Saturday, December 25, 2010
hens and chicks (old)
I’m done with loving
I’m done with eviscerating myself,
gut to spine,
tired of bleeding under my clutched fingers
as I wait in line
to buy the bread I
stuff in the hole
like a pullet.
I’m done with mourning
I’m done with tattooing your name
in memory across my arm,
tired of telling people
that, when written, the letters in “me”
only matter in “mine.”
I’m done with loss
I’m done with this un-animal solitude,
tired of crying alone in the library,
the last chick in the henhouse,
when all the others have been yanked out
and with a whine,
branded.
I’m done with eviscerating myself,
gut to spine,
tired of bleeding under my clutched fingers
as I wait in line
to buy the bread I
stuff in the hole
like a pullet.
I’m done with mourning
I’m done with tattooing your name
in memory across my arm,
tired of telling people
that, when written, the letters in “me”
only matter in “mine.”
I’m done with loss
I’m done with this un-animal solitude,
tired of crying alone in the library,
the last chick in the henhouse,
when all the others have been yanked out
and with a whine,
branded.
fruitseed
My mother has had her last child—
that must be very strange to bear.
Meanwhile, I am so full of life,
/belligerent seeds of child/
kicking and crying
to be born out of the little grapefruit
of my womb.
But there’s no one I want
to raise them with.
There’s no one who I want to let
harvest my small, sour fruit
and kiss the bitterness left there
by ancient fear.
So, the fruitseed babies lie heavy
within me, coagulating over time
into stones. Burnishing, they settle
over even more of a while
into pearls, so that on the day
when I die,
whole yards of beauty will be able
to be drawn out of me,
white, balled, and whole
with a knife.
(sometime in Nov.?)
that must be very strange to bear.
Meanwhile, I am so full of life,
/belligerent seeds of child/
kicking and crying
to be born out of the little grapefruit
of my womb.
But there’s no one I want
to raise them with.
There’s no one who I want to let
harvest my small, sour fruit
and kiss the bitterness left there
by ancient fear.
So, the fruitseed babies lie heavy
within me, coagulating over time
into stones. Burnishing, they settle
over even more of a while
into pearls, so that on the day
when I die,
whole yards of beauty will be able
to be drawn out of me,
white, balled, and whole
with a knife.
(sometime in Nov.?)
Alone in the Kissing Breeze (ver. II)
Through I see myself grey-faced like a statue
of a maritime saint, any grimness is betrayed
by the laxity of my pushed-up dress
in the face of the stalwart sea.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts
at modesty even more childlike;
by myself, beside myself,
alone on the waterfront
I am tactile and sensory
for the first time/ &
to keep my legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in the kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.
of a maritime saint, any grimness is betrayed
by the laxity of my pushed-up dress
in the face of the stalwart sea.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts
at modesty even more childlike;
by myself, beside myself,
alone on the waterfront
I am tactile and sensory
for the first time/ &
to keep my legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in the kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
the Future
some thoughts:
get out of school around May 18th
stay in and PDX and work until around July 1
come home to Brooklyn from July 1 to August 1
return to PDX around August 1 and prepare for burning man and hopefully work some more
leave for burning man somewhere around August 25 (?)
attend burning man from Aug. 29 - Sept. 9
return to PDX briefly (until Sept 15?)
WWOOF/ranch/explore/tour from Sept. 15 - Nov. 15
return to either PDX or Brooklyn
be in Brooklyn for Christmas
return to PDX on the early side (Jan 1?) in case I need to house-hunt again/make other preparations
Jan. 31 re-enroll at Reed
hooray!
get out of school around May 18th
stay in and PDX and work until around July 1
come home to Brooklyn from July 1 to August 1
return to PDX around August 1 and prepare for burning man and hopefully work some more
leave for burning man somewhere around August 25 (?)
attend burning man from Aug. 29 - Sept. 9
return to PDX briefly (until Sept 15?)
WWOOF/ranch/explore/tour from Sept. 15 - Nov. 15
return to either PDX or Brooklyn
be in Brooklyn for Christmas
return to PDX on the early side (Jan 1?) in case I need to house-hunt again/make other preparations
Jan. 31 re-enroll at Reed
hooray!
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Chthonian Darkness
The idea that somewhere in the still—
There in the darkness
Is a germ of life
Floating like a plankton
In the imperceptible night.
This invisible seed was born
At the right time, entered the water &
Tide-guided by some vague notion of sky, made it
To the one place where it could be brushed against
By a sleepy swimmer’s toe
& switched On,
A pincushion of light
That turns the void into a bioluminescent bay.
There in the darkness
Is a germ of life
Floating like a plankton
In the imperceptible night.
This invisible seed was born
At the right time, entered the water &
Tide-guided by some vague notion of sky, made it
To the one place where it could be brushed against
By a sleepy swimmer’s toe
& switched On,
A pincushion of light
That turns the void into a bioluminescent bay.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Shanty
There is something in this world
that is so big, we can’t get
to the bottom of it.
No one goes there,
except maybe as a fragment,
long dead.
& yet, there are so many forms
of life down there, beyond even worms.
There are spineless monsters
with snowy, hoary heads
and masses of waving tentacles,
pallid like the coiled leavings
in the gut bin at the grocer’s.
Maybe they’re just little souls—
the floating sacs of saline
and transubstantiated life.
Maybe they were grown
from human flesh
and are just as much a reflection
of us as they are horrible.
The creatures down there could well be a figment.
So could the soul.
& I think I could go on believing that
if only the floating death masks that leer
in the deep like repressed memories
didn’t suck at me
every time I smell life on the air,
pungent and dark.
that is so big, we can’t get
to the bottom of it.
No one goes there,
except maybe as a fragment,
long dead.
& yet, there are so many forms
of life down there, beyond even worms.
There are spineless monsters
with snowy, hoary heads
and masses of waving tentacles,
pallid like the coiled leavings
in the gut bin at the grocer’s.
Maybe they’re just little souls—
the floating sacs of saline
and transubstantiated life.
Maybe they were grown
from human flesh
and are just as much a reflection
of us as they are horrible.
The creatures down there could well be a figment.
So could the soul.
& I think I could go on believing that
if only the floating death masks that leer
in the deep like repressed memories
didn’t suck at me
every time I smell life on the air,
pungent and dark.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Untitled
Apprehensive, Henry asks me about what art is
& I tell him not to worry too much,
because I remember when he was art.
We had sat up the whole summer
night—Indian style,
though it happened on a park bench—
and gotten stiff-kneed while busy
sending words up to the stars.
Without knowing it,
I had been facing West until I turned around
to see the dawn come.
& I only found this out because
for one moment
straight-backed on the bench
in Brooklyn night
Henry’s face got all lit up
& his glasses shined
with the new pink light,
with our words given back,
all pouring from the sky.
& I tell him not to worry too much,
because I remember when he was art.
We had sat up the whole summer
night—Indian style,
though it happened on a park bench—
and gotten stiff-kneed while busy
sending words up to the stars.
Without knowing it,
I had been facing West until I turned around
to see the dawn come.
& I only found this out because
for one moment
straight-backed on the bench
in Brooklyn night
Henry’s face got all lit up
& his glasses shined
with the new pink light,
with our words given back,
all pouring from the sky.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Trainyard
I have to ride my bicycle places to write.
I can fill my brain all I want
with images of boxcars
but I cannot see the boxcars—
I cannot touch their corrugated frames.
I have to take my body to the places
that my mind goes
in order to pluck details from them
like butterflies from the air.
Sitting, still as I am,
I can pick out their black wings
and trace the constellation of white dots
like points on a map.
The butterflies of my memory sound
like the clear sky
and like weathered
wood—they shuffle out the song of how
everything that is outdoors
has touched the real air.
Riding the rails
I zoom past the ramshackles
on my tennis-shoed feet
as much weight in me as a butterfly
as much contained space as a boxcar.
And the yellow light
which sighs through the train yard like a whispering ribbon
unspools across my back
as I mount my bicycle and ride back home,
head full of things to stick
pins through—black
on a blank, white page.
I can fill my brain all I want
with images of boxcars
but I cannot see the boxcars—
I cannot touch their corrugated frames.
I have to take my body to the places
that my mind goes
in order to pluck details from them
like butterflies from the air.
Sitting, still as I am,
I can pick out their black wings
and trace the constellation of white dots
like points on a map.
The butterflies of my memory sound
like the clear sky
and like weathered
wood—they shuffle out the song of how
everything that is outdoors
has touched the real air.
Riding the rails
I zoom past the ramshackles
on my tennis-shoed feet
as much weight in me as a butterfly
as much contained space as a boxcar.
And the yellow light
which sighs through the train yard like a whispering ribbon
unspools across my back
as I mount my bicycle and ride back home,
head full of things to stick
pins through—black
on a blank, white page.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
the sleeping place
[knees pressed into the sandy soil of this fragrant field,
a drop of human musk in the expanse
of clover mustard & winter wheat.]
This tiny world/
(eight outdoor cats and a fraying, desiccated mouse skeleton on the front steps)
is linked to billions of other crystalline places/
(a devoured spider's skeleton still hanging from a blade
of grass, spinarets left miraculously intact and hollowed body open
to reveal eight tunnels to tiny legs)
is linked by the sinewy black wires of telephone poles.
Hopi gods mapped geometric and towering across the blue &
white(gold) back of the palomino sky, the spectral ghosts of the power lines
cradle the buckskin world in their outstretched limbs--
they are the wardens of this abandoned country,and their fierceness preserves
the wildly inhabited empty spaces where Nature steals
in like water downhill
and is sucked up by the life that uncurls here,
rosy-cheeked and vibrating/
(red ants crawling
up my sleeping legs)
exalting in the berth we give to our creations
and the taboo of change.
