"balustrades" poems
The first bell is silver,
And breathing darkness I think only of the long scythe of time.
The second bell is crimson,
And I think of a holiday night, with rockets
Furrowing the sky with red, and a soft shatter of stars.
The third bell is saffron and slow,
And I behold a long sunset over the sea
With wall on wall of castled cloud and glittering balustrades.
The fourth bell is color of bronze,
I walk by a frozen lake in the dun light of dusk:
Muffled crackings run in the ice,
Trees creak, birds fly.
The fifth bell is cold clear azure,
Delicately tinged with green:
One golden star hangs melting in it,
And towards this, sleepily, I go.
The sixth bell is as if a pebble
Had been dropped into a deep sea far above me . . .
Rings of sound ebb slowly into the silence.
1.7k
Free Writing
How curious to be told
to write freely,
to ‘do’ free writing,
and then be given a subject!
That’s unfreeing my freedom.
Thank you, but
I don’t want to think
about this time last year.
As September was
September is,
brim-full of wondrous light
now flowing ‘cross this table
as I write – as freely as I can.
Nobody is going to tell me
to write freely and then
give me a subject, tell me
to write for two minutes
then give me five.
The Memorial Hall
There was a continuity of safeness
in these grounds that frame
this unfortunate building.
Memorable and unforgettable,
the ‘Mem’ Hall was a travesty
by Clough William Ellis.
All balustrades and pineapples,
his signature touch, chosen
it’s said (this architect that is)
because he designed the Bath Club pool
whose famous cup this swimming school
inevitably won year upon year.
Walking with Alice
Grey day this Sunday
And a morning walk
Through the estate
To the edge of fields,
You here to collect
The season’s fruits,
Not to eat,
But for the dyer’s vat.
And I, just to crunch
My boot on stubble
And cross the wide acres
Ready for the plough.
For Jeanette
Her last day in Amsterdam
and a brief break from the Powerbook;
she was playing the flâneur.
In the late afternoon
she came across this painting
in a window, in a gallery
at Van Ostadestraat 294.
She was transfixed.
The painting demanded her attention
and her time. After an hour
(and it was by then nearly dark)
she returned to her hotel
and cancelled her flight home.
For the next three days
she went back to the painting
in a window, in a gallery
in Van Ostadestraat 294.
She had begun to learn to look,
not glance, but look, to stand still
for an hour or more - and look.
She was rewarded by a world of detail
no glance could have brought forth.
She was transfixed.
She was transformed.
Red Point
Leaving the fishing station
to the cows on the beach
through each kissing gate
we passed, we kissed.
The steep road ahead
with the horse and the boy
hid our cabin home.
The sea channel,
the red sand,
the distant rain
glanced us by.
To my children
You’re out there
Living famously
All the way down
And back again.
I do think of you
As birthdays pass
And Christmas letters
Demand attention.
You’re out there
To represent my way
Of baking bread,
Sailing the boat,
Walking too fast,
Winning at Go.
Whether in Qatar,
Kansas City or Deptford
You’re me in disguise.
Sep 25, 2013
Sep 25, 2013 at 2:38 AM UTC
Our bed is the prayer rug where I found God.
Yeah, THE God –
Not circumnavigating morality
Or bones of old saints
Lonely illusions of the sad and middle-aged
All Fat Tuesday freakshows in comparison
Our bed is the altar of sacred rites –
Marked with the devil’s big black Sharpie
And the intricately crocheted lace of sin
Nightly baptized in warm, honey-coated nothing
Pink patterns of iron and salt on linen
Painted idols on the shrine –
Absolution pours through drafty windows
Older than our bodies
Glass frosted by years without suds
Only rain
A holy city of yours and mine –
With gentle pyro ways
Stone and mortar become flame
The balustrades collapse
You light candlewicks with your fingertips
May 11, 2016
May 11, 2016 at 10:31 PM UTC
Manila is fray
Tough enough to die,
Brave enough to see ****** against
the billboards
***** on the marketplace
***** men haggling for prices
the corners are squalid -- rats with ambitions of men take their places in
the esteros
a car-horn blares, wanes old moon music.
I sing songs of malversation. Trains all graffiti.
