Find and share the perfect poems.
when love floods a person
it cuts
a canyon
that deepens year after year
carrying silt
away leaving
the essential person
revealed
letting everyone see
the layers of yellow
sandstone, red basalt
grey granite
when love washes over a person
it washes
the person away
I am not lyric any more I will not play the harp for your pleasure I will not make a joyful noise to you, neither will I lament for I know you drink lamentation, too, like wine so I dully repeat you hurt me I hate you I pull my eyes away from the hills I will not kill for you I will never love you again unless you ask me
The downward turning touch the cry of time fire falling without sound plunge my hand in the wound children marching and dying all that I do is a crime because I do not reach their mouths silently crying my boychild reaches with his mouth it is easy, being a mother his skin is tender and soft kisses stitch us together we love as long as we may then come years without kisses when he will turn away not to waste breath when I too will fall embracing a pillow at night touching the stone of exile reaching my hand to death
But it's really fear you want to talk about and cannot find the words so you jeer at yourself you call yourself a coward you wake at 2 a.m. thinking failure, fool, unable to sleep, unable to sleep buzzing away on your mattress with two pillows and a quilt, they call them comforters, which implies that comfort can be bought and paid for, to help with the fear, the failure your two walnut chests of drawers snicker, the bookshelves mourn the art on the walls pities you, the man himself beside you asleep smelling like mushrooms and moss is a comfort but never enough, never, the ceiling fixture lightless velvet drapes hiding the window traffic noise like a vicious animal on the loose somewhere out there— you brag to friends you won't mind death only dying what a liar you are— all the other fears, of rejection, of physical pain, of losing your mind, of losing your eyes, they are all part of this! Pawprints of this! Hair snarls in your comb this glowing clock the single light in the room
We stand on the edge, the fall
into depth, the ascent
of light revelatory, the canyon walls moving
up out of
shadow, lit
colours of the layers cutting
down through darkness, sunrise as it
passes a
precipitate of the river, its burnt tangerine
flare brief, jagged
bleeding above the far rim for a split
second I have imagined
you here with me, watching day's onslaught
standing in your bones—they seem
implied in the record almost
by chance—fossil remains held
in abundance in the walls, exposed
by freeze and thaw, beautiful like a theory
stating who we are
is carried forward by the X
chromosome down the matrilineal line
recessive and riverine, you like
me aberrant and bittersweet, and losing
your hair just when we have begun
to know the limits of beauty, you so
distant from me now but at ease
in a chair in your kitchen, pensive, mind
wandering away from yesterday's Times, the ink
rubbing off on your hands, dermatoglyphic
and telltale, but unread
on the chair arms after you
had pushed yourself to your feet such
awhile ago, I'd say, for here I am
three hours behind you, riding the high
Colorado Plateau as the opposing
continental plates force it over
a mile upward without buckling, smooth
tensed, muscular fundament, your bones yet
to be wrapped around mine—
this will come later, when I return
to your place and time, I know it, you not
ready for past or future, our combined
bones so inconsequent yet
personal, the geo
logic cross
section of the canyon dropping
from where I stand, hundreds
millions of shades of terra cotta, of copper
manganese and rust, the many varieties of stone—
silt, sand, and slate, even "green
river rock," a rough misidentified
fragment of it once unknowingly
dropped when I was a boy into my as of yet un
settled sediments by a man who tried
to explain how slowly the Earth meta
morphosed from my meagre
Wolf Cub's collection of rocks, his sheer
casual physicality enough to negate
all received wisdom, my body voicing its immense
genetic imperatives, human
geology falling away
into a
depth I am still unprepared for
the canyon cutting down to
the great unconformity, a layer
so named by the lack
of any fossil evidence to hypothesize
about and date such
a remote time by, at last no possible
retrospective certainties, what a
relief, your face illegible
these words when I began not what I had
intended to say—something new about
the natural dynamic between
earth and history, beauty and art—
but you are my subject, unavoidable
and volatile, the canyon
floor a mile from where I objectively
stand taking photos I will later develop of
the ripe, trans
formative light on these surreal
buttes to show you on the surface
how beautiful and diverse
and unimportant our time together
or with anyone else
really is—
We must ask ourselves what purpose is
ultimately served by this suspension of
all the accepted unities
if, in the end, we return to the unities
that we pretended to question at the outset.
In fact,
the systemic erasure of all given unities
enables us first of all to restore to
the statement the specificity
of its occurrence, and to show
that discontinuity
is one of those great accidents
that create cracks
not only in the geology of history,
but also in the simple fact
of the statement;
it emerges in its historical irruption;
what we try to examine is the incision
that it
makes, that
irreducible— and very often tiny
—emergence.
However banal it may be,
however unimportant its consequences may appear to be,
however quickly it may be forgotten after its appearance,
however little heard or however badly deciphered
we may suppose it to be,
a statement is always an event
that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning
can quite exhaust.
It is certainly a strange event:
first, because on the one hand
it is linked to the gesture of
writing or to the articulation of
speech,
and also on the other hand
it opens up to itself a residual existence
in the field of a memory, or in the materiality of manuscripts,
books, or any other form of recording;
secondly, because, like every
event,
it is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, and reactivation;
thirdly, because it is linked not only to the situations that provoke it, and to the consequences
that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in accordance with a quite different modality, to
the statements that precede and
follow it.
I remember you. You’re the one
who lifted your ancient bones
of fossil rock, pulled yourself free
of the strata like a plaster figure
rising from its own mold, became
flesh and feather, took wing,
arrested the sky.
You’re the one who, though marble,
floated as beautifully as a white
blossom on the pond all summer,
who, though skeletal and particled
like winter, glimmered as solid as a bird
of cut crystal in the icy trees.
You are redbird—sandstone
wings and agate eyes—at dusk.
You are greybird—polished granite
and pearl eyes—just before dawn,
midnight bird with a reflective
vacancy of heart like a mirror
of pure obsidian.
You’re the one who flew down
to that river from the heavens,
as if your form alone were the only
holy message needed. You were alabaster
then in the noonday sun.
Once I saw you rise without rising
from your prison pedestal
in the garden beneath the lime tree.
At that moment your ghost
in its haunting permeated every
regality of the forest with light,
reigned with disdain in thin air
above the mountain, sank in union
with the crosswinds of the sea.
I remember you. You’re the one
who entered in through my death
as if it were an open window
and you were the sound of the serenade
being sung outside for me, the words
of which, I know now, are of freedom
cast in stone forever.