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pressed up against
thrown in the sky of
strung up around:
       the impossible.

shimmers brush forward memory
all the dead can live again
only when we listen to clouds:
       misty, diaphanous oracles. 

voir à travers, le gris et le verre,
révéler le hasard.

there is never any end to paris
or to the naked girls, winding at your window.
i end up squeezing the red grapes from your cheeks
after midnight, near st michel, 
tearing up your every part
like an envelop of letters;
like a sentence hidden inside that 
i’ve waited for all my life. 

your eyes are so green,
one of your parents must have been a 
traffic light. we’re both self centered-
so the world revolves around us at the same speed.
this morning my sheets were covered in pollen, 
or tumbleweed, because we turned and tossed
so much in the night that there came
nebulae in your hair.

there is a foolishness beyond 
this cycle of wine water, honey
and liberal gentleness. 
he who knows he is a fool
is no great fool, they say. 
i bow at the greatness of fools
long past, quixotic acts before
they were shown the mirror.

I remember 
crying into mirrors when i was less then ten, 
thinking that it was the worst injustice.
even now, i wish for such acts that send me
above this tiptoeing at midnight
among french floor boards.
i bet you all of my life
that i can swim in the seine tonight and survive it.

i was made for the water 
such endless dreaming and praying.

even when you are afraid, art is no dictionary.
max ernst taught me that the other day, wandering
around the pompidou late into the afternoon.
you whispered to me deeply last night,
love is first of all a lesson in utility. 
my responsibility did not begin immediately,
though they did begin in bed.
so by sunrise i had to run away north,
without leaving a word. 
how many lovers have i lost,
taking refuge in the reverie of train trips.
reading <<ruins of paris>> on the way to Lille,
i learnt that you must look at things in the belly,
not in the eye.

i worry about all this, because 
I love you. 
because suddenly,
i want to devote my life to
glorifying you.
i’m sorry i left this morning, that 
i did not invite you along. 
i just wanted to see how far this cord
stretched, how long i could travel
without glancing back. 
i’ll make it up to you, when i return,
i promise.
(would you like another
three thousand love poems?)

we are dreamers inside a cosmic dream, i speak to you mostly clearly in the night, when my thoughts grasp onto the walls and waterducts of your sleep like some climbing plant. when the moon is the fullest, we enter the mythical. that is to say, the realm of risk. for the first time, i felt i had something to lose and myths began to thrash and generate within me. always, the gods were the last to arrive, silly and drunk with nectar. then we two, full of pleasure, so much that it felt illicit. compared to the life of a leaf, that have no gulf of wanting, we definitely owe some sacrifice to time, in our human form. 

but then i wake because something nibbled at my line. in a soft pond of repose, everything shook and the leaves stuck out their tongues. voices came out of silence, saying something i could not. tell me then, which is the way i take, out of which door do i go, where and to whom? 

there is a small song. some slow clouds. october arrives begging for water water water. 

i set up my desk, somewhere closer to the horizon, nearer to silence that anchor the wash of waves upon the beach. you will not understand, you’ll bite me. there was a time when your first reaction would have been to cry, cry for me to kiss you and we go on opening lies under a blue skylight, drunk and jealous of shadows. now, you only speak to me but you speak of tears. 

down the road there is my inlet of sleep, where i arrive always thinking of the love that remains untouched, wrapped in loneliness, somewhere across the sea. i know i must wave them goodbye. but as i approach it time becomes fluid and i am unsteady on it and though the others were prepared, i could never take on life vests. stupid, i know.

i keep thinking that we may learn something from what is born and what dies under the pressure of desire, but old adages tell me that life is not so tameable. you continue to dream. you go on saying things that flash in the sun but cannot weather any cold. i want to wake from the beginning. stop playing. see the shore from the other side, and know that it is unchanged. 

meeting an old friend

after you finished work, we met at a familiar place where neither had any homeground advantage, and the knowledge that we were in public, next to other strangers, was, i think, a comfort. they say that there is a permanent good to have loved someone, one time, even if you don’t remember all the circumstances, even if it was long ago. so i thought, we’re good. 

so sitting at the old bar, i remembered how the first year was like icing, but then the cake started to show through. that was fine too, but you forgot which direction you’re taking, and i was too in love to let it go. i remembered, how words grew heavy, even out of happiness, but that was anybody’s story. 

so sitting at the old bar, i read waiting for you, while the wind dropped and lovers stopped singing. i felt the wind of every extendable circumstance blowing against me, in and out of the afternoon. the surprises of history did nothing to prepare me for the shock of seeing you, who still wore time with colours of meanness and melancholy. 

