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for Veronique “sublimity always is simple” -- Esaias Tegnér A light face and a dark face contend by the river. The blonde currently has a few seconds of grace to practise beauty, her shadow is away in the wilderness evading the winter sun. As time falls those watching are held alchemically; their duty is to administer life, give a verdict knowing that water is malleable, and the cries of unseen birds give the sky a lasting grace. A lost poet is found north of the Hawaiian Islands. His wife knows the science of travel, having got her feet wet carrying her womb on board the Trans-Siberian railway. In March the swallows feel the pull and kick of the wind, and the sky is beginning to grow small again. Blue is the colour of fate, after white, and the faultless sky-blue overhead envelops our glistening bodies. ( _ ) The valley to the left of us crept lovingly into the earth. My tools are a smile and my bare hands, foreshadowing many days and nights softened by the rain. A river winds through the valley, traveling with the raindrops. The forecast is for birds, and women, to find shelter. My glow is lost in the silence. The last piece of bread is now moist and sticky, and this time, the sliding geometry above the water will camouflage and soothe the edge of the other world sufficiently for its eddies and flows to reap for us one, small, sacrificial fish; and as we eat, the weed on the bottom sways brokenly. ( _ ) A word dance stepped out. Her name was Jane, and I was elsewhere, far elsewhere, universes elsewhere. Our touch and its crimson aftermath warmed and soaked and hurried me; I knelt, and the butterflies my hands made ever are black. A spot for each of us, an anthem under the stars, and though the highest hill is no platform from which to launch desire, it reaches into the sky enough for our closeness to be part of its consciousness. Your hands are covered by our loss, and yet in the elaborate, patient weave your journey has become, this thought is a warm drop of blood. ( _ ) As trees take the sky within, blue prayers move hand-in-hand with a falling wind. Feeling the ages of life your heart is pumping rainwater, and the mud thins, in the inevitable marriage of dust to water. I am in the warehouse. I am the warehouse walls. I cannot see the walls. Thirteen years ago I carried a cloud, and now I sleep surrounded. Learn to grow mornings on your windowsill, pick them up and they blossom from your cold hands. Deep inside the music of bare flesh jinks away from you– ( _ ) The invisibility that shimmers in your glance as the storm gives evening flesh. A lightning bolt electrifies a rainbow white, in the blank space above God. Carved into the night, we sit on a bench by a pool of perfect water, and the meniscus of the Pacific Ocean and all the mothering the Pacific Ocean does for our planet melt into our eyes, and when our bodies have frozen under the blue-green crush, only then can we seek time without blemish only then can the noiseless need to finish our flight to the other continent settle, become mutual and smoothly naked, like waterlilies. ( _ ) The wordless birds sing, infinitely articulate, while constellations poised on the edges of the seventh universe offer new life to the likes of you and I. From the depths of inarticulate sorrow a starling pecks at a wriggling worm. From this sublime morning comes cool, clear, fresh air, and whichever feeling circles our sense, a starling’s shadow has power to give a holy blessing to the bereft, the sad, every unaware soul curtained from grace. Trembling, I pick a branch from the new, smiling breeze, and listen as the stars whiten, creation thickens, our planet lives. ( _ ) The restaurant by the harbour guards the shy, still water. Our table fires us into a night so deep, to leap through its abyss would take a century. The candle we have escaped to, the rose petals decorating the white linen, the blooms our love finds in this sheltered, drifting evening, all meld into our glances; and the strangeness of fresh water melding into salt in the sacred places our dreams live, the sight we hold and treasure, flows out to the mother ocean, illumined by the wordless, confident moon – a silky moment, this, as we hesitate, then plunge through our souls’ windows. ( _ ) In the thought is the fall; as the first night approaches we still our pulses, and the animals unknowing in our world begin to sleep. West of here, a comet trails across the velvet sky, and the opaque comedy assaulting almost every sense is far from irresistible – that privilege belongs to your eyes. Found among the atoms of tomorrow, a life surprised wide, the weft and tack of words shared, then thrust, as in battle, into the rough ground between us. It is lightening, and the boundaries