Find and share the perfect poems.
X.X.,
Someday, across glacier, a green horse will ride toward you; despite steam rising from heavy breath, you'll touch its snout.
When you paired a person's gait to signature, what lilt signed your step? What tautology, what tense was this body's hypothesis?
Do you remember your mother's Strawberry Fruit-Salad Recipe? 2 round Angel Cakes (2 pounds or 4 halves), 16 oz of vanilla pudding, 4 bananas, 2 containers of 8 oz strawberries, 1 big container of whipped cream. Layer and eat.
Your hands shaking, you wrote, "Christ is sentiment."
A cup cracked through with sky. A saucer planed into the shapes of numbers. Every written thing stripped bare, the more supple formulation of given law.
I told you distance to a thing is the purchase of its reality. Why are people like that for us? The more we love the more physical space our love inhabits & the world's lightness' & darkness' assume the order of human tongue.
Last night we tore & tossed memories into ponds. Geese swam across, pecked the waters. I splashed at them &, after, my hands shook. You stood beside me in a red dress. I wanted to drown you this pretty.
xoxo,
X.X.
as light
shaped by trajectory.
a wind settles in the body.
Echécatl the breath, the flint & spark.
the house of prayers.
I am
when sounds exchange questions
when light enters the lung
when given
the noun: a variable absence
a law pinned to a quail's wing.
as the meat
within the shell
as the shell before the caw
a bleached weed
a fig
dusted to sweet the skin
egg albumen of peacock
butterfly
held to the ivory of oxen hoof
pulling
the space
between sins I am
as I am so
the host on the tongue
God of Bread
complexion of conquest
the salt of Lot
as God is
a crown of thorn
diadem of wheat
so am I the echo
calling fossil back to name
amaranth ash spread across the light
Imagine—in front of us—they silently pass. And they believe unrelated
objects are machines
for recognizing the human. And, again, we are no longer interruptions.
Imagine—in front of us—the beginning is not a study. And they believe
the cicada's larva
reveals narrow secrets. And we accompany: to form, to shape.
Imagine—in front of us—a beautiful garden. And they believe color is the
shoreline's end
where we abandon our too sudden bodies. And, here, we are carriers of different
significance.
Imagine—in front of us—each word devolves a lexicon. And they believe
shape shuts on a hinge
within the voice they fable. And, here, we slaughter the spring lambs.
Imagine—in front of us—they pass us between nature, between history.
And they believe the door
frame alters the curtains' flow. And we are a dark summer moving against oceans.
Imagine starlings circling in a postcard's blue. And they believe oration is the living
thing, the end
of geometric space. And here, in full sunlight, we are gifts hoisted to the vanishing
point.
Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter half my day passes. One day it will be half a century. I live in strange cities and sometimes talk with strangers about matters strange to me. I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich. I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain. The fourth has no name. I read poets, living and dead, who teach me tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand the great philosophers--but usually catch just scraps of their precious thoughts. I like to take long walks on Paris streets and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy, anger, desire; to trace a silver coin passing from hand to hand as it slowly loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased). Beside me trees expressing nothing but a green, indifferent perfection. Black birds pace the fields, waiting patiently like Spanish widows. I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older. I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist, and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses dissolve like cumuli on sunny days. Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me and irony suddenly vanishes. I love gazing at my wife's face. Every Sunday I call my father. Every other week I meet with friends, thus proving my fidelity. My country freed itself from one evil. I wish another liberation would follow. Could I help in this? I don't know. I'm truly not a child of the ocean, as Antonio Machado wrote about himself, but a child of air, mint and cello and not all the ways of the high world cross paths with the life that—so far— belongs to me.