Constance Rowell Mastores lives in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The Lyric,
The Blue Unicorn, Rattapallax, and many other poetry journals. She has been a contributor to
The Neovictorian/Cochlea since 1996.
Contents
Paris:1957 In the Beginning Midnight Clear After Twenty Years
Boy in the Greenery Waiting Daughters Devoured Unhumble
Learning to Look at Winter Goats at Dusk on a Hillside Considerations at Dusk To My Grandmother in Darkness Solitary Flowers Medieval Speculations on a Name Chopin Between Sisters On the Way to the Neurological Hospital Mother Teresa Quietly Turns 87 Night Sky Earthshine Horses of the Night Nostalgia Plain Wood Willow on Lake Michigan Photographing Pigeons at Dusk Briefly Summer El Color De La Muerte Perplexed in the Extreme Acceptance Spring's French Academy Doppelgaenger The Wideness and Brightness of Winter All or Nothing In Praise of Swarming with Heisenberg's Bees Transparencies Muse My Sister's Triple-chambered Heart
Dependency Doldrums Willow Song
among the Leonids
PARIS:1957
Roses bloom in the rue des Rosiers.
The sky is fat. So's the chopped liver.
"Cream with your coffee," the owner
asks, and smiles when I say no.
"Shalom," says the crumpled man
as he enters. On his arm he wears
a flower. I exchange dollars
for francs. He chatters to me
in six different versions. Even
his Yiddish is all screwed up.
Roses bloom in the Café des Rosiers.
Everyone there wears a number.
But mine is tattooed onto my scalp
and marks the end of the war.
The owner parts my hair and blesses
it with it with a kiss. Everyone smiles
on the rue des Rosiers. The market's
black, the goods are numbered.
The exchange as good as you'll get.
And the roses bloom like no one else.
IN THE BEGINNING
He does not write to her --
he never writes to her --
but at night he comes
and invades her like a dream
leaving ashes, hints
of madness
cold as wind on snow.
Forgive him for
he knows not what he does.
Once he'd nailed his pain
to hers,
he never looked back.
There were seas for that -
and empty vaults.
MIDNIGHT CLEAR
These are the diseased
We glory after,
The leprous,
The tubercular,
The wronged of earth.
What frankincense
Do we offer?
What seduction
From our own sweet lives?
In recognition we bend
Our wings and hover.
There is not enough blood,
Not enough light,
To share the difference.
AFTER TWENTY YEARS
There is nothing I can do to bridge
this absence; there is always something wanting.
The watery figure from across the lagoon -
see how he makes signs at me? -
his black foulard knotted like a hangman's
noose. He comes to me again and again
in dreams - Ich bin verrückt. Shalom! Ich bin
verrückt. Shalom! - emerging from a narrow
passageway in Venice's deserted ghetto,
deserted by the tourists, that is, but with
the twisted charm of a De Chirico,
or like a pantoum with the first line
coming back to haunt the last;
this dream that won't stop dreaming; the black
foulard knotted over the haggard eye.
Which is more torn? My uprooted
lurch toward him or his toward mine?
What is this temple that we call the Past?
BOY IN THE GREENERY WAITING
He is more shy than the leaves that clothe him,
boy in the greenery waiting for the bus to come,
eyes shifting to each person passing in a car .
Who will find him if he dares not wish to meet them?
Had his eyes not flinched - mine drawn to his, his
away from mine - he would have been forever there.
He was more tree than flesh. . .or flesh than tree -
the security of his unestablished fact
the very thing that could be preyed upon
by those whose senses hunt for weakness;
and I, in my car, continued up the hill...
the furtive glance a plea, perhaps, or a surrender .
DAUGHTERS
Differences, once sought, are less sought now,
her three daughters become one daughter, brought
together in one thought - although she swears
she keeps them separate - like the Books On Tape
she wakes and drouses to, night after night,
but woven by her mind into one epic plot.
Or one conversation. About dinner and guests.
Of what to serve. Of who to seat with whom.
Things of finite nature. Homeric battle lists.
Men at a bar recounting baseball scores.
A mother trying to recall which daughter
she's talked to last - confused when she cannot.
Lists on the kitchen counter, on the breakfast table.
In the hallway, piles of New Yorkers.
