blackeyesunrise

Well, we were young
And turtlenecked all through spring, then it was
Summer on a turning millennium;

And when we turned
From one another, way back when,
It seemed like youth was always a safe excuse
To have been in love:
The heart darts and pushes
Past the curtains
Of sunshine, a furred critter
Suddenly wild.

Then, David says we can’t be it all.
I’d like to know why not (though
his logic is irrefutable),
A short fall cuts to a long winter;
The things in between
Were made in opposition.

The millennium no longer young;

Well, then there was that slow day so many
Years later

Wondering if this cat twisting
On my chest was a thing
Returned
Or if that other thing
Had ever run past the gardens
Into those wicked billows of sunshine.

Implicit in every word
Is the danger of being heard, as
On a sunlit afternoon
The rain ruined against
Her brow, and how she
Pronounces the coming wet
Might yield a gentler storm;
When all is flood,
How the arc gets named
Might defer a differing frame.
So tonight, she speaks
Of revelations, and I turn
To watch it in the clouds:
Implicit in every bird
Is the stranger being heard.

1.

We are to the brim with aches from teeth long shaken out on green apples and poised fists. Our teeth had left us toothless; we spat stones for each temptation, hands the manifestation of longing: two insects fluttering in search of a mating home.

2.

We are to the brim with blacks and blues remembered from tall dark woods trimmed to a single brilliant stick. Lo! How each generation seeks to define itself by suffering. I am damaged goods, she says, I may learn to love again but not now, not really.

3.

We are to the brim with wanting triggers emblazoned onto skin. For each tattooed minute we had lost a fighting head and thus gained a double conundrum. This is no way to live. This is no way to sing. The jagged son of Jupiter rises at our throats.

4.

Or none at all.

On the balcony across from where I am reclined, a young couple speaks to one another on a checkered couch. The man’s lips move with energetic discussion, the woman’s arms paint the gesture of a vase or the shape of some sensual curve. Their sliding door is open and I can hear the faintest afterthought from the record player in their living room. But even as the distant voices from down the street are carried to me, I cannot hear this couple just a balcony away. They speak in pantomime. Their outlines blur in the sunlight, and now they glimmer. This could be a scene from one of infinite dimensions: a perfect world where a young couple speaks to one another on a checkered couch, oblivious and silent to the other world watching just a balcony away.

* * *

This post might conceivably remind one of a similar scene(s) written a year or many years ago. I might conceivably agree.

So goes the month, “I’ve run out of things to say. My mouth moves, makes no sound.”

* * *

60 feet below, frozen and floating through the kelp forests off Point Loma, I am searching for ghosts in a green yellow sky; the shapes of boats overhead condense and coalesce, threats of shadow, maybe rain. The body heaves, entangled by currents. Then, my dive buddy swims to me and gestures there with his hand. A school of fish like a flock of birds, a rapture of souls. If my mouth were to open now, would the whole ocean rush in, fill the cavity with salt and wrecks.

* * *

“Since then, all sunrises have been viewed as if standing at the mouth of a cave bound by high tide.”

“Thus we only need to ascertain when ‘then’ arrived.”

* * *

Dear O.,

If your cat could talk, what would it say. I think I am happy, sometimes. Yesterday more so than today. Tomorrow more so than yesterday. I feel like I am getting somewhere, that this time next year, I will have arrived. What would it say: don’t be sad for what’s been left behind.

Sincerely,
C.

* * *

You can’t have contemplation
Without some contempt,

Like this:

In the middle of the night
There is an awakening

The body
Covered with strange dreams,
Skin ablaze;

Do you rise and
Cool yourself by the sea

Or

Beside the sudden hedge
Of darkness,

Do you watch
The ash from your cigarette
Fall on a web, small
And jewel boxed,

The clockwork spider
Struggling to wrap its silk
Around the divine

To make
A tasteless meal
My mouth is never rid.