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Nine Poems "dream is a desire, is a story" A dream is a desire, an authority against which we rebuke ourselves. A story, passage against night. When we woke a gecko threaded itself across the woven ceiling. Fresh eggs and papaya for breakfast. The ceiling is not blue but an elaboration of yellows cascading toward. Blue heat, feathered toes of the gecko where it hangs from the rafters, hunting. Cotton, resist stamped in blue. A pressure against which we weave, or are woven: lion god dancing toward the temple. Dream of monkeys, smoke rising above canopied green. A dream, or desire. Water ache poured from a long-handled cup. Another rebuke. Cold. When we woke, elaboration of desires, sweetening heat of banana jaffle. Or stories. Rough chatter of hens and kitchen fires, bull-form sarcophagi entomb the dead. A passage or dream of night, which is another. Blue, feather cascade of stars. Yellow defines an idea of the light. Or traces its circumference. Rebuke, or resist, an idea which is itself blue. This is not (or is) a story, I am telling. A dream of breakfast, and the dead. Dream tracing the circumference of desire. We drowse on the veranda, air ripe with heat and the broad smooth leaves of banana. A pressure of blue and yellow. When we. Counterpressure to the elaboration of another. Authority. Wake, blue, a feather. Cascade, or collapse. Resistance amid the rough chatter of definition.
kishuf "If you see a generation over whom the heavens are rust-colored like copper so that neither rain nor dew falls, it is because that generation is wanting in whisperers. What is the remedy? Let them go to someone who knows how to whisper." The Talmud: Ta'anit 8a 1 kishuf water lily, yellow water iris pickerel
hyacinth water flutters splashes
into itself mutterings of heaven
cypress (kishuf giving form to formlessness
mirror of heaven lily leaves drift over its surface yellow
water iris blue pickerel score its mirror brilliant orange flashes hycinth, beside lily
2 hyacinth, hyaline, sweet taste of
burnt: orange and yellow mirror (mirror), a
question splashes into itself
form and formlessness heaven
matters of definition
or imagination a drifting of leaves over a surface
the cat hunting in a mirror
3 leaf mirror (voicing a score of others
memory flutters over its surface matterless
whispering under a rust-colored sky mutters like a good
jew a god, this majik
language translating itself into silence babel (the gate of god
enters by means of a language of flowers
a question issuing itself into the air tumult of delight
water hyacinths forbidden,
forgiven alterations of intention
water forgives the mirror reflecting itself
an irrelevant question this precise collaboration of forms
of blue and yellow of blue
yellow water iris scores the heavens
making a muttering of its own
4 hyaline, hyades light re- fracted through a confluence of mirrors
a lens or remedy pointellist v of light
a scattering of light these daughters of darkness
a glass through which alternations of intention move refracting and muttering
rainmakers daughters of heaven
5 water mutters even in darkness even in darkness
when the rust-colored sky is obliterated kishuf mutters
calling to the air whispering to her daughters
arrow shaped leaves spikes of blue violet flowers
score the air, muttering the language of mirrors
chanting such voices of fish or flowers, of green swords knifing the air
Elegy When warriors put on light woven armor, Swords are the color of smooth salt
And bows groan and wail, And bending spears are wet. Al-Khansia (Iraq 575-646)
When warriors put on light When warriors put on armor of oaths and allegations Their swords are the color of smooth salt
When warriors put on armor woven of vengeance When their swords torment them with longing The sun rides among them as a warrior itself
When warriors put on swords When warriors grasp swords the color of smooth salt They groan and wail with desire
When warriors put on swords, whet and honed with longing When warriors are the goads of faithless lovers Desire binds their cries
When warriors wear the arguments of avenging saints When warriors chastise the unworthy Their swords are the arc of justice
When warriors advance beyond reproach When warriors determine to punish the dishonorable Light dances upon their swords
When warriors put on swords the color of smooth salt When warriors chant their vengeance over the desert Howitzers and cruise missiles rain upon Basra
When sword-songs rain upon Baghdad When cities burn and tumble in the schirrocco of their song Their song has the savor of salt
When mothers put on mourning When wailing bends the light rising out of city ruins Theirs is the garment of liberation
When warriors put on armor woven of justice When swords thrust liberation Death swims in their dark wake, devouring both blade and sorrow
When the sun vanquishes even the sound of arms When the sun makes the sand a retina-burning lens Light is neither a threat or a promise The taste of smooth salt is all that relieves the torment of light.
