Notes on the Mount
The last thing she removed from her travel bag
were the tissues she used to wipe my face.
To wipe her face.
Tissues from Austria. Tiny little surrender flags
to quell a flood – a flood older than Noah
and his boat.
And could you imagine the tears he cried
when on solid ground again surrounded by nothing
except the brown dirt of a clean world
In utter humanity.
Like her pupils, the center of her eyes.
She had said it. Something she didn’t realize
somewhere between mundane conversations
like “how’s the weather”. How was she to know?
How was I to tell her? Abraham was silent
on his way up the mountain when he still believed
that his trip back would be alone.
She knew that sons had to be sacrificed. And that time
could not stand still. She knew Jesus had wept.
Even as the sun is still over head
held by the hand of the Lord – time still passes. In hearts,
in minds, in swords, and in history.
So she delicately retrieved the tissues. The rough
recycled toilet paper had felt too much
like thorns on her cheek.
The nature of tears goes all the way back to the garden
before a savior was needed. Long before the juice
of a pomegrante could remove the skin
of an apple. Do you think the snake cried?
Having been nothing but the agent of the Lord
Pushing forward history – so He could have a Son.
So He could lose His Son – perhaps the most human act of all.
As we learned from Abraham.
A father crying the world into a flood.
Faith in silence, silent in faith, tears for tears.
Chains
The rising light shining through the chain
made it appear broken.
I fell asleep outside the gate, despite the rain
after we had spoken.
Light breaking steal, morning breaking night
it’s all too absurd for me.
All this sobriety makes me feel alright
despite my humanity.
For a moment its all just image, its all just story
to chain to paper, to throw away
But then I felt the light burn my face with glory
and I knew that moment was more than poetry.
Agudah
You don’t call me friend but brother,
Using my devotion for your shield.
Danielle my belle,
Age has a beauty revealed
far more glorious than the others.
They’ve made stars from your eyes.
They don’t like it when I call you sister,
such terms imply a blood line
farewells from brain cells -
We have another name to be assigned
One as Miss the other, a Mister.
Don’t ask me why.
You wanted to go home that fall
so I traveled with you.
A hotel in Israel
barely big enough for two
is all I can recall,
except for the starry sky.
We had always talked about love
as a thing outside our pair
Michelle did well
for inspiration and despair.
Though you never knew what I was speaking of.
Some words mean both hello and goodbye.
On Sundays you would sleep in
while I went to mass
Sell the church bells
and all the stained glass
for a little salvation from our sin.
Such homilies would make you cry.
Love could not mean as much as this
yet it is viewed as a demotion.
Rebel my dearest Danielle
against those destructive emotions -
They only serve to dismiss
a union that only family can supply.
The Funeral Games
Nature knew I would later write about her
in the context of some Mercurial poem -
One that before collecting some dust
just barely missed the trash barrel
that had collected the more ill-formed siblings.
It’s a rather Spartan practice I suppose
to dash such children against the rocks.
It wasn’t their fault their feet were uneven,
that they lacked sophistication
or intelligence.
But we can afford to be totalitarian with ideas -
they are just ideas
just words, just images, just fears.
Needless to say Nature knew all this
so she donned a newspaper gray dress
and unleashed a dull cold rain.
She knew that I would rather concentrate on her.
To linger in the land of inhuman objects
objects devoid of necessity or individuality.
I suppose that’s why I love words
more natural than every raindrop, every cloud, and her hair
far more natural than her hair -
where does she think she is going with that wretched hair?
It was one of those days, or perhaps one of those occasions
where human contact feels unnatural
as if this should all be endured alone like an apocalypse.
Or maybe it’s just me.
I suppose Art has her hand in that
because she knows it’s more meaningful
to have impalpable, unquenchable pain -
it’s more heroic when you do things alone.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Comedy is ugliness without pain -
that’s called philosophy my dear friends,
eloquence, meaning, passion, yet
in no way reflecting the actuality of things
this moment, her hair, the weather.
Perhaps its because we are false,
perhaps we are the untruths in a truthful world -
but no, such is not heroic, such is not natural.
We are the actuality, the history, the ugliness without pain.
Who does philosophy think she is anyway?
Not entirely unlike any other lover -
just more seductive.
The kiss she takes is always better than the kiss she gives.
Wisdom when possessed cannot be desired.
You can only desire what you don’t have.
Like time. We never have the time.
Her horrid beehive hairdo eclipses my vision.
I spent our time together writing poems
that will never be read. Trash – by all accounts.
I loved them all and wanted the best for them -
but desire does not always make something true.
If it did it would be sunny, this would be a birthday party,
the woman in front of me would have a long raven tress,
I would allow my wife to console me with her hands,
and their would be no such thing as poetry.
Belle Noir
Iris MacDuffin, a peacock butterfly,
with eyes like cigarette burns
which reflect her chiaroscuro -
the complimentary schism that
divides her, was so much
more than a white whale.
Though often her pale skin
made her a shadow’s double walker,
like some gothic non-being
or even worse a once-was.
Of all the places for her to come,
why she walked into mine I’ll never know.
She spoke only in sepia tones
about bland pre-Kodak recollections
tainted like artifacts too long buried,
which had no point, nor narrative,
just the bland presentation of facts.
Yet still, not without complications, an attraction,
a deliverance – something unusually mundane
yet shockingly poignant -
Like a pointed absurdity. Or a machine
with a woman’s soul inside it.
Those eyes – with the thin crisp
outline of color curling around
a massive dark planet – they darted without ceasing.
They were revisionist siphons – utterly blank
so that they could take things anew and recreate.
Her body was never too far behind her eyes
following around the room, dragging a finger
across the dust. She moved neither fast nor slow;
neither graceful nor clumsy; but oddly
like a film shot at 22fps.
Everything about her was unnatural,
an observation that made her laugh
since she had come to realize that man
could be nothing other than unnatural
unless he finally gave in to his bestial lychanthropy
howling at the moon like some lunatic Spartan.
It was this notion that made her so cold
for even love was just an unnatural passion
that came from outside us to sweep
us out of sepia toned history
and into the colors of the present.
This is why she could not have been my holy grail,
for she never existed outside her own mind
in any real way. She was her own windmill
untouchable and surreal whose being was utterly imaginary.
Despite my desire to have her
she escaped through clenched fingertips.
The night she died, some years later,
I read the entirety of Hamlet aloud
alone in the study we had once gathered in,
as if she were there. Words, slander, more words.
He finally made sense. She finally made sense.
I, however, never changed. I still desired her
despite never being able to love her.
