69. Upon Reading a Letter of Loss (2)

For Sergei

We save ourselves with the written word.
We say, it must be recorded
because the featureless waters of silence
lack holiness when death still fills them.
Because speech is the best outlet
for an unpronounceable grief,
but reminds us how impermanent
our disturbances on the world are.
Because we see no other option.
Because it absolutely happened.

It’s been raining all day.
Of course it’s been raining all day.
But when we are pulled
from the bodies we inhabit
by dumb reality we need to touch
the cold, wet outdoors.
We need to enter the world
on its own terms and temperatures,
embrace its undeniable water.
Embrace knowing that what we are made of
might also drown us.
It’s been raining all day but
in a green patch in the park
the world is still full of miracles
as well as deliberate misfortune,
and I know only that I need to write it all down.
To keep my hand holding a storied world
and commemorate the live memory of existence.

62. On Salvador Dali’s “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening”

Every girl makes a good fisherman dreaming
even on the edge of the earth.
Shunning the common ambiguous rockfish of contemporary waters
you catch other seal-felines
with your exposed breast and pomegranate heart.
No one blames you.
No one knows
the contents of your illusory nightmares
decries your conjuration of beasts, ice-floes,
tusked aerials. No one even knows
you exist,
but the crew of the passing lucid ship,
who swear they saw a mermain in the light
of the moon.

facelift

New month, new upcoming trip, new skin. I dusted off my web development skills.

return

August’s over, time to begin again.

brief hiatus

There are now 50-odd first drafts I put up here; I need a break. Regularly programming to return in September, possibly sooner.

30. The City and the Ghibli Museum

I lost my shoes in Tokyo
not to thieves or flood but accident,
a row of shoes by the door and someone took mine.
He left the same pair in their place
but newer
I walked around that mechanized city all day
on heels so white they fluoresced,
Shinjuku to Ginsa glowing like the neon
and diodes on buildingsides
Kuramae to Adhihabara for curry and lhassi
in subway and out
wondering where the crowds are,
no white-gloved men pushing bodies
into trains, just a few faces as blank
as the faces on any subway anywhere.
But everywhere the promise of
a good pair of shoes (go as far as you can)
and god-like machines (go further),
all the way out to Mitaka to find
the promise kept in reels of film
and strobelit zoetropes,
an enlightened robot raising his hands
to reach impulsively
at a spinning exultation of bluebirds.

26. A Picnic (2)

Daylight is the poultice for the solitary heart.
Rivers become the natural architect of your sorrow,
when on their banks you picnic alone,
winking ghosts and rosebushes your only companions
save the fisherman plying the aquatic organ’s waterways.
He pulls your sighs from the river’s ink
and tosses their silvery, twitching shapes
into his ice chest.
He will disappear with the light,
evaporated back into the water that would take you, too,
if you would embrace its silences.
But you will not. You will pack your tea set
and your singular ecstasy into a basket
and retreat from the banks of oblivion,
light electric lamps to cast away
the gauzy reflections of memories on the water.
You will hang a lantern in your chest to banish shadows
and sleep as only the living do,
alone.

23. A Vision

Striding around a cobbled uphill corner
I am confronted by a nimbus vision and overcome,
a stratospheric cloud body opening
itself above the collapsing roofs of Asyranya
and inflating marvelously, as ornate as the
high, lucid domes of the Haghia Sophia and as
deliberate as the rows of praying figures on
mosques’ carpets; I stop still as a photograph
of myself in shock. The bricks of the low
wall beside me are molten with knowing when
I sit on them, the afternoon sweaty and young,
and a child appears on a bicycle veering
down, downhill strobing neon-colored paper
threaded between the spokes of his
too-large vehicle (God what a beautiful boy)
but I dare not leave the cloud,
traversed now and again by hawks at a thousand
feet, small as the ants that wriggle like
live raisins up my bag while I’m distracted
by the pulse of the hillside, until a sudden
girl of seven or eight in an orange shirt
and dirty sweat-grow bottoms ventures “hello,”
but fades quickly back into the house when I
smile wildly back because all around
me this poem is happening and
I am so struck I can barely hold
what is inside of me in,
shit, breath and these words all
shifting uneasily to be released,
the leaf underfoot transformed into a glistening fish
and all the while the sky conducting
its operatic movements through me
and into the earth,
I am lightning-rod and cymbal,
conveyor of light
and keeper of words.

9. Sienese Swallows

Arclight
& dashing
strength in numbers:
quiet little voices
on the border of the seen.
The elegant tail two lanes
diverging on the highways of Tuscany.
The parabolic wings flex and sing
to keep the body aloft.
And every one part of the teem:
small ghosts around the duomo’s roof
and sky’s rafters.