On the left, I write an epic and on the curve of the right; a haiku. On her belly I build a city whose streets teem with peacocks, their thousand eyes watch over her. Between her legs I make a bed, I build a subway; I build a pyre that lights the city I have built on her belly.

On her back I project old silent movies; the flickering light makes her tremble. Her right arm is a snake that climbs up my spine; awakes me from sleep. Her left arm is a tree that reaches into the earth to placate the dead. Each foot is a bird that hovers over my head, as I hold her wrist down to the white fields of the bed.

She is between my legs, she takes me into her mouth; I lie back like a ship in a building storm. I become the crescendo of operas, a breath hovering. My body is a long sigh of silence, like the migrating monarch butterflies paralyzed by uncommon winds that rain down on the streets of Tehran. The sun warms us and we take hesitant flight.

There, a man with a pinhole camera takes our photograph that he wires to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We are two electric eels entwined like the filament of a lamp, lighting all of Paris.

Love arrives at my door
with a knock and a revolver.

“How much do you love me?”
she asks. I stutter—

and she soaks me in her sweat.
I feel rejuvenated,

and Love pushes me down,
buries me beneath leaves

and flowers.

“I love you this much…” I say,
and die peacefully—

while the ****** stumps
of my once-wings twitch

slightly.

We go off in a boat,
Love is captain, I am crew.

She now has a shiny hook
for a hand. She gestures me over:

“How do you love me?”

With perfect concentration,
I unscrew her hook,

tie the string of night to it,
and swing it up—

catching the open-mouthed moon.
With a quick tug,

I bring it down for her.

We lay on the water together,
watching the boat drift off—

smaller and smaller—
and Love and I

float for a lifetime or two,

watching satellites wink
as they fly by.
I ask her, “Love,

how much do you love me?”

“So much. That’s all I say,”
she answers.
“Sooooooo much!”

“But how? How do you love me?”

She smiles,
reaches for the light switch
on the other side of the sun—

CLICK.

She curls up next to me
in the darkest of dark,
in the blackest of black.

She spoons me close,
her good hand on my heart.

“This much,” she whispers,
“and this is how.”

I would have you hold me again,
but I am frightened.

The water fills the shower ankle deep
When I was small I swore it was possible

to go down the drain. Nothing she said
could convince me otherwise.  She was wrong.

I  need to move away from here.
My dog has become anxious

There are gunshots every night.
I swear she dreams of chasing the bus you left on.

She whimpers so loud, Sirius has started to complain.
I close my eyes and try to count 10 but can never make it

past six – I am worried  that when I close my eyes the North
Star looks for a way out.

I would hold you again, but I am uneasy.

Like that muggy august night when I saw
a coyote sulking and wet under a streetlight

on Sepulveda.  It was strange, no one was out.
So strange, you couldn’t believe it

but I shake all the time.

“Sometimes love is stronger than a man’s convictions.”*  
– Isaac Bashevis Singer


1.

There are wars, and rumors of wars—  
machineries, machinations  
of singular dark days,  

and clouds that hang  
like props above our city.  

We shut the windows,  
refuse to watch their play.  

Hungrily, we take refuge  
between each other’s legs.  

How comforting it is  
to love without armies,  
without tanks,  

without generals of reasoned love.

---

2.

There are wars, and rumors of wars—  
machineries, machinations  
of singular dark days.  

From the narrow street, they see us  
wrestling with an angel—  

the tug of limbs, the tangle of hair.  
You whisper low,  
your seditious talk of love—  

as my callused hands get caught  
in your low moaning—  

while I hold you down  
to the bed,  
my captive.  

The occupation has begun—  

your occupied body,  
my country of ardent prayers.

---

2.

There are wars—  
machineries, machinations  
of singular dark days.  

The soldiers are leaving for the front.  
Not us.  

We stay behind,  
to wage our war  
of tenderness.  

They leave this morning.  

Applaud their sad theater—  
the warships, the planes.  

Soon,  
letters will arrive  
without them.  

A few men will return—  
gaunt, less than before—  
with more silence,  
less dancing.  

And when they do,  
our war will have ended  
under a flag  
of white bed sheets.  

Only a little blood.  

Victorious,  
we’ll write love letters  
on each other’s bodies.

“Does anyone still want to go with me into a panorama?”
Max Brod

The sun floats down river
resting from a long day.
as Barvard draws love

birds in the sand.
She tries to explain
how his deformity angers her.

Unable, she leaves him
on the other side of the shore.
Banvard becomes a traveling salesman,

a campfire fiddler,
a drunk, a painter of shores.
Yearning for her -

He turns her into the Mississippi shore.
Riding the long river, floating
on a brush, he paints her portrait.

