Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, birth, books, fiction, fingers, genesis, Mallarmé, media, paint, physiology, semiotics, truth
Your skin is a transmission;
a message speaking of days spent
at the easel and loves
that touched you. A small
silhouette sits on the cover
of your bookish back. I
can read your name in the notches
of your spine and the signs spoken
by the movements
of your impure hair.
In my mind I see you turn towards
me, stepping gently in kinetic verses
punctuated by the grammar of your flesh
and your verbose hands. I
think of you as a story some have
read but none
understood; only I know the tale
told by your body when it was first formed
in the womb. That first fold was
the closing of a book.
Your skin is a message
emanating from your hips;
a broadcast in code your lungs
sent me and which the fine hairs
carry still down the small of your back. I
pore over the cleft of your
breasts, my fingers finding Braille in
your freckles. The medium enfolds
me like a story I’ve only begun to
understand but have read many times.
Literary legs draw me fast into this best
and last fiction.
Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, Chuang-Tse, colors, entropy, fractals, media, open concepts, order, paint, spectra, Wittgenstein
I tried to write a sestina for you
but I didn’t like it;
the words I selected had stood grumbling
like party guests that didn’t get along.
If a transmission is to be sent,
it’s easiest to write unencrypted,
spelled out in a message logical
and mathematical –
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3, and so on…
and free verse
owing to interpretation
and Wittgenstein
is said to be open;
and the image can be
scrambled;
so I’d like to say this before
I heap too many ingredients
into this soup:
You always mixed colors well.
I may be one to try to mix
oil and water
but your oils
and your watercolors
are never lacking in synthetic
perfection.
In fact I am not entirely convinced you are not
slipping in colors
from some other spectrum.
Where I see only the individual shades & shapes
of the sounds of the eye
you see a symphony
of tones that you stir
into action
and conduct with a graceful ear
towards mixture
and differentiation.
The colors you concoct
find their way onto canvas
through the entropic strokes
of your stirring spoon
and huddle close together
becoming so entwined
that they seem to be lovers.
Your paintings, too
are admixture fractals of
organic abstraction, a blend
of my blood, and your blood,
and the blue of the sea
and the bark of the trees
and the black of the dark
and a streetlight
and a flame
and my grey-green eyes.
And the intermixed symbols stand as one
and transcend themselves –
the browns are not browns but
the color of moist soil
and the greens when they
aren’t forest moss
are seaweed
or fresh apples,
and the purples are
a fading bruise,
a plum,
the petals of a passion flower.
My days and nights
are divided;
I ascend daily through strata
and find only further
separation
in the layers
of my existence;
you walk the line of the horizon
in a parted world
and see the ten thousand things
as one;
and bring warm happy nights
to my cold long days,
and make me forget the components of this
contented composition.
But you always mixed colors well.
I knew
when you sat down.
It’s strange to think it’s been a year
since I landed that first kiss,
and a year since you waltzed through my door
and confessed
you wanted me to be
your boyfriend.
My hands will remember
the soft, gentle curve of your hips
forever.
Since then I have lived
400 days
in your presence,
in tumult and in cheer.
In joyous days
which all blend together now
I have carried the torch of the day countless times
into night
while you have slept peacefully in my bed.
You have planted sweet kisses on my neck
that have yielded pale blossoms
dipped in black ink
which you have dried
and hung
on your walls.
In 400 days I have watched you create universes
with your paintbrush.
I knew
when you sat down
that things would never be the same again.
[Written on the inside of a copy of Sei Shonagon's 'Pillow Book,' given to a special someone on our anniversary. The passage from the book which gives this poem its title, 'In Spring it is the dawn,' can be read here: http://tanabata.blogspot.com/2006/04/in-spring-it-is-dawn.html]
Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, canvas, fingers, ghosts, hands, paint, paper, water
Whose hands are these?
that cover over other
points of light standing
on white canvasses.
Who makes them green?
Who holds the brushes?
What colors doe she use?
She fills the white spaces on the floor
like water fills a pitcher.
She leaves no spot untouched
by glorious fingers dripping specters
floated from her palette
on to paper and cloth.
Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, Egypt, Europe, love, oceans, reading, Rumi, travel, words
I’ve been thinking about you,
mostly.
Your eyes,
your lips, your neck, your voice,
your hands(!!!),
your beautiful, wonderful little body!,
your heart…
how much I want to sit in bed with you, kiss you…
read with you. Read to you.
Listen to you read to me.
Sit across a table from you.
Share you with the world.
Eat you out…
create (not make) love, force it into existence
through the friction of our bodies
moving against each other under the covers…
thinking about Oregon, thinking about traveling,
thinking about Rumi,
and my poetry, and how much I love your writing and your art,
and acting,
and how we should start a band,
and all the songs I’d want to sing with you,
and all the tattoos I want to get, and the names of our children…
and I know love is a transient and fickle thing
but I feel the strength of you
pounding out a rhythm beneath the pounding of my heart
and in the luminescent bodies of the words I never have to say when you’re near
and the thoughts I think
that I know you think too…
And.
I want to rub my feet against yours in the waters of all the oceans in the world.
