Tag: verses

on whom the pale moon gleams

Ode
by Arthur O’Shaughnessy

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

My mouth is full of night and water.

-::-

My dream started from where I had left off, lying awake in the tent, listening to Burning Man, Robin asleep next to me while I stared past the ceiling to the sky, wondering at myself, at what I might have to do to let anything in. Seamlessly, though in the shadow of sleep, I left the bed, carefully found my night clothes and put them on again. Then I crept outside, paused, took a breath as I stood at the mouth of the tent, then zipped it up like a child miming a promise kept. Then the dream skipped like an analog video on fast forward, its reality taking a moment to blur just long enough to get me to the Esplanade.

From there it was a long walk, all of it wrapped in pale dust and cold and the lights of fantastic things passing me by in the dark as if I were actually there, the thump of all the art cars blurring as I dreamed of crossing the Playa, the music hard and glittering, my body a shadow but as real as my mind could synthesize. My walk through the desert seemed to symbolize nothing, except as a means to an end, as I had a destination before I had even fallen asleep: The Magic Phonebooth, a public satellite phone some rich person provides every year as an art project that anyone can use to call anywhere in the world for as long as they want. I had spoken of it earlier to Robin, as one of my favourite things there that I had never used, offered maybe as a solution to some of my disassociation, some of what was keeping me from the world.

As I approached it, though, exhausted and cold, I could felt the emptiness inside my heart as if it were made of a tangible material, my apathy so extensive it could almost be measured by clever engineers. Yet my journey continued, my feet kept moving, until I was finally there, hand on the metal door, still uncertain of what I was going to say. My life seemed so hollow, so irrelevant, a pointlessness amplified to deafening levels. What was I looking for? Redemption? Validation? It was a mystery to me, but I opened the door anyway and stepped inside.

My dream self didn’t pause, though I would have fumbled there, but picked up the receiver and cradled it against my ear like an old friend, and dialled a number I’ve never actually known by rote. East coast. Across the river. The gantries. The transom over the door. The metal bed-frame. Lying on the couch, listening to a story about a man being bitten on the foot by a fish and losing one of his toes. “You would have been proud of me.” How I never would have gone back to that place if he hadn’t put his hand on the small of my back. How completely damaged he was. How much he liked the feathers in my hair. My photo in a terrible frame, tacky, grandmotherly. His picture pinned to a string at the foot of my room. The first time he told me, in a drug store that I have visited since to buy my first set of false eye-lashes, but hated in his absence, when he told me and I looked up and he shook his head as if I should have already known. It was a torrent. A rush. Endless, though it only lasted seconds.

The phone rang once, then clicked as he picked up. The background of traffic was barely there, even in the lee of the bridge. Late, I know, I thought, almost surprised that he had woken up in my dream, even knowing it was all pretend. “Hello?” An art car passed the booth, the wind picked up, the crawling sounds of Burning Man leaked past my lips through the wires, loud and flashy, obvious through my silence. He waited. I waited. When at least I finally spoke, it was only five words. “Everything is broken without you.”

the end of an inspiration

Grand Finale 2010-11 from McLean Fahnestock.

I had plans to fly down to Florida to see the very last space-shuttle launch, the one in the bottom right corner, and meet with my best friend from the internet, someone I had never met in spite of a decade of regular correspondence. We were going to watch the ship launch, then road-trip across the American South to New Orleans, stopping along the way to see things like Florida’s Real Live Mermaids and an exotic animal conservatory. It fell through, as many things do – his work schedule changed, the launch was delayed – so the plan changed and I flew to meet him in New York instead. The last star-ship sailed into the sky without us. Now the friendship is dead and so is the shuttle program. We missed out on both history and love and I’m still not sure, a year later, which was the greater tragedy.

I’m a size ten

There is an awful, delightful old tradition that women have “permission” to ask men for their hand in marriage on Leap Day, with the added impetus that if he refuses, he must give her the gift of a silk dress and a kiss to soften the blow. So, with the best of intentions, I asked one of my dearest friends to marry me today. (He is pretty great.) This is the glorious, achingly beautiful poem I received in reply, proving, I believe, that it was a win-win situation either way:

Handy Guide
By Dean Young

Avoid adjectives of scale.
Dandelion broth instead of duck soup.
Don’t even think you’ve seen a meadow, ever.
The minor adjustments in our equations
still indicate the universe is insane,
when it laughs a silk dress comes out its mouth
but we never put it on. Put it on.
Cry often and while asleep.
If it’s raw, forge it in fire.
That’s not a mountain, that’s crumble.
If it’s fire, swallow.
The heart of a scarecrow isn’t geometrical.
That’s not a diamond, it’s salt.
That’s not the sky but it’s not your fault.
My dragon may be your neurotoxin.
Your electrocardiogram may be my fortune cookie.
Once an angel has made an annunciation,
it’s impossible to tell him he has the wrong address.
Moonlight has its own befuddlements.
The rest of us can wear the wolf mask if we want
or look like reflections wandered off.
Eventually armor, eventually sunk.
You wanted love and expected what?
A parachute? Morphine? A gold sticker star?
The moment you were born—
you have to trust others because you weren’t there.
Ditto death.
The strongest gift I was ever given
was made of twigs.
It didn’t matter which way it broke.

contemplating a curse

Bewilderment and sorrow, that simmering concoction, like the aftermath of a murder or the first realization that roses have thorns. I pause, uncertain, blindsided again, memories stirred up, silt from the bottom of the dream-jar. My hands begin to move again, measuring out words, a confused reply, drained of the smile I had been trying to communicate. It is sunny outside, sweetly bright for the first time in a week. The sky is finally open. I had tried to share, some silly self-mockery about depressive dinosaurs and poetry, but the conversation flipped in their beautiful mouth. An invocation of sharp stones, a sudden grappling hook to the chest. Changeling child, fierce, erratic. I remember this, the sound of the crack as my ribs pulled apart, so true it felt like I should carry the scar on my skin.