Huge bolts of love
The canvas sags from longing
Immense wood contraption

(gears-pulleys crank machinery)
Three miles of canvas.
An uninterrupted portrait.

The papers publish the spectacle
“The hunch back painter and his panorama!”
He builds a wooden stage

Winds up river then down.
The lines are long, (.50 cents.)
they wait for hours….

He sits in the middle
of hungry brush stroke
Up river

down. Up river down
eyes straining
to find her.

To be published by JUKED.COM

The correspondence she writes is in the shape of a dog−
fills them with anecdotes of dressers

and the first two years of her life spent in a drawer.
We meet in Zurich over a nightmare –
(sleep under an argument)–

Travel to Berlin where a priest walks between us.
She promises to write.

Her letters are like a leap year. She writes riddles
about the price of post and serious Marian treaties –

only cursorily mentioning the living.
I read her letters like an eating

disorder. I try to decipher the hermetic meaning
of the word Shvod in all the margins.
Her last line reads,

“I must beat the walls it is March…”

A green streetcar is standing alone in the rain,
The man on the corner is staring at the green street-
Car . He is trying to remember

His daughters fifth birthday.

The green streetcar is alone in the rain.
The man is alone on the street in the rain.
He is staring at the streetcar, trying to remember

His daughter’s best friend’s name.

The man can hear the rain falling on
The empty green streetcar.

Rain is running down the back of his
neck and it is making him cold.

She is so much older now.

Her subtle lean left
accentuates the curve

of her waist - reminds
me of the curve of a street

in Rome where – I falll
in love with time

that moved so slowly –
The movement in the song

she plays for me turns
towards me, - The air

is a scented moment
of bed linens, lilacs,

leather, wood, ***,
soil - where memories

are instantaneous –
Everything is memory –

Everything has taken place – I am
in the middle of a Matinee

that I have never seen
before, but remember

so fondly. I am here now.
I easily could have been anywhere else.

The Lone Ranger writes a letter
to his Tanto, he writes,

things are not as they used to be.
I am as useless as an Iron Lung.

Riding around in his Ford Pinto
The Lone Ranger looks for anything
to do − the one working headlight
finding vultures on the side

of the road.
Driving through the night
scanning the radio for WXYZ

This long prairie night of his soul.
finding no one to save
he buys a *******
with a case of silver bullets.

She holds him like a little boy
Rocks him back and forth.

They don’t have ***.

He cries in her arms,

“I’m a man in a boy’s costume,”
“I am a jaw bone at a wedding.”

Later that evening
The Lone Ranger writes another letter

Dear Tanto,

Things are not as they used to be.
I am as useless as mouth without teeth.
I wish you were here.

Sincerely, Lone.

I did conspire to love you.

2. The moon was happy with us.

3. Baudrillard’s concept of “Object Fetishism” is more relevant than Marx’s.

4. Thank you.

5. Trees are closer to heaven than the angels. (I know, you already know that, but I like the line).

6. You have the most beautiful sorrowful eyes.

7. The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. (RILKE 1912)

8. Locomotives fall in love going in opposite directions.

9. Certain earthquakes do not like themselves.

10. The more one contemplates the less one lives; the more one accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less one understands ones’ own existence and ones’ own desires. (Debord 1967)

11. I did plot to love you.

12. The black crow on the wire is not me.

13. Umbrellas can be opened inside. (Only black; counter intuitive, I know).

14. Your touch; my body remembers softly.

15. I did love you.

16. Clocks sometimes stop for no reason.

17. Even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that contains a desire or its reverse, a fear…Everything conceals something else.
(CALVINO 1972)

18 Sometimes letters sent, never arrive.

19. Only you ever made me blush.

20. In the end, everything is just a dream.

21. This poem will maximize your interval times.

22. Love is ambiguous, at best a “Contamination”, from the Latin *** tangere. “leaving a tactile print.”

23. I will let you go.

24. I will publish this poem

25. I will always love you.


Sincerely Mr. Leibow

My mouth is filled
with the taste of rust

and ***.
I sweat above her
& a drop falls

into the
shallow
of
her
neck.

The drop vibrating
like oi on the ground
from the passing
train – carrying

coal to keep
The cities burning.

In my chest,
the drone of a fly–

wheel
a counterwieght
a boiler
a bag of bees

She is below me
I feel her heart
it is an abrasion,
a bruise,
a beating fist
a bed of nails

This is how it is.

And here we are
lunging back
and forth like a Stoker
our breath chasing

after the last locomotive

plaintively
pulling away
                 from the station.

