POEMS
The Drowned
The drowned man is also a drowned woman
There is the thunderclap of childhood arriving
And the hiss of it coming to an end
There is an undisclosed emotional undertow
There are the closed eyes in the water-birth.
There is the rot of cataracts
There is his shadow. I lie in it as he assesses me.
He doesn’t think to peel off my face
He doesn’t think to cut himself upon my boneyards
He doesn’t think “our mind is a camera”
Our linguistic register shifts, stops suddenly
The rhyme thrown off by what the words meant
How can you play for song, when truth is clumsy?
Truth is temporary, and later crossed out
Man must be loved, briefly. The binary must do it.
Birds must float up to the sky, then drop to trees
The arrow of time will turn any moment, we are
Only in the shorelines of believing.
How can every second ring solid, solemn and then
Become vapor, over and over?
His hand is reassurance, her brain is overlaps.
Can you remember your first moment before a mirror?
Can you remember what you've forgotten?
Can you see through him into his primal state?
Can you smash an arm into the illusion to pull his intestines towards you?
Can you laugh without dread?
This was love, all love.
- 2020
Engines of the Eye
My body is fire-baked bricks
Under construction, avoiding destruction
One cautionary tread at a time
One river, fifty years away from drying
Rendered in broad strokes of the dark,
In a four knuckled weave
Beguiled by your crying,
My hair is long, and no one will cut it
The door of the mosque is wide open
So shut it.
Can’t come into light, not for lack of trying
Its isles are white, and I ripped through the air
In a dancers arc, ground sparking, heels flying
When I was a girl, rolling up my sleeves
I lived in the world of make-believe.
- 2017
Slowly
The laughter of a brook, fragmented light under apricot trees
Broke over it under the Hunza sky, the ripples cooling
Our fingertips until I could feel
The heat on my neck as strongly as the ice in my hands
My respiration light, the air thinning in the fading afternoon
It was as if the whole world was in the span of my eyes
The radius of being was the unyielding
grass around me, beauty with no purpose.
Man had not chanced this way yet, only an empty isolation loomed
There was nobody but us, and even you began
To disappear.
It seemed it burned into my bones, because since then,
I was never the same. I carried with me
The space of that solitude
I could not watch you again, without looking right through you
I could see into your absence
And you, the rock, the roots, the man who nested
Further and further into the crowds
I could see none of you.
I was your ghost.
I was lost.
“Where are you?” you asked
Into the holes in me
- 2009
The Lower Fade
The fragrance of moringa
Frees itself into the sky
From the bracelets that I bought her
She loved them, and so I
Am filling vases with the flowers
I think of her through the hours.
And I know I am alone
Not for the lack of those who knew me
But memories of my own
Have only the mist to show me
Or the ones I shared them with
What they remember, I forget
There is a little holy circle
Where our thoughts do intersect
- 2010
This is how I fell in love
I thought that I was going to drown.
There was so far to climb and such
A terror that something was down
There with me, just waiting to touch
My arms and lift me up above
The clammy cold I knew, and so
With nowhere else that I could go
This is how I fell in love.
I knew I was a cloud, a fog
A pestilence I must contain
Was in me. Past my grand prologue,
My story grew a dark refrain
Headfirst, I took the plunge and dove
Into the void and vertigo
I wanted to be fresh-fell snow
I tell you, where else could I go?
And so I had to fall in love
The mountains trembled at his feet
But then his voice, a gentle song,
Convincing my eyes his to meet
He made me feel that I was wrong
So, fixing to the moon above,
Feet sore from flight, face red as rash
With all my thoughts turning to ash
This is how I fell in love
The black in me had to be cleansed
My breath came hot, congealed, condensed
My fires raged and bridges burned
My roadmap was the mass of stars
Obscure, untrue, five times upturned
My shadow self behind the bars
Watched life, which I had spent most of
Asleep. I had to fall in love-
He watched the silent sunset hue
He watched it turn to ink and I
Was out of words that I could use
With which I could appeal, deny.
All else was an electric blue
I had to be in love with you.
- 2010
Moon
Secrets in her red lip, curling,
Black hair caught in pearly earring,
With the moon behind her, burning,
Bright
That’s how I saw her look at night.
Notes of song from throat now swollen,
Standing like a marble column, bright and new
But eons fallen
Idle bleeding, heat receding,
Ancient astral castaway
That’s how I caught her during day
Grown old, bending into a crutch
Luminescent with a fire that I
Could not bear to touch
Tangential and waning
barely self-sustaining
The tail-end rains of June
I saw her on a summer afternoon.
The shadow of the banyan trees,
She learned the whisper of the breeze,
She’d listen slowly, tender, wholly
Liminal and melancholy
When I left her,
she was almost gone.
What stood of her
by light of dawn?
- 2012
The Men and Women
The sun is high and dry and cut in half
By telephone wires
Scorching the souls of men and women who work
Haunted by old desires
Within them all, as with the sun itself
Burn a thousand
Ravenous
Fires
In conjunction with the spheres, the waning moon,
Strung up and tense
Is silver and
Incandescent
The night is cloaked about the globe
The sun and moon rotate, disrobe
The men and women sleep and wake,
Thinking the day is theirs to take,
(Each day they think this when they wake.)
Whilst rich with smoke, the city
Roars
Its gears rotate
Produce
Implore
To feed it more and more
And more
It grows robust,
Its talons clawing at the sky
Raise up a cloud
Of dust
Under this cloud, women and men
Start over fresh, unseen,
Again.
-2012