between friends loom less. Wavering from the climb, we finally plummet into the soft mystery, and every creature in the gridlock dines on yesterday. ( _ ) Love closes our eyelids, amazingly above our heads the waters flow. Good, yet sweet, the rest embryonically alone. This renewal belongs to the furrows and blossoms of our planet, not the quest for rumour and noise. Flavour your days with static and the cracks will widen until we die hard, waterless, without miracle. Perfectly covered by bitumen and concrete, the throat that would sing tactile, thick songs of soil and roots taken has the time to compose secret, new oaths our children’s children will keep. Two pigeons gather the distance from the city, their rue. ( _ ) When the music flowed from white flower petals the sky came closer, and the man without a body, without a hunger, old and vast as the solar system, gave me an understanding that maps lead into the ground. I flop backwards into a yellow trance. Autumn depends on the bones of summer, its flesh is my flesh, and it is old, and its trees will dream again; they are monuments to the hazy ghost who took Friday, blistered it, discovered laughter in the cold silence of the Tuesday before. Half blissful (the other half intoxicated by the music’s pulse), I know the potential of your soft white form waiting within the clouds. ( _ ) His greatness was not in his breath, or his touch; it rested in the dancing around him, the stillness he elicited from echoes. Angels have their uses for the symbols of love and peace, and when the small crowd invaded his room his sobs lengthened the night, the ringing was piercing, almost savage, but it stopped. The next day he took his ribs to India and his heart followed. A defter, more delicate touch was needed the night before; safely returned to anonymity, he caressed the young, placid heads with his wit, while the world coasted towards a new decade; our complaint, if there is one, hinges on the lessons skipped. ( _ ) Do not hurt me as I play, take the war elsewhere. Let my black scythe be thrown into the sea. I am a tribe of one, you crumple my name in your hands, I am a sentient thumbprint waywardly holding my peace. I am an animal holding my shell and the slow sleep of the sea. I took every strike love could rein and built a ship from pure thought. And the sea searches for me, the planets glide about the neighbourhood, proving the truth of nothing. ( _ ) Their efforts to be human involved taking my brain and my eyes out onto a lake in a small boat. All of us caught just one fish, unsurprisingly, as our bait was three-day-old speech. The laughter from the shore, the laughter from the gulls overhead, all surely scared any fish. My marriage crept up under her thighs, her prayers, her lips, her darkness, her heartwood. Now, though, the reef just outside the mouth of the estuary is where the fish swim poetically, their gills quenching any echo of dangling lines; rising from our kisses, coming from your stomach, our baby slides into summer, superbly, a mermaid electing to laugh lightly at fate. ( _ ) My mauve tie attracts silent jeers, while your chaste, moist form leaves the mirror and walks to our bed. Into the millions of years huddled into our mutual past, twisting from sight your hands go lower, and their songs reach the centuries to come, lately lost, but as surely as the sea will be reclaimed, they will be reclaimed. Washing our rain into our faces, the light on our bedside table attracts a divine, forgiving lull, as time cycles away from us. White is our sense, the sequences of nothing that culminate in these hidden joys, this reality so clear its softness surely is founded on the intoxication of shelter. ( _ ) Play with a hypodermic in three acts. The curtains rustle near the snow. A hidden “why” lives near the armchair. A forest persists, in challenging autumn to stake a longer claim on the planet, in its delay. I myself won’t complain. The cards have fallen–over the ice dusk is nipping at the treetops. Heat belongs to the next season, the next sentence. The next sensation is your breath, gentle forgetfulness draws me there. It’s OK to be fragile. To be dressed, for each frame catches tears, the fabric closes around us, and we don’t hear it. ( _ ) The new lottery – a birth whetted by a desire given form in the bends and doors of a phone call. How little time for the smoke to multiply a crimson thirteenfold, gel into the plasma binding our souls. The harsh wind collects dew and quarantines it for use as tears. I’m too frightened to leave everything until September. My penis awakes suddenly from the netherworld, and dances past bits of hope, lace, sweeping its white milk-jet into a new land. Varied are gasps and pleasures. Suddenly the kitchen strides in as the phone rings again. It’s