Absinthe Makes the Heart go Find Her

Now is the summer of my disconent,
useless as an empty bottle.
I've hurled my disconsolate
body against walls to shatter
like glass in alleys after a frat-party;
Thrown shots like a berseker in pitched battle;
Hurtled buckshot and Bacardi
at my lover's ghosts.
This summer: an interminable Mardi
Gras desperate to drown itself in tourists,
frothing with a beer-inspired mock gladness--
As if happiness consists
of making more noise than sadness.
And still, these days without her pile
one on the other, bricks in the wall of absence.

All the Colors that Her Eyes are Not

Though I could write a poem about her eyes--
(A poem! Though I could fill a book with them--)
--to never hymn another's eyes again?
For hers are not the color of the skies;
Athena's storm-gray gaze,
nor cloudless blue, nor overcast azure.
Nor are her eyes a clover-strewn pasture
of emerald, peridot, or grassy jade.
Oh, all the colors that her eyes are not!
Each with its own voice, its note!
New muse: although I could-- no, could and will--
forsaking every other, praise your eyes,
and yours alone, and seek them when I rise,
and when I lie back down again-- still,
those other colors' sounds
that roll over the tongue like polished gems--
cerulean, citron, amber, aqua, flame!
And yet, your name is lovelier. I'll be bound;
Banish all those pigments from my pallette
that her eyes are not.

The Weaver's Daughter

she told me once that she believes in fairies.
she was the kind of girl who said things like that,
who painted medieval tapestries across her walls.
I’d been watching her—there were often spirals
of flowers along her arms, or pen-drawn runes
which made her look distracted and misplaced.
she agreed to an evening: on the way to the movies
she told me suddenly to stop the car: a cat
was walking along a fence-top; she was enthralled
with things like that. she said there’s meaning in small
occurrences. she thought every moon was a new one.
I could almost believe it: the way her black mane
tore starlight from the sky—but it was cold.

next week, I brought a book on dante rosetti’s art;
we spent the day painting pomegranates on the ceiling.
in my mind there was never a time when she was done
painting pomegranates on ceilings, she was like that.
the dragons on her walls seemed to take on depth
as she told me about her evolution; she had read
about them in some book. a paint-green breath
seemed to curve their sides as I teased her, their eyes
nipping at me. the fan-air played its slender fingers
through her grass-green hair; the room spun with it.

we just had one more date, two weekends later.
she never wanted to go to coffee-shops, or dinner,
and even at school, most of her was still
walking the forests of some imagined England.
even when friends came to see her at home, bells
rang out of ruined stone cathedrals in her ears.

that last night when her parents were out of town
we had spaghetti and wine, listened to records.
my mouth found its way to her neck, my shaking hand
to her crescent waist, lower. we kissed, then,
but when we pulled away, her eyes were twin
sad princesses, locked in some witch’s tower.
she had something to tell me. she stopped the music,
blew out the candles, and opened the curtains.
a bar of white solidified between the window
and fixed upon her forehead. she turned to me.
the horn shone like a slice of moon. you have one
too, she told me, you can see it under the sun.
well, not see it, but it casts a dark, dark shadow.

(from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2001).

Jogging Mantra

Keep on running at my steady pace.
You make me want to be a stronger man.
Build up my body's temple to your service
With the strength of your supporting hand.

You make me want to be a better man.
Though love's no competition, or no race,
Still, I will do my damndest to deserve
The least drop of your overflowing grace.

I was jogging this morning and this little snippet of doggerel began running around in my head. It began as one line-- "Keep on running at my steady pace" -- and the desire to keep myself running without feeling like I had to try to keep up with the other joggers, who are faster than me. If I try, I tire too quick. Pretty soon it had become this whole mantra/prayer thing. Heh. Just thought I'd share it.

Astrolabe and atlas of my love

When I close my eyes
I see her, sunnier than any skies,
the smile lines like a sunrise on her face.
Her body charts my future's boundaries--
a neck, an arm, a waist--
the map to trace
the countours of my life. That I should be
cartographer of such uncharted grace!
My hope laid out like virgin territory--
each hollow, hill and valley
of my faith in tomorrow
as visible as a countryside to me.
I'm not so blind as to think the plains and furrows
of our life together hold no sorrows,
but I have faith that soon
the tears our crying sows
as saltwater with water laughter's bloom,
and her bright voice will laught the rain to scorn.
Though dusk may draw up like a sheet, her eyes
will open like the dawn.