======
this is totally not formatted correctly
a drop of human musk in the expanse
of clover mustard & winter wheat.]
This tiny world/
(eight outdoor cats and a fraying, desiccated mouse skeleton on the front steps)
is linked to billions of other crystalline places/
(a devoured spider's skeleton still hanging from a blade
of grass, spinarets left miraculously intact and hollowed body open
to reveal eight tunnels to tiny legs)
is linked by the sinewy black wires of telephone poles.
Hopi gods mapped geometric and towering across the blue &
white(gold) back of the palomino sky, the spectral ghosts of the power lines
cradle the buckskin world in their outstretched limbs--
they are the wardens of this abandoned country,and their fierceness preserves
the wildly inhabited empty spaces where Nature steals
in like water downhill
and is sucked up by the life that uncurls here,
rosy-cheeked and vibrating/
(red ants crawling
up my sleeping legs)
exalting in the berth we give to our creations
and the taboo of change.
======
this is totally not formatted correctly
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Midnight Sky (Imagining the Ponderosa)
I miss the winter sky.
I miss my midnights crowned
by crystalline Orion's belt
that Ginsberg loves,
that stretches from home to Oregon.
Snyder and I lived and wrote in the same place
and both struggled
both loved Ginsberg
both looked at the empty
Portland sky and found only Orion.
The winter is watched by mortality, by blind Jesus,
hung up by fingers,
palms and knobby toes, defeated
benevolent and blind.
Those ancient mica flecks
that stud the black granite
of the western sky in
Hades night
outrank our Jesus,
outrank Orion. But
if any legend can be true,
they shone a grim portent,
that sky-flung belt of three stars; a red thread
connecting a birth
and death,
the palm-read line of petty fate,
that destined, curving course read rote
and laid bare in palmistry, in art
(the stars).
For who are these men,
dangling from invisible wires
in the dampened blackmold rafters;
hung
from plank like pine,
like ponderosa?
How do they compare to a field
of yarrow, sage, and bittersweet sorrel? How
do their words, their life-spun stories
surmount
the moon shining full like a dewdrop,
full like an egg containing sparrow,
sperm, hummingbird
rabbit?
Their wisdom rests on shallow
mountains,
absorbed like dry dust into the waiting
horns
of the mountain goats--fodder for shofar
--and nests in their capricious
brains; adorns
the tops of the leery juniper
bushes and holes under the flatrock
dens of scorpions.
Their wisdom never leaves
those breast mountains,
those sloping hillocks like
nipple and aureole,
that earth/Mother body.
Their words are not blown out
of the decapitated horn of the ram
or written down on papyrus,
birch-bark, vellum,
tincan or gold.
Their words are absorbed by the ponderosa.
Their words are covered in moths.
Their words are wordless
and can only be heard in silence.
I miss my midnights crowned
by crystalline Orion's belt
that Ginsberg loves,
that stretches from home to Oregon.
Snyder and I lived and wrote in the same place
and both struggled
both loved Ginsberg
both looked at the empty
Portland sky and found only Orion.
The winter is watched by mortality, by blind Jesus,
hung up by fingers,
palms and knobby toes, defeated
benevolent and blind.
Those ancient mica flecks
that stud the black granite
of the western sky in
Hades night
outrank our Jesus,
outrank Orion. But
if any legend can be true,
they shone a grim portent,
that sky-flung belt of three stars; a red thread
connecting a birth
and death,
the palm-read line of petty fate,
that destined, curving course read rote
and laid bare in palmistry, in art
(the stars).
For who are these men,
dangling from invisible wires
in the dampened blackmold rafters;
hung
from plank like pine,
like ponderosa?
How do they compare to a field
of yarrow, sage, and bittersweet sorrel? How
do their words, their life-spun stories
surmount
the moon shining full like a dewdrop,
full like an egg containing sparrow,
sperm, hummingbird
rabbit?
Their wisdom rests on shallow
mountains,
absorbed like dry dust into the waiting
horns
of the mountain goats--fodder for shofar
--and nests in their capricious
brains; adorns
the tops of the leery juniper
bushes and holes under the flatrock
dens of scorpions.
Their wisdom never leaves
those breast mountains,
those sloping hillocks like
nipple and aureole,
that earth/Mother body.
Their words are not blown out
of the decapitated horn of the ram
or written down on papyrus,
birch-bark, vellum,
tincan or gold.
Their words are absorbed by the ponderosa.
Their words are covered in moths.
Their words are wordless
and can only be heard in silence.
Friday, August 6, 2010
with Oregon and August come many storms
With Oregon and August
come many storms
and brooding cloud-banks over high hills,
spread out west to our shore,
the last land,
the charnel grounds of the sun.
The thunderheads all hustle as far out
as they can over our poor city,
searching beyond the hills, beyond the ocean,
looking west as every lost soul does
when ambivalence digs in, real
for the first time.
The clouds in Oregon run the course
that set the pace for our ancestors to follow, first
in covered wagons with hollow hearts,
then in combat boots and backpack
bustling with collected notes,
hungry ghost of a script
that's to be written and then learned rote
and delivered, hands clasped
tight behind the lower spine,
pitch-perfect.
It is the song of all our time spent hoarding,
collecting and judging,
the song of every part of our lives
idly passed through too-easy boredom.
This yarn (spun of words pulled
from Mother, books,
graffiti on satchel, conversation,
nights
alone and waterfronts)
is the anthem of longing.
Our pioneer hearts weave it,
the red thread that connects all our artlessness in the morning,
when it first sets in (shocking
like the hothouse and then the frozen lake)
that you are alone and will be;
and at night
when the sorrow of a wasted day
wraps you up in a black
cocoon of dreaming.
Cavalier and lonely,
we are like the tall clouds
(they came first, and twist our ears
with bad weather and melancholy
when when we ignore them)
and we press towards the west
in a bedraggled but maddened
and maddening hoard.
Our hearts spawn in those
woods where the sun dies
and we push out West
to be born.
come many storms
and brooding cloud-banks over high hills,
spread out west to our shore,
the last land,
the charnel grounds of the sun.
The thunderheads all hustle as far out
as they can over our poor city,
searching beyond the hills, beyond the ocean,
looking west as every lost soul does
when ambivalence digs in, real
for the first time.
The clouds in Oregon run the course
that set the pace for our ancestors to follow, first
in covered wagons with hollow hearts,
then in combat boots and backpack
bustling with collected notes,
hungry ghost of a script
that's to be written and then learned rote
and delivered, hands clasped
tight behind the lower spine,
pitch-perfect.
It is the song of all our time spent hoarding,
collecting and judging,
the song of every part of our lives
idly passed through too-easy boredom.
This yarn (spun of words pulled
from Mother, books,
graffiti on satchel, conversation,
nights
alone and waterfronts)
is the anthem of longing.
Our pioneer hearts weave it,
the red thread that connects all our artlessness in the morning,
when it first sets in (shocking
like the hothouse and then the frozen lake)
that you are alone and will be;
and at night
when the sorrow of a wasted day
wraps you up in a black
cocoon of dreaming.
Cavalier and lonely,
we are like the tall clouds
(they came first, and twist our ears
with bad weather and melancholy
when when we ignore them)
and we press towards the west
in a bedraggled but maddened
and maddening hoard.
Our hearts spawn in those
woods where the sun dies
and we push out West
to be born.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Mamihlapinatapai
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1]
It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."
It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."
New Cloud
New York under New
Amsterdam cloud
salt and musty sea of mica-
crusted skyscrapers,
the city a moment of grave portent
on the ocean, crests
and briny foam frozen,
peaks
into our needling towers.
New York under New Amsterdam
cloud,
your river-valley sweetness
plunging into sudden void,
impossibly steep,
and I see into you -- palm
the full lengthiness of 34th street
with my eyes
and discover the hazy ghosts of Brooklyn
drifting,
balletic in their purgatory
east of the river,
east of Eden.
New York under
New Amsterdam cloud,
a high
and mighty wassailer,
grand
and wide-hulled as a ship, you,
cloud mountain--
nimbly surmount these rolling hills
with the same marked gallantry
that mingles with the city
lights
and which transmits
through perforated density
the soft and slanting
beams of morning.
7.20.10
Amsterdam cloud
salt and musty sea of mica-
crusted skyscrapers,
the city a moment of grave portent
on the ocean, crests
and briny foam frozen,
peaks
into our needling towers.
New York under New Amsterdam
cloud,
your river-valley sweetness
plunging into sudden void,
impossibly steep,
and I see into you -- palm
the full lengthiness of 34th street
with my eyes
and discover the hazy ghosts of Brooklyn
drifting,
balletic in their purgatory
east of the river,
east of Eden.
New York under
New Amsterdam cloud,
a high
and mighty wassailer,
grand
and wide-hulled as a ship, you,
cloud mountain--
nimbly surmount these rolling hills
with the same marked gallantry
that mingles with the city
lights
and which transmits
through perforated density
the soft and slanting
beams of morning.
7.20.10
The Artist and the Healer
Today the sky fades perfectly from white mixed with crystalline
blue at the horizon
to a deep and pelagic cornflower at its highest peak.
O, how I long to live in the mountains.
But I am torn--am I an artist
or a healer?
Being an artist requires incredible devotion to the self,
solitude,
and a superabundance of beautiful and lighthearted surroundings
to quell and satiate the depressive melancholy that everyone creative suffers.
The artist must surround herself
with organic and resplendent comforts, must
create a safe place within which she can be sensitive and receptive without
being forced to absorb (via the sheer
and uncloseable openness of her heart)
bad energy.
The healer, on the other hand,
must dwell, by force of her profession,
around people.
She must be willing to absorb, and indeed take pleasure in empathizing
with pain, suffering, and existentialist ennui.
