A February Evening

At this hour a room above the world
stands still, silent, and full of evening’s glow.
Beyond billowing drapes brushed by a breeze
banks of silvery clouds scatter shafts
into amber stilts on which daylight strides
from patch of land to patch of land
on measureless legs of the sun.

From its great distance finally ending with us,
its warm liquid paints the panes, enunciates
the tones of the floorboards and the flower’s effusions,
couples with abandoned memories in the corners,
drapes itself from the ceiling like yesterday’s
voices, like laughter from an hour ago.
A makeshift vase supports the stems

of adoration’s condensation in matter; colorful,
the ebb of hours retreats. On the oven
steam fights the lids of pots, desiring
that eternal suffusion of essences into each other,
imitating our intimacy’s expansion into space
surrounding us. Night soon comes on
as soft as milk in a glass carafe.

Study #2

Thinnest skin of light
poured across the metro window
the young woman’s apparition
obvolutive with the pale child
and the dark boy folded into himself
like a strange Narcissus bouquet
while through the open rings of her eyes
the entire panorama of night passes
punctuated by hanging lamps
daubed to a pastel by the rainfall
and depthless.

Notebook excerpts 1

I am drinking in the rare pleasure of being sleepless at four in the morning, alone, lucid, and free to follow my thoughts where they wander. Sleeplessness pervades the entire room. This morning my thoughts are grander than anyone's in the world, in my shabby little house in a forgotten place where the chill seeps in through the walls and strikes at the nerves of my teeth. At this hour I feel close to those souls I know only in books, those deep, dusky vaults whose depths can be plumbed eternally.

~

Should I never find my home, should I never feel that contentment that all men seek, should I always struggle hand in hand with my better nature in a time-worn effort of endurance, may I at least rest a few moments here with you. Oh my dear, the stars are full, the night sky is as broad as the years we have known together. The horror and the bereavement have passed, our fortunes are steady, and my hands feel the pleasant ache of work. What life have we made for ourselves? Sometimes cold and frustrated, sometimes laughter of an evening and smiles that break across our faces unconsciously, sometimes bitterness and tears and sometimes passion, sometimes happy forgetfulness. All the time a contest of sympathies, regrets calmly set at ease, and time lost between decisions. All is as it should be or can be. The gentle touch of the cool breeze, the silence and the expanse of the night sky holding the wind in the grass, the closeness of those who abide us despite everything- it makes one sentimental for carefree days, it makes one imagine them obtainable again.

~

My thoughts are harried down two divergent channels at any given time. They are as distinct as those impressionistic flows can be, though they issue from the same hidden source; such as the trickle which forms a mountain stream, when parted by the rough landscape over which it carelessly flows, becomes two distinct branches of a river. One of these can be as clear and prismatic as the spray from the ocean breaking on rocks and the other can be thick with silt, slow and dark and impenetrable. It is the landscape, the quality of the soil, the type of roots of the trees and grasses binding it, the gradation and the arrangement of geological features; that is, all that the river races over in its obligatory downhill course to where it knows not, that gives the water its character, its clarity or its density. So it is over the panorama of my ever changing moods that these thoughts course, across grounds of unidentifiable flora and unearthly light, toward an indistinct destination at the mouth of an ocean. All the debris they carry in their current, all the stray flower petals and seeds and stones which drop in as well as the sweat of the people who wade into them (whose voices rise on the little ripples but are indistinguishable from the murmur of the water in motion) and the bodies of the little fish whose names I don't know or have forgotten, are portaged along in the steady stream. That is where I find myself now, considering from a high vantage point on one of my peaks these two rivulets, which, I can see, further down the slope widen, gain strength and momentum, and if it is clear in my head and the sun is at its peak and the clouds are thin I can see, very far away, they are emptying into a magnificent and seemingly bottomless depth.

~

At the starting point, always, is a song. There is the innate rhythm involved in each motion, each interaction and reciprocation is the beginning of music, the first break in the silence or the first still moment among the dissonance of moment after moment. Either is the beginning of a song or of a new movement, and as the mind tells the eye that the cloud is a face rather than the play of light and shadow on water vapor, so my will to order tells me it is a song that we make. These are the words of my recollection that I am using to fasten you in my memory, to find and still myself as well in the center of motion. I cannot clamor and grasp for things that have passed, I do not reach out in my sorrow for voices and faces that have faded away. All that has passed is now a vast landscape of impressions, a skyline, a rooftop, a bridge, a mouth... I can only wait in mute patience for some spark to flare like when a match is struck, and I see something of myself in the shadowy eyes in front of me. I am now such a distance from that point, I can hardly remember when we were there. But I can organize my impressions, what lingers, I can see them as songs and I can make houses out of words and places for all of them to populate and they can live with me, in me, changed as they would be, but alive, and I too could live.

I watch with these eyes now seeing 30 years, I feel with these same hands and taste with this same mouth. I know the season's cycles and I change with them, my blood courses with histories. And should I have not lived before? I have lived before- I am drawn to certain people and objects. Those who have known me have known only some vague and indistinct form, they have known a cloud, a vapor. And all I have known of them has been this mist, the words that were spoken across tables or rooms, their gestures, exaggerated by candlelight, or when they were hurt and turned away, or when they spoke of things quietly for fear of crying, when we were silent in the freezing air and the moon hung bright and high above us. But now it is morning, a new morning, and I feel a great hope, child-like, with willing and naive eyes and limbs, passion that isn't stifled and doesn't need to be explained. We are promised nothing more than the next few moments, and so each must be a birth in itself. Songs and words are the vessels of this birth, friends and family to aspire with.

Dissimilarity

Where gone the years
or those who peopled them;
perpendicular growth,
vascular wilt,
weevils in old wounds,
when cut to the stem
streaks of black stain.

Dendrochronology reveals
years sans summers,
lengthened, bitter winters
lonely spans of dry cold hours
the pressure of decades unknown,
or only unfelt in

cross-cuts
cut downs
slights
biotic or abiotic
xylem and phloem
weakened new wood.