Those cruel fairy woods are a dark place, laced with private, uncanny paths that I cannot follow, paved with accusation and marrow deep mistrust. I am left behind. The ways in are a mystery. Those roads too foreign, too strange. All I can do is apologize, blindly, astonished, and reach out as they vanish. Perhaps I am capable of some last, impossible action that might save things, a spell, a sacrifice, a gesture in the air, but whatever is needed is not something I know. Too soon, too late, they are gone. The door between us has shut. I am still a moment longer, waiting for what? Inspiration, a cascade of light, even partial understanding, but I close the computer still wondering, wandering among ghosts, no wiser than before.

Outside, at least, the sun continues to shine.

I am lost

Each Sound
by Dorianne Laux

Beginnings are brutal, like this accident
of stars colliding, mute explosions
of colorful gases, the mist and dust
that would become our bodies
hurling through black holes, rising,
muck ridden, from pits of tar and clay.
Back then it was easy to have teeth,
claw our ways into the trees — it was
accepted, the monkeys loved us, sat
on their red asses clapping and laughing.
We’ve forgotten the luxury of dumbness,
how once we crouched naked on an outcrop
of rock, the moon huge and untouched
above us, speechless. Now we talk
about everything, incessantly,
our moans and grunts turned on a spit
into warm vowels and elegant consonants.
We say plethora, demitasse, ozone and love.
We think we know what each sound means.
There are times when something so joyous
or so horrible happens our only response
is an intake of breath, and then
we’re back at the truth of it,
that ball of life expanding
and exploding on impact, our heads,
our chest, filled with that first
unspeakable light.

-::-

There was a kiss that tasted like reëntry, the sky hitting the brakes with a roar, that blazing, intimate acceptance of a spacecraft into atmosphere, every unlikely angle, one head tilting to another, a scorched, soft light jet-stream wish to return home. History made and slammed back like a shotgun round. A promise on the wing, the ground salted, memories buried. The cast lines up, takes a bow, walks off stage, and leaves their shadows behind as the curtain falls, and it tasted like hello as well as goodbye. My apartment is choked with memories, my neighborhood is a cemetery, same as the highway south, much like my life.

He asked for my writing once, to permanently tattoo, something short, beautiful, meaningful. “Between our hands, we could have made fire”. To the death, he said, to the guttering of the sun. (The next one, he gave me nothing I have not been able to give back.) In the archives, our shared love, deliberate and valiant, a blazing comet made of fiercely bared skin, and the small delicate jewelry we wore in our ears, drops of garnet dipped in silver, lost but unforgotten. I send him a message just after midnight, from a number he doesn’t know: I am still wearing your name at the base of my breath.

adoxography

“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.”
— Anaïs Nin

Part of me knew I would never stay, that every moment should be crystallized in amber, trapped like the genetic blueprint of actual happiness, ready to be cloned by some mysterious future tinker, lamps for sale, the escapist cry under the window, rub the brass to recall a broken sugar landscape, an electric vision of what it was like to be young and finally glad of life. Every atom shining. Quotations and fabricated salvation, the canned replies of pop song poetry, always and forever, forever and always, roses are red, except when they’re dead, the way our footsteps matched in time, the way our voices rose together, the silliest song, that tricky bit with the bridge. In the back of things, back on the beach, my body still lay crumpled in a street, left where it had been dropped, a life abandoned like an unwanted chore. At the core, even as I found a place to walk forward, it remained the death of my joy.

Prelude, fast forward, in fine literature they refer to it as foreshadowing, (three times before, midnight gypsies knocking at the door), a trivial divergence blossoming into the most expensive explosion, blinding as a blow to the skull. Divergence, silence, a rough handed, hard, concrete truth I had tried so hard to ignore, that trust, at the base, is a wretched and foolish game. No matter how far I go, it will still be towards the funeral of my dearest friends. Every tomorrow will come, but the sun will be no more. I have been amputated. My heart no longer alive as a vessel for golden light.

“Listen”, the line says, “I never dreamed I would learn to love you so.”

Love is Like Life but Longer from Poppy de Villeneuve.

-::-

From Portuguese – Saudade. According to Wikipedia:

“…a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.”

Photographs of you make my heart hurt, as if I miss you the way I’d miss my second self lost in an accident, as if my heart is no longer a gift, but only a muscle slowly closing and unclosing with a strength too small to taste, too unhappy to sing, a shout in a room that will never be heard. This is a funeral, a year as hungry as an empty highway, a broken radio, days numbered, months stretching into false dusty infinity. Every morning I wake up the same way, watching for reality, waiting to be. I was there, where were you?

She opens her bitten, rose-petal mouth and rain drops spill out. She opens her cloud blinded eyes, now the colour of steel locks, and the sound of torn paper falls from the air. (Your city is still carved in the nape of her neck.) Walking out of sunshine, a stolen, wilted flower in her hair, into life the texture of bone, there was something about his smile, eyes always as bright as unexpected lightning, something about his body standing cynically by the side of a road, that was held sharply enough to slice through glass.

There are certain roads I hesitate to step foot on, the same way I try not to look down your street, as waves of pain constrict my soul, as I resent your vacancy, your undeserved intrusion into my life. Memories float to the surface, all wax on water, like bruises swollen with a tender, fierce regret. Should I have come out swinging? It was unnatural how fast you turned, changling child, honey tongued fairy fire, a shape-shifter in the clothes of a friend. You were faithless, even as I relied on you, a star that burned a dirty hole in my trust, the deep-language reason my laughter started to feel so much like lying.