Unlike the artist,
who spends her days searching for and defining meaning,
the healer must have already found
or decided upon
her true concept of reality, and be ready
not only to impart this knowledge to others,
but also to infuse their very bodies with it--to use her perception
of the fixed and definite order of things
to re-regulate a broken heart.
To be both:
open and closed
solitary and social
depressive and stable
seems impossible.
It is true that the healer must be open, too--
she must be absorptive.
But at this point in my understanding it seems as though the healer cannot process
or retain all that she absorbs,
for what she takes in is not only alien, but lethal.
In order not to be taken down with the sinking
and mutinous ships of her ailing patients' bodies, the healer must possess an amount of detachment
and mindlessness
that the artist does not and cannot have.
//\\//\\////
Even the philosopher and the artist are different; I see this myself.
In all my efforts to create, I forgot
about the importance and the pleasure of processing
or analyzing, of pattern-seeking,
rather than simply making forms. I want to do both--
I want to do all.
7.18.10
blue at the horizon
to a deep and pelagic cornflower at its highest peak.
O, how I long to live in the mountains.
But I am torn--am I an artist
or a healer?
Being an artist requires incredible devotion to the self,
solitude,
and a superabundance of beautiful and lighthearted surroundings
to quell and satiate the depressive melancholy that everyone creative suffers.
The artist must surround herself
with organic and resplendent comforts, must
create a safe place within which she can be sensitive and receptive without
being forced to absorb (via the sheer
and uncloseable openness of her heart)
bad energy.
The healer, on the other hand,
must dwell, by force of her profession,
around people.
She must be willing to absorb, and indeed take pleasure in empathizing
with pain, suffering, and existentialist ennui.
Unlike the artist,
who spends her days searching for and defining meaning,
the healer must have already found
or decided upon
her true concept of reality, and be ready
not only to impart this knowledge to others,
but also to infuse their very bodies with it--to use her perception
of the fixed and definite order of things
to re-regulate a broken heart.
To be both:
open and closed
solitary and social
depressive and stable
seems impossible.
It is true that the healer must be open, too--
she must be absorptive.
But at this point in my understanding it seems as though the healer cannot process
or retain all that she absorbs,
for what she takes in is not only alien, but lethal.
In order not to be taken down with the sinking
and mutinous ships of her ailing patients' bodies, the healer must possess an amount of detachment
and mindlessness
that the artist does not and cannot have.
//\\//\\////
Even the philosopher and the artist are different; I see this myself.
In all my efforts to create, I forgot
about the importance and the pleasure of processing
or analyzing, of pattern-seeking,
rather than simply making forms. I want to do both--
I want to do all.
7.18.10
Ode to the Light in the Evening
The earth is an ordered body, just as we are ordered
beings
and she reflects and resonates
the same warm streams of electric, amber light
that every living creature feels coursing through their physical bodies,
connecting the mind and the heart,
and filling up that space between them (the chest cavity
that overlies our holiest organ and contains
the soul) with golden spaciousness.
This is why the light turns
all warm and glowing in the sun's preamble to its setting;
the sun, messenger between earth and sky,
is a visceral embodiment of these rays, and it grows
most intensely lovely
and magical in the moments before it finally settles into the bosom of the earth, and delivers
to her own glowing core (both iron, both like blood)
all the infinite wisdom
that it, the holy messenger sun, has gathered throughout its day
spent with the moon, and clouds,
and veiled but still existant stars.
7.18.10
beings
and she reflects and resonates
the same warm streams of electric, amber light
that every living creature feels coursing through their physical bodies,
connecting the mind and the heart,
and filling up that space between them (the chest cavity
that overlies our holiest organ and contains
the soul) with golden spaciousness.
This is why the light turns
all warm and glowing in the sun's preamble to its setting;
the sun, messenger between earth and sky,
is a visceral embodiment of these rays, and it grows
most intensely lovely
and magical in the moments before it finally settles into the bosom of the earth, and delivers
to her own glowing core (both iron, both like blood)
all the infinite wisdom
that it, the holy messenger sun, has gathered throughout its day
spent with the moon, and clouds,
and veiled but still existant stars.
7.18.10
Ode to the Sky and Her Clouds
Her formidable clouds obsess me
to the point that I fix my gaze constantly upon the blue bowl that contains them
and I become the circadian sunflower: my entire life
spent experiencing the sky.
These cloud giants
are what first allowed me to conceive of her,
the planet,
as magical.
Looking up at their whiteness,
their decidedly un-geometric and abstract beauty, I realized
that they existed
not in another realm of coldness
and sparse air,
but in the center of a vast vault,
our skin,
that connects this world
indefinitely to all the others.
The science of their bodies,
the ephemerality of their forms (a solid-seeming
thing made up of water)
is what revealed to me the true miracle of this world:
we are
from top to bottom
an open system,
and all parts cohere in a manner as precise and scientific as the laws that allow
our amazing clouds (just
simple wisps of gas) to form.
It was that dense condensation that opened my heart
to the regularity and perfection of nature.
7.18.10
to the point that I fix my gaze constantly upon the blue bowl that contains them
and I become the circadian sunflower: my entire life
spent experiencing the sky.
These cloud giants
are what first allowed me to conceive of her,
the planet,
as magical.
Looking up at their whiteness,
their decidedly un-geometric and abstract beauty, I realized
that they existed
not in another realm of coldness
and sparse air,
but in the center of a vast vault,
our skin,
that connects this world
indefinitely to all the others.
The science of their bodies,
the ephemerality of their forms (a solid-seeming
thing made up of water)
is what revealed to me the true miracle of this world:
we are
from top to bottom
an open system,
and all parts cohere in a manner as precise and scientific as the laws that allow
our amazing clouds (just
simple wisps of gas) to form.
It was that dense condensation that opened my heart
to the regularity and perfection of nature.
7.18.10
Ode to the Body of the Earth
God, this is a beautiful day, and I live to praise it.
I am so grateful that all this exists, that we are both here
and I meditate
on the thrumming gratitude that plays my heart
as I bury my cheek in the soil and the dusty grass
(strewn with pebbles, clover,
and anthills),
nuzzling and pressing in to
the warm shoulder of the earth
like a sweet and desirous woman: affectionate
and lusty.
As I lie over the bosom of the earth, I feel
completely grounded, calmed, and more--pulled
by an invisible force as strong as love,
but stronger, in its fixed way, like gravity,
from all the lively, spinning centers of myself.
My hot and liquid core, pulsating
and flowing with acrid, vital fluids
is drawn, irresistible,
to hers,
and our bodies lay upon each other like mirrors
and reflect an endless symmetry
until we blend into one another and are indistinguishable.
The earth is my god and my body,
and only when I think of her,
when I press myself, childlike, into her tumescent sphere,
wrap myself in her long grasses
(the first fibers to be woven into clothes) and her caressing winds,
and fill my ears with her self-bound stars,
the birds,
do I feel at peace,
and my heart opens
to encompass the entire sky.
6.30.10
I am so grateful that all this exists, that we are both here
and I meditate
on the thrumming gratitude that plays my heart
as I bury my cheek in the soil and the dusty grass
(strewn with pebbles, clover,
and anthills),
nuzzling and pressing in to
the warm shoulder of the earth
like a sweet and desirous woman: affectionate
and lusty.
As I lie over the bosom of the earth, I feel
completely grounded, calmed, and more--pulled
by an invisible force as strong as love,
but stronger, in its fixed way, like gravity,
from all the lively, spinning centers of myself.
My hot and liquid core, pulsating
and flowing with acrid, vital fluids
is drawn, irresistible,
to hers,
and our bodies lay upon each other like mirrors
and reflect an endless symmetry
until we blend into one another and are indistinguishable.
The earth is my god and my body,
and only when I think of her,
when I press myself, childlike, into her tumescent sphere,
wrap myself in her long grasses
(the first fibers to be woven into clothes) and her caressing winds,
and fill my ears with her self-bound stars,
the birds,
do I feel at peace,
and my heart opens
to encompass the entire sky.
6.30.10
The Ocean pt. II
As the glowing sky dims,
over water, over ocean-
floating pier,
men appear out of the bushes
and the drydock anchors, hushed thinkers
and fleeing criminals, all struggling
to pantomime the slow,
open and shut
motions of the hand of god
(God, who is fleshless,
God, who is the ethereal,
God the sublime).
It can only be for the sake of poetry that this
innumerable, unnameable presence
has limbs.
It can only be for the sake of my heart that this evening, Venus
shines brightly over the bay, pinkly radiating
with a blank and listless beneficence.
There can be no beatitude by the ocean. It is too weighty.
7.18.10
over water, over ocean-
floating pier,
men appear out of the bushes
and the drydock anchors, hushed thinkers
and fleeing criminals, all struggling
to pantomime the slow,
open and shut
motions of the hand of god
(God, who is fleshless,
God, who is the ethereal,
God the sublime).
It can only be for the sake of poetry that this
innumerable, unnameable presence
has limbs.
It can only be for the sake of my heart that this evening, Venus
shines brightly over the bay, pinkly radiating
with a blank and listless beneficence.
There can be no beatitude by the ocean. It is too weighty.
7.18.10
Alone in the Kissing Breeze
By myself, beside myself,
alone on the waterfront
tactile and sensory for the
first time, watching
like film glitches in a '40s film, rainbow
bridges and crystal globes
doubled and spinning, ringed
and familiar, like how
the halves of cut pearls
radiate
the same layered symmetry
as displayed in the miniature nymphs
that float hazily before
my eyes,
ballet-ing in and out
of the panorama I'm facing
and hanging, star-like,
from the shimmering pistils of my
blurred eyelashes.
For the first time in a year
and a half I am alone
in my silence
and quietly complacent in a self-imposed quarantine,
the nursery of all my latent
and brilliantest thoughts.