"I wish we could be friends
like we used to be friends."
But there is this agony
in our outer armor
there are fatal flaws
in our superstructure-
dissimilarity,
unforgivable, I guess.

Why go looking for fault?
Why must we name each other such?
Why the need to lay down
whole forests
decades of speechless, vegetative growth
where shade and animal life once?

Give Up Solitude

Give up solitude,
a promontory
where birds rise air-wise
singing to no-one
wav'ring, thronging songs.

Wav'ring, thronging songs
to no-one, give up
solitude, you've lost.
The road from the mount
goes back to the town.

Goodbye to my fields
imagined just so-
bluebells and lilies
among knee high gold-
late day's light dissolves.

Late day's light dissolves
descending the road
in fields imagined
so live fox and doe
in sighing shadows.

Goodbye to forests
where I alone roamed
in sighing shadows
picking white mushrooms
making deadwood thrones.

Making deadwood thrones
and moss blanket beds,
unfastening dreams
'round the canopy
soar and stretch their threads.

Limb to limb they spread
a gauze of daylight
a leaf-green quiet
an inward shiver-
a thought so resolved.

A thought so resolved,
"Give up solitude!"-
a perfect forest
imagination
uninterrupted.

The road from the mount
goes back to the town
descending I say
goodbye to my fields
goodbye to my forests

where I alone roamed,
a leaf-green quiet
within it I longed
singing to no-one
wav'ring, thronging songs.

Coastal Parallax (a poem in decasyllables)

It is just now that one can apprehend
the lengthening day, that one can begin
a retrieval of hours from oblivion;
nebulous transactions between seasons
and Habit, the rotating planet and
silent sunrise shadows lengthening prove.

It comes subtle, or as I've heard they say
"knowable to those on whom nothing's lost";
we came to be on such intimate terms
with daylight and with nightlight, conversely.
One night years ago extended to this
very present and a certain morning
disappeared, hid in shame, dropped quietly
into that which becomes unremembered-

that which makes us whole, and retrievable.
What worth actions unless rendered images?
Lessons of the day scrawled in a tattered
ledger of dreams (the inverse of lessons,
memories shuffled randomly and writ
and erased and re-imagined or lost).

Remember anachronistic kisses
and apocryphal hands holding empty
air in time? Was it snowing there as well?
Or am I superimposing, shuffling
the deck, rearranging the lettered blocks,
making anagrams of hours- dear, I think
it's snowing here, or it snowed, or it will
inevitably, as I was to know.

Letters rest, but might rise in later years
to agonize over a placement or
a purpose, or you may find half your life
was paralyzed wanting something ineff-
able (I'm tempted to write f-able)
under a bough where our coda began.

But the bowler you gave to me rests on
my dresser and dim memories of your
dresses dress my blessed recollections.
Then giant silence, then sunrise, driving
home alone stripped of all magnificence.
It bled out of the horizon, sadder
than the last drop of this winter's snowmelt;
the sky colored a rosé from Bouzy.

Oblique Rain excerpts 2

The rain cut sharp, straight angles across the glass encasement of the bus stop shelter. Simon was preparing his intellect for work, listening to the thin patter on the roof and watching the traffic signals smear through the mess of droplets washing down the panes. His translucent reflection eyed itself. The face, he thought, was a fluid thing, different at different hours of the day. At night he looked aged when he studied himself in the mirror. He saw that his hair became disheveled, his eyes bulged and his cheeks deflated, and sometimes he found the creature there so odd he could not recognize him. But early, in the hours after waking up and washing and having coffee and something to eat, and dressing himself, and then sitting for a time in the shell of the bus stop, waiting for the bus to arrive, he looked absolutely young and poised.

From Monday to Friday, invariably, he found himself at this hour seated on the same chlorophyll colored bench under the iron branches interwoven with glass, either baking in the heat of the sun beneath which the bus stop acted only as a greenhouse, or in the cooler, softened light of a swimming, rainy day. Often he thought that he preferred the mornings when it was raining. They seemed muted, hesitating, caught up in a drawn out gesture that reprieved him silently from the agony of a sun-filled day he would undoubtedly be prevented from knowing, had it occurred. The hours in the Great Hall of Records were long and pitch black. Only two small lamps glowed above his head at his desk. The room was kept dark to better regulate light saturation, and with each workstation, circumscribed as it was in its own unique sphere of pale yellow, and set apart from the others at different intervals about the chamber-like expanse, the scene at times resembled to him a school of jellyfish bobbing in the depths of the sea. As he watched them, they became more like stray moons, micro-planets encasing a silent, hunched individual, broken free from their orbits and come to a still there, in the fathoms.

A full bus: ladies and gentlemen in fine clothes and in worn clothes. The perfumes of the people infected him, drifting on the still air. He was rocked and lulled like a child by the steady vibration. A scent from the woman beside him, a strange smell of violets and formaldehyde, and the green light running along the ceiling disoriented him pleasantly. His eyes were heavy, but he was determined to keep watching the rain-streaked windows as he moved along the curious lengths of the street, now becoming fuller with crowds of shining umbrellas and the sheen of rain coats bubbling in a mass at a crosswalk. These, he thought, were the only minutes allotted to him, and he must take everything in. Even the leaves were just then falling from the rows of trees, and in a matter of a month the same deadened sky would pour its cold November snows over the sidewalks and the window sills. The same sleek backs would huddle a little further into themselves and follow the same paths each morning, their footsteps slightly muffled.

In the afternoon perhaps this rain would burn off, and the air would be cleansed, and on his lunch hour he could walk through the gardens letting the new sun touch his arms. Then the autumn flowers would release their perfume, and the trees would stand upright and sway in the breeze and the sparrows and blackbirds would alight on the branches, waiting for crumbs. All of this he dreamt of in the morning, bobbing up and down on the bus, stealing quick looks at the faces of the people around him.

