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Composure

by Shirin Swift

blue painting yellow frame
you are you -- yet not the same
the foreground in a colored-in balcony scene
arms folded throat composed
i wish i could not care for you
my hands shudder inside my chest
trying to reach your profile
through my ribcage
feeling for a way out of this composition

the painting changes before my eyes
before i know it, it's sunset
and i am knee-deep in pencils
about me are the blooms that never stop
fingernails blunt from scraping colors
citrus trees, red roofed houses,
mauve gristle and purple stings
decapitated green creepers

when you see them practicing for life
that way, is it any wonder they come out
like they do?

Colors stream from your eyes
into the garden, i follow them to the red hibiscus
the rosemary arcs – you end
in my perception's flounder

unwatered
a talisman of wild discordant
spoils withering on a wooden tray
from which i drew all day an untalented sketch

you and i are descendants of room temperature
and warm binary creatures, let me know
when you find them
dividing
their songs, their cells, into lesser and greater mysteries
the gift of listening to morning glory gramophones:

out of the window
some are winding up, others winding down,
when you see them practicing for life
that way, is it any wonder they come out
like they do
smiling from their centers, recordings damaged
only by the inability to hear or expose organically inclined gramophones

invisible fingers play my bones
perhaps i am heating up the sun for it is a magnificent day
on which to be a necessary, winding shape that is not new.

01/18/2007

Posted on 01/18/2007
Copyright © 2024 Shirin Swift

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Kathleen Wilson on 01/18/07 at 07:47 PM

Intensely visual, yet full of sound, the morning glory gramaphones playing themselves our into the days brightness in all their stages of opening and closing. The simple set scene (blue painting, yellow frame")an the overwelming stretch toward... "composition", "composure" all linked in a heartfelt exasperation... "I love "knee-deep in pencils". And the feeling of the progression of the colors and the day all throughout, the grasping, the inexpressible thirst ("perception's flounder") ("wild discordant spoils")and the wish for escape ("feeling for the way out") and true expression ("trying to reach your profile through my ribcage") from the everyday of even the self into the heart of mystery and to (if only) tale the other with you...("let me know").

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