What must be kept, or thrown away; what must
be passed on to her daughters. Tomorrow's worries
summoned up at night while she lies awake
wishing she could cross the next day out.
But what's it serve to argue differences,
to promote ourselves like a Regan or a Goneril,
demanding that she remember to which of us
she's spoken of a movie or a book? What does
it matter she breaks with the particulars
of Love? Or if there's need of names at all.
DEVOURED
These gorgeous holes of blue
that should be blackness -
the whole night sky
smoldering;
the breakup of clouds
like a stormy marriage -
gulfs widening;
a cloud raining down below;
but not up here
not on me, not on us -
or what used to be us;
clouds dissolving
in the radiance
of the February sky;
below, dark latitudes
evolving in the cities.
meanwhile I dance and
study unmistakable tracks
and yet, despite it all,
how beautiful, oh god,
how beautiful, this moon pool,
this distance, this dropping off
this hole in the sky
that breaks like a flower.
UNHUMBLE
A bandtail pigeon perches
like a dark weight
atop
a bony eucalyptus.
He is the only bird
in the world
at dusk.
He finds himself
exquisite,
his winged puffery,
his plump, carnal breast.
Lesser birds
of lesser weight
move frivolously
among the branches.
They do not exist.
Only the diminishing
colors of the sky
that set off
his bold silhouette
exist.
And when he is ready,
night.
LEARNING TO LOOK AT WINTER
I had to learn to make sense of you before I began,
to draw in lines and make a shape of you; to call you "Orion."
Back then, before I thought of a world beyond my own,
you were just a vague pattern of stars, a dislocated brilliance
I could see in the dark before dawn as I nudged myself
to work in what I called the dead of winter.
Now I know the names of Betelgeuse and Rigel.
I can draw you from shoulder to foot. I can bring you together
in the middle; or point to that other Arabic star: Aldebaran.
I've even bought myself a Guide to the Heavens.
It's small and usually fits in one of my pockets. And I'm a long
way off from where I used to be when stars were just stars
and I was always in a hurry and rarely looked up.
Until, that is, I began to study things other than myself.
And the breath I drew was cold as wind on snow, and as fresh
and as simple...that first noticing, that clearing of the mind.
Ashes of heaven. Stars shining by their own light. Hot stars
Cold stars. Blue-white. White. Yellow. Orange-red.
Variable super giants as in Betelgeuse. Super giant doubles
as in Rigel. Globular clusters. Protoplanetary discs.
And on and on. Certainly on. According to my pocket book.
It was a relief to know all this. Finally. To exist so far beyond myself
that I could forget about those blizzardy winters in Chicago
when I went to work in what was then the dead of winter.
Now that I am realigned and have eclipsed that distant other,
I look at its spectral being as a shadow flung upon the wind -
a cast-off husk of autumn, or summer, if you will. For winter
is the time to watch the sky where even fainter stars are seen
in great profusion. Sprays of flowers. Nebulae less nebulous.
The entire mind uncluttered and true to the Great Self beyond,
which here might be a crow at dawn upon a crusted pack,
a dark nebula, blackness rampant on a field of snow.
GOATS AT DUSK ON A HILLSIDE
They prepare to bed themselves down,
a blanket of earth tones blended and breathing,
some of the Nubians striped with a coppery brown
that lifts them from the general pattern.
Have you ever seen those cheap tapestries depicting
the pharaohs of Egypt? -- the ones the hawkers
used to sell to tourists journeying up the Nile --
perhaps still do -- pieced together from remnants of old cloth
that are the color of the goats on the hillside?
Although rivulets of red run through a pharaoh's skirt
and the crown he wears. But the cobra on his forehead
and the ankh he holds are black; black as the kohl
that lines his eyes; his body, a coppery brown,
set upon the throne and stitched upon a neutral colored fabric.
The herd grows listless in its milling. One by one
they paw the ground, then gently kneel to sleep.
One of the large Nubians settles later than the rest,
its serene gaze a part of the drift toward night.
The Pharaoh's kohl-dark eyes.
Can you tell me that the kneeling down of goats
on a hillside is not the same languorous still-kept time
as the time once kept in Egypt? Shawl hawkers calling
to travelers as a boat nears Assiut. Scarves rippling
on evening breezes. Crowds settling on shore. The banks
of the Nile slipping away, unrolling like two large spools of ribbon.
