trompe-l’oeil on Regent Street
painted woman lounging
in a shop window
Preserving an Independent Reality
I envision the room where you spend those
other days, the ones you don’t believe. Does
it hold a sofa, sink-holes straddled by blue
plaid cushions, red lines of Murray of Atholl
tartan diagramming equations from the theory
of relativity?
If it does, invite me.
I would much like to migrate into such
a living room,
perch on the edge of space-time,
compliment the contents of the empty
frames displaying nothing on the wall.
In response to Dave Bonta’s “Believer.” Title drawn from a quotation by Hermann Minkowski.
Celestial Visions and Insect Songs
When someone curses
you and your stars, switch
to the tarot deck. Cast
your runes to approach
the future in a different way.
The stars reveal The Future
only to a select few,
which is why we had to invent
these other ways to divine
our ever present ancestor,
The Future. We squint
to see what it holds
in its wrinkled hands.
The Future, mysterious and hooded,
prefers the shadows, the galaxies
hidden to our casual eyes.
Very few of us want to know.
We prefer the icy sparkle, the knowledge
in our stars kept light years away.
But if you listen, you can hear
our destinies in every insect song.
Every butterfly sighting reveals
our future: the crawling
creature cocooned
until a moment of brief
beauty, the rush skyward,
the descent into the dust
that will reclaim us all.
Inspired by Laura M. Kaminski’s Ghazal with lines from The Book of Flight and Luisa A. Igloria’s Trusting the process.
Seriously Fine
Carry my feet away homewards
Where it takes more than two days
To fully learn to love the land,
Where we rely on hands more than reason —
Except it would be seriously fine
If we had some mechanical means
To shell the peas. If we did, our evenings
Would be free to meander with the creek
And fish, and we’d be rich indeed.
In response to “Bit parts.”
Let things lie
My father left school at twelve,
my mother told me.
He had told her he didn’t leave
until he was fourteen,
she told me,
but his sister
had told her it was a lie.
I wonder why she needed
to tell me this.
She could never let things lie.
Ghazal with lines from The Book of Flight
One day someone will say to me: “To hell with you and your stars.”
That will be a dark day. When someone curses you and your stars,
Indigo clouds will gather and weep, pour fathoms of water.
The ocean is full. Something must move out to the tide pools: shore stars.
Spiral galaxies fall toward each other out where there’s no up
Or down. Vacuum-trapped, they still play Red Rover, Tug-of-War stars.
No up, but equine abundance in space: nebula horse-head,
And sign Sagittarius, galactic alpha-centaur stars.
Some were flung skyward by the old gods, heavenly haven from
Powerful lechers. Untainted, eternal, pure folklore stars.
For children, the mouths of such legends are thoroughly soap-scrubbed,
Painted on film, where headaches are rings of bluebirds and sore stars.
Too soon, children grow, are tangled in troubles resistant to
Soap scrubs. Some take up arms and uniforms of war and corps stars.
Wrong or right, they go. And then, they fight. And either live. Or die.
Or are taken hostage, forced to act in films with captor stars.
Indigo clouds, then, gather and weep, pour fathoms of water.
The ocean is full. Something must move out to the tide pools: more stars,
And sand dollars being flung like bad alms, neither hand knowing
What it is doing. These crack and reveal: white doves and core stars.
One day someone will say to me: “To hell with you and your stars.”
That will be a dark day. When someone curses you and your stars,
Stand on the deck, send a dove out to seek, tell her to look for
A supple sprig of Jacob’s ladder—tell her: bring azure stars.
While we are waiting for her to return, while we are braving
The dark, Halima reads by fireflies—those ghost-(f)lights of your stars.
In response to Luisa A. Igloria’s poem “Trusting the Process.” Lines in italics are from The Book of Flight by José Angel Araguz.
Cézanne’s Doubt
He comes here daily,
endlessly repeats the same motif,
his whole existence focused
on the mountain, on the struggle
to relate the scene before him
to the one appearing on his canvas,
stays until the light fades,
packs his things and,
unappeased, tramps home,
begins again tomorrow.
Cézanne’s agony, the doubt
he feels about the value of his work,
stems just from this: he starts
not with a given image, ready-made,
but seeks instead to make anew
each time the sense we have
of looking at and living in the world –
and thus creating it.
After Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? Chapter 8: “A Universe for the First Time Bereft of All Signposts.”
Writer and book blogger Victoria Best recently conducted a long and wonderful interview with the novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici that makes you want to rush off and read/re-read his books – I did, and found the cadences of his critical writing so lovely they were almost a poem.
Celestial Directions
Once again, we ride the Apocalyptic
Highway, angel voices ringing
in our ears, Johnny Cash on the car
stereo. Unsure of our destination,
we leave the desolate city behind.
Others rely on maps or GPS devices,
but we travel with a different
sort of celestial directions.
We dream each night
and see the markers by day.
We eat the way our grandparents
ate on the road: a loaf
of cinnamon bread, a hunk
of cheese, and a bag of apples.
This food will take us far.
Only when we rest by a stream
do we let ourselves ponder
the future. We soak our feet
and then bandage them. We hurry
on towards what awaits us.
Inspired by Luisa A. Igloria’s “Zip,” Dave Bonta’s “Slumming It” and the Epiphany/flight to Egypt story in the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
Pale blues
Skylight, pale light
rains softly on the red silk roses
and the complicated chandeliers,
the turquoise-blue mosaic
and the pale mural where
a pale, veiled woman sits beneath a vine.
This is pretend Morocco, theme-park
Morocco, but gentle and understated,
in the best of taste, like the food
that alludes politely to north Africa –
merguez and hummus and mint tea
on an old brass tray that glints and rocks,
harissa careful to be not
too hot.
Stake A Claim
A lake breathes under the car park
evenly rising and sinking.
Dried reed silts limp, dead fish
flush into my dilated lungs.
She sat on the grass, legs dipped
in water. Pearls of desire
beaded as his fingers ran along
her back into the throat
of lily. Lust gushes out of the tap
into the sink in my kitchen
curdling the milk. The cream
trembles orgasmically in the glass.
Water oozes out of springs like
a secret hard to keep.
Particles of clay turn molten, car
floats as the lake reclaims itself
in my veins where corpuscles in
blood are displaced by algae.
Another poem prompted by the recent flooding in Chennai. See “Flood” and “Chronicle of Drowning.”