Grey-faced like a statue
of a saint,
I resolve to know the saints, to osmotically become
a manifestation of their devotion
through my understanding of their lives.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts at modesty even more childlike;
to keep one's legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in this kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.
7.18.10
alone on the waterfront
tactile and sensory for the
first time, watching
like film glitches in a '40s film, rainbow
bridges and crystal globes
doubled and spinning, ringed
and familiar, like how
the halves of cut pearls
radiate
the same layered symmetry
as displayed in the miniature nymphs
that float hazily before
my eyes,
ballet-ing in and out
of the panorama I'm facing
and hanging, star-like,
from the shimmering pistils of my
blurred eyelashes.
For the first time in a year
and a half I am alone
in my silence
and quietly complacent in a self-imposed quarantine,
the nursery of all my latent
and brilliantest thoughts.
Grey-faced like a statue
of a saint,
I resolve to know the saints, to osmotically become
a manifestation of their devotion
through my understanding of their lives.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts at modesty even more childlike;
to keep one's legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in this kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.
7.18.10
Found Some Old Poems (The Ocean)
you cry on to me on
the other side of an ocean
and i want to rock you in arms made
of tear-salty waves. the liquid
from my bleeding heart adds
to the distance between us; it dilutes
the purity of the ocean's amniotic
fluid and makes both our
sadnesses spill onto the shores we've
created with our different perspectives.
On mine can be found the futility of
rebellion; on yours the stale
taste of an ultimate freedom and we
both pour our bodies into different
vessels of murky water. Your eyes
shine brightly at all times speaking
of youth in its prime and your knowledge
of how to succeed in just living. You cry
slowly into your cup of beer while
my eyes glow dully with the trembling
flame of fear and the knowledge that
nothing will stay the same. I cry
into the ocean as the water adopts
my tears, and i bathe in myself.
8.2.09
the other side of an ocean
and i want to rock you in arms made
of tear-salty waves. the liquid
from my bleeding heart adds
to the distance between us; it dilutes
the purity of the ocean's amniotic
fluid and makes both our
sadnesses spill onto the shores we've
created with our different perspectives.
On mine can be found the futility of
rebellion; on yours the stale
taste of an ultimate freedom and we
both pour our bodies into different
vessels of murky water. Your eyes
shine brightly at all times speaking
of youth in its prime and your knowledge
of how to succeed in just living. You cry
slowly into your cup of beer while
my eyes glow dully with the trembling
flame of fear and the knowledge that
nothing will stay the same. I cry
into the ocean as the water adopts
my tears, and i bathe in myself.
8.2.09
Found Some Old Poems (Leaving)
on my left hand i wear my grandmother's
ring, symbolically wedded to you
so i won't cheat when we're forcibly
separated by nothing
other than fate and my drive
to succeed. i pleasure your
name and your lips and your hair i
drive myself crazy imagining how
i'll feel when we're both home but
in different states; i imagine
you'll be crying while i grimace
and grapple with so many
different desires.
you love me now but will you
still when i give in and wrap
myself around a stranger?
8.2.09
ring, symbolically wedded to you
so i won't cheat when we're forcibly
separated by nothing
other than fate and my drive
to succeed. i pleasure your
name and your lips and your hair i
drive myself crazy imagining how
i'll feel when we're both home but
in different states; i imagine
you'll be crying while i grimace
and grapple with so many
different desires.
you love me now but will you
still when i give in and wrap
myself around a stranger?
8.2.09
Found Some Old Poems (Details)
this one has a renewed relevance!:
your little bear's nose and your laughing
girl's lips all pinkened by liquor and kissing
a cigarette each make me crumble
and wither inside; their perfection
reminds me that all things are fleeting.
8.2.09
your little bear's nose and your laughing
girl's lips all pinkened by liquor and kissing
a cigarette each make me crumble
and wither inside; their perfection
reminds me that all things are fleeting.
8.2.09
Found Some Old Poems I
This one is actually the oldest of all. A poem?
"You know, although it would make me feel quite disloyal, self-sabotaging, and maybe even a bit inappropriate to ever be your friend, I like you."
9.8.08
"You know, although it would make me feel quite disloyal, self-sabotaging, and maybe even a bit inappropriate to ever be your friend, I like you."
9.8.08
Found Some Old Poems
I found some poems that I wrote about Felix, most from almost exactly a year ago. They seemed like 1 am rants at the time but upon reexamination I actually think some of them are pretty good. I'm going to post them separately. Here's the first; this is the poem that used used to be a secret:
As you stare at me
nakedly I wonder whether
I would love you
if you were a woman
and in a case of severe dramatic irony,
I often wake up
tragically next to you
from a dream of making love to a girl-
the same girl I've dreamt of
numerous times.
Once I kissed her, drunken sparked-orange
tongue lolling into her perfect Romanian mouth
on a sidewalk, and I remember how
she pulled away
upset despite months of subtle come-ons.
She is grating, turbulent,
petty
so this is not a love poem.
She haunts
me, grimly, a skinny blackhaired reminder
that I will always want something
more.
3.29.09
As you stare at me
nakedly I wonder whether
I would love you
if you were a woman
and in a case of severe dramatic irony,
I often wake up
tragically next to you
from a dream of making love to a girl-
the same girl I've dreamt of
numerous times.
Once I kissed her, drunken sparked-orange
tongue lolling into her perfect Romanian mouth
on a sidewalk, and I remember how
she pulled away
upset despite months of subtle come-ons.
She is grating, turbulent,
petty
so this is not a love poem.
She haunts
me, grimly, a skinny blackhaired reminder
that I will always want something
more.
3.29.09
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
This is the first time I have ever really told the Truth in my whole life (Admission)
The reason that I'm writing you tonight is to tell you something very important. It's something I've known for quite a long time but have been afraid to share with you. I believe in god. And magic. And spirits and energies, not as elegant metaphors, but as manifest realities. I believe in these things because I have experienced them firsthand. I never told you because I was afraid of you juding me and not holding my beliefs to be legitimate or sane. I projected this fear onto you because you are the lens through which I experience the world when not looking through my own eyes -- yours is the second opinion I seek. For a long time I was ambivalent about the validity or even the reality of these beliefs, and so I used my fear of being judged by you as an excuse to not fully admit them to myself. However, tonight on the way home from your house I finally was thinking about it clearly and I realized for the first time that you want me to be happy, and that the source of that happiness is immaterial to you so long as it exists. This was very huge for me. I'm sorry it took me so long -- I don't want you to feel offended. It's not you. After realizing that I had been raped (and most likely throughout the entire time leading up to that realization), my ability to trust anything was severely retarded and our development as intimate friends was undoubtedly delayed. Coincidentally, it was during one of these times (most seriously, when we weren't speaking) that my passion for mysticism and spirituality really bloomed. That made it easy for me to hide it from you.
But yes; ever since I went to Burning Man, and even before that, I have felt as though I have been on a spiritual journey of sorts, to reconnect to myself and to the Mother earth, the entire bountiful Universe, that I came from. It is very hard for me to write these words, perhaps because they portray a sentiment of vulnerability that I am most afraid of betraying. To say that one believes that the Universe is founded on love, harmony, and symmetry, as I do, is to not only open oneself up very wide in general, but to open oneself specifically to ridicule; when viewed at surface value the world hardly seems to reflect that, so believing in and devoting oneself to accessing all-present love definitely seems more than a little crazy. But I really do believe, and when I open up the shell that surrounds my heart, I feel it.
I hope that you can respect this. It is a very integral part of who I am and has been for years now. I deeply apologize for not telling you sooner. I have wanted to, and have been trying to for a long time, but unfortunately I only felt able to today, and we are no longer together for me to say it to your face. I'm going to leave out details because I do think we should talk about this -- after all, we have both got to both equally see through the mask, and this is the side of myself that I have been hiding from you. To succinctly define what I mean, I will leave it at this:
over the years, I have discovered that I am a reverential person, and am most happy when in the act of worshiping something. You probably know this from the way I used to worship you. However after a lot of thought and processing I realized that I cannot worship people in any form, but rather that all I feel comfortable revering is nature and the great, unknowable, cosmic/psychic/spiritual/physical forces that form and govern every aspect of our Universe. Pretty much, I love science, and especially quantum physics and geology (fuck it, I love em all, they're all inseparable) and am overwhelmed by the symmetry and organization I see present between and without all aspects of physical reality. What takes this home for me is the way that I feel these forces relating to me emotional being. I believe that all bodies are supersensible resonance chambers capable of being affected on the quantum level. Thus, we are all connected and every shift in motion of the breeze, earth, galaxy, and Universe can be felt within us if we pay close enough attention.
And that's what I'm trying to do with my life, among other things -- to pay attention to the cosmic rhythm and use what I feel to help others do the same, because it feels so good. So I worship the sky, love the clouds, kiss the trunks of the trees and embrace the hot earth that lies beneath everything. I do this alone, but it is truly this sentiment coming out when I call things beautiful. That's why it hurt me so much when you used to tease me for that -- it felt like you were catching me at prayer.
I hope that this does not make you feel different about me. If it does, consider this: all od these feeling and habits have been a very real and manifest part of me for years, and I know that you have still loved me. I don't doubt that love enough to think that this admission would be enough to drive it away; I don't doubt it at all actually, and that is why I am finally telling you this. I really want you to know me for all I am, for what I am most proud of, as you said. To close, I think that Joanna Newsom has a pretty good way with words, so I'll let her sum up how I feel about life:
"Squint skyward and listen, loving him, we move within his borders, just asterisms in the stars' set order. We could stand for a century, staring with our heads cocked in the broad daylight at this thing: Joy. Landlocked, in bodies that don't keep, dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, 'til we don't be."
