
again.
With constant

warming he folds each time
his core melts,
ductile each time
he gives himself.
I’m not sure there’s a name
for the grade,
that basalt he
calls home formed
from parts of everything.

The glacier melt we barely
hold our heads above
a swollen, breccia rush
tumbled to cobbles in his throat.
Possessed his cheeks flush.
He paces the peak.
Searching for correlation we
struggle to keep up,

origami in his genesis.
Only when angles sheer
and distress can grey matter
shed its rust.
He whips his magmas to fury,
plutons his dead language, draws stars
conducting fertile soil where
none was before.
It’s all here with him;

all he endures, all he loves.
New mountains to climb,
each unique in texture and hue
(how do you do you?)

​Tiffany Corley
​
Tiffany Corley is a 44 year old house painter, life-long writer, and current junior student at the University of Missouri, working towards her PhD in quantum mechanics.