Though his days were sacrificed on the altar of earning his living, the evening was his. During the interminable hours bent over his desk at the Great Hall of Records, what sustained him most was the anticipation of evening, and the light above Lake Embresse, and the whorl of faces that would pass him on the street. In summer it is a drawn out spectacle, the sky absolutely huge, in swaths of orange and red, moment by moment darkening, the peak of Mount Embresse by the minute merging into the dense purple of the night, its rippling, wavering double mirrored in the lake. Simon had also seen, on many occasions, night passing over the city from a vantage point on the heights of the mountain. Then Embresse slowly became draped in a veil of shadow, and street by street a spray of lights unfolded in the shape of a Japanese fan, as if a lazy hand was spreading it out in the lap of the valley, and then he would admire the twinkling pentangles of fire points, strewn out before him like gems on a cushion of night. The lake appeared to be a softly undulating fabric, dark mercury.

In the evening he could lose an hour wandering by the lake and the canal, watching the light changing over the rooftops. And where the water was channeled into the stone arms of the first lock, it roared a deep and diffuse sound, and he would pause there and absorb himself intently, totally, listening only to this sound and watching the water flow and the people about. At times, over his desk working, he would sit dead still, his head would stoop a bit, and he would lift one ear, convinced that from somewhere in the dark hollows of the Great Hall that same sound was emanating, approaching him from an obtuse angle, washing through the dark chambers and hallways at a terrible rate, rushing toward his little desk with a deafening roar and leaving complete decimation in its wake. But soon he returned to his senses, and the sound dispersed in dissipating waves back to the edge of his memory.

A Bridge.

I seek to still each moment
not for a want of immortality
or out of the fear of the darkest dreams
of the subterfuge. What would I do
with my eternal life
and what would I fear
in the unknown wilderness
if I lived forever unknowing
and had not your hand
to pull me through the wilds?

I seek to still each moment
because the mirror of each moment
reflects something we have shared,
because the surmountable distance
of miles and years that opened over us
only reveals its fragility, its permutability,
when I try to draw the eternity from the instant.

For instance:
the eternality in the image
of a snowy bridge
lies in the passage of the water
along snow-tinged banks
and the silvery surface, silken
with the reflection of the whirling sky.
Do you see? I am
already there, and you
are already there, and we
are there together.

Oblique Rain excerpts 1

These fragments are excerpts from a longer work that I have neglected for months but that I wish to return to presently. When complete, I intend it to be a tribute to all the planes of the imagination opened up to me by the works of Fernando Pessoa and Robert Walser. Take these for nothing more than what they are, brief sketches of a work in progress.

****************************

This year the day of the dead was rung in on the tolling of faint bells, which were carried along soft waves of light and seeped into the houses of sleepers in the same way that the perfume of soil pervades a forest. None were woken by the bells, whose sound shivered in the chilly morning, as substantial as perhaps only the puffs of breath lifting from the lips of dormant bodies and diffusing in the air. Simon listened to them in half-sleep, the refractions of the distant sounds, cool bands of metallic air dilating and protracting. He tossed on his side. He became aware of a sudden desire for the heat of another body. He tossed again, restless. In the frame on the white wall across from the bed, obfuscated by a glare of slanted light from the window, hung a photograph he had taken of a dry, four-tiered stone fountain in a sandy courtyard. Along its lower most basin some loose stones lay among moss. A single tree stood farther in the courtyard, in autumnal flourish, thinning of its leaves which were scattered like patchwork across the white gravel. The fountain was appended to an ancient wall, where faint traces of ruined frescoes almost appeared. On the uppermost tier of the fountain, the statue of a Naiad, her body twisted in dance, playing a lyre. It was from this lyre that in earlier days water would issue in a plume of sunbursts, a stream of honey cascading in an arc across the sky. Its music would bubble and splash in the basins all summer long, overflowing one and gurgling into the next, and the courtyard would sigh with this sound, like a steady wind, through long, light-filled afternoons. But the absolute, stilled, sheer present, the eternal present moment caught in that particular photograph showed no golden cataracts or illuminated mists. Tufts of weeds were sprouting in the seams between the stones. The wall beneath the solitary tree was in disrepair. No water flowed, no music filled the courtyard. There was the orange light of autumn, a white door in the derelict wall, the elegant abandonment of the lyre-player, the silence and resonance of her crystal-like time.

***************************

Footfall followed footfall over the green and gray cobblestones. The street was almost empty, though the sky was clear and the sun unusually warm. He walked from the bakery and crossed the street, where a fruit vendor was set up under the arches near the canal. She yawned and put an open hand to her mouth, looking about aimlessly over the multiform shapes and piquant colors stacked in bins below her. His hand was plunged in the pocket of his coat, working at something. Blackbirds were perched on the walls above and every few seconds one would suddenly flap its wings and dance in place, giving out a shrill call that echoed curtly in the bright morning. He cut his pace and hesitated by the banks of the canal, watching water pour from the lock and the swans lazily drifting about in the current. On the footbridge directly across from him someone was clipping the flower boxes. An old man, with umber skin and a thick white moustache, his hat pulled down over his eyes, was drawing out quantities of lifeless stems and limpid petals with gloved hands and placing them in a wheelbarrow. A mallard swam toward him from the opposite bank and Simon watched its slow progress. He tilted his head upward in concentration; a trail of steam was rising into the atmosphere from somewhere beyond the rooftops. A moment passed. One of the blackbirds darted from its perch and landed a few steps from him. It approached him with an awkward gait, bobbing side to side, its shiny black eyes darting this way and that. Simon drew a clinched fist from his pocket, and then abruptly released a shower of crumbs about the startled animal. It greedily dove into the debris, and its companions followed, leaping from their perch in a fury of flapping wings and squawks. Simon quickly moved on, the birds descending in a blustery black cloud behind him. He tossed another handful of crumbs over the river in the direction of the mallard and walked on, watching the sun-specked water course steadily along the stone walls of the embankment. He crossed the bridge and gave a nod to the umber-skinned man, who in turn acknowledged him with a slight adjustment of his jaw.

Passing under the shadow of the Church of the Ascension, he took notice of the grand wooden door standing out in sharp contrast to the large building’s white stone façade. The sky was pure blue above the bell tower, adorned by a simple white cross. He came out into the square, where hardly anyone lingered now that the mass of all soul’s day was underway. He watched a man and woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, the pink face of the little baby girl staring absently into the air. A chilly breeze wafted through the square, and on it the smell of breakfasts being prepared in the kitchens of restaurants.

