blog-palette

[blog-palette]

Ache

Begin, World, with my beating heart; condense at my center, vapour to cloud; sprout from ample fingertips of aspen — and, each step in between, each certainty and indecision, every death’s difficult graft, walk across my mind. For I am entirely sure of you — knowing another bloom to be inevitable as stars — so at ease occupying this air, these rocks. If I arrived a little late, with little left to name, I arrived with us already intimate, arrived in love and you under my spell. So sure that when I leave you will never be the same. So when the woodpecker hammers pinewood, sending hollow rings of sound as evidence of a gentle conflict through this pooling assignation, I take both their sides — and the tension between this contradiction is the aching of my life.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Fake Empire

I suppose that I was born of a nation. Remind me again, stranger, just who I am. Am I an army marching down an isthmus, swallowed into proportion? I should be flattered by your fear: by the way, when you see me you see an idea, a movement, a collection of principles so far beyond what I could have gathered, and I so naturally stand for. How I yearn for your indifference, to be mistaken for a migratory bird passing through your empire. But there’s no denying the times. I could have come from a man, from a village. Once I could have come from a deity, now I’m reduced to come from a race and religion.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Love Letter

City, blinking at the lake through fog like you could never be as free as this, wistful City like the roots to clouds above you, air around you. And drifting out into the lake I always forget you are more than a monument, always regret the living core of you; the same way I see the forests and the mountains from distance, not knowing the forces that bore them, as if in frame, interpreted through an artist’s gaze. Cold City, I feel close when in the rearview, larger in my imagination than in my feelings, always leading to the question: will I ever be able to make a home of you?

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Sink

To see that ship afloat — I would follow as if I could walk on water. Swells leaning against the rounded hull, like the sea’s hands caressing broad shoulders. But I am of denser stuff than faith — I would rise across the fish of Galilee, asking them questions beyond their fragile memories. This is natural to me, sinking into air from amniotic water, for a moment of difficult breathing, to rise to the bottom to the bones of Peter. Like an inanimate fruit I grow rich and heavy, bruised, sensitive with age, to the abundance and the disease, to that which is deeper than joy and sorrow.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Start Again

If I could start again. If I could say this is the beginning. The Earth spins as of now. That God created us just like this. Breathe this smokey air as if I needed it. Drink this plastic water as if it’s medicine. If I could say every moment creates itself anew. Say we arrived here just today well prepared with knives and measuring tape to carve it all into pieces. Sit across a dark chessboard with divinity, try to bend it to my will. You can tell me all is as it must be. And I’d say I’m not sure just what we’ve lost.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Cassiopeia

Balanced on a piece of driftwood, leaning on Cassiopeia; between two skies, one above and one below. Every stroke of paddles sent the wake shimmering through lament — how could beauty bring you down so low? I swear I will not fall as long as I’m alive.

Afloat by the grace of stories, prayers, Ave Marias; dim lights in heavens, lit one by one. So many awakenings transfixed upon that shared canvas. But the shores veiled, my eye returns to that indelible line. I cling to your frame until the Sun is nigh.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Anesthetic

I invited him now and then to the comfort of my living room. Walk off the tightrope between rooftops, slip through one of the wounds in the night sky that you go looking to suture — let’s have a drink, a chat. I could never be sure whether I envied him or loved him. And he drank all my whiskey and said this comfort is an anesthetic, and stumbled out again in search of a bar fight to break up. I am divorced from the violence I perpetrate to survive, but sometimes I catch my thoughts running out loud on sidewalks, and marvel at this gush of feeling. I save up the trivia for the next time he comes by. It’s incredible, I say, how sands from the Sahara fertilize the Amazon. I no longer feel worthy of leading a difficult life, where the consequences throttle the pulse.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Chained

So hard to imagine being free. Hard to find a metaphor, to ascribe to a purified symbol, point to an exemplary life. Look, I can say, how the smoke disperses. I can experiment with this will, try to create moments, live them in search. There I am, supine on a cabin’s floor by the fireplace, under the smoke, thinking of the Raven; directionless on the road, town after town; here I am, after her flight through city streets, with an uneasy feeling I’m being followed by my future. And to shake that off, I picture picking up arms for your cause. Once it’s over, what would our freedom be from? This bondage to the struggle, your voice raised in protest, is all that there is. Chained to me, you can come and go as you please.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Train

On a train to Paris you asked where is it that you’re going? An old lady told us where to disembark. The streets might as well have had no names; the cafes might as well have been deserted. And you led me through with long strides, wide eyed, one foot in the future. I could have taken root in the middle of that ancient desert, the cream pastiche of buildings following one another, forever; the pavements branching out like settled veins, abundant and imperative. How far forward could I leap? You were always departing, and I felt so comfortable in the Pavillon Denon with the old men I knew. After you did finally leave, I wondered if I ever did get off that train.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Emptiness

