language —
transparent,
like dew, iris, cells,
when things were yet to be named, at the beginning
in the cradle of nothingness,
where darkness came first, before light,
before fire and earth,
Oceans, the favourite child, and the sky,
with her celestial, feathery friends, lazing on that hazy chasm;
from the horizon,
emerged forms and words
and poetry

II

Blue base and pink hues, black lining, framing the face saw once in dreams, a face with a name that began with the letter M. The other painting – a hazy black, red lips, no eyes – is a man’s face. Flying across shadowed, spiralling stairs, I encountered exits blocked by chairs – all these impressionist paintings hanging along the corridor, where a painter was explaining to his students the woman he met in his dream… they all called to me as a dream factory, dream logic – where everything was bound and unburdened, and we were told to identify faces in these coffin paintings. All day we tried matching, mouth stuttering half-formed names, lost faces, amputated body parts, strangers’ fragmented memory. Then the old lady I was working with let out a wail. She bolted, I followed, and there we saw creatures known as man and woman – to the woman on the right, she greeted with the M-lettered name, and to the man on the left she pointed at the eyeless painting, said, stranger, this is you– and they wept together.

I

I was told that faces persist, could wear away pebble, wind, and sand. Rivers, long and winding, and the rain, always so strange, mingle with rippling ashes of our ancestors, their fingers dipping through charcoal powder, tracing animals over stone’s face, carving bodies out of empty space, faded faces on walls. We are not a dream, they were saying. Not flashes of an aged old dream. Sand-like memory, look for us.

my love letter to dreamers is the

solitary snow flower in an ashen field

missing your sweet innocence & the
dimming embers of your fiery heart

leaking a deathly pallor too cold to touch
bitter rue tasting like moonlight kissing purple cauliflower

ephemerality is the gentle promise of something
beyond this world of banality

for you know, dreamers of young & old,
the silver, the blue, the yellow,

the colorless & intangible is
where you will reside

forever & more
forever & ever & more

the body is a lonely mountain
mosses and fences kiss my skin,
curious deer nudge at my nose,
brown hare huddle up my feet —
my amiable friends at spring

chirping birds & summer cicadas
sing my sorrow
evening haze & morning dew
collect my tears, sliding them
past the valley of the throat, to the pit
of the stomach, forming
a crystal-clear blue lake glittering with diamond dust

run run run
fallen red leaves surging with the rapid,
spiriting to the sea, disappeared
into the white, cold mass

echoes come back from the dead forest
palms open, decaying
the body is a lonely mountain