What makes me want to press that and this into memory? To lift
the tapestry of goats from hills and hold them sacred
in my mind as others used to? Or pass them on, framed perhaps,
so they may decorate someone else's wall;
as I have decorated mine, with remnants of old cloth.
CONSIDERATIONS AT DUSK
Exceptions have so ruled
my heart, its passions played,
then led them on with fits
and starts that I have turned
their fool and failed most
where most I took their part.
This Dante knew who heard
Francesca's woeful gale,
exalted yet condemned
the fires that fray her soul,
for love, exclusive, rules
one part; while love that loves
returns to love its whole.
At times we need to hear
discerning distances,
a mind not quite our own
to read our fever clear --
till it be blessed with scope
and, loving deep, include
the vaster fits of time.
Francesca's ancient grief
has narrowed in my thought,
made passion's impasse mean,
yet widened Dante's art.
More faintly I repeat
this tale of two made one,
more poignantly descend
through deeper shades of dark.
TO MY GRANDMOTHER IN DARKNESS
Now tired eyes must rest
That once were fed with light,
Though long ago confessed
To having lost their sight.
Fears of solitary
Night brim an aging mind,
Time long spent in wary
Trust deepens with the blind.
If eyes see no kind lies
To mitigate your plight,
Learn then how friendship feels
Divorced from meddling sight.
Our worrisome debates
Into each other's soul,
Clarified while death bates,
Now binds us to one goal.
My love, my younger years,
May fail to match your skill;
I watch momentous fears
And quail. You struggle still
To earn your past, pay fee,
Review your season's sum
In silent colloquy.
To this I too shall come.
Quiet darkness shivers
Where, long ago, at dusk,
A dear friend shared your tears
Of guilt, refreshed by brusk
Behavior in the past.
No false vision guiled words.
Near death we seek our last
And final truth. Lost friends
To trust appear and claim
Some final testament.
Sight memorizes time;
Effaced, mind's sacrament.
I too will come to this:
My eyes will shed their light,
Undo the tired fuss
Of time, and share your plight.
May darkness teach us faith
And trust's last will: to take
The hand of lonely death
To heart, love still, then break.
SOLITARY FLOWERS
Of crocus, I say, pick out the purple-white
ariegated
ones
the ones with sumptuous gold stamens topped
by three orange
drops
of pure spring -- albeit brief this push toward
spring
and all.
So low they sit, uncharacteristically wealthy.
Nothing to fear
from me
peering at them, focused entirely, wondering
if I am not
of them
this flowery, mutable design, detailed
and organized
and yet so un-un
in its hard-to-grasp purple-white-yellow-orange
signed
or un-signed
unsigned now, closed down by the full moon
assuming its own
ascendancy
and beyond, so far beyond, that if you think too much
it loses sense
and collapses,
is the colossal war. Gaze instead upon the moon,
its crib of clouds.
O pacifier!
Tomorrow we'll peer into the fuse of time.
Stare down those
solitary walls.
MEDIEVAL SPECULATIONS ON A NAME
I, whose name is Constancy, have borne
the blush of time with countless variation
and little joy; have joined body upon body,
sealed each flashing eye with a flame surmised
my own, though mine long since failed to try.
With you, though hardly in my own, I never
called the choice and split the senses from
their fact. My nobler years run dry. How can
they now assail experience and turn me
back to when the body knew no tricks?
Impassive, almost wise,
indifferently
pleasured? Flesh is what my mind falls heir to --
since I have come into its ruins. The walls
grow thin. The body's parched, hands drift apart.
And if your hands were on me now, what then
to do with Time that always has preferred
indifference? Or Love, whose years, undone,
return to dust? I did not want these questions.
The granite form is what I hoped to teach.
And now, it seems, it's well within my reach.
CHOPIN BETWEEN SISTERS
Ah, yes, we did sit
at the piano that day
in December, arguing
over a Nocturne by Chopin.
Being older, she played better
and I, of course, worse.
She had a perfect ear,
mine was less so.
She, mathematical and sure,
I, fictional and in doubt.