After everything, I ended up in this empty room; all surfaces the same, no way to know floor from ceiling. Over the years, I crawled every inch of every side, like an ant looking for her colony. And in the grain of monochrome I found shapes of everything I have known; in the nothingness that was left me was compressed the whole world. They would take, if they could, from me, even this emptiness — in their hands it would turn to rust. Stranded in space I will find something to love.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

A Desert Rose

The desert encroached, sand making its way foot by foot, to the very doorstep. A primrose rose through tiles, like a raised hand — blocked my way out. And I can call anyplace home, as long as they let me sleep. Daughter, I said, don’t dwell on these myths, we do not belong to memory — we belong to that which is left us, and even now it is much more than a life can take. But shall we uproot again and go looking for the mythical Garden? — let the caustic air dry us to birdcage and roll us over, back across the ancient footsteps. When finally the rains do come to our rest, you can continue to marvel at possibilities, and I, with a clear conscience, give in to nostalgia.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Nicer Cage

Cross legged under a tree, wild haired, uncivilized, preparing for my lives to come; naked and muddy-wet, they dragged me out of the Ganges as I was bathing. No one bothers to educate me anymore, but as long as I am here I might as well have a nicer cage. And they imagine they’re on the outside, entertained; and they are wrong. This world within me — washed pure by Ganga — extends beyond their laws. I don’t want to dismantle these bars anymore. I’ll pull them out and plant them in a wider arc one by one through all my lives, until everything is on the inside. Soon enough my cage will be their empire.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Another Way

A nation convulses as it is absorbed into another, tearing itself to pieces. A fire savages a forest and weeds take over. A bird loses its wings and goes swimming for fish. One thing becomes everything; everything returns to one — through death. So we disperse from Cain into a thousand tribes, and will return to a lonesome old man under an orange Sun, with no one left to kill. And I am not yet ready to ask if there is any other way. So do not parade these corpses before my eyes, as if to scream the dead are innocent and the living guilty, as if your false beliefs have no culpability. I am not willing to mourn at each of your awakenings. Stripped of my lineage, like the dead, dispossessed of my language, I stand free from the burden of history.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Other Side

The end came and went, and it’s as if nothing changed at all. He stood ambiguous in a different place, suitcase in hand. Thought, I guess, in a different language, the same sort of thoughts. How to reach for the same old words? — to say: this must be the other side.

How strange to be faithful, as if we could hold anything for long. It is, I guess, an act of rebellion, to love anything at all. And the silences the same, and wind disturbing serenity of water the same, through ages. I wanted to ask him: what is it you’re holding on to? But I let go of my pride.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Second Beauty

In the neglected little garden behind the apartment, littered with toys and then sporting gadgets, petunias’ bloomed long year on year. The girls I knew then have since blossomed and faded — started looking for meaning. Then the search for a second beauty. How beautiful would I like to become? — so much so the people carry me through my life, so adoration serves as sustenance. And if I stand before them and sing, so they may remember. And if I drop alms in the arms of some wretched creature on the streets, no, if my heart aches for him sincerely for just a moment, and I become more moral than his creator. If I could find any way to be without the body. I do wonder if the petunias still come and go in that garden, and wish that I had asked them for their secret.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Come and Play

How do you see them? — storming out on their horses with their Book and their swords, ready to give and take life. You would rather belong to legend and destiny. But what about today? You confront the moment only when there’s pain to bring it into focus — yours or someone else’s. And then return to hope, as if it were the ghostly camp of an eternal army of purpose, waiting in the wings for the next humiliation; to say look I told you so, and it is so; and we are waiting to rise from the dead. It is true that there are things that we are born with and things we have to learn again and again. And each time we learn we change what we learn a little to suit ourselves. Because you are afraid, I will change incessantly, again and again and again, until I am as clouds, unprincipled and for the sky-gazers, until you are not ashamed to leave the past. Come and play the games of power: even midst hope it’s the only way.

#poetry

[blog-palette]

Significance

You said it made you feel insignificant, how one thing follows another, all the way back, how one man follows another, over and over. Above rocky beaches of the Shield, over feldspar and quartz, bats followed moths and dodged fireflies, over a canvas made of the Milky Way. It made you feel small, the governance of laws holding stars to account, all the way to us being pinned upon the rocky beaches, upon this forever expanse. And I could not express how wrong I felt you were; and shivering, we returned to the fire. Men of numbers will continue to count infinities, looking for the pixel: the limits without and within run the same forever expanse. All this for the shifting fire to throw into relief your many angles — so I may contemplate you, while you contemplate the moon.

#poetry