Here is the girl
with the fish
hook in her

heart , heart skipping
every leap year.
Skin slippery like a fish

Shimmering as if caught
in a net of stars. Her body’s
dull thump against the side

of the ship sending Thank You
cards to everyone she’s loved.
The fishermen come in from the sea

bellies full of insomnias,
while their women wait
on docks playing lush lullabies

on mandolins they carry
in their chests. Tonight their men
will dream of drowning as they rock

them to sleep, Their women’s
backs gently thumping
against the headboards

This poem was the result of a comission to write a poem for Bello Magazine. I was given a photo essay on Cuba by a Latino photographer. I wrote two poem based on the photos. Unfortunately they chose the lesser of the two poems. This is the poem they should have chosen.


If I were to write the creation
The first man

The first woman
Would be born from

The heart of
Cuba

Where angels live
Among men

Disguised …. Walk
Among us rolling

Cigars, wait for
Rain and drink

Coffee. In
Cuba

Man and angels
Would be on family

The one hidden
To the other like

Two sisters caught by
The camera just before

Laughing One sister
With wings hidden

Under her dress.
See the shoeshine

He is an archangel
His sword hidden

In his box. In Cuba
It would all begin

From the cane fields
Adam would rise

Sweet and coarse
And Eve would

Emerge from the beating
Of a drum.

We would all dance
And carry dolls

and wait for
the moment of redemption

As if it were a summer
Storm moving closer


Filled with love letters
From God.

The Secret Lives of Things

I am thinking of
the lives of Ferris wheels
and how the world revolves
because of the dream
of a barber sleeping
in his chair.

My meditations are such.

Now I am thinking
about the arguments
of scissors
or the disclosures
of curtains
or the epics of children
playing in clouds of pollen.

Have you ever thought
if somewhere there is
a librarian who only falls
in love with men named
Dewey?
or if stairs
contemplate the meaning
of varying degrees of
footsteps?

Maybe not.

I once over heard the deliberations
of empty rooms wondering what
they can do to dwell more consciously
in the spaces they enclose,

and eavesdropping, I've listened to
the murmuring of windows
trying to be less vulnerable
to the gaze of strangers.

This world is filled with such things.

Like the time I was involved
by accident
in a contest of streets
everything was moving underneath me.
or being accused by a debate
of church bells for not
believing
in the providence
of empty chairs.

Have you ever wondered
about the dreams of hats
or the tragedies of suits?

Or more importantly,
the secret lives of your fingers?
How they remember your life
in small gestures like the path
of stars displayed in a child’s hands?

I have.

She buys a torn and faded map
All the continents are misshapen
The rivers smudged.Her faith is
inexhaustible. So here I am,
the bridge she will never cross.

The cataratic mapmaker rubbing his
eyes knowing only one route.

I stand on the other side
watch her put on a mask
so we will know exactly

how she feels, watch
her turn away
with map in hand

watch her
as she gets
smaller
and smaller.

I am on the otherside,
sitting on a chair,
in an empty room

in an abandoned house,
the windows have been boarded shut.

With my finger I erase
the ring of water
left behind by her glass.

It is true that I loved

her.  I am gaunt
and my ribs are showing.


copyright c.a. leibow 2007
Published in Rat Fink Review

i

there….
in the wind….

now in the falling

rain….

calling

calling us home…

Namu Amida Butsu

ii

Just as I am,
right now

floating in an ocean of light –
the Great Compassion carries me across,

–  Namu Amida Butsu

iii

” Chanting “Namu Amida Butsu,” which translates as “I entrust myself to the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life,” is not a form of petitionary  prayer or mantra. It is a means of communication between a relative being or consciousness and the Buddha deep within. When I chant, there is the expression of Namu Amida Butsu not only from this side, but also from the side of the Buddha. “ T. UNNO



My mouth,
Amida’s breath.


Namandab,
Namandab,
Namandab.

  

IV

From the West
calling me home

my true self –

V.

Blinded by
passions , I
complain out
loud in
the darkness
of my own

making,

not noticing

the one
guiding
the boat
to the Other

shore, not
hearing
in the light

namu amida butsu



vi.



The Voiceless voice;

she calls out from within,

with these lips

& this breath.
Namu Amida Butsu
Namu Amida Butsu

Astonished
even as I am,

the Buddha
& I are one.

Namu Amida Butsu
Namu Amida Butsu



  

vii.



My blind self
pierced by Amida’s light
illuminated and dissolved
into the great ocean of compassion

into the Oneness of life –
Palms together, embraced

just as I am.
Each step with the Buddha,
my truest self, my Amida self –

the deep flow of the oneness of realty –
all beings one with me,
palms together

and bowing,


“namu amida butsu,”
“namu amida butsu,”

embraced just as I am.