My heart like a jailbird freed somewhere
in the big sur; love assuages nothing,
comes with a cheap price
a freak December night in Roxas blvd.
i sit on marble benches and dream
of artilleries, garlands on snuff-nosed
barrels, nuns grieving dust
in the ground. communal bathrooms
drunk in foolish caricatures,
the tabloids displaying flowerheads --
the democracy in the streets a ****
for kings, no love to lull
me to infantile sleep
tortured are the bulls
matadors hiding behind faces red like
faces of statesmen flushed with
the spirit of bourbon
whereas we are here river-facing
northern tip of its undying source
like wives on balustrades waiting
to catch the fragrance of inamoratas,
light reenters
interstice of chary webs of dull heads hemmed in like canopies in the throat of overthrown ponds, scraps
of metal sold for a night's worth
of gin and Sinatra,
Deep within the grave, the dead laughing
at the dead living. Atop waters,
yachts peering into drowning fish,
in the middle, a jam of buses
belching lassitudes that strangle
the console, the man in all of us
the same, cursing behind the wheel
and everybody else different
dancing at the top of our heads.
Feb 27, 2016
Feb 27, 2016 at 5:04 AM UTC
As evening falls,
And the yellow lights leap one by one
Along high walls;
And along black streets that glisten as if with rain,
The muted city seems
Like one in a restless sleep, who lies and dreams
Of vague desires, and memories, and half-forgotten pain . . .
Along dark veins, like lights the quick dreams run,
Flash, are extinguished, flash again,
To mingle and glow at last in the enormous brain
And die away . . .
As evening falls,
A dream dissolves these insubstantial walls,--
A myriad secretly gliding lights lie bare . . .
The lovers rise, the harlot combs her hair,
The dead man's face grows blue in the dizzy lamplight,
The watchman climbs the stair . . .
The bank defaulter leers at a chaos of figures,
And runs among them, and is beaten down;
The sick man coughs and hears the chisels ringing;
The tired clown
Sees the enormous crowd, a million faces,
Motionless in their places,
Ready to laugh, and seize, and crush and tear . . .
The dancer smooths her hair,
Laces her golden slippers, and runs through the door
To dance once more,
Hearing swift music like an enchantment rise,
Feeling the praise of a thousand eyes.
As darkness falls
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live tonight? Where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit halls which reach no end.
892
"Should any harm befall me on my journey, you may open this letter."
when darkness is befalling me
when it won't stop raining
i'm skidding, stumbling, and
be spiraling downwards
then, you're my balustrades and my light
on all my ways
my stilt, my rod and my staff
my soil
Nov 28, 2020
Nov 28, 2020 at 6:14 AM UTC
/ rivers pulse this house as if activity, predictable.
leave this body just like that.
and heave the emptiness from the thrum
of the streets just like that
the stars delineate an axis tilted by my means
to live under frail coruscations.
take this house, take the rivers
with you, all the more my body
anything other than my blunder.
take even, these tiny and immediate currents
as i hear this is how it is to be delivered from
grace and expanse.
you are what this truancy is trying to undo
as you were by mine before -- this is how
it feels to be moved and sidled again and again
this river that you carry me across and left with details none can supply. there
is resolve in this, even when I am taken aback,
which certain things are left crossed and wronged,
and how you keep the place guarded, possessed
by light -- how it wholly hurts, this invented
life all mine /
1
What is to break if not another word for
impossibility, or another phrase as palliative
for suffering each other
2
What is so sure of it to arrive
in the densest minute, say when if already
out of sight, I implore you to
unlearn my body
3
This and the deep and hollow end of it.
Visage voyeurs as if the past is just next door
sleeping with my woman, laughs and then cuts
open to free itself from a slammed door
and mosey on.
4
As statement to refute my coming into,
I am already accomplished. Turn this day opaque.
Lens to the world my found
imperative of what was given, a knife
to stalk a heart so difficult as if known to me
as a path home, or unearthed bus tickets
from Longos to Tabang. Say when it rains,
forgive me. I remember still.
5
To believe in touch and its memory is
obligation. The way I see this, a palimpsest.
