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.