Garden of Delight for Darrell Bourque
"A vein of sapphires hides in the earth, a sweetness in fruit"
Mahadevuyakka (12th c., India)
1 a vein of sweetness in the earth in sapphire fruit in globes of lemon flesh
a fire of blossom at its feet in sweet tree in iridescent wings
a tang of sweet fire and heat in honeyed earth in mouths of sapphire flesh
an earth of juice and warm air roiling in hidden tumult in sweet mouth
a blossom on the tongue in lemon fire in vein of earthy madder
a mouth of heat and light in sapphire blossom in globes of honeyed scent
a tongue of sweetness in hummingbird air in sapphire wings
a tumult of blossom and sweet tree a fire of flesh in veins of earth and light
a lemon sweetness roils, gives way to fire in sapphire mouth in honeyed tongue in iridescent wings in earthly veins a tumult of fire dances in the air
2 an air of fire in the tumult in sapphire veins in wings of lemon tongue
a mouth of fire at its sweetness in sweet light in iridescent earth
veins of sweet flesh and fire in honeyed tree in blossom of sapphire tumult
wings of air and warm sweetness roiling in hidden tongue in sweet scent
globes on the blossom in lemon light in heat of earthy mouth
a madder of vein and fire in sapphire tongue in blossom of honeyed mouth
a tumult of air in hummingbird juice in sapphire earth
a flesh of mouths and sweet earth a heat of fire in tang of wings and tree
lemon feet roil, gives way to blossom in sapphire fire in honeyed flesh in iridescent globes in earthly fruit an earth of sweetness dances in the vein
Negotiation with place Topos, to articulate a means of entry, a sanction against trespass: consensual knife-edged opening. Topos, Atchafalaya water way, silt, alligators. Bayou threads imperceptible over cypress knees. From Choctaw bayuk. A removed people, a tracery of languages left in their absence: litany of sensation or impression. Swamp lilies and bald cypress, salt domes, water moccasins, sticky clay. Humidity. Place and memory, complex and branched sensibility: forest and booted feet. Carrying me there (memory). Sweat clings to my brow, mosquitoes drone in the thick air, matted verdure. Palimpsestic, language and history (damp, bird-foot, opossum), articulating one's experience as translation. Another: place. Slavers, Mound Builders, French colony. The wet whispers its own arguments over my skin, irrefutable. Topos. Relation between particulars of local and its human inhabitants, we enter a world defined by. Experience of language itself: Teche, Arcady, Catahoula, Natchez. That surface, a response or collaboration, hybrid of human and other-than-human. Synthesis. Water oak and woodcocks, M. de Iberville, War of 1812, tupelo gum, zydeco, crawfish, swamp lilies. Intersection across a temporal gradient. Place, topos: a mode of articulation, or sanction. Temporal gradient across which she (I) move by means of language: bayou, bayuk, Code Noir, creole. Past and present, intimation of. Grand Derangement, M. de Chopart, swift justice of Natchez Massacre, Code Noir, army corp of engineers battling implacable and sprawling Mississippi birdfoot delta. Suburban topos: live oaks sheltering houses, loosening foundations, abandon leaves and leaf-out all at once, hard clattering over the lawn; lithe green lizards spring, take. Cover under the branched sprawling boughs of purple and white azaleas. Waxy camellia leaves. Near natives, these. Azaleas and camellias. Cat, gray intruder. Grasped solidly in seven year old arms and borne away. Cat and child. Place.
Winter Canon: South Louisiana Bare branches draw a pale refusal, irritable beneath an absent sun: charter of stillness, an opening overhead in the dissolution of leaves. In the absent canopy, black and white warblers, flashing brilliance of, prints like small hands (augere, to increase: litany of imprecision.) A negotiation with place Language rustles, dry in the wind where cold etches yellowed grass. Empties the air. Composition of wet clay and oak. Roots assume a quiet determination. A space shaped by the persistence of rain, or raccoons. Small hands worked into the earth, their tracery a sentence forming at the edge of memory. Leaves and their absence, recollection a process of accretion or sedimentation. Bare trees efface the distinction between sky and horizon. In their refusal to abide by the darkness of winter, vines cling, asserting a motion forward as well as back. Twining. Light-washed trunks of water oaks and ashes. Motion Forward: augment, a vowel or a lengthening of the vowel. Winter refuses to participate. Canon piecing together stillness and motion, cold and the directed movement of low pressures along a gradient. Warblers and the flashing brilliance of. Language moves on a current of memory, or air. In the absence of memory, language insinuates itself. Introduces another pressure. Permission, augere. Moving tangentially to the source, water erodes its passage. Creek bed washing away earth, revealing the twisting architecture of oak roots. Bayou a crosshatched flightway, language and memory.