Later, grown old,
we giggled over a waltz
I used to dance to.
She played the right hand,
I played below --
until her operation,
then mine. After that,
the fast parts became delirious,
the slow parts extra slow.
So much to make up for,
so much to let go.
ON THE WAY TO THE NEUROLOGICAL HOSPITAL
First on required list: Teddy Bear.
She: age sixty-four.
Reason: brain surgery.
A friend: embarrassed.
Embarrassed
to be carrying this Teddy Bear --
this request, this return
to something.
No, not childhood.
No Teddy Bears in childhood.
Only a grey worn tabby cat --
left eye yanked out --
forehead shaved; red-nail-polish-
initials painted across
the middle --
my sister's initials (my mother's
unrequested red) -- greediness
in the possession of the cat
making it the rarest thing,
the gray torn mongrel.
No breeding. No standing. No future.
The most loved/warred cat
without which/whom the world
was not worth living.
Right arm eventually torn off.
What's left more necessary,
more needable than anything you can
remember of perfect.
A ferocious, uncuddly thing.
The thing my sister thinks
we may meet tomorrow
in the hospital-for-safe-keeping.
MOTHER TERESA QUIETLY TURNS 87
San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1997
Harmony, perhaps, or interwoven soulfulness,
this hooting of owls at dawn;
minor, sympathetic, Chopin-esque progressions
on a scale I cannot seem to reach
on my Steinway grand piano.
Phrygian. Greek. A Muezzin's call
to morning prayer that purifies the heart.
"And a clean heart can see God in each person."
How wonderful and absurd this melodious waking
to the rare harmony of loving owls.
An aubade, a relinquishing of mother night.
And then these newcomers, a song bird,
so-called, hammering out its monotonous notes --
four to the measure -- and next a squawking jay.
They have no idea how ugly they sound ...
But then did we? Lost in hurt confusion.
Screeching and railing so tediously last night.
NIGHT SKY
It's
a beautiful sky --
the wings of a dove
have spread over it --
amid such misery
such confrontation --
war-stranded,
hospital stranded --
we always expected it --
these wings --
these last reminders.
EARTHSHINE
Stayed up all night for no reason. Watched
TV -- Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda --
my mind not quite involved but somehow there.
Puts you in a space, those other people
acting, talking. Jigsaw puzzle not yet
resolved except for a few singular pieces.
Don't yet know who's going to side with whom.
Outside, Venus and crescent moon in a sky
bold beyond belief -- yes, that's it, beyond
belief. Tomorrow a brief stellar eclipse
somewhere between us and them. Between
the light years that divide us. The void's far rim...
Henry Fonda, like God, has done his work.
He's resting. Sureness here, strangeness there.
The dark implicated world on its lonely
way. Everyone trying to find some sense.
HORSES OF THE NIGHT
for Sharon Kourous
This long unsheathing like
the touch of manesilk streaming,
muscled-withered-rippling --
currite, currite, noctis equi --
into the dark seeded night.
NOSTALGIA
It brushes along
the hairs of my skin this early morning light.
A spider rides the fringes.
Soft buzz, soft hum,
and then not so soft the wheeling screak
of a red-tailed hawk.
Last night a vixen
yelped for her mate. Neighbors complained.
No one slept.
Today a quiet world,
despite the rufous towhee's obsessive song,
the chattering jays,
highpitched hawk.
Night has its sound. Day has this: ceaseless
murmur in summer grass,
the snap of poppies
seeding, spider moving like a shadow brush --
and memory receiving.
PLAIN WOOD
A simple coffin of plain wood will do quite well.
Vogue's Book of Etiquette, 1948
Later, we congratulate ourselves
on a job well done -- the cherry casket
(five thousand dollars), the gaunt corpse
rekindled, the minister's kind words.
"They did a lovely job," remarks a guest.
"My little sweetheart," says her husband.
At Elmwood Cemetery, under a mauve
tent, we watch the graveyard workers
lower the coffin. For a moment death seems
real. Despite the roses. The plush chairs.
The pastoral lakeside setting. The Teamsters
crank into place what some call closure.
Back at the house after the funeral dinner,
we pass around our thoughts. "God cried
for Mary Ellen," her husband says...Quiet,
she was, wore two strands of pearls...
