Since I haven’t posted any writing for a while, I thought I would put something up I wrote a few weeks ago when it started to feel like spring.  On another note, I’ve noticed many of the poems I’ve written over the past few months have had Pittsburgh as a backdrop or main theme.  Maybe that’s why Pittsburgh has always felt like home from the moment I came here…

At the Cathedral of Hope

In Pittsburgh, after a cold dark winter-
      after the sun was hiding somewhere further south-

In this chapel of urban sanctuary-
      in this diamond of perfect acoustics-

A singer with a mouth full of petals
     altered a season of silence,
           brought the crickets and poems of spring;

and neither angels or pearls
       or couples running nude through a park
            or the wet grass of meadow sticking to the legs

could have spoken the wanton language
      of the season so well–
            (and I am still translating.)

Wrote this sometime in late November of 2008.  It was written after hearing some disturbing news about the political climate in Venezuela, the country of my birth.  I pulled it out last night and tried to polish it up a little.

Maracay

I want to remember
a different Venezuela.

The one from before
had a cement washtub
and Abuela’s concerned hands
washed away travel
and motion sickness.

The one from before
flashed a decadent Carnival
and a shy child with
thin curly hair
waved in her clown costume.

The one from before
had a donkey pinata
for a sister’s first birthday
and children were spun and spun
until they missed and fell.

This Venezuela is laden
with raspy voiced men
resting their hands on loaded guns,
shaking poems into
my quivering boots.

Morning of Vernal Equinox

From the window, a touch of dry lips
a song of breath, a pierce of beauty,
a groove in the record, hair of wheat and raven,
an artistic hollow, hands cupping ashes.

From the window, silver streaked beams of moon,
the fire in my head, sulphur stale in my lungs,
red wine in the small of a lover’s back,
the sweet smell of grass blades and morning glories.

From the window, decaying leaves abandoned by autumn,
a Sunday rest with Blake and Thomas,
rumbles of growth, sunlight, and frogs,
urban priestesses hiding from mirrors.

From my window, the haze of pollen, green, and water,
a grasshopper with yellow blood in its veins,
a glass of iced tea sweating on the veranda
in the cradle of a morning like this.

Sometimes its fun to write an angry vent poem after a long day at work. Written on 3-10-10.

Handprint

It took me two lines
to know that I hated you
with your iron-rich breath
exhaled in my ear as though
we were a pair of lovers
tangled in a set of happy sheets.

The small of my back burned
shrinking as though from a witch’s touch;
never trust a man that calls you
Baby after 5 minutes.
You could have been beautiful
silver haired and silver tongued

But the curried mouth is too hot,
too poisonous, too sweet
like a moist slice of angel food
melting in a jackal’s mouth
spongy and dissolved
in gnashed teeth and acidic spittle.

Still reworking and fine-tuning the poems I wrote last year and found again with that journal.  It’s been an interesting process, allowing them to sit unopened that long and then looking at them again almost a year after most of them were initially written.  It may be something I try again…only next time on purpose.

It’s been an extremely productive March…20+ new poems in the past 3 weeks, plus still going over the older work.  Here is a couple of short ones.  Not quite ready for prime time yet but I felt like posting them anyway.

Cadenza

To a singer, the throat is the terminal,
the magnetic field to which
all music points; the due north,
the guiding star, the apt conclusion.

I have too much of voices
tinkling without resonance in my ear,
the primary is now secondary;
I need the skin and bones of you.

For a Dancer

Your graceful arch on demi pointe
(beautiful naked counterbalance)
extended in arabesque
grazed my shoulder
my elbows facing downward
my chest now full of
the narrow reedy breath
exhaled from your thoughtful Ghandi face.

Allegheny Cemetery

I weep at the beauty of the day;
the lily of the afternoon
is already dripping with gold,
the urban-planning pond
heavy with algae and mossy ducks.

The jade angel opens her wings
to the bright kaleidoscope of Children’s Hospital
and I wonder if the sprite inside it
will help me fly into the blue
if I touch her granite leg.

I wonder how long
I’ll be Carl to your Allen,
if we’ll be friends as old men together in Rockland.
My stomach swims in a tight spot
and I’m on my way to get some art out of it.

I hope you don’t object
to the words I found in you today
or how the coffee spilling
on my designer wrap dress
made me feel more like myself.

Pittsburgh seems like a village
in Greenwich or Italy today
and I am feeling jolly utter
while you are soulfully intense
beneath the spring-city sky.

Like Chrysostom

The Eloquent, your tongue makes clarity
out of my oblivion; like Seurat
with his small distinct dots
of pure color blended with canvas
blended with light
to form an image; My image.

My thoughts spin out like
tendrils of string, elusive slips
caught in the zephyr of the Aspberger’s
and you cup them in your hands
like a child at the beach
sorting the tiny shells from the sand

Somehow you read the pages
of my illiterate broken heart
and I am learning to write again
to make words from discord and entropy
to make language into something that sings
even if I alone understand the lyrics.

Written in the hospital, November 2008, shortly after waking up.

Offspring of Saint Clare

O blithe indifference

Tiny child, eyes resplendent
Cold on a mask of warmth

Hands stirring deftly
with surgical precision, fastidious

Cutting, cauterizing
unsafe malignant growths

The snap of gloves
and snap of eyes, slap of skin

Me lost in the shadow
of indelible unconsciousness

Shoved into wakefulness
knuckles dragging, bleeding

Soul abscessed, diseased
torso empty, organs removed

Nothing remains but
misspent love and two wet eyes

O blithe indifference
Icarus plummets
and death eludes.

Reworked this one in the early AM hours of today.

The Seeker

Awkward and dexterous, like a monkey’s hands
Hands with knobby knuckles and fingers too long
Long to reach out and touch what is not yet hers
Hers for the taking if she would only reach out
Outside of herself, maybe for the first time
Time is only a promise, an illusion, an afterthought,
After her thoughts have exhausted a lover
Lovers stop to watch her pick through the grass
Grassy and overgrown, her hair falls in her eyes
Eyes misting over even as she stoops to search
Searching for the coin or bauble that was lost.

I’ll start with this one from the recovered journal, most likely because it is my favorite I think. I wrote it after hearing an operatic performance, so moved was I by the voice of one musician in particular. I am still not sure I like the poem, but it is still my favorite because it is exactly what I meant.

Muse

It was a place of surrender, obsequious
as blown hair is to a gagging wind,
a mezzo voice and a jade sea
drowning me with sound; I was already dead
slipping in it like a jugular wound.

I choked on the bitter taste of iron
it’s spikes hurting my teeth.
There was too much beauty
cobalt melting into the jewel
efficient and savage in loveliness
eloquent in it’s torture.

I sat as if in a cauldron
trapped by the blackened lid
my sight narrowed, effaced
the music melting me in a refiner’s fire
the dross falling away like spilled perfume.

Ah, but what a sweet passing
to be liquefied by melodic vibration,
to grow limp like the little death
or a rag-doll hanging from a clothesline,
the words of Lawrence echoing
th’ art lovely, th’ art lovely.