Under the equestrian monument he found a bench in the shade of a tall tree. He swept the brittle red and yellow leaves from it with his hands and sat down. His thoughts now began to settle, too. The clear morning cheered him, and he thought with pleasure at how he had nothing at all to do the entire day, that there was no work that had to be caught up with, no obligations to anyone, and all that lay ahead of him was a strand of blissful hours of freedom, and the sun shining at that. He looked upward through branches of flaming leaves at the blue sky that came through at every interstice. Towering to his right was the figure of a soldier mounted on horseback. An arm was extended and held a rapier aloft in a sharp line against the horizon. With each breeze that blew through the square, leaves rained lightly from their bows. Simon felt a strange, sleepy peace come over him. His eyes were tired from tossing all morning in bed. Dreams and the brightness of the early hours kept waking him. No matter how he sank his being into darkness, when he shut his eyes tightly, or plunged his thoughts into deep, dark, hollow places, he still could not entirely keep out the brightness of the morning sun, which pierced the slats of the blinds. His tired eyes gazed at the statue. Streaks of dirt from a recent rain had obscured the soldier’s face. Some sort of filth had washed over him and dried there in blotches.

Simon had a presentiment of something emerging from one of the side streets, and before this being entered his periphery he was already drawn to it. Now he began to make it out. Across the square a figure moved silently. A young, dark-haired woman in a long coat and black boots was walking slowly in the slanted shadow of the buildings. Through his tired eyes, Simon thought he saw the air distending about her, as if her physical form was warping the space she moved through. He blinked his eyes and focused again, and this effect was lost. Her shoulder length raven’s hair was tied in a spout at the back of her head, where her lovely neck rose from a tall collar. Her hands were in her pockets, and her slender body was wrapped up in a rather large gray coat, her arms drawn into herself as if she were walking against a stiff wind. And in fact a wind had picked up, and dry leaves lifted and swirled about her ankles. Her hair took in all the light of the morning and held it in a silver sheen that seemed to ripple across the dark strands. His whole attention was drawn to the hair about her neck, bobbing lightly as she stepped. As she moved out of the square he had the sudden urge to follow her. The luminous day, the clean, chill air, his sense of freedom, all rose within him in a single urge to know this woman. But as suddenly, a kind of anesthetic haze descended over him, and while he thought of all the things he might say to her, while he tried to imagine with what words he could possibly open himself up to this girl, she disappeared beyond the stone wall of the Church of the Ascension in the direction of the lake. In the empty square, a wind rushed through the tops of the trees, singing among the limbs as it went. In the distance he could hear the coursing of the water in the canal, and some vague voices which were also like music, if only because they were rendered incomprehensible by the length and obstacles over which they sounded. He listened to this music and the sounds of the square, and almost forgot himself and the reason he had set off in this direction this morning.

Half-light.

An overwhelming sense of you
Flooded within me today
My head bent in remembering
My heart glazed over and quickly solidified
And I wandered the waterfront
In a coral colored twilight
Trying to regain a sense of myself.

A heart fulminates with passions
With wild energies, with sureness,
But it carries these energies lightly
With an ignorance of gravity
And I remembered my heart
Before it bore the burden of years,
Or I wished for this memory.

Evening descended on the city
Lonely strands of lights lit here and there
And the shade of night slowly consumed
The glittering fabric of the lake.
Once in this same half-light
I held a dear friend by a thin hand, and slowly
We were swallowed up by the darkness.

To Loneliness

On a night in my youth,
in an age distant from my aged self
before I had become acquainted
with the mythology of my own blood,

before I knew my life
was ruled by the Moon, incrementally
shrouded behind pale wisps
of the ghostly breath of an unseen demon's

clouds, with no stars illuminating
the presentiment of a deathly sky,
the color of a sickly bruise,
I stood beside a silent river-

my compatriots at my side.

The frivolous nature of youthful conversation,
stuttered and gleaming and fluid,
song-like and devoid of substance, yet
overfull with symbols that would devour us in time.

I was already haunted by a predilection
for solitude, but the spirit was not yet crystallized,
I was not yet irremediably drawn
into the lonely kingdom of my maundering.

How was I to know those princes
who had plucked me out of terrible tides
would one day become strangers
with peculiar motives and flashing eyes?

And the Moon, barely half its height, mocked me

as if to say "behold the deathly
night of your youth, behold the selfsame
darkness and the fragrance of demon's breath
and the muted stars falling adrift!"

What was I lonely for then and what
am I lonely for now? What prevented me
from loving the people I knew?
It was always the adumbral sky

the silent motion of the water and the Moon.

Le Passeiste

If it is out of a former life we awaken when we are born, I do not know. Knowledge of that life would be severed with the strings of fate or the umbilical cord, by Atropos' shining shears. Yet something stirs behind my memories, as if my memories held memories, which are betrayed by a vague, and no less intense, surge of feeling.

Daylight courses down her dark hair like liquid. The street is simply burning and throwing sparks. In her eyes, a clear depth. In her eyes I move across great distances, yet I am not pulled toward her, but in all directions toward oblivion.

I sometimes wonder if I am a passeiste. Or if I am like everyone, following Shades down unfamiliar streets until the light is drained from the day, when we can no longer distinguish our prey from the night. I reach so longingly and call so deeply. Am I unlike everyone? Are we all not seeking to repair or replace some shattered or lost image?

But what I feel goes back further. Reflections of which I know no definite origin find me. I walked along a wall embraced by ivy and heard the stones singing from their tombs. I once caught a phantom and held her by the hand on Charles Bridge and we watched the night cover the city like a flood tide. When I was very young, I imagined that Orion spoke to me but called me by another name as if, from his heights, he had confused the centuries.

Travel Fragments: Costa Rica pts. 1-5

1.

Today’s august-
The human honeycomb seethes.
Aureate tides issue from the crystal sky
And radiate, as they sweep down
The shaggy green backs of verdurous cordillera.
Yet in San Jose, even the icons
Are behind fences and wire.