--> I challenge you!: You listening, Matt?

So, I watch this anime called "Marmalade Boy," a girly serial-romance that's basically "My So Called Life" in 90's Japan cartoon-form. Many of the cultural references and lifestyle was pretty familiar (resembling 80's U.S., really), but sometimes the differences are pretty significant. For example, the show gives the impression that the Japanese are all running around yelling "I challenge you!" to settle their differences. The forms these "challenges" take is absolutely comical: basketball games, ski dares, tennis matches, or junk-store sell-a-thons.

So: this one's for Matt-Steve especially, but for anyone who wants to have a little fun with form.

Matt, let's write a few poems in each other's forms; I'll do one of your "twenties" if you write a "veintet."

--> form: veintet

- 20 lines
- iambic (pentameter/quatrimeter/trimeter) in a regular, repeating pattern (like 5 quatrains, or 4 quintrains)
- rhyme scheme also in a regular repeating pattern (but not the same one as the rhythm scheme)

Thus, the cycles of rhyme and rhythm overlap and syncopate, because they are of different lengths.

Example:

~/~/~/~/~A
~/~/~/~/~B
~/~/~/~/~B
~/~/~/~/~A
~/~/~C
~/~/~/~/~D
~/~/~/~/~D
~/~/~/~/~C
~/~/~/~/~E
~/~/~F
~/~/~/~/~F
~/~/~/~/~E
~/~/~/~/~A
~/~/~/~/~B
~/~/~B
~/~/~/~/~A
~/~/~/~/~C
~/~/~/~/~D
~/~/~/~/~D
~/~/~C

In this example, the rhyme-scheme is a simple repeating ABBA scheme (that is, a four-line pattern), but the rhyme of the iambic pentameter is broken up every 5 lines by a trimeter line.

Djinn

I.
From the lips, from the rim
of the pipe's glass lip,
they rise up, robed in smoke,
unroll like rising smoke into the room--

They coil upwards like billowing bolts of silk--
a wire-wide curve of light along each brow.
Their thoughts are gas,
their minds a scalding mass of steam--
tesselating augurs, arabesques of thought.
Smoke floods the tunnels of their brains,
fills the gray sprawl and expands...

2.
Cinnamon and sandalwood: halos of vapor
slide around them like slow snakes--
What do they carry so lightly?
Flowers sown of fire line
the sleeves of their ice-black gowns.
What lies as light as ribbon
in the folds of their bundles?

The young boys are now empty
earthenware, discarded on the couch.

3.
These gods smolder, shudder inwards,
converge beneath the blacklight.

Dim in the room,
exchanging vocal glances.
The tight-locked geodes of their skulls
nod, condense slurred syllables.
The air blurs into incense,
their robes' embroidery unravels...

They trail down to the lips
of glass-eyed boys lounging on the floor.
They are sucked back to the fog
of a meat-mind,
tongue of dust,

into the true thirst--


[from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2001]

Pygmalian pauses to admire his bride

It isn't that I doubt that every block
of marble holds some future Galatea,
straining to be shorn of excess rock;
But how many possible Galateas are there?
It's not the line I write that haunts,
but for each word I use, twelve ghostly words--
each in its way as fitting and as right--
gutter like smoke, unwritten and unheard.
It's not the choice itself that paralyses;
It's the death of all those choices.
I wonder whether Michelangelo
(that seer of possibility in stone)
just before the hammer's shattering blow
heard the other could-be statues moan?
So with each word, the others fly
like chips or marble, or like bits of bone.
Her cheek emerges; other faces flee.
The dust settles. What is done is done.
I take her hand. Why was I so scared?
She's lovelier than I could have dared.

--> lost poems

I'm sure all of you are familiar with that old story, perhaps apocryphal, about Ernest Hemingway losing all of his works. Whether the version of the tale you're familiar with involves him losing them in a Spanish bar, or in the back seat of a French taxicab, or in a field-hospital during the Great War, the grist of the story is this: Hemingway wrote a lot of things, and lost them. All. Typewritten. His only copy. Everything we have of his, so the story goes, is whatever else he wrote.

