Three of my gorgeous friends stood outside the restaurant
where I sat eating dinner with the poet
and made faces at me through the window.
They were wearing red, turquoise,
and pale green silk,
and with their ripe smiles,
they looked like goddesses behaving goofily.
Not what well-mannered women in their 40's do,
but they did it anyway,
and I laughed and he laughed.
He raised his fork to them and laughed.

I wanted to talk about "Moon-Skin,"
and poetry and courage and mortality,
and we did.
We talked about all of it.
We ate steak and drank red wine,
and if I noticed that his hair did not fall over his eyes in the quite the same way it had all day,
or remembered—just briefly—
the feel of his hand on my back as we came through the door,
or listened to the sound of his breathing as we drove back to his hotel,
it does not mean that I hadn't been paying attention
to all of the talk,
especially about mortality.

It just means that some part of me finally woke up
and realized that that the mind and body together make poetry,
and I wanted to apologize to someone
for taking so long to understand this—
that I am allowed to pay attention to all of it,
that this craft will not ask me to leave any of my senses behind,
that it will say, instead, use everything, tell it all,
and my God,
what have you been waiting for?

Yes, tell everything, even how he took the moist, red morsel of meat
from the point of my knife and put it into his mouth,
even this description—so flagrant and entirely lacking in subtlety,
I am allowed to say yes,
yes, it happened exactly that way.

you had birds in your mouth and sunlight dripping from your eyelashes.
i promised i wouldn't speak if you wouldn't change faces twice an hour.
we made conversation under a tree and sleep-walked through your kitchen.
i couldn't stare for your poetry disguised as fingers, always moved your hands.

i opened your window and slid to the street, took a walk with the recycling.
my hands looked tired the next morning, and you wouldn't take no.
when the lights fell asleep, we ran for the boats and slipped into the water.
the moon smiled and pulled us apart, i never matched your shoes again.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

His eyes grew dark and distant
absolutely nothing wrong
He smiled without his eyes
how are you feeling?
nothing, numb, bored

Bracing each other, pushing
                                             out

Fearing the flatline, we find
one another, in the dark

Rubbing the blood back into his palms
he buries his breath in my clean hair
Counting down the seconds, we remember

Leaving the cold room, he asks
is it over now?

Paper looks so much better
with ink bleeding through the seams

thoughts written down
to be crumpled up and thrown away

objects to be traded
only to fall inside the couch

making checks and bills
destroying lives and souls

words that can't be spoken
feelings that will never be heard

to be recycled
and forgotten

For example: the frogs
find a dinner plate, and an acorn
makes funny gestures from beneath the dirt.
And the string twangs, as was expected.

How simple, how unlikely to happen to us.
Only a misplaced vector connects
the pine tree’s yowl to the sandbox,
which, if you don’t think about it, is alright.

I get confused so many times
before I stop and train my thoughts.
And again: the sound I hear
is either walnuts cracking or red birds

splashing into windows. But
the movements have been extinguished
and the two are so dissimilar they may as well
be the same. Or watermelons

stomping insects underfoot. In
the other room of this house is a man
walloping a rooster with a broom,
but the rooster is too scared

to tell him just how effective
positive thinking is, just as oceans
are too murky to provide freethinkers
with a useful metaphor.

Of course not, said a man
lifting his cat from pool. But then
it was too late, and something
was pulling whimpers through the air.

A woman drew herself up from wrecked wood at the bottom of the ocean;
whispered sea-songs into the wistful ear of a long lost love;
shook her locks 'til his heart beat faster;
looked longer than she should into the deep pools of his pleading eyes.

"I will call you when I want to;
I will call you when I want."

Cooled his temples;
breathed her watery breath
as silvered beads streamed down his shocked skin.

                                       .......

Rumors rock an empty drifting boat;
a glazed shell faced with priceless pearl
broken from its moorings,
strangled by a knotted rope.

"You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you"

Hold fast the bestowed gift,
your Quinquireme of stowed treasure.
Protect its precious structure.
"Who are you, the one who stripped my soul?
Who is the third who stole yours?"  

                                          .........

B­roken from netting I lie
a beached starfish on burning sand,
wishing the waves to wash me
back through Time's receding current
to find the silence that once was;
to turn away before the sacrifice,
before the Eye of the storm.



copyright © Caroline Grace 2010

A BOAT beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July --
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear --
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream --
Lingering in the golden dream --
Life, what is it but a dream?

THE END

He
Fill your bowl with roses: the bowl, too, have of crystal.
Sit at the western window. Take the sun
Between your hands like a ball of flaming crystal,
Poise it to let it fall, but hold it still,
And meditate on the beauty of your existence;
The beauty of this, that you exist at all.

           She
The sun goes down,--but without lamentation.
I close my eyes, and the stream of my sensation
In this, at least, grows clear to me:
Beauty is a word that has no meaning.
Beauty is naught to me.

           He
The last blurred raindrops fall from the half-clear sky,
Eddying lightly, rose-tinged, in the windless wake of the sun.
The swallow ascending against cold waves of cloud
Seems winging upward over huge bleak stairs of stone.
The raindrop finds its way to the heart of the leaf-bud.
But no word finds its way to the heart of you.

           She
This also is clear in the stream of my sensation:
That I am content, for the moment, Let me be.
How light the new grass looks with the rain-dust on it!
But heart is a word that has no meaning,
Heart means nothing to me.

           He
To the end of the world I pass and back again
In flights of the mind; yet always find you here,
Remote, pale, unattached . . . O Circe-too-clear-eyed,
Watching amused your fawning tiger-thoughts,
Your wolves, your grotesque apes--relent, relent!
Be less wary for once: it is the evening.

           She
But if I close my eyes what howlings greet me!
Do not persuade. Be tranquil. Here is flesh
With all its demons. Take it, sate yourself.
But leave my thoughts to me.