So yeah. That's all. That's my side of the mask. Thank you for showing me yours.
Love,
Stella
But yes; ever since I went to Burning Man, and even before that, I have felt as though I have been on a spiritual journey of sorts, to reconnect to myself and to the Mother earth, the entire bountiful Universe, that I came from. It is very hard for me to write these words, perhaps because they portray a sentiment of vulnerability that I am most afraid of betraying. To say that one believes that the Universe is founded on love, harmony, and symmetry, as I do, is to not only open oneself up very wide in general, but to open oneself specifically to ridicule; when viewed at surface value the world hardly seems to reflect that, so believing in and devoting oneself to accessing all-present love definitely seems more than a little crazy. But I really do believe, and when I open up the shell that surrounds my heart, I feel it.
I hope that you can respect this. It is a very integral part of who I am and has been for years now. I deeply apologize for not telling you sooner. I have wanted to, and have been trying to for a long time, but unfortunately I only felt able to today, and we are no longer together for me to say it to your face. I'm going to leave out details because I do think we should talk about this -- after all, we have both got to both equally see through the mask, and this is the side of myself that I have been hiding from you. To succinctly define what I mean, I will leave it at this:
over the years, I have discovered that I am a reverential person, and am most happy when in the act of worshiping something. You probably know this from the way I used to worship you. However after a lot of thought and processing I realized that I cannot worship people in any form, but rather that all I feel comfortable revering is nature and the great, unknowable, cosmic/psychic/spiritual/
And that's what I'm trying to do with my life, among other things -- to pay attention to the cosmic rhythm and use what I feel to help others do the same, because it feels so good. So I worship the sky, love the clouds, kiss the trunks of the trees and embrace the hot earth that lies beneath everything. I do this alone, but it is truly this sentiment coming out when I call things beautiful. That's why it hurt me so much when you used to tease me for that -- it felt like you were catching me at prayer.
I hope that this does not make you feel different about me. If it does, consider this: all od these feeling and habits have been a very real and manifest part of me for years, and I know that you have still loved me. I don't doubt that love enough to think that this admission would be enough to drive it away; I don't doubt it at all actually, and that is why I am finally telling you this. I really want you to know me for all I am, for what I am most proud of, as you said. To close, I think that Joanna Newsom has a pretty good way with words, so I'll let her sum up how I feel about life:
"Squint skyward and listen, loving him, we move within his borders, just asterisms in the stars' set order. We could stand for a century, staring with our heads cocked in the broad daylight at this thing: Joy. Landlocked, in bodies that don't keep, dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, 'til we don't be."
So yeah. That's all. That's my side of the mask. Thank you for showing me yours.
Love,
Stella
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
The Same Hands
This entire year has been a re-run
of all the stupid shit I already
thought I'd said and done. And
you can break my heart
'til the dawn comes;
I'll just pick up all the parts
and stuff them down in my pockets
until you think that they're all gone
and you've erased my fear of love
made manifest
in that broken old organ.
And I have held the same hands
for what's suddenly become four
whole years, tracing
the bones
and
fondling the broad palms,
soft as lambs' ears.
But really I know
no time at all has passed
between us, because
everyone leaves for so long:
spring through fall, still
circling the sun's sphere.
And even more harshly, each
decides they were wrong
and they want to come home,
but they'll only love me if
I've completely reformed and developed
telepathy, so
they never have to show me
all their hopes and fears and weaknesses
and we can live together, happy and
blindly
and never have problems
if we don't feel like talking.
And through all this leaving and
reuniting, I can't
grasp why no one will trust me
when I told them softly,
lightly,
that my love is a constant
like gravity.
Yet we repulse
one another yearly, drawing so
close only to find
with great shock and surprise,
our magnetism's contrived,
so we spiral off
to a new network of stars.
And I have held the same hands
for what's suddenly become four
whole years, tracing
the bones
and
fondling the broad palms,
soft as lambs' ears.
But there's one pair of hands
I'll probably never tough again, unless
we're reunited
by that great mystery,
tragedy,
and I have to comfort him
because we've been thrown together
(against our will)
by that force
that can only form death
and beauty.
But considering
my only chance of holding him
in my arms again
would be if one of our friends died, I'd
rather lie alone and whisper
myself a lullaby
made of all the tears we cried
in the corner of my room
underneath the God's eye.
And you can break my heart
'til the dawn comes;
I'll just pick up all the parts
and stuff them down in my pockets
until you think that they're all gone
and you've erased my fear of love
made manifest
in that broken old organ.
You've destroyed my heart just to help me
grow a new one.
You're destroying my heart
just to help me grow a new one.
of all the stupid shit I already
thought I'd said and done. And
you can break my heart
'til the dawn comes;
I'll just pick up all the parts
and stuff them down in my pockets
until you think that they're all gone
and you've erased my fear of love
made manifest
in that broken old organ.
And I have held the same hands
for what's suddenly become four
whole years, tracing
the bones
and
fondling the broad palms,
soft as lambs' ears.
But really I know
no time at all has passed
between us, because
everyone leaves for so long:
spring through fall, still
circling the sun's sphere.
And even more harshly, each
decides they were wrong
and they want to come home,
but they'll only love me if
I've completely reformed and developed
telepathy, so
they never have to show me
all their hopes and fears and weaknesses
and we can live together, happy and
blindly
and never have problems
if we don't feel like talking.
And through all this leaving and
reuniting, I can't
grasp why no one will trust me
when I told them softly,
lightly,
that my love is a constant
like gravity.
Yet we repulse
one another yearly, drawing so
close only to find
with great shock and surprise,
our magnetism's contrived,
so we spiral off
to a new network of stars.
And I have held the same hands
for what's suddenly become four
whole years, tracing
the bones
and
fondling the broad palms,
soft as lambs' ears.
But there's one pair of hands
I'll probably never tough again, unless
we're reunited
by that great mystery,
tragedy,
and I have to comfort him
because we've been thrown together
(against our will)
by that force
that can only form death
and beauty.
But considering
my only chance of holding him
in my arms again
would be if one of our friends died, I'd
rather lie alone and whisper
myself a lullaby
made of all the tears we cried
in the corner of my room
underneath the God's eye.
And you can break my heart
'til the dawn comes;
I'll just pick up all the parts
and stuff them down in my pockets
until you think that they're all gone
and you've erased my fear of love
made manifest
in that broken old organ.
You've destroyed my heart just to help me
grow a new one.
You're destroying my heart
just to help me grow a new one.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Around Your Borders / Catlike / I Hope (100th Post!)
I hope that when
you break her heart
you are swift and honest,
and leave her doubtless
that you are gone
or else you'll be at fault
for the grief you've caused.
And she'll lay around your borders
all day-- she'll lay
around
your borders all day, mewling
and clawing, with catlike paws
at the door that just held all
that she loved,
until she collapses for almost seven
months, wondering
in her feverish sleep, what exactly
made you leave?
And she'll lay around
your borders all day--
she'll lay
around your borders
all day.
I hope that when you break
her heart, you
do it early
and do not leave her to linger on,
kitten-blind while you move
on.
Or else she'll lay around
your borders
all day-- she'll lay
around
your borders all day, mewling
and clawing, with catlike paws
at the door
that just had held all
that she loved,
ignoring, willfully,
the new pet you've begun to feed,
and she'll lay around
your borders all day--
she'll lay
around your borders
all day.
So I hope that when
you say you're gone,
you're gone,
and that she does
not hang around too long, skinny
and starving from the gifts
left on your lawn
that should have been her breakfast
every morning that she laid
around your borders all day,
laid around your borders
all day, mewling
and clawing with catlike paws
at the door she knew had just held
all that she loved.
you break her heart
you are swift and honest,
and leave her doubtless
that you are gone
or else you'll be at fault
for the grief you've caused.
And she'll lay around your borders
all day-- she'll lay
around
your borders all day, mewling
and clawing, with catlike paws
at the door that just held all
that she loved,
until she collapses for almost seven
months, wondering
in her feverish sleep, what exactly
made you leave?
And she'll lay around
your borders all day--
she'll lay
around your borders
all day.
I hope that when you break
her heart, you
do it early
and do not leave her to linger on,
kitten-blind while you move
on.
Or else she'll lay around
your borders
all day-- she'll lay
around
your borders all day, mewling
and clawing, with catlike paws
at the door
that just had held all
that she loved,
ignoring, willfully,
the new pet you've begun to feed,
and she'll lay around
your borders all day--
she'll lay
around your borders
all day.
So I hope that when
you say you're gone,
you're gone,
and that she does
not hang around too long, skinny
and starving from the gifts
left on your lawn
that should have been her breakfast
every morning that she laid
around your borders all day,
laid around your borders
all day, mewling
and clawing with catlike paws
at the door she knew had just held
all that she loved.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Sparrow and Scallop
A tiny house, up on a hill:
that's where I'll be, still.
And when you feel all overwrought,
I'll be the only soul
who's not corrupt.
And we can lie together
in the mustard and the clover,
and sing each other's praises
over and over,
alone as the loneliest last stars of morning--
plaintive as sparrows
and sealed shut like scallops:
nestled in our solitary loving.
But like dogs on a trail,
our deer-hearts will be hunted
by people with the zeal
of over-nervous mothers.
And we'll vainly
try to hide from them:
lower our eyes
and cover our skin,
grow out our hair and hide nymphlike,
behind
the translucent vestments
like reluctant brides.
We could hide this way forever,
as meek subsistence farmers;
preoccupied with sowing
and nature's simple, sainted order.
Born from the constellation of the archer,
headstrong as stallions
and trembly as rabbits;
united in our adroit
and earthy cunning--
we'll ignore them and laugh.
We'll ignore them and laugh;
let their gaze roll like water down our backs.
