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, 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: books, crowns, dust, fingers, hands, heraldry, mutilation, sand, thirst, writing
I’ll smash these fingers to pieces
and saw these hands off my arms.
They are petty jewels of an unworn and undeserved crown.
They are the vestiges of a lost name.
They are vestigial.
They have proven themselves redundant,
they have been dominated by a decreasing art
and slackened by sliding skill.
If I have need of them now, they certainly don’t tell me,
and seem contented to resign themselves to the fate
not that they had chosen, but through a refusal to choose, chose -
an aching ruinous crumbling,
as though they were made of dry sand, of red dust,
bled near to smacking their lips in dumbfounded and final thirst.
I’d rather not know them
when the day comes that they fail me.
It would be easier to live with stumps, with castration,
than to stare at these fully formed phalanges
shriveled, inactive, and shuddering from underuse.
If they are to be destroyed, either way,
in sloth or activity,
I should rather they be removed
to a home for old hands
than for me to spend
another minute looking at their knobby, knuckled backsides,
squeezing what little life I can from their tendons and tips,
staring at the imposing white expanses that separate me from the world
and knowing only my fingers can navigate,
like they do the passage from pale, veiny thigh
to the great fold at the spine, at the center.
These pumping cylinders of flesh and bone and gold and nail.
These fair painters.
These graceful, ungrateful little pencils.
There could be no greater pleasure
than to run them down to the eraser.