My homeland has a hand in this, but
I am not of my homeland.
I am as everything under the vault of the sky;
I belong to the terrible expanses.
The land rolls unheeding.
The sea rolls unheeding.
Time rolls unheeding.
The land,
The sea,
Time
Do not recoil before such diminutive monsters
As politics, economies,
Or imagined borders.
They level and make insignificant
The thieving passions of man.
They know a wordless generosity
Whose abundance cannot be diminished
And possess no urge for domination.

They give
Pineapple light, blood orange at sunset,
The roaring voice of the Pacific
The song of unseen wild birds in the morning
The lace work and lances of leaves and limbs
The pelting rain falling in open, warm spaces
On roofs of tin or palm leaf
And the people beneath to bear witness.

I too was born by the sea.
In the remote distances of childhood
I was showered in its diamond mist.
Not so distant, sea and childhood,
Not so distant, you and I,
Only a few strides under the sun.

We cannot separate
The crests and swells of time
From the people over which it cascades
And pulls along in its murky riptide.
And yet you are kind to me.
And yet you lavish me
With your language
With your songs vibrating on strings
With your food that you pull like a miracle from
Your fields and the sea
With overfull hands.

With my hands now
Full of variegated
Fragrant petals,
Allow me to lavish you.

2.

Jaguar patterns
Of dark sand
Toss in the wake
Of the clearest water.

Yellow foam
The color of idle afternoon clouds
Disperses across a field
Of soft granules.

Staid rocks stand in the tide pool
Where they were tossed
Under the eyes of ageless vultures
Who took them to be impenetrable turtle shells.

Among fractured mosaics
A tiny Spartan
Sidesteps the bleached bone
Eggshell fragments.

The little warrior
Has compensated in time
By corporeal diminution
And amplified precision of movement.

Eggshell fragments of time
Are jostled in the ebb
Of incalculable days.

Incalculable days spent
Casting lines in the break
Casting nets in the tenor.

3.

I resurface to bask in midday’s seraphim.
At each ascendant peak
Light touches and flashes a star-point
On the blazing veneer. I am
Following the Nereid alighting
From the distant Aegean
When I dive back into the water’s coils.

A conversation between sun and ocean
Unfolds on my trembling cornea.
The horns of the sea sound.
A conch’s low bellow
Follows my muffled ears
Into twilight sediment.

Floating again,
I feel the fullness of my body displaced.
The language of this reality annunciates itself
On the teeth and tongue of light.
My lips are glazed by salty air.
Something is readying to be spoken.

This moment,
A point of reflection
Stilled and plucked
From the spiraling tide of impressions,
This axis of body and mind and place
Is not to last.

An ominous grey beast adumbrates the mountains.
A tremulous groan shakes the throne of the water.

Golden ages only come from the destruction of an order.

4.

Rain.
Mercury sheets
Shake the window.
Percussive chorus
In the rafters.
Metallic shouts
In the huddled forest.
So similar
To that silver song of the coastline.
The sound of an army in motion.

Indoor objects
Assume a lonely air.
A grey leaf smacks the pane.
Outside
The equestrian smell of fecund earth
Invades the empty spaces.
Low monstrous clouds
From horizon to horizon
Are again announcing
Hurakan’s nomadic lineage.

Amid roots like boas
Streams are surging.
Hoof shaped pools
Glitter in the forest like cat eyes.
The great trees creak
But no double-trilled bird song
Or arrows alight the sky.
All are waiting
Pretending silence,
Murmuring “Earth, earth, earth”...

5.

The sky, a codice,
Unrolls
The figures of hieroglyph
Clouds.
Wanderers
On the deep orange canopy.
The resinous rain has passed.
Tiny crabs with gleaming black shells
And legs the color of coastal wildflowers
Cautiously study the being risen before them.
New fortitude
Is tasted on the tongue
Is painted on the eyes
Breathed into the lungs
Disperses through the blood.

I watch the second by second changes,
The reddening of the sky
The silhouettes moving out across the ocean
The papaya tint the last strip of blue has taken on
And the face of another absorbed in apprehension.

Experience inhabits the body by duality
That of the medium and the spirit.
I ask the other,
“What is beyond beauty?”
He answers,
“St. Peter in Rome”.

Each object of the world
Is readying to release its light and happiness
Is waiting to be struck by the blacksmith’s peen,
And we must exalt each thing.
We must relearn odes,
Raise everything to its proper grandeur,
Contemplate stones until they flash like stars.

Tributes, affirmations, ovations
Must be written
To the organic digestion of a moment of solemn wonder.
Then grandeur may incorporate itself
Into our own germinating perfection.

One more moment
Of sun
Of shoulders and spine
Sloping in contour with the hills.
One more glimpse
Of sandy hair
Stretched along the shore
Winding in the receding tide
One more vision of her curved body
Breasts and belly
To carry with me homeward.

Second Letter (A Petrified Forest).

Dear__,

There are times I wonder, is all that is left for me the indigence and remoteness of my heart? Everything I try to possess falls through my fingers. I shall have to renounce my hands. Each voice fades more quickly than the next. I shall have to renounce my ears. The visions, the foreshadowing of each successive moment, worlds revolving around a world, have all been proven spectral. I will renounce my eyes. In the fatal, internal black mass in which I will sink I will fold my arms around my knees as I descend and revisit the dreams a child dreams before he is born, the dumb dreams of one who knows only depth, murk, and a muted, strangely familiar beating sound.

Dumb and tacit my heart beats, encased in the body born to carry it. It could carry only this one. My mind races and my eyes expand their sight to enfold each thing that confronts me. Always things are projected toward and from, but the center remains still, isolated, a space within space, or a unique object among all that are possible. How distant is the self I knew, the counterpoise that results from balancing all points of degradation and replenishment, of silence and clatter, serenity and chaos. If I am careless with my thoughts I begin to find other people arbitrary, no doubt a result of this peculiar flow of apprehension. I begin to forget that the bodies in motion and the ringing voices simmering on the miasmic surface of reality are in fact relevant to my existence. I indeed forget my own existence entirely sometimes, or I become as sure of my existence as I am of anything else’s, that is, only as sure as it has moved me to reflect. But I reached out to you, and you returned my gesture; you gave me proof that we are alive.