Everything was perfect...Wouldn't change
a thing...Looked best in the forties and fifties...
Less matronly...We should have left her as
she was...Shouldn't have touched her up...
Wonderful how the sun came out just as we
were leaving. "My beautiful sweetheart,"
says her husband...Do you think Adimanis
will come down on the funeral cost?
Some were shocked...you know, the minister...
a woman...No mention of Jesus Christ...
Didn't believe in God...Everything was
perfect...Wouldn't change a thing....Do you
think Adimanis will come down on the bill?
"My little sweetheart," says her husband.
Some say it takes a year to begin to remember.
WILLOW ON LAKE MICHIGAN
Tonight, as I brood under the ancient willow,
the slender leaves bow down to me.
I had forgotten how compassion rules --
through each vein, each scab of bark --
although the lawn is littered with impossible
cruelties. And still this reaching down,
this covenant not to be broken.
Hours before, I stood at the edge, ready.
PHOTOGRAPHING PIGEONS AT DUSK
The pigeons are everywhere --
and though the world would be about
the same without them, they have
changed our sense of it: the greens
greener; the sun more central
to our purpose; the shades deeper,
more irrational. The pigeons layer
themselves against the trees,
the incoming fog. I photograph them
against everything I know: hills,
coyote bush, eucalyptus. They fly at me,
caught in the brief caesura of wings.
BRIEFLY SUMMER
I like the wild formality,
the strict order that survives.
Dune grass, beach rose;
a spindly yarrow. In rivulets
by the roadside, watercress
and vines of morning glory.
Closer to the sea, a struggling
pine; or tea tree bent by winter,
its muted foliage rustling
as the wind passes to the east --
peacock feathers of palest
|green. No ardent color
until you breach the dunes
|and tumble into summer:
volleyball players in orange
and neon green. A Coney
Island of umbrellas. Yet soon
the season closes, its color
spent. The beach resumes
itself: bleached, shucked,
strewn with shell; in browns
and olive greens, kelp tautens
on the shore and turns to salt.
Forward into autumn the egret
stretches; left to themselves
on sandy shoals, the harbor
seals growl and mumble, earth
tones blending and breathing
as they shift about. Pelicans,
in silent flight, cross over.
Steady as a line of patriarchs,
they move from sunset into dusk.
EL COLOR DE LA MUERTE
The color of death is in a rainbow,
in the flamed winds that blow until the last leaf
drops. It blazes in reds, blues, yellows,
in purples and greens. It is alive with itself,
as if nothing but itself.
It is a rumpled sheet, a hollowed pillow,
the shadow of a shadow. It shows itself
on the side of a house where the moon
seeps in, and on the Gothic side
where the moon does not.
It is in the seeds you gave me at your wedding --
the marigold, the Aztec flower of death.
Now they blom in fields of orange
and gold. You married in the spring.
I planted them in autumn.
I have made an altar, a meeting place,
and hung a canopy of hand-painted flowers
that mirror the flowers of night.
My ancestors come down to me --
skeletons, dolls, puppets
dangling from the crib of heaven --
their bones knocking like wind chimes,
their mouths clacking.
I listen as they tell me stories
of deserts and the wild wind in poppies.
I used to think I would dress myself
in black as if I were God's last chance.
But now I take myself with a grain
of salt. Nothing more than a skeleton with skin.
And in my skull, the seeds of marigolds.
DARKLY LODGED
These stunted misbegotten trees
still hold the eye. How long have they endured
this Heathcliff weather,
scorned and scorning? No counterparts
that I can see. No useless metaphor. A simple
edge in time. A way of holding on.
Hold on, hold on. I, too, am stoical.
The foxes turn their eyes. They wait for bones.
I cast them what I can.
Among the small panting breaths,
wind-swept trees, is there a voice that hears me,
no matter how isolate my whisper?
ACCEPTANCE
The light-flood is billowing through gusts
of fog swept inland off the ocean. It moves
my soul these openings and closings --
the breathing in and breathing out; intervals
of silent grey and then the sky expanding.
Yet dusk is where we should be. It is that time.
I've checked my watch. The world seems ready.
But oh, these flashes of unearthly light:
rebellious, unwilling to concede! I speak,
of course, from the vantage point of Earth.
