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Sunday, August 26, 2012

In Childhood (with Tess P)

Perhaps in childhood when nights you waited at the foot of your bed, watching the moths draw their circumference around the streetlight as the stars fell, you listened to the quiet pumping of crickets and cicadas and wondered at the dense darkness of the forest below; and you caught a whiff of disappointment and it came from God; you had thought his great arm had reached across the road that shines like a snake at night, bringing a small offering of light, some jewel from a crown, but when God opened his palm in the solitude of your room, you beheld nothing. It was then that you turned to the wall and out of its paper, the roses, the carriages; the long, billowing skirts like down-turned umbrellas; it was all life that took your breath away, night after night out of paper, and the horses again and again their curved legs and hooves were all pieces of that magnificent moving alphabet.
 
Maybe every childhood is braided with quiescence: moments when a grey-blue haze enfolds the hum of the house, muffles the dog’s bark. Lakes sleep without a ripple. Suddenly a harsh flutter of ragged black wings erupts as an awkward shape emerges from the delicacy of the silent lake. Your question is the gaze you turn toward it. Its answer has no need to push or prove itself.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Transmigration (with Tania P)

Perhaps life passes from one body to another to rise again and look out with refreshed eyes. So pods and fruit appear, only to be plucked by a child’s greedy hunger, or, shaken by a breeze, to reseed the earth for another season – populating farms, towns and cities where words once thrived with meadows of silent grasses and golden poppies.

 Maybe the poppies, so credibly orange and famished red, signal the child, urging her eat the fruit within reach, not necessarily the ripest, signposts of the planet’s collusion to fade memories of stars, wars, lovers and lakes traversed prior to this birth, city, this mother, the slats of past in place, gated, peripherally viewed like the black legs of Thoroughbreds sidling before the bell.