These words are coming at me from strange angles, pursuing me through flashes of light and shade, but like Daphne I am helpless but to let them twine from my fingers. For only in that elusive moment when the untterable seizes form do I find my safety and reassurance. Only by creating that second skin, “another divinity”, encompassing all I am, am I able to solidify myself and take root in the earth. Our words and our letters one day will be unearthed, my friend, a petrified forest.

I am an object contemplated by my surroundings, a chimera of materials and movements, barely holding my memories and knocking the nails back into the framework of my corporality daily. It is torn to pieces by the wind, by the debris in the gale, by the force and teeth and breath of time. Your letters will be a bulwark. I will use them for foundations and walls, harmonic beams in the Doric columns supporting the weight of stone years. I am so far from everyone we knew, in mind and in place, but your carved visage emerges from the white hot stone walls, painted and sneering, with deep, absorbing eyes. Now more appear, caught in the physiognomy of different expressions, wild spatterings of color about the brow and cheeks, hundreds of marble likenesses of all your magnificent poses and profiles, all the angles that one could describe in stone or on canvas, a whole lifetime we lived together in stilled images. How glad I am, that you have returned my words.

For ever returning,

An Unaddressed Letter.

Dear __,

I pick up the pen after many years of silence between us. I have always thought that perhaps something beautiful could come from that which has been destroyed. It only takes time, and I think of how the sea rose and ash and fire rained on the Minoans, and now the cliffs are crested by the most stunning white villages, and that caldera arches out like my two open arms over the broken water as I try to pinch the peaks of Therasia between my thumb and forefinger. Not so many thousands of years have passed since you and I jumped from the rocks and shot deep into the blue, against the wind. Odysseus slept there too, and the journeys across our ragged home town were no less a miracle, no less fantastic. I have nearsightedness; my past is always attempting to eliminate itself. I come upon my memory and find it shattered. Voicing your name sets rise to a strand of unfettered images, of night skies and dismembered streetlamps floating by, of fields with fires and people gathered about them, of the momentary, pulse-like pauses in conversations beneath the cross of the peninsula. Time scatters friends like a wind lifts seeds from their capsules, it nudges them over the edge and their descent is eased in the forgetful nature of the wind as they are carried along. I am eager to follow one of these mistrals down the complex of hallways which house the inhabitants of my consciousness. I am anxious to come upon a certain door, behind which sits on a darkly stained desk a rather large ledger of accounts.

Ash and fire rained into the sea, and the sea churned and frothed as in a feeding frenzy, and the water was red from fire and blood. In the primacy of my mind, in the outland where memories dissolve, all of this recurs. The skull of the sky and the skull under my skin are choked with ash, stinging my eyes as I grope my way from the epicenter. We are shot into the air and plunge into the earth or into the Aegean depths where the Beautiful One once lay like a bloodstone on a field of sapphires. A constant rumbling shakes us out of our youth, the scream of birds unheard. We wandered from our youth like the shocked survivors of a geological disaster, gathering what little gems we could manage as they poured from the belly of the land when the quake rent it to shards. Whatever of value we could collect from the rubble of experience, from our destroyed home, we carried under our belts in dusty leather pouches or in the flinching pain of certain recollections.

A ringing lasted in our ears, but after listening to it for some time we both realized that this ringing had always been there, from our very earliest memories, and it was just the disaster that brought it to our mind’s attention. The distracting ringing of something distant and intimate, something generating from the reaches of space and also from the veins, and vibrating and washing over all of the matter in between. And it eventually came to a point where we no longer heard the ringing, as our senses accommodated to this ever tremulant and buzzing reality. Our thoughts, too, simply began to oscillate and resonate with this same frequency, as a pane of glass shivers in its frame against the wind. The thing was, we knew this of each other instinctually, we could tell it in fragments of sentences and it would be fully understood. The violence of youth, the misunderstanding nature of our immature desires, the inherent awareness of some ineffable mystery linked to the understanding of our lives, all of this was clearly read in the face when it distorted itself to speak and the words became almost ornament. And now I take to searching for those words and they are absent. What I find are gaping chasms, distance that is mounting that will never be retread, and a body that seeks to eliminate itself. Days fall away and my meek utterances do not even agitate enough to cause concentric circles to ripple across the surface. I move to speak but I halt. What do our lives have to do with each other, besides chance proximity?

Unfathomable forces disperse everything from the center. The universe will expand until all the planets are cold, stars will exhaust their heat, even the black holes will whirl themselves into oblivion. Then there will be only time left alone to age unto itself, to eventually disperse, come apart at its seams, and fragment into tiny shards of the past, present and future. When time collapses, will we meet again, when the little broken mirror pieces of reality tumble and collide on the unimaginable plain? Were our lives only to fade into that secondary sonority, the other constant song, the past, whose waters are always lapping at the jagged rocks still lying scattershot where they fell when the sea rose and ash and fire rained on the Minoans?

I am reaching out to you, my friend, always,

Signifier and Signified.

A dream.

Someone opens a door and steps out into the hallway. A character presents himself to me from a light wood-colored door at the end of the hallway of periwinkle blue and almost olive green wallpaper of an intricate, indiscernible pattern. At the end of the hallway is a bright window and through it an obscure city-scape and the intimation of an ultra-clear sky. The door opens and he silently emerges, this as-of-yet nameless character, and he pauses mid-stride as if he were startled by something. I am behind the wallpaper, and it seems he is looking for me, the unseen seer, and I think "Is he coming to report himself to me?"