so sitting at the old bar, we took another sentimental journey, as we do, with no destination in mind. the sky was open and i was genuine and that’s the best i know how to be, hoping that life knew where i was and would find me somehow. you made counterproposals so judiciously, it made whatever happened disputable. 

so sitting at the old bar, we had the look you always wanted. 

so sitting at the old bar, i was glad that we will never run out of paintings.

finishing a book

there were some whispering and apprehensive regrouping. you pace back and forth like this, ignoring the reality of the scene, or pretending that you were able to withstand the monstrosity of reason. you might have considered it beautiful, this ornament in that curious setting, that phrase which placed the character in a perfect outline - but you were missing it. this beast that was trying to approach you so as to admire you. the first question was: does beauty and irrationality always have to reign alternately? the second question was: who is this stranger that has agreed to my company? there must have been a third question too, but lights slowly came up again, it drew the streets and then the vague outlines of christmas decorations still strung across balconies, along the facade of department stores. and the wildness of ending dropped like an avalanche, falling and falling,

seferis on the tarmac

love everything, she said, as she sent me out into night. i was bewildered by departure, by the sudden shift in weather and above all else, i could not understand what air traffic meant. it made me feel like we are living in some blade runner society, surely spaceships should be involved, but looking out onto the tarmac, it clearly wasn’t so.

there is nothing but sky and we are worshipping hollows. i keep a rein on my life. i keep a rein on my life but i keep my eyes closed to the roads and only have the sound of your voice saying ‘happiness’ to guide me. your voice that sounded like tapping against the trunks of an old cypress tree - it grows thin as the air - and it saddened me to know that distance will press out the bodies that i have loved from my memory. 

there used to be a time when travellers must face the sea in departure. the threat of it must have kept some on the shoreline, not a bad way to sort them, i reckon. but fitness is not what it used to be, and what i am doing required so little courage it frightened me. i heard that stagnant hollow sound, the same as our loneliness, the same as our love, the same as our bodies.  

the snow neglected to cover me. i kept dancing just ahead to keep my heart in sight, above this hidden city. some of us are blind, so when all is silent and no language is too embarrassing, we all began to pray. not on a sunday. not in a wafered, cautious tone. our sounds were more piercing and hurt, as if it needed to reach an audience on the other side of a very crowded cave-disco club. what is a poet for, other than to scream ourselves into admiration?

it is monday night and we are plotting our place in history, figuring out all those fisted hearts out there, addressing ourselves to flowers and photographs of less painful occasions. what else could we do when the town is savagely decorated, when feathers were torn to make medalled collars, and i was forever at risk of wickedness?

where is our love now? probably following some vagabond fisherman, heaving itself across the ocean floor, testing its own against the wind. it is waiting for another hero to rescue it, and shine it into some perfect configuration, more gem-like, how entertaining it would be then!

i don’t remember when
the monsoon cut across the delta,
whitely, undirected, it wiped past
our eyes, like lust, or
other accumulated moments
that drum up each hour.
the villagers gathered.
they began a small medley
feminine and merciful
prepared.

the space between us

it pumps - like a train’s beat that
flutters between lips, or that narrowing sun
that squeezes its way through winter parisian clouds.
it is wednesday night, and i was running toward
the dream of a week in ireland. i was excited by
the prospect of wildness of cities - of the hammered miles
that would diversify the year.
i know, it was only a distraction, but what else could i do
when the wind demanded all our directions:
towards north.

no, i will not find love, i told the wind.
only a moon with no home.
it is not love i will find, because
i have no limb. because i only know…
Flow. the swinging sun lights up my eyelashes, 
shapes my sharp wild hair, it runs back,
it gestures as i speak my foreign talk, my voice
watering one stony place or another.
sometimes the land takes away my words and
i am left, crying for stillness with no mind
or mermaids or sea. in those moments
i thought i knew death. but no death would come. 

so ireland

salt water, my lips searching for her surface

i was a fish, yet unseen, but

by the cliffs crying out for departure. 

if the atlantic doesn’t clear your head, i don’t know what ever will. the wind enters through your eyes, swirls through your mind like a snow storm, then to depart through your ears. it could wake any falling vagabond. 

and our love? because i love the sea

and the swim that burns and the failing fire, these

things will always break my heart.

like that ascension up to the sea’s ferocious surface. a little like surrendering, a little like escaping into a realm that might just overwhelmall our past lacerations. 

because paris

i can’t belong to the winter.
while the sun went out
i could sense the deafness of heaven.
knowing what i know, that spring
is the thieving of persephone
from the underworld,
i fear, it may never come.

