Or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.
More
keeps coming out about the dogs. Surely a simple embrace
from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not
now.
There's a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,
but prematurely old and worn. It doesn't get better. Rocks half-buried
in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.
I yell to the ship's front door,
wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.
I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.
It always turns out that much is salvageable.
Chicken coops
haven't floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business
with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night.
It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall,
the air was digestible, the fish tied in love knots
on their gurneys. Yes and journeys
were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances
and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning.
Was there ever such a time? I'd like to handle you,
bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short:
the knowledge that this isn't history,
no matter how many
times we keep mistaking it for the present...
"I am aware that, after all these years of separation and non-communication, the Gale I adore is not entirely a real person. The real Gale has become confused with my re-imagining of her, with my private elaboration of our continuing life together in an alternative universe devoid of ape-men. The real Gale may by now be beyond our grasp, ineffable." - Salman Rushdie
"...all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others. It was all very well for me to say each time: What a relief, I'll turn the mileage back to zero, I'll erase the blackboard. The morning after the day I arrived in the new country, this zero had already become a number with so many ciphers that the meter was too small, it filled the blackboard from one side to the other, people, places, likes, dislikes, missteps." - Italo Calvino
can't we simply say a personal matter?
is a small plastic gun
done.
the yellow torches have become green branches.
or what about food? cabbage
with friends and the crinkly
edges that turn up under your
fingers, the vinegar pickling
your tongue and you talk about
revolution,
what will we see by?
things you shouldn't discuss in poems.
not quite culturally appropriate.
this art is a game i play with symbols to give
meaning to my time, time with no bread in it.
if you clear the throat enough will an aria come out?
there was honey, rice vinegar, maybe even sake - "non-art reality."
I have read too many poems, I don't know how to build a cage.
you will never catch up,
purge the world of
borgeouis sickness
empties. the room empties.
not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.