At first I guess that he is I, aged decades, emerging from my cloister into the hallway of my own invention, pausing, distracted as I cross the threshold, feeling something, and involuntarily searching for the source of that feeling in the minutiae of the olive wallpaper and its intermingling lines. He is all but bald with tufts of white hair about his scalp and ears, his face is pinkish and shaved cleanly and he is wearing glasses. He emerges from his wood-colored portal, and what is behind that portal I have only hints of: a brown, thick carpet, a darkly stained table with an open book on it, a couch with a depression on the left cushion. Other than that darkness, oblivion. I am frightened at the possibility that he is I, and that I am realizing in that startled moment that I am being watched by myself. But I am the eyes of the wallpaper; he stops and stares into my eyes and I see that he is not I. He is a character that came to me from oblivion in the monstrous apartment complex in my dream, a monster himself, and a ghost, but he is not frightening in the least.

Another dream.

I am walking a street from my youth, the one where a lake sits above the ground and lily pads and reeds obscure the elevated water.

Katherine Anne is sitting on a bench outside of a small, white building. She is at a small, white table. Her brown hair is blowing in the breeze. We do not speak, but she returns my gaze. The paint is peeling in little ragged white petals from the table in front of her and on it is a child's game, a box with plastic colored blocks on pegs to allow them to spin. On each side of the blocks are letters and numbers, a different color for each letter and each number. When spun they form different words and combinations of numbers, possibly dates.

I become distracted and peer down the road past the elevated lake. The road loses itself in a thick green forest beyond, and beyond that I know is the home I grew up in. The forest is bright, the light is golden on the limbs as it is on an early summer evening and all around me is still and silent.

Myopia.

At times I feel my thoughts are cushioned by my porous, spongy way of sensing, I worry I am inoculating myself against a certain terrible clarity with this myopia, this ancillary reality. My eyes dwell on the sky too often, and so my writing is overfull with remarks about the weather and the land, or stimulated by memories of broad seascapes and great forests that only exist to me now, at this moment, as a series of inconstant photographs accompanied by a lingering perfume. What stands outside of people, the objects and daily phenomenon of our lives, when transmuted into a substance of our body, are utterly unique to us and are absorbed and nourish us singularly. The things beyond the thin border of our skin, those objects and animals are only created by our witnessing them. Beyond that margin are the mysterious things of another plane, and it is on their terms that we all must relate, with our garbled, languishing tongues.

A thunderstorm penetrates, the hot sun penetrates, but to one another people only come close but never breech any barriers. They press their mouths to one another’s, they try to enter into each other’s eyes, try with words and gestures to hypnotize or teach each other. They mumble and grasp for permanence, looking for immortality under the flesh of another, in the veins of the other. All in all they try despairingly and fiercely to find a mirror and an echo.

The first human words uttered perhaps were imitations of a thunderclap. Animals sing and call in a language that is a burlesque of inundations, skies trembling with storms, the imperceptible noise of the growth of plants, the erosion of mountains, and the cold wind blowing sand in the desert. I am no different, acquiring my speech and my temperament from the confluence of forces and objects inhuman, seeking out a mirror and an echo in the lightning spirals of a tourbillion.

A Solitary Swimmer.

To slip into the ocean, to actually be there, not imagining it any longer- not isolated by the abstractions of distance that invariably separate a memory from the sensations that etched it into our past. When one recalls a sensory impression, an event, the body arches backwards toward it. The brain reaches out through the fingers and toes and face, imaginary arms extend to feel again what was once not at all an impression, but an instant of the numinous and ineffable present. Something lifts which was weighed down in the center of the body, and images accompany and accentuate this completely motionless motion.

As the body sinks into the ocean the mind changes. It is as if the eyes are reading a piece of musical notation, and the brain at the same time is attempting the dual effort of visually conjuring every gesture of each living member of the orchestra. A friend said to me, “When you submerge your body your thoughts focus only on the acquisition of the next breath”, which isn’t entirely true. That notion is there, but it is reflexive, like the stride of your legs as you walk when you are not aware of your gait and the swing of your shoulders because you are distracted by a particularly lovely building or the height and depth of the sky. Your mind is not detached, rather, your mind and your body coalesce into essential movements. Your breath is taken, but you do not notice, you thrust your limbs through the darkness, you think to open your eyes- but not yet! You hold off, treasuring the last few seconds of such an unaccustomed experience. I was tempted there to say “unnatural”, or “inhuman” experience, but this state is utterly natural and utterly human. Sometimes the instant after one awakens from a long sleep, there is a momentary disconnect between the mind and its surroundings, when there is no immediate lingual response, when nothing is named. All of what we sense is contingent on our associations to what we have named. Sinking into the ocean, we are briefly without names for things.

On this particular trip to the ocean, advection from the south had carried smoke on its winds from a wildfire in North Carolina. There was a slight acrid smell in the air, and here and there hung low clouds of white smoke in the windswept trees and long grasses along the island, giving it an even more alien look than usual. I have always been struck by the trees here, short and wiry, with trunks like bleached vertebrae and tufts of white-green vegetation exploding from the limbs, all grown sideways and off-kilter from the force of steady sea wind. I come here and I too strip myself down to my essentials. I wear as little clothing as possible. My back and shoulders become red in the sun. I lie in the sun with my eyes closed and feel its warmth touch every hair on my arms and legs. I eat the food of the ocean, scallops, crabs, shrimp, and fish. I bask in the water from which my sustenance is pulled, I eat vegetables grown and cooled and strengthened by the salty breeze. To eat what comes from the land you live on, to be of the land and the water, to know your humanity all the better.

My shoulders and back and cheeks are red. I walk across the hot sand, not feeling the heat at all. My eyes peer off to the horizon; they are inevitably drawn to that long, endless arc on the other side of which I dream someone is looking back toward me in their imagination. The cold at first stings when the waves begin to touch my knees and thighs, so I throw myself into the break. I am under. I am swimming outside of myself and inside myself. My head and shoulders break the surface. The water is no longer cold, but has diffused a perfect equilibrium of temperature throughout me. My head bobs and watches simultaneously the sun glinting off the sea through the slight haze of wildfire smoke and the motion of gulls circling above in an almost perfectly unbroken sky.

It is said that those who love books are those for whom the world is not enough. On the contrary, at times such as these I am absolutely content with this world. And it is because I will eventually leave that I set down in words all that I can recall in my thoughts and body, so I may understand my contentment.

