|
The Tides #1
Of Sophia it might be said
That her fish are held in waves of
glass
Like porcelains in a green swell.
They wait in their little alcoves of
water
To fall, return and be delivered
**
“She might be waved, and held
as abandoned”
To turn, and silence the winter with
the spring.
She might be absent and speak as if
turned
To kiss, to charge, the bitterness
she encounters.
**
The green day darkens.
There are emeralds in her eyes.
**
And with her arrives this intermezzo:
where love has no home.
And he would build it one..
“simple, not grand, a place for
reading,
and for friends”
where time might find rest
and turn to light
and misery find solace
in the occasional post-it note.
White halls and white ceilings
To contain regret
A bright blue lintel
And a bronze-gold horse.
**
And the future is waiting to kiss this
silence.
“It pours into my head like a
tone of light, that has no place to
be,
unless I welcome it to the table”
**
It waits for us in silence, and we
must enter it in silence.
Humility. Reverence. Virtues remembered.
The death of the numinous all too near.
It must be held like an ember.
It must be fanned into new reminders.
And in the light of that light, the
angels may fulminate.
From silence into silence. Love’s
mouth to love’s ear.
The
Tides #4
Love
acquires itself in air.
It
is the science of what is not seen or heard.
Love
is the muse’s little bird, That
finds a random office
In
a random theater.
.
Before
him
A
woman ‘s torso floats
in air.
It
is Isis.
Floating
In
the bestiary of her tears.
A
flower comes. White, as if with cinnabar and a blotch of rose.
It
moves slowly, tenuously, into open air,
to
dissolve into something without desire
Clouds
passing over and returning again.
Isis,
You
are not a woman, and no woman has claim to you.
Nor
does any man have claim to you,
or
any child,
Any
mouse, or any tempest of fevers.
Alone
you must wait,
until
we have plumbed our disdain.
and
become little panthers, little anonymous beasts
in
hidden yellow fields.
Then we will discover again that we have always
been inside you.
*
Sometimes,
when I am sleeping, I get up and go downstairs and I’m there at
the table laughing. turning the silence into an afterimage of water.
Sometimes,
when I am awake I go upstairs, and there I am in bed, turning over in my nightmare and filing away snores.
Sometimes
when I am alive, I wake up to the great stone tablets of my death, And
cannot help but chuckle
at the insignia I have not refused to wear.
There
are times when the photograph of a derelict engine is superimposed on
my head, and I walk around all day, torn among the pistons,
And
that is when I say”This is poetry, and I insist I have a right
to it.
It
is not a flock of mistaken birds that sigh above the fields in the figure of their ‘turning’ .”
Sometimes, when I am falling into the sea, as if I have driven there in an emptiness reminiscent of latency, I
see what is to be seen, and there is nothing for me, but the form of
Strindberg, lost among his photographs, and the willfulness of his despair.
Then
I know I have taken on the education of the visual. That as dolls without
resonance we have lost our hope in pleasure.
The
Tides #7
In the town where their was knowledge, there is
only thunder.
In
the town where there was hope there is a hard rain.
In
the town where there were farms there are miles of cable.
In
the town where there was death there is a penchant for sanitation.
In the town where there were weddings there is
always a plan.
In
the town where there was sorrow there is therapy alone.
In
the town where there was light there is electricity.
In
the town where there was laughter there is TV.
Beautiful
mannequin, I am afraid for how you remember us. Our faces shadowed on
your cheeks of rouge. . . lie
down and say nothing, it is almost dark,
The
infinity of your eyes, the blank infinity in which we hope. . .
Outside
a heaven of doors and windows . . .
“All
there is and all there was and all there will ever be. . .”
**
The
smoke rises.
It
obscures the first star.
There
is a woman in the sky, her body is like gauze
That
has been bled through in the rain.
The
blue around her eyes is a film of desire
that burns away to reveal a smile
of pain,
a
grimace her skeleton inhabits with misery,
the
great figure floating above the minor city,
turning
and diving above the outlying graves
mourning
for the dead from the air where they escape
Into
the fissures of the sunlight, and then the starlight overhead
bright
fumbling apes
Without
hope or memory. . . .
**
The
sky shifts above the river’s nape and
the sorrow that is nature, having lost its thread wanders
off alone and mumbles to itself out of the silence its
interminable emptiness that is somehow a remembrance .
**
Having remembered, the few are unborn.
Having remembered, they cannot help but wander.
Having remembered, the dead position themselves.
They
are starved for a whisper. They hope for a whisper. . .
Having
remembered, she weeps.
Having
remembered, they sleep.
The
dead dissolve and wish for the fullness
That
decorates desire with the inverse of its objects. . .
Having remembered, they feel the suffering of
those they harmed,
Having
remembered, they turn, in the winter of their sleep.
And
are the dead that caress them and prepare for them, having been born
from desire
Into
the greater hope of losing the desire that desire finds.
**
“. . . His body. .
.transparent, as though filled with light. . . “
as.
. .”there came a time when
for some days the soul departed altogether. . .”
“And he lay as if dead ... And when the soul returned it was as though the twelve streams of wisdom lived again . There
had come to him. . .an experience like that of Paul at Damascus.” |