I attempt to discover something, witnessing myself
pass mirrors, body found as if rivers do drift
me to the brink of a high noon wishing
to swing downstream the words I have
no use for, if not documents of haloed hours.
6
I passed by your house.
Silence annuls azure skies.
Balustrades gone. They took everything down
evenly to the last inch of paint,
balmy this oblivion only for me, catatonic is this
peace as my hands lift a piece of the soul
to shred. The day burns like a forest in my hand.
May 15, 2016
May 15, 2016 at 8:18 PM UTC
Softly flows the sunset colors
painted on tired skies with fire
Igniting a wafting cloud in orchid tints,
the fresh scent of pine lingering within its escape
Drowsy horizons boast their claim
along seaside waverings in salted mist
Romance swims on shorelines engulfed
with all of the pageantry a white cap stanza can bring
And I whistle as I walk along,
taking in this wonder that has followed me home
Resting on a porch swing, feet off the ground
as morning glories sleep beyond white painted balustrades
Satin fingers intertwine with mine,
milk pudding lips bring their flavor to me
Luscious frosting in a whipped frenzy
coating my mouth in sugary mass
I point to the sky, the stars they beckon,
heart shaped constellations for two
Twinkling in your twilight eyes
as I reach for my pen and pad
Only to realize that this indeed is my imagination,
lounging on a worn out sofa, tattered cushions,
empty beer cans acting like so many wishes
leaving wet rings on a table, but who cares
There was a time when poetry flowed
from these lonely fingers
in paisley emotions and violet scentings
climbing the arbor of love
But since you left,
leaving behind the shadows which claim my eyes
my ink is dry and my paper tossed, tiny ***** in random patterns
on a floor that begs carpeting, but only bares soiled footprints
As I struggle to my feet, to the front window
desperately waiting for the grass to grow and daisies…
I stab the wooden sill with my pen, I need it no more, for…
there is no poetry without you…and never will be again
Oct 10, 2014
Oct 10, 2014 at 5:03 PM UTC
Why this house? This house that walks without frame? Only air strides
circumventing the dome. The permeable atmosphere
flows freely shaking water down my arms,
pulp by pulp, fragment by fragment,
consolations for tippling music streaming in the ears.
Blowing arias – intone of regret, or the loss of beautiful things.
Preferring silence over sanguine narratives. How are we to assuage yearning?
I heard someone say, “The ideal is unattainable.” – strange, holding
the small of one’s back and lament the narrow ends of the world.
Strange the flight of birds, the hum of buses past Quezon City.
It would drone that you do not know her – and that she is never somebody
else’s – that is dearth consoled. Your palm indents delineate not fate
but the steady distances of things close to contact, eluding tragedies.
Why this house, and why you?
I have no blueprint of your home. I know not what festoons the balustrades.
Your rue for the absence of a balcony. A panel over earthenware I suppose,
or partitions to separate dreams from stilled things impaled to the wall.
I presume there are photographs of you in every corner
to remind you of your gathered storms.
I know not the smell of your home, but I have your
nameless fragrance on my shirt wedged, ambulating with me through the halls of
where I chase moments like cirrus stirring in a somersault of summer.
Make use of bowls with
evening water and flush the specter down like how you would, cold water
into throat from a night of weeping. Somewhere there,
the China will remind me of your elliptical face in
the intensity of leaving. Your eyes
the windows for birds humming a music I do not hear. I have been to too many neighborhoods,
I have seen unfinished structures foretold by obliged scaffolds holding together
a would-be home. Why this house? There are only shadows intimate on
the floor. The sudden burst of impossibilities watered down, attenuated by
piercing glances through the thickest of nights black with remorse.
The palpable silence gyrates and the diameters of the world are too close
to break in sidereal circles.
Why this house? Because you are in it, and outside,
through the thick quietude, underneath the paling moonlight,
you pretend you see nobody.
Mar 22, 2016
Mar 22, 2016 at 12:08 AM UTC
I saw a bird this morning
The early sun was caressing his plumage
It was standing there, on the black iron balustrades
Of our unused balcony
Feeling the sun, feeling the warmth
I looked away and it disappeared
In the blink of an eye
The sun is still there, waiting.
Jan 26, 2015
Jan 26, 2015 at 1:21 AM UTC