Poetry
Synthesis
…Perhaps there are signs of alliances
between wind, sun and stone to force
The softness to the surface… (Yvette Christianse)
The artist returns to the cave, starry-eyed from
overexposure, drenched from the spray of blinding light
Like Gaudi, she builds a cathedral for a world she will not live to see
organic shapes rewriting the violent spires of enstoned truths
commemorating a future unbound
Vapors escape from the soldering iron
as she stitches together pieces of mirror and ancient sand
with drops of lead
(once poison, now transformed
for the more noble causes of reflection and refraction)
Tired discourses crack in these fires of new creation
While polychrome lenses align
to filter the force of glow from beyond
She tells us,
the eyes must grow
to meet the light
As she points the way
through windows of colored glass.
Transgression
“The gaping mouth slit heart from mind. Between the two eyes in her head, the tongueless magical eye and the loquacious rational eye, was la rajadura, the abyss that no bridge could span. Separated, they could not visit each other and each was too far away to hear what the other was saying. Silence rose like a river and could not be held back, it flooded and drowned everything.” (Gloria Anzaldúa)
Each day we turn water into wine and back into water
but our cycle denies at the outset the possibility of nectar
(the soul’s wings are bound by the world’s assumptions)
“Pick your battles,” they say.
(they mean, “don’t pick this one”)
They beat paths of rationalization
into submission
with granite walls raised on each side
(arrival and departure sketched in stone)
They prepare bullet points with the
precision of trained assassins
the shape of thoughts circumscribed
by the casings that carry them
Caught in the flytrap of how we’ve always done it
the brute force of our language betrays the desperation
of the soul’s missives of peace: interrupted
writhing, twisting, grasping
for release
Daring us to lay down soft blankets for the words left out of the poem
to make real the heavy imaginaries not yet enlivened
to dissolve the crown of thorns
and scatter its brilliance into prism.
Dialogue
This siege will extend until we teach our enemies
paradigms of our Jahili poetry… (Mahmoud Darwish)
Imagine the discourse
as a wine-dark sea
seething with storms that ensnare
the future in the whirl
The sea’s deep cerulean hue has not yet been invented
but we sense its pull
so we comb through the froth and churn for new words
to bring our blue to life
The Sirens sing us toward the seduction of old resentments
while Charybdis vomits fragments of men and their feral doubts
Poseidon raises waves of obstinance, stonewalling our compassion
and Zeus burns scars of light across the fragile skin of truce
All taunt the audacity of those who dare to attempt the crossing.
These guardians of old-world habits and antiquated grievances
revel in ancient entrapment
(much later, it will be the orcas,
passing their own judgment on the vagaries of hubris)
We run aground
gasping for release from the assaults of gray water
parched from the salt of history polluting our drink
Sometimes the passage hurts more than it should
but persistence yields a landed sunrise
new angles of light exposing shades of sapphire
when seen from the other side.
Conflict
“...the mile ago it takes to stop the train…” (Ed Roberson)
Tonight’s light
(born from the flames of manufactured firestorms)
forces the stars to resign their posts
the blood of millennia still spills forth, its progeny lapping
at the beaches of Troy
at the riverbanks of ancient promises
at the coastlines of dead seas and retaliatory instincts
rough, cavernous tongues: tied
(and thrashing)
in barbed wire and the spoils of hollow dialectics
The sun gazes down upon the squabbles, sighs,
and recedes into the maudlin consolation
of leaden clouds
This discourse yields a power absolute--
too heavy for peace, too taut for grace.
Risk
The words left out of the poem, they are frightened. (Yiannis Ritsos)
A turmeric moon rises above the arctic horizon
speeding through its low-hanging arc
frosting and brightening as it climbs
I settle into calming promises of hearth
wrapped in the weighted blanket of the known world
late harvest wine seeping through my ambition
Outside, black river currents run below the ice
starmelt drips from the sky
and the firefox beckons
her emerald tail a trail through the heavens
A discourse of light awaits
but the sharp shock of winter’s slippery veil
looms, a deterrent to illumination
A dilemma posed:
to remain ensconced
or
to traverse the delta’s brittle crystalline crust
and enter a wilderness of words not yet uttered.
