Musette

March 8 poem: Lightness

The first line was part of another poem once. Today it wanted to be larger than it had been before, and I let that impulse lead me.

 

Lightness

Bones crumble inside us for lack of water. It’s said you become so accustomed to thirst it passes into the marrow unnoticed. The hollowing out. The silent transmutation of all that was never seen, never taken for necessary, or beautiful. A face that goes unreflected, so plain the wearer thinks, seeing on every other mouth voluptuous red lips, a kiss. The word is dry in her mind, wind lifting its edges, pulling at its weightlessness like a wing that’s scattered into feather. What remains of the struck bird on the sidewalk, that single, drying wing. Desire crumbles inside us for lack of, lack of, decays, a molecule, a pixel at a time until the screen is blank. Is this the lightness of saints who find in themselves the emptiness to rise? And emptied, do they inhabit the kiss at last?

3/8

Photo by be_your_guru, Sylvia Van Nooten, via Flickr

March 5 poem: Memory palace

Joshua Foer's recent story on memory in the New York Times Magazine put the delicious image of the memory palace in my mind. From there, it went its own way.

Memory palace

A shaft of darkness, bedroom door. The boyfriend’s parents’ bed where he and I may have, or didn’t. Tried, this time for real. What story did I slip into the box beneath the mattress? Perhaps my own Macondo, last Buendias making love in jungle ruins. I remember ants, and vines. They say outrageousness enhances, but neither of us was practiced then at memory or pleasure. Yet here’s the bed, sheets thin and worn and blue with faded daisies. What covered me was stale, smelled of the father, his heaviness pressed into foam and springs, his daily disappointment. Thank god no whiff of my own father’s sweat, though I sensed it in the boy’s scent, turned my head away. The mother’s crater, shallow next to his, was cracking, dry beneath me, racket 8.0 in the sliding headboard junk: pills, New Yorkers, dirty cups, sock wads, clock radio. A black cord swayed and tapped as walls took bumps, the windows painted shut and ceiling on my chest, the rising, falling boy. I listened for a grunt, the parents’ car, a sister’s footfalls. I could hear the toilet running. My hand fell on a shirt that one of us had shed and I held on, my eyes fixed on the boy’s, first closed then so much white around the blue.

Photo by dno1967b, Daniel Oines, via Flickr

March 4 poem: What I want from you, poetry

On the bus, looking out the window, thinking about poetry that pricks instead of soothes. I'm a friend of the lyric, the sonnet, but I love puzzling over the words that blur, as well.

 

What I want from you, poetry

Not the swoon, the prick. Not what you think. I mean the shining silver tip before the red drop. Or perhaps I mean the corset, deboned, signatures ripped. Which is not to say no gasp and drop. No telling why, though. Nothing on the page but what’s lost in the folds of an exquisite corpse, the one smudged word in the sacred text: A way? The way? The beauty of the article. The beauty of the illegible, the lost, the looping plane spelling Oulipo, Opilou, wind dissolving the pillow, the leap, bending what the reading eye finally sees: O. The poem of O that empties, fills with blue, becomes the wristwatch on the pilot’s hand, time moving still.

 

3/4/11

Photo by emdot, via Flickr

Night mysteries

I'm interested in the idea of unseen selves--perhaps exterior, perhaps interior. And, after reading lots of ghazals, I'm not surprised to see this 14-line poem want, today, to be in couplets. We'll see if it stays that way. I'm going back to 14 lines, mostly, by the way. I liked the short sijos, but they still feel like beginnings of things to me, short 10 or 12 turns of thought. Next I'll find that 14 is numerologically significant, somehow....

Night mysteries

i. insomnia

Thinning sheets of sleep, too fragile to wrap dreams.
Images fall back, into the almost-black.

Waking tired, confused, smells of lost travels
fading before they’re named. Another night razed.

Nature creates its own burrs and thorns to rip
mind’s fabric, make anything cling. Words. A place.

ii. my restless doppelgangers

So much of science becomes cryptology.
Patterns emerge first as pairs of similars,

near–repetitions. Is it just inexact
duplication or subtle variation?

And our own near-twins? They don’t know who we are.
Still they ache, our phantom limbs, those unseen selves.

iii. my own dream thief

The girl in the supermarket had my face,
hovers at the edge of the bed till I wake.

3/23/07