We'll ignore them and laugh.
But like dogs on a trail,
our deer-hearts will be hunted
by people with the zeal
of over-nervous mothers.
Each striving to fondle and fetishize
and worry themselves over
the same solitary consciences
lain wasting in fallow fodder,
searching the sky for a limit on its borders,
star-eyed as boatswains
and fate-bound as martyrs,
cradled in a hollow in the soil.
Or, we could ignore them and laugh.
We could ignore them and laugh;
let their gaze roll like water down our backs.
We could ignore them and laugh.
that's where I'll be, still.
And when you feel all overwrought,
I'll be the only soul
who's not corrupt.
And we can lie together
in the mustard and the clover,
and sing each other's praises
over and over,
alone as the loneliest last stars of morning--
plaintive as sparrows
and sealed shut like scallops:
nestled in our solitary loving.
But like dogs on a trail,
our deer-hearts will be hunted
by people with the zeal
of over-nervous mothers.
And we'll vainly
try to hide from them:
lower our eyes
and cover our skin,
grow out our hair and hide nymphlike,
behind
the translucent vestments
like reluctant brides.
We could hide this way forever,
as meek subsistence farmers;
preoccupied with sowing
and nature's simple, sainted order.
Born from the constellation of the archer,
headstrong as stallions
and trembly as rabbits;
united in our adroit
and earthy cunning--
we'll ignore them and laugh.
We'll ignore them and laugh;
let their gaze roll like water down our backs.
We'll ignore them and laugh.
But like dogs on a trail,
our deer-hearts will be hunted
by people with the zeal
of over-nervous mothers.
Each striving to fondle and fetishize
and worry themselves over
the same solitary consciences
lain wasting in fallow fodder,
searching the sky for a limit on its borders,
star-eyed as boatswains
and fate-bound as martyrs,
cradled in a hollow in the soil.
Or, we could ignore them and laugh.
We could ignore them and laugh;
let their gaze roll like water down our backs.
We could ignore them and laugh.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Musings on Kiki Smith / Night at the Batcave (poem)
The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white cotton linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
:
But I love the greatness of the clouds.
I love the grass that wraps my calves
like a stocking.
I love that I crept, knock-kneed and uptight, into the Gowanus, led, precarious, by expert night crawlers,
over the most sloping and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled,
scrambled slipshod in the dark grass,
with wind
rushing and sticky arms waving,
to rest at the foot of my favorite building,
the monolith, beautiful
and resplendent in the faint starlight.
We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap
fleet-foot and leather-winged
in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky,
all stretched out in the haunted gloom
of the structure’s moon-
wrought shadow and gutted
windows like empty eyes.
Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place
was ordained by the crisply painted, revelation-
seeking banner
that crowned the brow of the beast,
that shouted into the darkness:
“OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.”
Our singular movements across that concrete veldt
were all brought into being,
our skins all wriggled
and our brains all turned
in the way they did
because that order hung above our heads.
:
We settled into the night like deer
that tramp listless circles into the high grasses
to create their chosen torpid nests;
mosquitoes
hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers
and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly,
for something to happen.
And imperceptibly, it did.The stars shifted overhead
and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower
lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving
time out of the blackness
like two small trails of dark blood
swirling in a slow and shallow drain.
Various thuds passed in the night;
we felt as though we were being watched
by all manner of creatures, and more
than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing,
close-set eyes
that peered, humble and inquisitive,
from the bushes that sprang
(dark fireworks)
from of the cracks in that abandoned lot.
The only way into the towering structure, full
of holes and trick boards
like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor,
is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless,
until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape
that is to be swung onto
as if it were the bow
of the boat to your salvation
(it is).
:
During the day I am told
the light filters through the blackeye windows
honeygold like pure laughter,
and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor.
The light, always filtered through a smoky screen
of luminescence, moted,
and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights
on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing
the forgotten art
that dwells there
in the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers.
The sheer emptiness of this space,
its ultimate abandonment,
makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a
kiss.
Its silence envelops you in a totality
so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated
that in your solitude you are more surrounded
than you have ever been before.
The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time
and that embraces the entire space of your being.
You cannot think of anything else but the fact
that you are completely alone there,
and that it is truly only you,
for as long as you wish.
You bathe in this silence, luxuriate
in the way it muffles everything
but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
:
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—after having stood transfixed for an entire day
and slowly losing your sight,
the expansive
perception you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself
within that hallowed space allows you to hear,
with unmitigated clarity,
the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice
that there is a moth nearby, fluttering
a muted waltz outside the window.
Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left
and gone somewhere else.
You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing
as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable
to them as it is to you.
You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you
that dead space. The whole house rings
with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure
that your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back if what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
:
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry
out around the old, broken windows
and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there.
The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation
to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels.
Sooty, swaybacked meerkats,
they appear to be heralding the dawn
and for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered
throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn,
is united in their alertness.
The katydids and other clickhumming
night beetles quit
their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae
in a singular, momentous signal
to their robotic brains.
The feral cats that had come to war
with the masked and bandit-like raccoons
in a territorial dispute
lope
away into the distance,
whiskers twitching and backs arched;
they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
:
Even the slimy fish
resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal
are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium.
Your laugh has caught the breeze, and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily
upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges
and circles it creates, and spiraling
down to the silted brown bottom, echoes
in a muffled cascade through the green water:
your laugh, the dispersing
eidolon of its selfsame source,
has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal created
by a rising pocket of gaseous levity,
the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display.
And so the fish stir too, wending
their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates
and rusted anchor chains
that line the muddy, clouded bottom,
smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips
light up
for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them
resting,
to the bottom,
to sleep.
:
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up
by the ghost
of your gentle laugh in the toothless, eyeless, gutless building;
by the recognition that even in total solitude there is
a superabundance of life, perfect
and intricate in all its forms.
As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—
you have never been to such a beautiful place,
and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin
to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there.
And your heart beats
newly,
like it never has before:
your chest is filled with the warm
and solid spaciousness
of the man-made building
that has become a precious,
organic cavern.
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white cotton linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
:
But I love the greatness of the clouds.
I love the grass that wraps my calves
like a stocking.
I love that I crept, knock-kneed and uptight, into the Gowanus, led, precarious, by expert night crawlers,
over the most sloping and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled,
scrambled slipshod in the dark grass,
with wind
rushing and sticky arms waving,
to rest at the foot of my favorite building,
the monolith, beautiful
and resplendent in the faint starlight.
We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap
fleet-foot and leather-winged
in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky,
all stretched out in the haunted gloom
of the structure’s moon-
wrought shadow and gutted
windows like empty eyes.
Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place
was ordained by the crisply painted, revelation-
seeking banner
that crowned the brow of the beast,
that shouted into the darkness:
“OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.”
Our singular movements across that concrete veldt
were all brought into being,
our skins all wriggled
and our brains all turned
in the way they did
because that order hung above our heads.
:
We settled into the night like deer
that tramp listless circles into the high grasses
to create their chosen torpid nests;
mosquitoes
hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers
and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly,
for something to happen.
And imperceptibly, it did.The stars shifted overhead
and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower
lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving
time out of the blackness
like two small trails of dark blood
swirling in a slow and shallow drain.
Various thuds passed in the night;
we felt as though we were being watched
by all manner of creatures, and more
than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing,
close-set eyes
that peered, humble and inquisitive,
from the bushes that sprang
(dark fireworks)
from of the cracks in that abandoned lot.
The only way into the towering structure, full
of holes and trick boards
like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor,
is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless,
until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape
that is to be swung onto
as if it were the bow
of the boat to your salvation
(it is).
:
During the day I am told
the light filters through the blackeye windows
honeygold like pure laughter,
and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor.
The light, always filtered through a smoky screen
of luminescence, moted,
and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights
on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing
the forgotten art
that dwells there
in the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers.
The sheer emptiness of this space,
its ultimate abandonment,
makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a
kiss.
Its silence envelops you in a totality
so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated
that in your solitude you are more surrounded
than you have ever been before.
The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time
and that embraces the entire space of your being.
You cannot think of anything else but the fact
that you are completely alone there,
and that it is truly only you,
for as long as you wish.
You bathe in this silence, luxuriate
in the way it muffles everything
but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
:
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—after having stood transfixed for an entire day
and slowly losing your sight,
the expansive
perception you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself
within that hallowed space allows you to hear,
with unmitigated clarity,
the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice
that there is a moth nearby, fluttering
a muted waltz outside the window.
Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left
and gone somewhere else.
You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing
as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable
to them as it is to you.
You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you
that dead space. The whole house rings
with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure
that your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back if what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
:
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry
out around the old, broken windows
and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there.
The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation
to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels.
Sooty, swaybacked meerkats,
they appear to be heralding the dawn
and for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered
throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn,
is united in their alertness.
The katydids and other clickhumming
night beetles quit
their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae
in a singular, momentous signal
to their robotic brains.
The feral cats that had come to war
with the masked and bandit-like raccoons
in a territorial dispute
lope
away into the distance,
whiskers twitching and backs arched;
they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
:
Even the slimy fish
resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal
are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium.
Your laugh has caught the breeze, and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily
upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges
and circles it creates, and spiraling
down to the silted brown bottom, echoes
in a muffled cascade through the green water:
your laugh, the dispersing
eidolon of its selfsame source,
has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal created
by a rising pocket of gaseous levity,
the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display.
And so the fish stir too, wending
their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates
and rusted anchor chains
that line the muddy, clouded bottom,
smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips
light up
for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them
resting,
to the bottom,
to sleep.