Now, whether this delightful little nugget of narrative has any truth in it or not, this story is a wonderful parable about something that happens to every writer: we lose things. We burn the only copy of a poem written about an ex-lover in a fit of rage. We accidentily use the bar-napkin on which a sudden jolt of inspiration was scribbled. Works disappear electronically and instantaneously, in a whoosh of electrons. I personally can think of over 20 poems I've completely lost, for various reasons, including stolen laptops, Internet Server errors on livejournals, and careless record-keeping.

What's strange is how much it hurts to lose a poem. I can't figure it. But it does-- I am quite literally haunted by the loss of several of my works that I'll never see again.

Why?

I mean, theoretically, I wrote them, so I could write them again-- or ones substantively similar. But the loss is crippling. It feels as if I managed to wrest something beautiful and worthwhile from the chaos of life and happenstance, only to have it yanked back into the abyss. It makes it difficult to write anything else; I become obsessed with either recreating the same poem-- which I know to be impossible-- or defeatist about the likelihood of anything else I write being as good. This fixation with lost poems can become quite manic-- I've torn through my old papers and notebooks like a madman looking for poems I lost years ago, knowing that I've already been through them.

Why?

I wonder whether it isn't like a little piece of me is lost. Or a little bit of the way I make sense of the world, at least.

Untitled

Together on the love-seat after dinner,
enjoying a quiet sit.
I'm reading my old poems while you knit
what might become a sweater.
I'm reading what I wrote three years ago,
each line an invitation
to rethink my life now (and my vocation)
and you would like to know
why I have never written a poem for you.
My poems were thick with girls
before I met you, but there were strict rules:
wait for the other shoe
to drop before you set your love to paper,
let art redeem your loss
but never jinx your happiness with verse--
love poems court disaster.
Anyway, I rarely write these days,
as if writing were a glitch
I've since debugged. I see you've dropped a stitch,
all your hard work, erased--

Water to Wine

Another visit this afternoon-- again to her small cell.
In her long white gown-- that unadorned robe
that hangs to her bare feet-- she's like a Medieval saint.
She has that air about her-- she doesn't seem to care
about the tubes leeched to her arms, the cold
machines behind her with their foreign thoughts,
or that she's dying-- just that childlike smile
when you walked in. Those hands that played like water
over the strings of cellos are still now, and bunched
over themselves, like dead spiders. It's so wonderful
to see you, she says. They say the soul's a harmony
strung along the body, and she's humming
along her whole whole being, now. She's become so beautiful,
now the cord of her life's stretched taut as catgut,
and you want to tell her so, but instead you tell her
about the dream you had of her-- how she stood
with you at the edge of a slivered stream,
how she glowed-- he she smiled as she reached
one hand into her side and pulled out, one by one,
gleaming stones from her own flesh. She smiles, then,
but it tires her to stay awake so long.

The cancer's burning her up faster now,
turning her to light and tight-bunched lumps of gold;
now the doctors are sure there are mere days left.
You stay with her most nights; you finally sleep
leaned up against the wall. The machines don't rest.

A rattling breath; you start awake. She's opened eyed--
a red-eyed box emits a shrill-- she looks
as if she's trying to say something-- her lips
flap open, closed-- she moans-- and then--
From her blue lips, the glistening damp wings,
the oily-black insectile legs emerge--
A dozen butterflies swarm from her mouth
and flood the room--
the roar of gem-like wings--


[from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2001]

My body knows it's not alone in bed

Sunday, six AM: the eyelids rolled
like windowblinds against the light that bleeds
in through the windows, eyes drawn back, the blood
burrowing further inward from the cold.
Under the comforter's weight
the body curls into its animal heat,
a sightless puppy nestling toward the heart-
-beat of its mother and its littermates.
It only wants what we all want: this warmth
as close as your own marrow.
In my dreams, it isn't yet tomorrow,
the coals are not yet cold piled on sleep's hearth,
I don't have to be anything but my breath.
I'm not yet hooked beneath the gills by time,
dragged up by a line
of scheduled moments ground between my teeth.
For now the blood-warmed flesh, that sweet, dumb creature
briefly liberated from the reign
(others would say tyranny) of the brain
shivers, and moves to reach her.