so i am tough and selfish, but
maybe it is this city that is
overcoming me. this city,
where blame falls like rain.
there must be a topography to typography, 
but did cities ever exist,
but here?

i feel those fishermen’s eyes on me. they murmur amongst themselves, ‘she just wanted to go somewhere’. their judgment made me want to beg for forgiveness, or claim a soul too drunk to hear….

but is there a wrong to retreating? i was weary of all our advances. i was forever in the shadow, all those wild horses, the dust of their gallop. so it didn’t seem obscene to be here for a little while, letting the waves wash under me, no paddling, no frantic passion for the ecstasy of waves. here lies a simplicity. the sea. it cares not for excellence. volume is no measurement. 

don’t you understand what is going to happen? i left you to your sentiments, yet i don’t mind letting you know you are delicious, darling. so each of us may have what we want from anyone else, and you can have whatever you want from me. just know - there is you. then there is the sea.

in the sea, he is the poet. my little dark hair boy whose black looks hung rampart between green and white frothing waves. the way he can always get out there, i think he must swim just so, past all the hallmarks of the heart. i dont think i have ever known admiration until now, a feeling hysterically away from the world i am from. 

when the swell drops, when the night falls and we retreat back to the cottage fire, i am the poet (or something less ridiculous). i was indulgent and full of air, playing the role of some exotic courtesan, who shouts yeats across the kitchen floor. 

there is a natural elegance to his nervousness, like those small flowers he grows, like that absurd irish humour he draws from. yet there was no fear in him out there, before forty foot waves, loose and windy and whoosh, he’s up. exploding into another realm i could not follow. 

so it has been the headiest entrance into spring, and we could not tell villains from villainy. 

there were no hibiscus flowers,
no sign that the winter in paris
would ever end. so i am
fighting off the future,
return to the shadow of the
pantheon, where i am
so little, and having dallied with love,
a fragment of a paradise
if only truces could be struck.

the cloudy paragraphs of my heart
shall grow old and die,
like any cloud passing not into
rain or shadows, but scattered among
meadows and cascading hills.
the flatland falling, falling like a
forever now, fertile with bodies
beautifully fecund, now falling into a
sea of mornings. although, i know
the swell of the heart is no landscape

but a fatal pull of the moon
at our roots.

maybe it was a welcome. a few days into spring, snow haloed paris, giving everyone a new diadem. how could i not press this into some mythical praise, that comes as easily as love to me? 

there is an indecisiveness about snow, the way it lingers in the air, this way and that, and sometimes even upwards. as if it is lost. as if it is searching for grace. here, try not to think too much, can you see it dancing? 

so i walk home, late at night, in thigh high stockings and a mini skirt, dreaming of plundering this air. dreaming of our time of leisure that bears me upward towards art, that could strip me bodily my own ambitions. there will be no hours there, as if in a cistern, as if in the sea, as if with you. 

…in all our circumvention, will we always find these shores? where ariadne was abandoned, the full breasted one, who beared her chest as memories enter like nests? for her, music will always be the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system - but i guess she has never known modelled systems of playlists that preempt your desires. 

so the dog days follow the dog nights and i was forever planning another departure. each bound cable strands, arching upwards, veering with light, with the flight of strings. it is the blessing of the unstrung - wavering streams as though a god were issue of the strings. one of these days surely i will fall to the bottom of the earth, along with all the other unstrung people, who see no love as monolith but a frosted cape that must be shook. is there a destiny in that? i hardly know. 

what i know is that - late at night, the telephone wires whisper. the drunks will stammer. the moon will rise out there seemingly moveless and seven oceans are there to answer our dreams. even if it is oblique. even if it is against our wishes. and upward our sleep will veer towards the helm of dog stars and always - the traveller carry no script. 

the brazen hypnotic glitter, and glee
that shifts from foot to foot.
i wondered if we are all conditioned to feel 
this thrill of arrival, of excursions:
i left a place of a thousand shrugs and met
this hail of melody, or melancholy, but at least
in this there are new soothings, new amazements,
even if i fall down the stairs from naivety i feel
there will be still more harmonic laws that will
greet me.

the truth is, i wanted to be gathered.
in a conspiracy, in embrace, in a togetherness
that cannot be shook by the wind or sun.
this is the hardest thing to come by, because
it is rare. so i continue to greet all things
with naivety, and sing that guilty song of the sun.
because no one has ever frowned on me
when i smiled. no one has ever dipped in rain
when there are gardened skies, and you cannot stop
the magnolias when they demand spring.