The palm tree is strong
as the wind is green.
The rage we once
called holy.
The language that once
had a direction.
The future that once
rebounded
onto us.
The indifference now
that I myself have come along
around the sun
forty-four times.
The indifference now
that the closed cycle
opens its doors.
The indifference
in this insufferable
image of reality.
Teach me to repeat
the future now,
while we are being born.
Let my mind fly up
into its nest
in the depths
of the rustling crown.
Let the eggs shine
with an afterglow
like milky sun.
Let the wind be green
and sorrow slaked.
*
A sorrow
that speaks
in clusters
of concealing
light.
So simply that light
gets the eye to see
that it is light
in the rustling
darkness.
So simply
that light is as fast
as the eye is a hole.
So easily
when the closed cycle
opens its doors,
as easily as anything,
as in the distant
acacias'
glowing
grave mounds,
the world
so killed
and buried
then and there
in light,
light
that stands still,
so easily
in April
in the April
of pain
when acacias
see me
as my mother did
when I was born.
And while I draw
and map out
whole continents
between kin
and sorrow,
the revolution turns,
hanging suspended,
and the feeling
that never leads out
is for a moment
outside
itself
and illuminated
in the dead,
inconsolable
visible
and the silence
has doors everywhere.
translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied
where the word spoken aloud takes you, hypertexts you. how a phone call flips the hood up, pulling the cloud down to separate us with sheets, every call comes with an invisible booth - we step into its confessional, as most calls are, and we are the actors who pretend so thoroughly on any improvised stage that they believe whatever isn't really there as a matter of convenience, or is it a deal made in the chapel we sought refuge in, silence for some, support for others, a station for the confidence men to fill up again, to verify ourselves by rethreading the story with our narrative masters, to travel through time, these are the powers unleashed with buttons, pressed to exit. a code that solves our identity, a spell to manage the merge, to delineate self from selves, to preserve the particle of our presence here, carved, cut, the weld broken, scraped like an outline chalked on the street. the instrument that saves us from being swirled, but fleeing the prisoners in your cell without really escaping the jail itself only strands you in the smallest self, the soul's cult and every phone call is a make believe island you are waving on, or is it the raft you bought to flee the island? the fence you wear that allows you to reach out from whose gate is locked, depends on our suspension of disbelief, as if you were protected by your hand held company, as if you were safe with that thing in your ear, that plastic leach pressed against your cheek, feeding on psychic scraps, that wears you as walk, that sits you down and pulls you from you, as if you carried your own door, a portable emergency exit kept in pocket or purse, as if you didn't already carry your own door, or perhaps it's really a door for the doorless, a door for those who could never find the one inside because it was too dark in there and maybe they fell down the steps and got lost once and couldn't fumble their way back out and so now they carry a door they can always find, that leads out instead of in, as they are getting to know themselves out loud.
Although my feet
Never cease running to you
On the path of dreams,
Such nights of love are never worth
One glimpse of you in your reality.
Ki no Tsurayuki (868-945 AD)
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
by Delmore Schwartz, from “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”
castled in his castle
happily imprisoned
within inflated color
striped astride the gentle slide
poised for that next merry slip
mattressed inside the designated
play palace camouflaged
on the outside as nondescript
joy warehoused inside
each possible edge,
calculated, softened every
texture sanded smooth
until there was nothing to
discover that wasn’t already
known and led,
sunless in this hangar
stranded on a planet
that no longer supported
life they tamed
color sun and surface
dim inside these nets
innocence caught
and kept innocent.
twisting in the crosswalk downtown, not in the mythical middle but almost before reaching that other shore, i notice an older man who is not quite old enough to be old, who has not arrived at the other side and something i did not catch and that maybe no one else caught has arrested him there, wearing a not quite white tshirt the color of recycled paper or skin, emblazoned with a conspicuous crimson question mark on his chest, offering a bulls eye to the universe, which provokes me to wonder if he's offering his heart as a landing pad for all the unanswered questions that linger in the air here like second hand smoke, or am i misreading a sign that's trying to advertise his soul's confusion, that he doesn't know and he really doesn't, and what motivates a man to put on a tshirt with a big question mark on a spring morning that is much too cool for such optimism? i have arrived to put my mind down and i am served tea this early april by a beautiful young woman who's name, coincidentally, is april. can a month be a coincidence? can a beautiful young woman? i was picked up along the way by an old bookstore friend from another state who spotted me waiting at the bus stop. and though we are both gray & bald & middle-aged, we are younger than that guy twisting in the crosswalk on burnside, and i think, that could be us, clutching our white trash bags of recycled cans, the unanswered questions in our hearts wearing us in public...