The House We Once Lived In
…they were raised to believe they could only trust words. words were a place to stand… [1]
…the trap of reason binds us in the net of time… [2]
…by the reach of your hybris, shall your house be known…[3]
A foreclosure sign went up today outside the τόπος κοινός;
the words couldn’t pay the rent.
in the final pass-through before departure
syntax wept
laden with memories on the precipice of dissolution
a lone rhetorical trope buried
in a backyard paint-can-time-capsule
that stain under the sink
where the emergency stash of grammar leaked through
its container
the nail hole on the wall in the bedroom
larger than it should be and not enough time
to fill it in the haste of departure
(the frame that hung up the sentence
was too heavy)
a faded, half-finished landscape drawing on the wall
where punctuation had tried her hand
at curating a museum exhibition in the staircase;
thwarted, mid-vision, she blustered and pouted all evening
(already so sure of her artistic worth)
she used sharpie
and the acrid scent of incipient structure lingered
for centuries
this house of spent phrases and broken syllogisms
will be on the market tomorrow;
a τόπος uncommon breaches the perimeter
in the arcane hours before dawn opens her doors
feeling grasping easing gasping
towards an occupancy of spirit.
***
Quotations:
[1] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After The End Of The World
[2] M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!
[3] Sylvie Kandé, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore
The Jellyfish
The jellyfish is feeling especially electric today.
Threads of voltaic grace have been threatening
to break off from her center,
diluting her gossamer rage and
pulsing her exposed to the vagaries
of the waterworld passing through her.
The fact that the jellyfish has different metaphors
should give pause
should rankle the hegemony of the upright ground-bound body
(the one that has to work so hard to swim or fly
the one that can’t decide if the future we see up ahead
is really behind)
should awaken epistemologies of atmosphere
(that don’t rely on one foot in front of the other
that don’t need the arc of time to sweat out our discrete lives
in droplets)
and yet we carry on wandering the flat earth
as though we know it
unable to reckon with its demanding roundness
we are thirsty but afraid
to let free the water
(for fear of losing it to the horizon’s edge)
so we cup our hands and dip them into a puddle of mirage
to drink the desert-soured juice of our myths.
***
The Color Of Water
Iridescent hues claim the arc of the wave right before it crests
into light
the sun and my eye and my anchored stance create these colors
together
at the moment of tumble, a wall of mirrors appears
the taut wave at point of collapse
refracting the light into me
(or is it a ruse
to keep me from looking through her?)
the spectrum assimilates, spilling into a churn of surf
offspring of the undulating liquid abyss
a foam-white carpet of air
(the white that contains multitudes)
reaches beyond the boundary of shore
tomorrow, more gently, the lapsed blue
(is it the same as your blue?)
settles into sandy bay containers
drops of a maybe-the-same ocean
but tempered now, in glass silence
the angles of iridescence lost in transfiguration
(having sloughed off their sharp tint and violent beginnings)
crystalline shadows still lodged in the space between my eyes
and the sun
***
El Fénix
Entre el incendio y las cenizas
hay un solo momento en que el fénix debe decidir
si quiere vivir otra vez
si quiere empezar al ilimitado principio la próxima iteración
En este momento
la crisálida que viene
habita en fragmentación
en lágrimas negras que caen de ojos que todavía no existen
Estas gotas oscuras, lluvia del alma inconclusa aún infinita
transportan todas las posibilidades de ser
encajada y encerrada
al borde del abismo
En la frontera
el aliento de vida
queda suspendido en suspiro cautivo
y el fénix baila fuera del ritmo
considerando las opciones
de permanecer o de morirse en final
Al igual que en momentitos de nuestros propios renacimientos
la decisión de emerger
viene con llanto resbaladizo y viscoso
y nos presentamos mojados, demasiado agotados
al crudo principio nuevo
Los mitos nos esperan allí
enloquecidos de anticipación
aguardando que tenemos la fuerza necesaria
para arrastrarlos con nosotros hacia la vida
***
I Pledge Allegiance
[A poem for a precarious, incongruous, slippery holiday….]
I pledge allegiance
To the better angels of my nature,
divided within me, around me, above me.
To the deep disruption of their binaries,
in star-spangled, kaleidoscopic jubilee.
And to a republic unbound
which does not stand; it overflows.
Dismembered states shimmer on cave walls
known only in fragments and backlit shadows.
One of many nations,
under dark stars and blistering sunsets
in search and service of becoming
craving truth and beauty, wisdom and justice.
I pledge allegiance
To revolutions not televised
To the nine-pound hammers of ill-fated coups
To the offspring of barbarous ancestors
To bread, and roses too.
To the mischief that mollifies factions
To the buried hearts at Wounded Knee
To the tired, poor, and huddling masses
To the mystic chords of memory.
To sacred corn and purple mountains
Majesty not yet debased
To stalwart salmon running
Legacies not yet erased.
To the pursuit of something more than happiness
In these times that might be changing
To wrath and grapes and hard won solace
In these times that won’t stop raging.
I pledge allegiance
To the fire next time
To the seventh generation
To the dreams we still have
To the ramparts of creation.
***