Thoughts Surrounding "Anna Karenina"

Happiness is a far more vague word than truth. Happiness one feels; truth one senses after distance and consideration. Happiness is a composition and mingling of moments, a realignment of the past with the present. When I experience a situation that rings with truth, however, it is like a stone wall, immovable, implacable, cold and indifferent. Happiness and sadness alike are made of cascading memories sent tumbling through the present by some interloping impression. Truth exists alongside time, both endlessly and recklessly destroy and create. Truth and happiness have nothing to do with each other, though they touch at so many common points. I’m not trying to philosophize about it, I don’t care to define either, I will use both words as they suit me.

I am watching the shadows of tall trees shaking in the wind. The sun is hot and bright and the shadows are strewn across the tables and the walk and the faces of the people talking and eating. I watch the entanglement of shadows writhe and dance across the brow of a young man talking to a pretty young girl. I watch them smear and distort, darkened as if by ink. A man next to them is almost snoring. I myself am holding a book in my hand and drinking tea and noting the dancing limb-shadows, the violent leaf-shadows that no one else seems to notice. I look at people as I look at myself, as filters of experience who either are crushed or uplifted by what they have known, either made weaker or stronger than the quality of their original nature. Surrounded by people, I wonder at their happiness, I try to read their story in their faces; I listen to how they speak and what they speak about.

“The singing women approached Levin, and it seemed to him that a thundercloud of merriment was coming upon him. The cloud came over him and enveloped him; and the haystack on which he lay, and all the other haystacks and carts, and the whole meadow with the distant fields all started moving and heaving to the rhythm of this wild, rollicking song with its shouts, whistles and whoops. Levin was envious of this healthy merriment; he would have liked to take part in expressing this joy of life. But he could do nothing and had to lie there and look and listen. When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him.”

““How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange mother-of-pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds that stopped right over his head in the middle of the sky. “How lovely everything is on this lovely night! And when did that shell have time to form? A moment ago I looked at the sky, and there was nothing there- only two white strips. Yes, and in that same imperceptible way my views of life have also changed!””

“He left the meadow and walked down the main road to the village. A slight breeze sprang up, and it turned grey, gloomy. The bleak moment came that usually precedes dawn, the full victory of light over darkness.”

“He looked at the sky, hoping to find there the shell he had admired, which had embodied for him the whole train of thoughts and feelings of the past night. There was no longer anything resembling a shell in the sky. There, in the inaccessible heights, a mysterious change had already been accomplished. No trace of shell was left, but spread over half the sky was a smooth carpet of ever diminishing fleecy clouds. The sky had turned blue and radiant, and with the same tenderness, yet also with the same inaccessibility, it returned his questioning look.”

I am reminded of the first time I appreciated the night sky when I was young, on the bank of the Patuxent River near my home. The moon is full (at least it is full in the flawed recompense of my memory) and I am surrounded by my friends, but no one is speaking. It is a clear night; the stars are thick and full and in motion, and long skeletal fingers of ghostly clouds are daubed and smeared here and there. At the full height of the sky I finally see the Milky Way. And at my feet it is all reflected in the silently passing water, and in that surface among all the other wonders I see my own wavering outline, and I am unsure at first of what the dark mass is crouched there, startled and unsure of its existence even then.

I am isolated in this memory; it lingers behind every experience since. These singular memories, perhaps meaningless to another, but resounding within me with all the force of life, these partitioned moments, when wonder starts in stillness; instants that stand solidly apart from happiness or sadness, points that sound deeply in strange and inaccessible tongues and tones... stone-like truth.

An Introduction.

My hours are bracketed by silence that is, as Kierkegaard notices, the qualitative opposite of silence. My silence ends when I exorcise whatever has formed internally within that silence. I cannot picture opposites perfectly; I can only pronounce the imperfection of my memory. I try to define notions and colors in the thick of a stone-white cloud. I try to make out a landscape, to allow my breath to blow mists and fog from the forests and roads, so my eyes can apprehend the hillsides and the sun and the faces of the people moving about, so that I might find my way to them through the inward noise of experience. Behind all of that flows another channel of thought, one whose current laps at the bank of all my experiences, trying to pick and pull and carry away any little thing into the next inevitable silence.

I am nothing; my quantity is similar to that of sunlight reflecting off drops of moisture on the lace of a web strung between blades of grass in an isolated, untended field. I am spun by a spider into an infinitely fine web, at each cross-section the contact point becomes a word, and the slightest breeze tests my strength. My intuition and my intellect are those ultra-fine threads winding from word to word. Everything is filtered through; each second of the day is run through like a sieve held in a stream. I reach my hand and thought out to whatever sticks, trying to take hold of what the spider is not already gobbling up.

I am nothing, and how can nothing have an enemy? But I do have an enemy, and this is my fight against it. As the universe teaches, everything came from nothing. So the enemies of that which is nothing are all the forces that prevent it from becoming. I know that it is true, that something can come from nothing, because before I was born there was only an abyss, and then at the moment of my birth the world came into being. I am aware that for me to have been born there already had to be the world in which my mother existed. I’m not arguing against that, but that is her world, and this is mine, and our worlds, as all people’s, are as alien and as intimate to each other as the sun is to the sea. The sunlight hits the sea and shimmers, it moves in flux with the surface of the water. All of the opposites coming together on one thin surface of movement and experience, all the different elements of water, wind, and air, and all the animals in the depths and the sky that require all of it to exist, becomes a fine mesh that we absorb and sort, and that becomes our universe.

Because my thoughts are my own and your thoughts yours, because they comprise the lattice-work of our lives, and because the only commonality between us is language, I stare through a stone-white cloud and try to create a landscape on which we can meet. I try to stave off the enemies of becoming; I try to focus my energies on one goal, that is, to exist.

These writings will be the voices I remember, the images that form that I find worth saving from dissolution, the letters I write and receive that find no other proper place, sketches of faces, descriptions of walks, studies of bodies and buildings and moments, stray thoughts that have solidified into sentient feelings. These will all be products of silence.