Come back to me.
We can go to the beach.
We can plan a trip to Europe.
We can go to Italy, to Greece, to Spain (for you),
to Austria, to France, to England (for me),
to Egypt (for us both).
We can go anywhere
or nowhere
and be everything and nothing and be each other
and live in each other’s pockets
and blow the candles out and in the dark pretend we don’t exist at all.
We can go. We can not. We can.
Whatever it is — we can.
Love love love
love love love love,
Me.
You are learning to juggle.
The trick is to have them all fall in place.
You are learning to live.
And the same rules apply.
I learn so much from you
when you learn.
I can taste the light touch
of wisdom in your eyes
on my tongue.
I see the places you want to go
or fall in
and I have been there.
Your love
is the soft tapping of raindrops,
the hard touch of death…
eternal, but fleet of foot,
and the blink of an eye
is the breadth of its life.
But remember.
Two blinks of an eye
could spike lightning
to the moon.
You are learning to juggle.
I am learning to admire.
Filed under: sestinas | Tags: AJB, cobras, curry, elephants, India, mongooses, sestinas, sparrows, Thailand
Alli, I’ve struck at this point for weeks as gingerly
as can a man with a sword but not a proper
sword-arm, and none to be got between here and India
anyway, and those to be had sold by that stuttering sparrow
boy in Thailand hawking cheap fucks and eating peanut
curry and us here thinking it’s beneath
us. But never mind the gentle riders beneath
the waves we will skip not-so-gingerly
alongside. Forget the acres of peanut
fields in Georgia. Forget the acres of proper
-ty our foes have set ablaze. The sparrow
asks you as it flies away to remember only India.
But not your grandmother’s India. That India
lies on doors buried beneath
office buildings in Calcutta, beyond the reach of the sparrow
and the owl, both of whose talons may gingerly
grasp both rafter and rabbit alike, proper meals and proper
sermons enjoyed from the peanut
gallery by all. The preacher works for peanut
-s, as well he should, being imported from India,
and as elegant and bejeweled and proper
as an elephant can be while toiling beneath
a monsoon season sun stepping gingerly
through thick grasses too fatal even for the hungry sparrow.
If you catch and question a stuttering sparrow
caught in the jaws of a king cobra, he will lay it on thick like peanut
butter and offer any number of excuses, gingerly,
tenderly explaining he lost the way to India,
caught between the teeth of a “s-s-slight d-d-delay” beneath
the rainclouds of the monsoon season’s monsoon proper.
If you cave and rephrase the inquiry to the bird proper
-ly, the advice from the coy, stuttering sparrow
will be to – at all costs – put leagues beneath
your wings until you’ve found the man with teeth like peanut
brittle sitting in a marketplace somewhere in rural India
calling your name, though he does not know it, gingerly.
Do not approach gingerly; instead be a proper
little mongoose, in India, forget the sparrow and the sparrow
boy, and the peanut curry; search for cobras in the brush beneath.
Filed under: poems | Tags: the ocean, God, books, the sun, the stars, my mother, trees, traffic, His pipesmoke, airplanes, cliffs, Thomas Pynchon, the Old Testament, anachronism, films, AJB
I can depend on my mother’s charity
and the stupidity of mankind…
Relying on the tides to rise and recede
and the birds to chirp
and the squirrels to nibble noisily on things
sitting in the branches of some tree
is infrequently rewarded with the opposite.
Even counting on the improbable
to occur
is safest, sometimes;
and most things tried are true;
and most lying words do
nothing but strike at reality’s flint
in futility and are doused by their own
unshakable impossibility.
Traffic will always mean dominoes of flaring taillights,
muttered curses and blaring horns
like kites of weathered strings and polymers
that carry the fumes and the din
and any doubts as to Man’s lot
up into the maw of the sky,
to float alongside God’s pipesmoke
and be returned to the earth
by great silver birds
that can be expected to land
but never on time.
These are things I can predict;
causes and effects with no affection
for quantum physics.
The short straw will always poke its head out above the others for us.
First breaths shall have their last breaths,
and good things their ends,
and millions of tiny absurdities shall assert their common nature
and shall certainly nibble noisily on certainties
dangling from our ears like great silver talismans
that can be expected to land at our feet
but only when least expected to.
I know that footsteps
can only lead to a corpse or a cliff
if they are followed to their good ends,
and I can tell you that if a screaming comes across the sky
it’s unlikely we’ll hear the sound when its great silver tip parts our skulls
like the Red Sea.
These are things I can safely predict
because I have read about them in books,
because I have watched them,
because I have induced them into forming patterns,
and made them into sensible accounts, and dependable things,
kites on strings
and great silver wings
and the years of a tree
spelled out in rings
and plain on the face of a tenth-generation squirrel
nibbling noisily on some things he stole off the abacus
I use to count off the animals I’ve seen on the backs of clouds,
the probabilities,
things I expect that never arrive on time,
the good endings of movies, the cliffhangers,
all our short straws,
all the patterns picked out from amongst storms of uncertainties,
and all the things I hate but know to be true.
And I count here on these fingers what I’m sure of:
the sun,
the stars,
and you.
