Category: Poetry

…because. A 12 x 9 x 2. ♥

Either Side of Silver

Our words tangled over the distance, after they
provided the set-up and we tried to deliver
the punchline, but the joke was on us: distances
aren’t bridged with slippery things like will. What I loved
in those wintry days was the mere thought of you, and
your laughter, curled up in my imagination,
your keystrokes composing a crisp sarabande that
transposed the keys of your sleeplessness into my
low register and then back into your tenor.

Those memories exist twice, separate, on either
side of mirrors pointed away from each other:
as listless dogs, napping on the cool stony floors
of a summer house, stirring when the sunlight floats
over their repose; and as ether, above the
castles and cathedrals of modernity that
hold up the skies, where every tittering whisper
we passed between us hovers in diaphanous
quiet, too scattered, too far removed to bind us.

Ecco: a little Fibonacci-inspired syllabic poem – 3, 5, 8, 13 and back again – about getting stuck.

the episode.

metronome
for days without shape,
spent on the underside of my
solipsistic wanderings, where the deep’s arrived at
my door, where all good sense has sunk
beneath the weight of
time, ticking.

A side note: back in May 1999, I went to the Tate Gallery in London, where they were exhibiting “The Deep” by Jackson Pollock. Every time I think of the deep as a concept, I always remember this painting, if only because white has never looked so black and black never so white as on this canvas. It reminds me that, ultimately, it’s all a matter of perspective. ♥ EAB

Voilà: a brand new 10×10 syllabic poem. ♥ EAB

The Snow Storm
Despite all sophistication, it comes
to replace the pattered brilliance of night
with the uniformity of a cloud,
and it settles on expressing itself
as clean, discrete crystals that seek the still,
quiet surfaces outside my window.
All the world’s branches, as intimate as
a widow’s fingers on the graveyard fence,
crack against the glass, their messages tapped
in secret rhythms: “It’s winter. At last.”

Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to get back to work! Here’s a new poem. It’s a terzanelle—a form that’s a hybrid of terza rima and the villanelle—and below is my most recent experiment with the form, eleven syllables per line. I also wrote it out by hand and scanned it in.

“Misjudgment”

It doesn’t look at all like it was meant to:
I touched the thread’s hissing, forked tongue to my own,
then smoothed out the fray with my fingers and drew

it through the iris of the needle. (The drone
started here.) I knotted the ends—and again,
touched the threads’ hissing, forking tongues to my own—

and beginning, I pushed the sharp through one end,
back once more, embroidering the pattern for her.
(I’d started by knotting the ends, once again.)

Stitch into line, line to object, object for
pattern, pattern in picture: rhythm as rote,
back once more, to produce the picture for her.

Repetition drives a routine. I devote
a stitch, ’til I slip and knot in the wrong spot.
Patterns fail: no picture when rhythm is rote.

The fingers bleed, fibers fray, and I forgot
to smooth out the ripples with my fingers, too.
The stitches slip, there’s a spot in the wrong knot,
and nothing looks how it had been meant for you.

Happy New Year, everyone! ♥ EAB

I wrote this little pair of interrelated verse about four or five weeks ago. I don’t know why I’ve been holding on to them. These are about sadness—Tristitia—and joy—Gaudium. ♥ 

FIDES
I. Tristitia
There’s a flicker, and it comes with the
expectation that distraction
has come to rescue her from the
mouthy weight of inexorable
confinement, but the horizon’s
lights streak westward, in slow, fixed paths,
delivering no distraction,
just the steely white noise of more
paranoid imaginings.
Within her mind’s demoted eye,
there’s another rote listing why
her cognitions are drowning in
sticky black paint, her faith is smoke-
damaged from fires set by the
Patron Saint of Self-Destruction,
and her sense has left her to chase
the ever vanishing tracks of
failing, falling stars that aim to
become the disparate peace of dust.

II. Gaudium
Dust exists and persists, though, as
a permanent state of wisdom
—accumulative as it is—
and she finds tempers and torrents
are only empowered by
the rains’ tendency to sculpt
the soil into uninvited
monsters. It’s all in the choice, no?
Liberation arrives in a
kiss, as understanding itself,
for the only things she has
to lose are the merciless
irons of expectation.

I wrote this one in August ’10. Click on the image for fullsizeyness. My handwriting’s admittedly little tough in this one, so the full text is after the image. ♥

Eurydice

I belong to you where the great enigmas collide.

So I don’t care to practice restraint at this instant.
I want to embrace it. I want to press it into
a powder and flatten my skin with its soft pigment,
until I taste the traces on my lips. I need you
to appreciate my need to twist this moment round
my finger like your ring, to marvel at the deep blue

jewel. This clumsy, mortal circumstance in which you’ve found
me is anachronistic, limiting. Could’s only
basis here is an unlikely physics. So confound
them for being conclusively inconclusive. We
don’t need their permission. I’ll still hear your song inside
the apparent silences where you can still feel me.

This poem was longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize last spring, but alas, it missed the shortlist. I wrote it in July ’10, when I was in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. It’s a terza rima box: thirteen lines, thirteen syllables per line. Click on the visual to view it in its full-sized glory in your browser. If my cursive’s a bother, the text is at the bottom. ♥

The Margay

I was bound by my gratitude and obligation,
as you were to your familial companions, yet
we ditched them all in spirit. A slice of elation

brought out a curve in your smile when you stealthily met
my eyes, for there was a crystallized understanding
between us. Recognition followed suit, and we let

it release our hidden history, reinforcing
that taut thread stretching from you to me, from me to you,
until we had to bend to its pull. We were circling,

each aware of the other, and you sent me your cue
to hang towards the back for the brief conversation
we both knew would be far too casual for the two
of us to talk about the renewed admiration.

During the summer of 2010, I wrote three poems that I subsequently submitted to a number of contests and literary journals to no avail. However, as developing a traditional publication record isn’t a priority at the moment, I’ve decided to post them. The first one’s below, and the others already have been scheduled to post over the next two weeks. Truth be told, I’m not as happy with them as I have been with my more recent work, but I feel like sharing. Anyway…

I’d never written a Petrarchan sonnet before I put these words to paper in June ’10. Honestly, I still didn’t manage it, as there’s no real volta, although I justified it to myself that grief itself cancelled out the volta. Hmm.

Here’s the text and an image. ♥

When You Were Mine.

It’s in a scrapbook, in a box they don’t mean to
open again. Your artifacts hurt too much for
regular consumption. There are tracts of grief, doors
locked from the inside, and everyone just makes do.
And yet, the curiosity builds as a lust
without the promise of relief. When you used to
spell out words on fogged up windows, it was I, too,
who reached through the translucence to find you. I trust
that in a hallowed place, they have evidence
of your vision. I won’t know. It’s not here. Like you.
It makes no difference if I trip myself up on
hypotheticals. Within the useless frequence
of this dire, crushed up need to take your hand, the view
remains the same wherever I go. You’re still gone.