Of the Shulamite "black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime" Paul Celan
"The way the sky turns deep honey at noon. The way my sensations seem to belong to a me that has already sided with the world." Rosmarie Waldop
with the world what alternative to that honey already
woman dusk skinned fragrant as olives
green rue fastened in yr hair Celan's black
milk yr flesh saffron and pomegranate Sulam garden you've already
sided with honey with green figs and flagons of black wine saffron scented robes
sided with myrrh and aloes, damask rose
garden and gardener our bed is green yr jeweled cheeks
yr black hair sided with Gilead's black goats
sided with Israel like pillars of smoke black and tasting of cinnamon
sided with milk sided with honey honeyed morning cedar house and fir
sided with wilderness forest of grape green vine so pleasurably flesh
yr hands a henna tracery of vines green shoots green rue in yr hair
dusk woman yr body a skein of black silk
sided with fire sided with red lilies, vernal
anemones and lilies Genessaret anemones already green
morning yr hair rue yr fingers smelling of myrrh yr jeweled cheeks
olive skin yr flowers and black milk you wash
yr feet in the sky honeyed feet Sulam woman
black as Celan's black milk, black attar morning we drink you
kiss yr hennaed wrists so pleasurably a bed, or gesture
tangled garden damask rose among black pillars
cedar house yr jeweled hands and hair black as goats, as black attar
yr jeweled cheeks a drink at dusktime a damask sky
Shulamite the sky a tracery of vines on yr wrists hennaed tokens
letters, calligraphic gestures already siding with sensation
yr rue yr black goats and wine Celan's morning our green bed
garden henna traceries like pillars of rue and vine
or rafters of fir Sulam and Israel Solomon's sustenance
black milk of morning damask and black skinned apple Sulam ::
Shulamite wild garden
The daughters entreat scent of black skinned olives, hands shining with oil with lilies Genessaret lilies in your hair red (honey) in your hair. black and already fragrant damask skinned woman, your hair, your fragrant hair and skin, your hennaed hands, green rue and foliage, these adornments, your grape vines and wine tracery of vines your hands, or veins, a jeweled tracery, lapis formed language of desire. in your hands green figs, green and saffron colored roses. at dawn, your roses turning, or you turning your hair glistens with fragrant oil with Genessaret jewels or vines, argot of flowers we cast at your honeyed feet honey woman, black skinned Sulam woman, olive woman. lilies form a jeweled script. henna adorns you, we adorn your wrists and ankles with lilies we adorn you. green rue in your hair, garden redolent with saffron with fragrant olive flowers, these already belong to you, your hands petals and green figs roses their red petals, their green and russet canes a tracery. milk and honey fragrant ointment, dark wine. saffron adorns you, your saffron robes green rue in your hair. black hair, black as Gilead's goats your petalled hair. belong to noon as to morning. where you turn against the sky you drink damask rose and he sighs jewelled woman, lapis petalled woman, woman of Sulam deserts and wilderness. jeweled language woman, your saffron mouth and myrrh scented hands, crocus stamened hands. green robes your green bed in your hair black and winding swath Genessaret lilies and roses, he sends you green figs and roses you eat them teeth white as washed sheep you stretch out your ankles dusktime myrrh and the savor of roses jeweled. your robe dusk a sky fastened in your hair, lapis petalled sky already honey. already olives glisten on your mouth flower language gestures from your wrists and ankles. you stretch out etched wrists, garden's voice your black hair and wild pomegranates, his ardor a veneration:: yours
her reply (the Shulamite) rose (damask black and lapis petalled sky language glistens blind to itself or bound fastened with brooches and jewels at dusktime opening and erasure henna dipped brushes adorn my wrists with signs a language of gestures Genessaret lilies Genessaret anemones a green bed green rue a fastening of vines figs and vines at my waist another language another
hunger bound (or unbound beckons glistens like dew grassy palimpsest green bed green roof or sky longing black and lapis formed desire mine
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