In interstellar space, no light is cast.
Elsewhere darkness swallows matter. Here,
as we tilt toward night, I yield and make my peace.
The evening, in its borrowed hours, beautiful.
SPRING'S FRENCH ACADEMY
Leaves glint in the early wind.
They show their desire for
the sky that is inscrutable.
I can smell eucalyptus
and sweet acacia.
Closer still, the white narcissus.
The brighter flowers
have yet to lift their heads.
These I await
with impatience,
as I await the storm,
out there, somewhere,
breathing its moist flowery air.
This is the time to life
the feathery grass
from around the daffodil
and crocus.
This is the time for sacrifice,
for the plucking
of what grows too fast
and threatens,
so the solitary ones
may rise and speak to us
in wise, uncluttered tongues.
DOPPELGAENGER
I don't know yet, but just looking helps.
Not pilfering. Just looking. Leaving what I see intact.
A gaze following as I write. Someone
I can't quite place. I get up and walk to the window.
One ruined look....his work so near completion
One chapter more and I am done.
Branches flowering, lyre a limb
Best not to look back.
His will was yet unstructured
to the silence deepening close behind him
Although one must.
Could she move weightlessly
and by her weight still hold him to the path?
If only to make sure.
Her steps become the air, the light,
the breathing of the moon
That the one following is not out to get you.
Looking back he saw no other footsteps but his own
Someone with death on her mind.
While Eurydice,
melting down to empty fields of darkness
Or urgency.
No longer felt the touch of silver sand
upon her feet
So scary it must be broken.
No one there he could remember
If one is to stay alive in this world.
THE WIDENESS AND BRIGHTNESS OF WINTER
*
The sun is leached of all impurity,
landscape as well.
Windows of the house, any house,
burned with the clear image
of winter.
The morning crisp and virginal
An angel, like in old-time verse,
secretly contributing
Oh praise the Lord!
But would the Lord be lucidly etched
as what I look out-onto here?
Everything in focus, photographed
so beautifully
through a Leica lens
that worships reality -
even to the way the shy gray-greens of eucalyptus
detach themselves.
Only the bay tree
with its constant source
of budding green
seems to cut the edge of purity
from underneath us.
*
And now, just now,
the red squirrel spread out
on an empty limb
that keeps its eye on me
like the eye in a portrait
that cannot do without you - the visitor
in a stale room that hopes for understanding
or resurrection -
and follows you - what else to do? -
around the room
and sees each bone,
each echo of the heart.
ALL OR NOTHING
The absence fled into what he had not
expected - or the sky came too suddenly -
stars biting and pecking, fiery wheels
on a joy ride, the moon in a planetary huff.
She hissed and buzzed at him,
looking for a place to exterminate -
whereas he was looking for a middle place -
a dark, unroiled space of time
without fiery wheels and ravenous stars -
without a nervous moon buzzing you
to extinction - a place of dark absence
and noiselessness - for as long as it took -
from the universe zeroing in - eager
to get on with it - desperate to fill itself up -
determined to have it all, all of the time.
What he wanted was a small beginning.
What he wanted was to get out and then in.
What he wanted was a place of his own
to curl into - with no biting and pecking -
a dark absence - a place to get in and then
out - unless he was handed his hat, period -
the sky busy with its own significant detail.
IN PRAISE OF
after Christopher Smart
For I will consider my neighbor Dorothy.
For she is kind to those she loves and knows the art
of happiness.
For she dances in her kitchen and prepares the evening meal.
For her fingers press buttery dough that she fills
with slips of apple.
For she feeds the cat that brushes up to her .
For she feeds the guests who pass through freely.
For she gives them freely of her labor .
For she brings me poetry when I am sad.
For she embroiders cloth and fills it with Attar's* sweet mystic birds.
For she did not flinch though they filled her with poison.
For she did not weep though she lost her hair .
For she did not break though they cut her to the breast.
For her feet were numb and still did she walk.
For her body was tired and still did she toil.
For her heart grew weary and still did she love.
For she looked on death and asked for instruction.
For she passed the cup and bade us drink.
For she dances in her kitchen and praises the world
in all its parts.
