blackeyesunrise

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.

Two dirty shingles over a bending blade, this
House reaches through time and space
Learns to cut again; and it cuts, such divisiveness,
Decisively deceptive
Like the lilt of listing laments, the litany of longing
To be cataloged by librarians,
And spoken: your friend is dying,
Your friend is full of inconsistencies…
And more than once, the uncertain narrator pauses,
Breath taken by a sentence that spans a year,
A home to be remembered, brandished, where
Everything changed, sharper than life itself.
In these times, he wonders when joy devised to be
So fleeting; so he says it, the heart
Can be a poem too, composed of fragments
And so hard.

mid april,
the last wind arrives from its forgotten country
beyond the undulating questions of the sea, carries
on jutted shoulders her glacial scent, tundras
and frail purple fragments; your memory of it
– at once heartbreaking and frightful –
is familiar, like an old friend who may have
betrayed you in a previous life.

these days
i am held aloft only by this wind, which is to say
nothing tangible: a junction where two pressures
lead into one or one diverges into two —
the shame of it comes later,
familiar as tropic fruits, their skins
lachrymose and bitter; but still
the wind finagles her entry.

high noon,
just past the sempiternal curvature of morning
these junctions manifest again,
devastatingly metaphorical: two paths into
disparate tunnels like tumors in a cliff –
you are haunted by your old life, as you walk,
as you bite into a pear — the frequency
of junctions disturbs you.

an ending
drone emits from the mountain’s manifold mouths;
shame is the afflatus of the little green
in an inhospitable land, what i lack,
what the morning withheld in its secret heart:
a traveler on a path into darkness, lost
perhaps doomed to exiguous light for
the remainder of his years.

on time
the tunnel swallows you whole, an unmedicated
pill exploding into foolishness: the burrows
are merely overpasses, the daylight
marred only by terrific shadows — yet
you are never certain until the light speaks,
fills you with luminescent relief, just how
much the passage will take.

Like apples in a bowl, her
Sweet rotten flesh
Cupped by cusps of oranges
Spilling down an open front

Everything here glistens
With sweat, silver beads of
Compromised light

The thing will burst, that nothing, that gray bubble doubling back
I am sure of it