:
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up
by the ghost
of your gentle laugh in the toothless, eyeless, gutless building;
by the recognition that even in total solitude there is
a superabundance of life, perfect
and intricate in all its forms.
As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—
you have never been to such a beautiful place,
and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin
to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there.
And your heart beats
newly,
like it never has before:
your chest is filled with the warm
and solid spaciousness
of the man-made building
that has become a precious,
organic cavern.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Musings on Kiki Smith / Night at the Batcave
The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
I love the greatness of the clouds. I love the grass that I currently wrap myself in. I love that last night I crept, knock-kneed and uptight into the Gowanus, led precarious by expert night crawlers over the most broken corrugated and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled, scrambled slipshod in the dark grass, with wind rushing and sticky arms waving, to rest at the foot of my favorite building, the monolith, beautiful and resplendent in the faint starlight. We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap fleet-foot and leather-winged in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky, resting in the haunted gloom of the structure’s moon-wrought shadow and gutted windows like empty eyes. Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place was ordained by the crisply painted, imposing banner that crowned the brow of the beast, that shouted into the darkness: “OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.” Our singular movements across that concrete veldt were all brought into being, our skins all wriggled and our brains all turned in the way they did because that order hung above our heads.
We settled into the night like deer that tramp listless circles into the high grasses to create their chosen torpid nests; mosquitoes hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly, for something to happen. And imperceptibly, it did. The stars shifted overhead and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving time out of the blackness like two small trails of dark blood swirling in a slow and shallow drain. Various thuds passed in the night; we felt as though we were being watched by all manner of creatures, and more than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing, close-set eyes that peered, humble and inquisitive, from the bushes that sprang out of the cracks in that abandoned lot. The only way into the towering structure, full of holes and trick boards like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor, is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless, until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape that is to be swung onto as if it were the bow of the boat to your salvation (it is).
During the day I am told the light filters through the blackeye windows honey-gold like pure laughter, and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor. The light, always filtered through a smoky screen of luminescence, moted, and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing the forgotten art that dwells there the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers. The sheer emptiness of this space, its ultimate abandonment, makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a kiss. Its silence envelops you in a totality so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated that in your solitude you are more surrounded than you have ever been before. The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time and that embraces the entire space of your being. You cannot think of anything else but the fact that you are completely alone there, and that it is truly only you, for as long as you wish. You bathe in this silence, luxuriate in the way it muffles everything but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—you have stood transfixed for an entire day, and the loss of your sight, combined with the deepened attention you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself in that hallowed space, allows you to hear, with unmitigated clarity, the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice that there is a moth nearby, fluttering a muted waltz outside the window. Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left and gone somewhere else. You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable to them as it is to you. You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you that dead space. The whole house rings with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure that the momentum it gains from your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back of what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry out around the old, broken windows and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there. The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels. They become meerkats for a moment, and appear to be heralding the dawn; for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn, is united in their alertness. The katydids and other clickhumming night beetles quit their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae in a singular, momentous signal to their robotic brains. The feral cats that had come to war with the masked and bandit-like raccoons in a territorial dispute lope away into the distance, whiskers twitching and backs arched; they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
Even the slimy fish resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium. Your laugh has caught the breeze and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges and circles it creates and spiraling down to the silted brown bottom, echoing in a muffled cascade through the green water: it has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal that was created by a rising pocket of gaseous levity, the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display. And so the fish stir too, wending their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates and rusted anchor chains that line the muddy, silty bottom, smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips light up for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them resting, to the bottom, to sleep.
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up by your gentle laugh in this toothless, eyeless, gutless building; by the recognition that even in total solitude there is a superabundance of life, perfect and intricate in all its forms. As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—you have never been to such a beautiful place, and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there, and your heart beats newly, like it never has before: your chest is filled with the warm and solid spaciousness of the man-made building that has become a precious, organic cavern.
-----------
this is going to become a really long poem.
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
I love the greatness of the clouds. I love the grass that I currently wrap myself in. I love that last night I crept, knock-kneed and uptight into the Gowanus, led precarious by expert night crawlers over the most broken corrugated and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled, scrambled slipshod in the dark grass, with wind rushing and sticky arms waving, to rest at the foot of my favorite building, the monolith, beautiful and resplendent in the faint starlight. We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap fleet-foot and leather-winged in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky, resting in the haunted gloom of the structure’s moon-wrought shadow and gutted windows like empty eyes. Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place was ordained by the crisply painted, imposing banner that crowned the brow of the beast, that shouted into the darkness: “OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.” Our singular movements across that concrete veldt were all brought into being, our skins all wriggled and our brains all turned in the way they did because that order hung above our heads.
We settled into the night like deer that tramp listless circles into the high grasses to create their chosen torpid nests; mosquitoes hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly, for something to happen. And imperceptibly, it did. The stars shifted overhead and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving time out of the blackness like two small trails of dark blood swirling in a slow and shallow drain. Various thuds passed in the night; we felt as though we were being watched by all manner of creatures, and more than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing, close-set eyes that peered, humble and inquisitive, from the bushes that sprang out of the cracks in that abandoned lot. The only way into the towering structure, full of holes and trick boards like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor, is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless, until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape that is to be swung onto as if it were the bow of the boat to your salvation (it is).
During the day I am told the light filters through the blackeye windows honey-gold like pure laughter, and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor. The light, always filtered through a smoky screen of luminescence, moted, and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing the forgotten art that dwells there the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers. The sheer emptiness of this space, its ultimate abandonment, makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a kiss. Its silence envelops you in a totality so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated that in your solitude you are more surrounded than you have ever been before. The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time and that embraces the entire space of your being. You cannot think of anything else but the fact that you are completely alone there, and that it is truly only you, for as long as you wish. You bathe in this silence, luxuriate in the way it muffles everything but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—you have stood transfixed for an entire day, and the loss of your sight, combined with the deepened attention you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself in that hallowed space, allows you to hear, with unmitigated clarity, the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice that there is a moth nearby, fluttering a muted waltz outside the window. Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left and gone somewhere else. You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable to them as it is to you. You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you that dead space. The whole house rings with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure that the momentum it gains from your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back of what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry out around the old, broken windows and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there. The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels. They become meerkats for a moment, and appear to be heralding the dawn; for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn, is united in their alertness. The katydids and other clickhumming night beetles quit their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae in a singular, momentous signal to their robotic brains. The feral cats that had come to war with the masked and bandit-like raccoons in a territorial dispute lope away into the distance, whiskers twitching and backs arched; they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
Even the slimy fish resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium. Your laugh has caught the breeze and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges and circles it creates and spiraling down to the silted brown bottom, echoing in a muffled cascade through the green water: it has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal that was created by a rising pocket of gaseous levity, the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display. And so the fish stir too, wending their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates and rusted anchor chains that line the muddy, silty bottom, smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips light up for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them resting, to the bottom, to sleep.
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up by your gentle laugh in this toothless, eyeless, gutless building; by the recognition that even in total solitude there is a superabundance of life, perfect and intricate in all its forms. As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—you have never been to such a beautiful place, and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there, and your heart beats newly, like it never has before: your chest is filled with the warm and solid spaciousness of the man-made building that has become a precious, organic cavern.
-----------
this is going to become a really long poem.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
no stone unturned
there may be silence here
but rest assured
i've left no stone unturned.
some may castigate me for this, harshly
but i cannot live a life of bland
obsequiousness-
i cannot creep like moss over
the surface of things and sit,
hands folded like an egyptian statue.
i am a tunneler
by trade, i am a rodent with a nervous heart
and a keen mind that never stops whirring.
i will infinitely delve, inverted sysyphean am i,
for i cannot be convinced there is a bottom
to things, but rather an everlasting, murky fond:
all nature is like the tumescent, layered
soil: richly creeping with comlex, ethereal beasts
and strewn with gems at every tier:
the self is a deep, dark well
life is escaping that capture
thought is tunneling.
i am a stone at the bottom of a mellifluous pit
i am a mole, scraping at the edge with my paw
i am transformed by my desire to escape the boundaries of myself.
occasionally, with tooth and nail, i will break
out through to the clammy and sodden void,
and i will scrape at the dense nothingness of absurdity-
haphazard but strong, penetrating, and entirely direct-
until i find the bottom of another well to lie in, in hopes
of finding, in that hollow vacuole, a stone
to turn
and wonder at,
in awe.
but rest assured
i've left no stone unturned.
some may castigate me for this, harshly
but i cannot live a life of bland
obsequiousness-
i cannot creep like moss over
the surface of things and sit,
hands folded like an egyptian statue.
i am a tunneler
by trade, i am a rodent with a nervous heart
and a keen mind that never stops whirring.
i will infinitely delve, inverted sysyphean am i,
for i cannot be convinced there is a bottom
to things, but rather an everlasting, murky fond:
all nature is like the tumescent, layered
soil: richly creeping with comlex, ethereal beasts
and strewn with gems at every tier:
the self is a deep, dark well
life is escaping that capture
thought is tunneling.
i am a stone at the bottom of a mellifluous pit
i am a mole, scraping at the edge with my paw
i am transformed by my desire to escape the boundaries of myself.
occasionally, with tooth and nail, i will break
out through to the clammy and sodden void,
and i will scrape at the dense nothingness of absurdity-
haphazard but strong, penetrating, and entirely direct-
until i find the bottom of another well to lie in, in hopes
of finding, in that hollow vacuole, a stone
to turn
and wonder at,
in awe.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Blood Orange
Last night I dreamed
of being raped,
and retaliating:
of screaming and gnashing my teeth,
of clawing and biting and yelling
violently public obscenities,
of throwing broken shoes
and champagne glasses and scrambling
out the window of my childhood home
(a wild-eyed and frantic bacchant)
to streak stark naked
and wailing across the silvery tar-
papered roofs of a dormant Manhattan.