* Farid Ud-din Attar was the 12th century Persian poet who wrote The Conference of the Birds
(Mantiq Uttair)
SWARMING WITH HEISENBERG'S BEES
The bees I heard, but could not see,
made no particular sense to me.
I thought the buzz man-made
and mechanically predictable -
until I stepped into their midst,
found nothing fixed, and let
momentum have its casual way
with me. How they whirled and purled
as they flew in flux in a wanderlust
toward positions of possibility!
Then someone shouted: Look at
all them bees! And we collapsed,
without much fuss, into an observed
and perfect singularity.
Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle postulates (in the Schrodinger interpretation) that a particle
doesn't have a single fixed location but a wave of possible positions until the wave is "collapsed"
into a singularity by observation.
TRANSPARENCIES
Blackness into light,
into light that once was darkness,
transpositions across the sky
like white shadows
crossing the morning, morning
the dusk; transparency that scans
the universe and retreats;
a tremulous sigh in late afternoon,
when self explores its possibility,
descending into gaze,
into sanctuary, blueness,
light. A sigh, tremulous, in late
afternoon, when self explores
its possibility and moves aside.
MUSE
after Paul Valéry
It was when she said,
"It does not matter who writes the Poem,
it only matters that it is written,"
oh, you who weep so close to me,
stilled in the moment of tears
that the page opened
leaves gathering, glance upon glance,
so near to myself in the forests
of myself, watching
It was when she said,
"Do not hasten this tender act
that comes to you like a child in sleep,"
silently stepping,
earer and nearing,
sweetness of being and of not being
that my heart opened
deep forest
in the moment of song
and dared to wait in silence.
MY SISTER'S TRIPLE-CHAMBERED HEART
For Sharon Rowell, creator of the huaca: a clay
triplechambered vessel flute. Mendocino, California
The forlorn sigh spreads over her as she lies dreaming
a potter's dream in shapes of clay - foghorn-sound
so different from the blasting horns you hear
off the San Francisco bay. This voice comes just to her
and makes her want to weep - round, intimate
and deep - comes just to her. And makes her weep.
She wonders how to answer him, how she will love
him back. At her potter's bench, she begins to form
a single-vessel flute. As years pass by, she expands
her love into a triple-chambered heart. And ocean-
near she plays to him, and ocean-near his song
comes back - intimate and deep - and makes her weep.
DEPENDENCY
How we each need the
other to exist; how earth is bound
to sun, and sun to moon,
and moon to earth; how each
of us needs the other's
gravitational pull in the
deep space we've fallen into;
how, when the steady scheme
dissolves, we escape into
that icy reach that holds
no human legacy, no tethering
of mind, body, soul.
DOLDRUMS
It's a bland, tedious night.
No clout, no bluster.
A few stars puncturing
downward.
A poem here, a poem there,
like a drab melancholy,
like a senseless unity.
I need parts, I need pieces.
Come Havoc, destroy me!
Fling me into storm-rage,
into the heart of the no-heart,
into the place with wind.
WILLOW SONG* AMONG THE LEONIDS
Already the burning Pleiades descend into the ocean
and night becomes itself;
from a grove of black poplars,
the huge sigh and shift of wings;
and soon the Leonids will streak across a sky
and flare in a burst of showers,
sussuration and brilliance among the leaves,
a glint of the end folded into the beginning -
Give us, love, another kiss -
as birds fly down from dark branches
and by a pool a willow trembles,
then a strange and terrible knocking -
undo my hair, I pray you,
the weeping willow shall be my garland,
this bed my marriage grave -
as the funeral song unveils itself, petal
upon petal, until the words arrive
at the core, a woman
at prayer, kneeling on silken folds,
a mere quivering;
the end burned into the song and then out,
peony unburdening its heavy flower until
each pale petal drops;
and the night grown terrible again
with orchestrated flowers,
perfume, rising, like a sickness
amid the ruthlessness of love and even language;
and then the song re-opened, petal upon petal -
let me live a moment longer -
Give us, love, another kiss -
the weeping willow shall be my garland,
and birds shall fly from dark branches
into the emptiness of my song -
the wind knocking at the door, at the whole sky,
owl gone from the grove of black poplars,
a few last streaks from November's fading showers.
*From Verdi's Otello.
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