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: 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.
