The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker

I stood on a mossy rock in the center of a great cave, a cool dampness enveloped me - like a dark breath pressing against my neck. Water rushed around, ice cold and shattering the quiet with its incessant grate and gurgle. The cold roots that jutted out bare from the foot of the embankment appeared like stone-carved veins holding up this bit of earth, a sort of gray clay frosted with bluish-white lichens encasing a mound of hardened peat bedecked in the midnight green of a hardy moss, wet from cavish dew as if there were an ocean spray churning around me. I climbed the rock, clinging with mushy hand-holds, feet slipping to find any firmness, and peered over the top to find a nest of thick and riddled branches, coiled and hardened, somehow formed into a circle and yet wildly sprawling like roots into the moss. As I traversed around the mysterious damp pyre, i found a large branch leaning up from the shadows against the great mound, spread out like fingers reaching up in a dying attempt to grasp for help. And though the harshness of the cave had long ago stripped the bark from the limb's bones, the white, ghostish hardwood that remained held as I attempted to climb up to get a better look. Straddling the web of limbs, I felt something wriggling alive against my hip as I pulled my way up to the top. The branches held, though bent under my weight, and thrembling with my slightest move. It was then I saw something I did not expect to see. Nestled in the crown of branches, upon a bed of velvet red-tipped moss, were six opalescent eggs, each a tiny globe of soft, swirling light - silent, bluish, dim, and yet radiating the only apparent warmth in the dank expanse of this cave. They were oddly untouched by the cave, appearing neither wet nor soiled or sullied by whatever was creeping amidst the moss and branches and occasionally my ear. I stared into the closest one, a perfect sphere almost levitating on the finest blanket of emerald moss, its light barely a glow and yet white as if milk could be fire - shimmering, spinning, swirling, surrounded by a thousand scarlet fingers, for whereever the moss touched the sphere, the green gave way to a brilliant carmine. I focused my gaze, trying to grasp at what I was seeing - trying to find form within the beautiful dance that never seemed to repeat or settle into something my mind could touch or comprehend.

I turned my eyes to a second sphere, and then a third and fourth, each as different as if it had never been seen before, and yet identical in its unyielding any perceptable quality I could describe as its uniqueness. Were they slightly different colors? There was no color. Different patterns or speeds at which they oscillated? They were in each moment moving together and yet if I focused on one, moving entirely apart from the others. I was mesmerized and confounded by their beauty. I wanted to reach out and touch one, but a cold shudder reached down my spine, the branches holding me seeming to threaten to give way, leaving me bouncing as I grasped tighter to regain my balance. My mind shuddered to think what manner of creature might return to defend such a nest, if they were indeed eggs or offspring, and for a moment, the darkness of the cave seemed to descend around me like a great pair of wings were beating the cold, damp air against my back, pressing me down. I braced myself, expecting to feel some great beak pierce the back of my neck, but as my fear abated, I realized the tiny pinch at the base of my neck was just another insect bracing itself against the cold, damp swipe of my hand. And as my hand ended whatever agony had crawled down my neck, the moment opened up as I realized I too should flee before I fell or where swiped down to my demise. Should I pocket one or all of my found treasure before I run? Or slowly withdraw from something so precious it could not conceivably have been left unguarded or watched - something must watch or wait in the shadows! My fears were tantalized by imagining the roots rising to encircle my legs, the branchs coming alive to imprison me, or some cave beast roaring up from the depths to set right the injustice of such a theft. Would the spheres even be movable? Perhaps each weighs a thousand pounds or is rooted into the rockface, or would shatter at the slightest touch - their light dissapating in the face of such aggression. Who was I to possess such beauty? Or was I merely enlisting myself as their conservator or guardian, and working to ensure their safety? But I could not imagine what harm was befalling them to justify such an arrogance, and realized even at my best, I would not be worthy to such a task.

I turned my eyes to the closest sphere, and let the cacophany of my thoughts fade slowly into silence as I set myself afloat in the gentle maelstrom of light within.

My mind tried to resist, conjuring a warning of the blasphemy my presence would be if I like some fly speck were to enter the sphere and spoil its purity. In the shadows of my mind, every foul beast of my nightmares readied to testify I must flee. And from every woodworm hole of my imagination, tempations lined up to plead their case that I should abscond with such a fire from heaven at any cost. But there was only one remedy to this epic facade of pretense, and I took it. I reached out and picked up that beautiful pearl I held so dearly in my eye. It lay in my hand, neither defying physics with some magical response nor evoking a cataclysm. It felt neither of great weight and intensity nor of some ephemeral, otherworldly weightlessness - it simply continued its dance of light. I brought its gentle glow to my face, staring more deeply into the folds and eddies of its intricate sparkle. I sniffed for any hint of its essence, expecting to smell an ocean of its air, whether earthy or of cinnamon or some sweetness to match its shimmer. But no scent beguiled its beauty. I closed my eyes and reached with my ears to hear the tiniest of musics or vibrations or some angelic voice. It took a few moments before all the sounds I was hearing in my anticipation were drowned out by the sound of the water running beneath me and the myriad echoes off the damp walls around me. But no sound came from my hand. Like a child without hesitation I placed the sphere in my mouth, rolling it around my tongue, biting it briefly and then sucking on it expecting it to melt into some luscious, sweet ecstasy of white chocolate or buttered lobster or some caviar saltiness or a flood of oyster musk. It was neither hot nor cold, and I tasted nothing as my tongue delivered the pearl back into my hand. I opened my eyes, and it shimmered before me.

As the sphere lay in my hand, I steadied myself and reached over with my other hand to put it back. But as I lifted it with my fingers, a pattern of two blue stripes encircled the surface of the sphere and a low tone rung out as if a bronze bell had been struck. The tone resonated in my ears as my mind went white with a flashback of my childhood, the fields I had played in, the village where I grew up, and then the image of my father ready to go on the hunt with two lines of blue woad under each eye, the mark of our tribe. It was then I knew that I was in the right place, at the right time, and all was as it should be. It was that sense of the big picture that sometimes happens at the most solemn moments in your life when everything comes together and a milestone is set. It was as if in a moment, I had come of age once again, realizing my place in the universe and all the events that had led me to this cave, to these white wonders, were now both finished and just beginning. I then saw all six of the white spheres reveal themselves in my mind, each marked with a symbol I instantly recognized and intimately understood as if they defined fundamental qualities of who I am. And for a moment, I understood ... understood beyond time and place what they were saying to me and the sacred properties they represented. But that moment as intense as it was, though in some way it branded itself into my very being, quickly faded to a grasping for words to re-tell myself what had just happened, and as the tone faded and ceased to ring in my ears, I could no longer see them or recall the markings. Only the darkness of the cave filled my eyes, and the rushing water filled my ears, and the scent of moss and clay filled my nose and mouth with its earthiness. I gathered the six pearls together and climbed down from the rotting limb. My feet touched the damp ground, but they didn't slip nor did the dim light in the cave diminish my sight. It was as if a light eminated from inside me, a confidence that even if my foot slipped into the stream, and the stream became a rapid river, it could no longer sweep me away or drive the air from my lungs. And so I stepped over the rushing water, leaving the mossy rock I had discovered behind, and I glanced again at the six white lights in my pocket, hoping to see the symbols again and to remember, but they just danced with a soft glow - six milky marbles, so beautiful, and I smiled.
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