Mike, wishing us “improbable and small blessings” before we fuse back into each other, giving openly. ( _ ) Into questions the mouth of the river flows. The artist by the river holds the surf, dredges from the bank an intimation of water and this gives him, or her, (it will be hard to tell until dawn comes) the delight, the badness of a god cast off and holy. Golds, pinks, a sunset calmed by the day’s unfolding. Her grandmother studied under Picasso, listened to his boasts, drank him in, and knew what was missing. Now she gives the boats a final, sideways look for today, momentarily glances down into her cleavage, and then rings her daughter. “How are you?” Teach us, dear, archaic, involving quest. ( _ ) The hidden, small attic we shouldn’t be looking in so intently – a genuine secret, like the design of a butterfly’s wings – holds carpenter’s tools and many canisters of film. The click of the projector can be heard all the way to Rochford. I empty my wallet, and, with no regard for gentility, throw notes out of the small window. In Australia, as in Oregon, old Westerns trail off into a multitude of hackneyed moments. My joy is never esurient, it is never mistaken, it weaves through the sky like a star adventuring away from the night sky, upwards into the days of heaven. John Wayne? Cary Grant? It matters not. After midnight, all the dust blows soundlessly away. ( _ ) Non-existence. That café I was in last week? The waitress was a forty-something goddess, the eggs, bacon, chips and tomato were delicious, but yes, perhaps it was non-existence. A dead poet hands me a skull to drink absinthe from. A deformed deity, unmoored and lost on the busy, eddying streets, I return to non-existence for pathetic traces of paradise, periodically forgetting life’s anodynes fraught with the thick residue of feeling. A bizarre death awaits, caramelizes no doubt, while we take her strawberries to a market, not to sell, but to throw at the stars which gather overhead; occasionally we are entangled, but your buttocks are bare, as mine are, during life’s maneuvers. ( _ ) My soul froths slowly at my feet, the Thames settles as my mirror, and nourished by its stillness London is content. The black starlings rise toward the moon. The history of each pub in the suburbs is replete with cheesy smiles, drinking men warring greyly with their souls. A woman enters, carrying her risen virginity in a brown purse. The men twitch, the river’s slow morph punctuates their glances, unseen. The prize: a dreamed night. Her beauty is never clearer than on a foggy evening, when the horns lop and bundle time, when her tongue nears salt, and all the ships leave their docks for the voyage southward. ( _ ) Still water, broken and re-broken, a clear fruit, we share its sweet impossibility, for it is no fruit of any vine or bush or tree on this planet; its clearness is its evolving, moon-like taste we taste so briefly, then the stars reflect again your echo, dear beloved, and my themes and opinions are seeds, and their fruit is found in the inconstant, phenomenal ground between God and the devil, and this verse. Into extremes of foolishness, you drink the waters of my body and all its vivid, flaming tears. Into pain, God shares a little luck, relief, laughter, until he leaves us to eavesdrop on the silent, heartbroken spaces between people seeking love. ( _ ) I saw my child, my daughter, for a moment until her beautiful breasts, mouth, forehead, eyelids disappeared strangely. I wrote in a card you are my love, and set a goal to consummate my words before my shell and sinews break. Through all the elements of kindness, people massively switch to exasperation, often; and the genius of plants and the phases of the moon, the handsome, white flowers cleaving your bewilderment,–this, lucidly, from the far, far east to the blazing Western sunset, is the furniture girls whisper questions over, pin beams of light to, be funny, wild, soulful, and reverent over. ( _ ) “Happy Christmas,” says my true-love as we continue to endure. One sacred certainty unites us, still, unsure, as we glimpse the shadows chained to our natures. The mystery, the glare of pleasure can drown us if we re-open thought, take the news again, and choose to wallow in the average glories. By the water’s edge the forecast gathers turn and reason, until our marriage. This universe shelters somewhere else sometimes. Your encyclopedic eyes will keep me, sate me, all my life. Moments later, the proof weathering my heart. The shadows are greyer than age, tauter, to teach us to repay from our ethics, to bestow the onslaught of a hurricane only after we are not going to die, but rather, mercifully, sing, dropping time into the ocean. I died; but you wrote my eyes. |
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