In green times hold my hands aloft
10/01/2007 06:54 a.m.


Each time a bottle brush is touched (by raven or bee) it seems I do not appreciate enough, and so I write, sometimes I pray to the stained glass spider webs at my feet propped up against the balcony. I see nature’s anonymous effigies when the clothes sink from your hips each time a brush emerges from the bottle I do not think twice, it seems, about picking up more colour to make a red I cannot describe and cry crazily inside the room I depict or at least inside one of its small cupboards where I have lain too long still like lost keys. How to make the right shade with words? How to arrive at the right colour? In my first set, there was Love (it was red). Now there is Bottle Brush and it is the tone of unrequited desire or an old man smoking a cigarette at the bus stop. His pants are torn. There is a mythical hand on my knee waiting for me to say yes, I will. There are kitchen sounds from my neighbor that sound indistinguishable from my own, there are flowers watered by sirens, once there was a you to pull away from. Sometimes the rain tells me my window is closed, sometimes the wind, but only the sun paints me with its unflinching wrist then walks away quickly down the hill.


I am currently Blue

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...we
09/15/2007 09:55 a.m.

…we gave to the world a dark and bitter hold… In between their former selves and in between the leaves, the dancing lovers imitate the summer and the breeze. The laughing lovers rise and wash, think and say goodbye. And in between the lovers and in between the leaves, a dancing wind uncovers the vows lost in the trees.

What you uttered in knots and petals on the tapestry let me through the door to borrow the parts of your caresses you allowed yourself to share. I returned them all to your shelves one by one, cremating the condensation of lovemaking. The world holds a candle to our lives and to the coming grave; it will not let us part before we’ve found our separate ways. There are chips in the clouds of this eastern porcelain outlook; wheelbarrows painted over by wildflowers, ferns and sky.

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were they to reply
07/06/2007 11:12 p.m.

were the gods to replace darkening rosebuds
between fingers instead of rational husks
reply to our hands with pomegranates, tongues and branches
tighten like archaeologists, were they to display their wings like gaudy
lorikeets, and screech, and do other nasty things,
would we be less drawn in the image of their craziness and fear

I am currently Peaceful

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the ones i love
07/06/2007 12:18 a.m.

the ones I love aren’t very far – furled in scarves & sipping wine
laughing shoulders (and how they laugh)
at anyone who isn’t fine, the ones I love
have treated nails and low-down eyes, aren’t far enough,
love to describe the steak and kidney pie they ate on a winter’s day
under the oaks – amid a suicidal rain of leaves –
our tongues do not behave tonight, tasting
blasphemy and prayer and floury soup, indite, the ones I love
unfolding from their unit doors in jogging gear


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More real when asleep
06/22/2007 02:48 a.m.
I carried the unlikely flowers home in the rain and washed the rental vase out myself. The tulip’s salmon-knuckles rest outside the vase – as far as they can as though they hate getting their feet wet. Maybe they just hate the disconnected feeling of being cut off. I’m renting everything these days, down to the teaspoons and forks in my rented cutlery drawer, the copper pipes corroding just under the cement floor. I’d go so far as to say I’m even renting a body so that “I” can cruise. That might be pushing this metaphor. My rental body owns some things, is buying a house and some second-hand things. It crawls around on the window’s surface, ready to fly and never look back, yet compelled by necessity to seek a way to stay on track. Mosses deeper than dreams grow on low voices, a lake composed of sight and sounds standing on my sleeping hands and spread hair and head, staring up into who knows what, more real when asleep – we hold each other down under water, make believe we are a chain of double-sided beings walking off branches like weathered angels who come home at dawn and slip off their wings, for I trust only in these yielding things, the reed-splintered dirty water shifting to let in reflections and a docking ferry’s hull. Clear blue sky cups birds raising them to its thirsting lips. In spite of your shirt, glimpses of your heart drift behind the sun-shaped button-holes. On the harbor, ferries constantly switch sides.

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Flowering from the blackest centers
06/18/2007 02:56 a.m.
The woman walks up the hill, carrying her own coffin, thinking “With too many words at our disposal we cry under their burden.”

She walked for half an hour or so and then, where violets sink into themselves and the starlings refuse to nest, the woman came to rest. She positioned herself on the rough edge of her coffin, rich with graffiti and leaves, and watched the condensation simmering off her wet shoes. Her thoughts drifted to her father’s fishing trip where across the lake he fished, swallowed up by the fog; the mushroom farm on the way to her college, spinning strands of mist from the mounds of damp black-brown compost. The interplay of air, pressure and temperature all going about their invisible business of expanding and rising, and contracting and sinking.

The coffin’s wood was beautiful, worn, unvarnished and wholesome-seeming as though it had been constructed out of all the wooden things she’d seen and felt and smelt in her life: Firewood just starting to burn, pine kernels, the antique sideboard that never looked quite right in their house, her favorite school ruler, wood shavings, bark, wood glue, resin, memorial benches along her favorite riverside walk.

As she gently stroked the coffin, she realized for the first time how much she loved wood. Like water, it had a complicated life cycle all of its own, and in its afterlife, served to furnish the houses and apartments of human beings, to be the very log cabins and boats and what nots in the service of adjacent life forms.

“I wish my body could be that useful,” she thought. As though they’d heard, the branches released a yellowed oak leaf onto her shoulder.

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so many earths
06/07/2007 04:34 a.m.


drown your hands here

sun

       we are different with your return

some of us died others watched

             drown your hands here

in us – we are so many earths

waiting for you with residue on our finger

for we fired you from our own hearts

     our blooms race up to you - you swallow

rockets on your finger tips

to feel your earths

so deeply we weep

drown your hands here

sun

       we are different with your return


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visible
05/21/2007 02:04 a.m.
the sun borrowed his skin thus when the stars left his eyelids, the worlds bloomed on his fingers... your skin hides your true nature, as does your heart and your mind and your utterances - your true nature is omniscient and invisible to you, as is mine, and that is why we flail through each other like disseminating seeds, as above so below, as outside so within, the stars describe mysteries that we've created... in some other galaxy they are talking about stars
I am currently Questioning

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Religion is a story.
04/13/2007 11:13 p.m.

Age borrows my body for a while, as did youth; as does happiness and sadness, and various other transitory emotions, instants and states of being. Age burrows through my soul’s mollusk shell, defying the separation of body and soul. My shoes are holy, they are made out of sand and flesh and do not trample the earth. I yearn for synthesis and integration, for cause and effect, for the coffin lid, for the enigma of a bruise that came out of the blue to stain my thigh. Erosion is coupled with gulfs, chasms and mountains. I draw the blankets of many religions closer, finding in each a borrowed comfort, akin to the comfort of cooking exotic dishes with a cacophony of spices – along with something uncomfortable in each. Happy to be cross-pollinated; aware that I can never be cross-pollinated.

>I began to beat up my heart, poured hot wax over it, made of it a graven image, so that I could worship a tangible incarnate. Was it so bad to do this now that so much time and religion had passed? My heart was beautiful, obscene, caught in mid-beat externalized, my chest cavity dried and closed up. My eyes dried and closed up like a baobab tree’s knots. It was fine to be like this in a desert for forty years, but when I heard the return of the sea, my heart rebelled on its pike, and began to bleed for my chest. So, I rolled away the skin and re-placed the idol.

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Hours and stars
04/04/2007 12:07 a.m.

At the beginning of the world a man came through the door.
Where his face ended the heavens began.
His legs folded under him wrapped around rocks.
A man came through the door with a galaxy of stars up for sale.


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