“These birds are the most singular of any in the Galapagos.”
                                                     ­              Charles Darwin.

Volcanic up swell,
tick mark,
tiny dot in the middle
of a blue map.

Stationary ship,
belly of the earth
like a backstroke swimmer
in a blue-black sea,

where erratic rains run away
while a Cactus Finch (Scandens) has gone
black to mate, so black that shadows cast

blushes back.  So black,
more silhouette
than a black beaked bird

Daphne,
on your barred black belly,
this fine breath’d bird, this

penumbra of feathers and flight;
demonstrating divergence and drift,
so proud he sings aloud

the song of the Ground Finch (Fortis). 
O befuddled bird
bereft an opera coach,

sans score  of Scandens,  the bird song
bindery gone  bankrupt,  loose leaf
scores littered, learning a  neighbor’s
second hand sheet music.

 Amid the volcanic dreams
of Finches, and bird shaped voids, 
singing atop cacti, amid these small
dark commas  set against  a bluer
than blue sky,  he sings the wrong song

 but it's been a good year  and she comes,
the star crossed lover, Lady Fortis.

And before the rains return, and they will return,
                  a small clutch of stars.

And when the rains return,

             they will return
                                  with long lost letters from London.

"I was the same, but I was waiting for myself on the shore to return."  -   Murakami

 
IIt is a difficult time. You wait
for the return of yourself.
You sit on the pier, watching
pelicans pirouette in the air,
weightless for a moment

before diving into the water.
The sound of their splash
reminds you of something
you just can’t quite remember.
You sit there, eating fish after fish,

washing them down with beer.
You have started counting seagulls
and giving them long Spanish names.
You choreograph ballets, create architectural
drawings of dreams, and have begun to build

a home out of seashells. On weekends,
people come just to see you waiting
for your own return. “Where did you go?”
they ask, and you simply shrug.
You make new friends and take up painting,

creating self-portraits,  your image is repeated
like the latitude and longitude lines on a map.
Each morning, you lean against the railing,
and the seagulls join you. You’ve made them
tiny red scarves that they all wear. All of you

stare, still as glass, as if any movement might
blur your vision. Together, you watch the sea,
straining to see yourself coming back, straining
to catch a glimpse of the prow of a boat

cutting through the silver morning water.

"Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions."
            - Isaac Bashevis Singer

*

There are wars and rumors of wars.
machineries and machination of

singular dark days
and singular dark clouds that hang

like props above our city.

We shut the window, we avoid their play.

Hungrily we take refuge between
each others' legs.

How comforting this is to us,
to love without armies or tanks

or generals of reasoned love.

*

From the narrow street, they can see us
wrestling with an angel -

the tugging of limbs and hair-
You speak low so they can’t hear

your seditious talk of love,
where my callused hands get tangled

in your low moaning - while I hold you down

to the bed,
                    my captive.

The occupation has begun —

your occupied body
            my undiminished country of so many
                                                            ardent prayers.

*

The soldiers are all leaving for the front.
Not us, we will stay

        and wage our war
                                of tenderness.

They are all leaving this morning.

Give them your applause for their sad
theater, and all their war ships
                                      and planes.

Soon

they will write letters home
which will arrive without them.

A few men will return,
        return gaunt; much less
than before
        with more sadness and less
dancing.

And when they do
   our war
        will have ended
        with a flag of white
                        bed sheets,

only a little blood,
            Victorious,
                 writing love letters on each others' bodies.

'Does anyone still want to go with me into a panorama? '
—Max Brod


The sun floats down river
Resting from a long day.
As Banvard draws love

Birds in the sand.
She tries to explain
How his deformity angers her.

Unable, she leaves him
On the other side of the shore.
Banvard becomes

a traveling salesman,
s campfire fiddler,
s drunk, a painter of shores.

Yearning for her—

He turns her into the Mississippi shore.
Riding the long river, floating

On a brush, he paints her portrait.
Huge bolts of love
The canvas sags from longing

Immense wood contraption
(Gears-pulleys crank machinery)
Three miles of canvas.

An uninterrupted portrait.

The papers publish the spectacle
'The hunchback painter and his panorama! '

He builds a wooden stage
Winds up river then down.
The lines are long, (.50 cents.)

They wait for hours...

He sits in the middle
Of hungry brush stroke
Up river

Down.
Up river

down
Eyes straining—

To find her.


Nominated for a Pushcart Award 2008 Juked.com