Fleet-foot and furious,
I ran long and hard,
only to pause,
trembling and shocked
like a trapped animal,
once I hit the last stretch
of that final roof on the corner of Greenwhich,
that place where the tarmac
became my ritual ground
and I became electrified,
rooted,
compelled to cringe
and stomp and arch my back
and leap in terrified frustration,
to tear my hair in a freakish pantomime of grief,
and to howl,
from the deepest place in my heart,
all the songs of destruction,
backlit in my archaic mania
by the obsequious figure of the rising sun:
A broken blood orange (with tattered
and dripping hemispheres revealed)
that, reddened and oozing
with the previous night's violence and surrendering,
slowly spread its indelible stain
across
the great,
white-tablecloth mesa of the morning sky,
the ghostly filaments of its hollowing skin
trailing in the breeze as translucent
crepuscular
clouds,
and its small seeds disseminating
like missives
to the lonely, hanging stars
of Callisto's great Bear.
of being raped,
and retaliating:
of screaming and gnashing my teeth,
of clawing and biting and yelling
violently public obscenities,
of throwing broken shoes
and champagne glasses and scrambling
out the window of my childhood home
(a wild-eyed and frantic bacchant)
to streak stark naked
and wailing across the silvery tar-
papered roofs of a dormant Manhattan.
Fleet-foot and furious,
I ran long and hard,
only to pause,
trembling and shocked
like a trapped animal,
once I hit the last stretch
of that final roof on the corner of Greenwhich,
that place where the tarmac
became my ritual ground
and I became electrified,
rooted,
compelled to cringe
and stomp and arch my back
and leap in terrified frustration,
to tear my hair in a freakish pantomime of grief,
and to howl,
from the deepest place in my heart,
all the songs of destruction,
backlit in my archaic mania
by the obsequious figure of the rising sun:
A broken blood orange (with tattered
and dripping hemispheres revealed)
that, reddened and oozing
with the previous night's violence and surrendering,
slowly spread its indelible stain
across
the great,
white-tablecloth mesa of the morning sky,
the ghostly filaments of its hollowing skin
trailing in the breeze as translucent
crepuscular
clouds,
and its small seeds disseminating
like missives
to the lonely, hanging stars
of Callisto's great Bear.
For Molly (extended)
black ringlets fiercer
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:
in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that I want
to call you a summer storm,
I want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
I want to make you
red
bold
hot.
but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and Newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.
We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.
We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another
and our shared solace, in
those endless basement, backyard
cigarette, stairwell
tell me everything,
tell me, dreaming, graffiti,
tarot,
apple cores and coffee,
inspired, platonic
sixteen-year-old
nights.
And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:
Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.
The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, bountiful third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Is a Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
waters to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
Abundant consciousness
a lung, and
blood-salt like sea water:
your thoughts breathe
throughout everything.
The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram,
your skin has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Liberal limbs
join at a torso that is constellated
with a girdle of tattoos
like stars, each
marking a moment when kismet came
too close to home.
Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:
in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that I want
to call you a summer storm,
I want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
I want to make you
red
bold
hot.
but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and Newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.
We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.
We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another
and our shared solace, in
those endless basement, backyard
cigarette, stairwell
tell me everything,
tell me, dreaming, graffiti,
tarot,
apple cores and coffee,
inspired, platonic
sixteen-year-old
nights.
And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:
Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.
The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, bountiful third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Is a Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
waters to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
Abundant consciousness
a lung, and
blood-salt like sea water:
your thoughts breathe
throughout everything.
The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram,
your skin has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Liberal limbs
join at a torso that is constellated
with a girdle of tattoos
like stars, each
marking a moment when kismet came
too close to home.
Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
for molly
black ringlets fiercer
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:
in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that i want
to call you a summer storm,
i want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
i want to make you
red
bold
hot.
but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.
We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.
We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another.
And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:
Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.
The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, great third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram
it has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:
in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that i want
to call you a summer storm,
i want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
i want to make you
red
bold
hot.
but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.
We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.
We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another.
And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:
Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.
The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, great third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram
it has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
I AM
Tonight I read the Song of Solomon
Tonight I absorbed drop by drop the bitterness
slow-creeping of Kaddish, vulgar
gloom and creepiness describing
ancient
vagina, death, Kali,
mother looking, grey eyes
with yellow jaundiced rims, staring
bloodshot and cocked
into the terrible void of future, the promise
of nothing.
Tonight I saw the moon hang
twice, a crescent: fingernail
clipping on night sky making gaudy
the ragged shrouds of old cloud that lingered
like dust trails on the velvet black night: twice
reflected blurry in gazing pools that dotted
New Jersey, wan
sickle, imitator.
I saw you, beautiful, two moons
running swifter than gazelle
over quiet night-plains, Artemis,
hart leaps over middle-america.
Your two breasts like two fawns--
I remember
that song like love like your solicitation
and I am that second moon
blurred and transient
sitting, airplane seat cold, hurtling
back towards life unknown--no friends--
falling headlong into college,
secondary
education in forms, education in
fucking, in no one, in meaningless
beers by the side of the road.
Library dust, smell,
isolation and hard-backed chairs
ears twitching with the paranoia
of a hacking cough or a restless heel,
I feel
more like pain every day, more like
twisted, spine broke, ruined brain.
I feel like love gone
fallow lands
I feel like spring, like Rilke's
melancholy and I'm 3200 feet closer
to the great unshifting stars, this whole country
encompassed by Orion,
that same doomed hero I watch spread his arms across the skies
of Brooklyn, of Oregon, sword hanging
flaccid and useless at his belt, Orion--
already dead! Has been
defeated by crustacean nemesis, sea's
Arachne, hubris, excellence, void!
Already bloody like the ravine
sliced through my thumb by tremulous 8 am
breakfast, the burnt poppyseeds like asteroids
across the countertop milky way--
the blood, sudden, dyeing my bagel like love, crescent
cut like sky-caught moon, pain like
Solomon, and the gradual joining of skin
without scab, I see into myself
and like a prism
my heart's distillation into a thousand
colors: flesh, bone, blood, I am
revealed to myself
a scared and quiet thing
manic scribbler of choked-up words
struggler, love-obsessed,
knowing only
when I give birth will I be born.
Tonight I absorbed drop by drop the bitterness
slow-creeping of Kaddish, vulgar
gloom and creepiness describing
ancient
vagina, death, Kali,
mother looking, grey eyes
with yellow jaundiced rims, staring
bloodshot and cocked
into the terrible void of future, the promise
of nothing.
Tonight I saw the moon hang
twice, a crescent: fingernail
clipping on night sky making gaudy
the ragged shrouds of old cloud that lingered
like dust trails on the velvet black night: twice
reflected blurry in gazing pools that dotted
New Jersey, wan
sickle, imitator.
I saw you, beautiful, two moons
running swifter than gazelle
over quiet night-plains, Artemis,
hart leaps over middle-america.
Your two breasts like two fawns--
I remember
that song like love like your solicitation
and I am that second moon
blurred and transient
sitting, airplane seat cold, hurtling
back towards life unknown--no friends--
falling headlong into college,
secondary
education in forms, education in
fucking, in no one, in meaningless
beers by the side of the road.
Library dust, smell,
isolation and hard-backed chairs
ears twitching with the paranoia
of a hacking cough or a restless heel,
I feel
more like pain every day, more like
twisted, spine broke, ruined brain.
I feel like love gone
fallow lands
I feel like spring, like Rilke's
melancholy and I'm 3200 feet closer
to the great unshifting stars, this whole country
encompassed by Orion,
that same doomed hero I watch spread his arms across the skies
of Brooklyn, of Oregon, sword hanging
flaccid and useless at his belt, Orion--
already dead! Has been
defeated by crustacean nemesis, sea's
Arachne, hubris, excellence, void!
Already bloody like the ravine
sliced through my thumb by tremulous 8 am
breakfast, the burnt poppyseeds like asteroids
across the countertop milky way--
the blood, sudden, dyeing my bagel like love, crescent
cut like sky-caught moon, pain like
Solomon, and the gradual joining of skin
without scab, I see into myself
and like a prism
my heart's distillation into a thousand
colors: flesh, bone, blood, I am
revealed to myself
a scared and quiet thing
manic scribbler of choked-up words
struggler, love-obsessed,
knowing only
when I give birth will I be born.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Sage and Snow
I kissed those lips once
extracted drop by drop
the holiest of liquids
o fluid love, o mountaintop!
Your fountainhead's dried up
softly ceasing, little stones
lighten in color, as your
lighten in color, as your
body leaves their bones
Sage and snow, a stoic sylvan throne
tread lightly across the surface
undisturbed until you come
and weave frosted bowers upon the peak, upon the place
Where lonely I lived, o quiet grace!
O empty space!
[instrumental]
Come, sweet, soft
twining vines surround you
my heart is a fruit fallen off
of your limbs, of your limbs, of your warmest bough!
Bursting open, sapped and sticky, I am drowned
and the ants crawl in to my grieving skin
to pluck away my seedling hope
and to scatter my body in the wind
And wither tend you now?
I am the seed, I am the vagrant spore
Wind-tossed and wandering, hollow and soft
inchoate, separate from your barky moor
Rooted, you must be where you were before
but it seems you're as breeze-blown as I
For the earth, she has turned her face
clear around, left you inverse, dangling in the sky
She has left you, lonelier than I.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Anemone (revised)
Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging to hide slippery inside a calcite, crescent
neptunian warren. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish, dissolute
and trembling. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging to hide slippery inside a calcite, crescent
neptunian warren. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish, dissolute
and trembling. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Anemone
Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
****************
this is a second draft.
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
****************
this is a second draft.
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