the sun in our palm like apricot
the air so delicious and light
warm, fuzzy and soft
we spent most of the day in the garden
admiring the colour of this spring
i like the strawberry flowers blooming
i like how they are small praises
how happy, how happy we are
because we are alive
a tremendous beautiful spring day
holy like tenderness of a real god
blazing as he drinks his own poison
errorless coloursetter (elytis)
what the garden sees
is a world we can’t add much to
just the green opening in me so darkly
it could capsize your shy love
experiences unteach me
everything vanishes
the tree that knows me says hold on,
the wind against my tin roof
cries out you mustn’t.
i think they all mean to tell me
desire is one thing, yearning another.
agape is one thing, eros another.
and because i can love anything
for their dazzle and fragrance
i owe my flesh all happiness
is landscape the language of the gods?
that’s the question i want to ask
as long as my voice holds out
the world must obey me and
when the birds drink they
will quench my wretchedness,
quickening the thunder and lightning.
the spring depends on us because
last night i met a girl so beautiful
in her body revolutions glistened
and i saw an hour of tremendous
light bringing fruit back to the century.
she gave us a certain lavender courage
we haven’t known since childhood
St. Marina seventeenth of July
embracing all the lovers so that
for a time saints go out walking
among us gleefully barefooted.
newly besieged by intimacy of a
magnificent jasmine bush,
from garden to garden sparkling dew
reflect the ancient green and gold
within us. and we were true for a time,
like the sea.
what we loved were:
dark water and endless bright aether that burst;
our souls in the arms of verdant waves waving;
long nights that bleed into soft dawns;
chilling flares of good hard drinks;
far travellers of a sunburnt race who come
telling us about a giver of eternal sleep.
and the most important thing of all, we will die.
another’s eyes’ world will open and the trees, they
shall go on exhibiting their works: syllables of
uninterpretable beauty. gently the seashores will go,
another girls supine breasts rise and fall for you
in the night light. love remains neither what we know;
nor what the magicians assert. the lucky ones
the gods need - their lips will be gilded and
in storms, they find their crumbs of calm.
the book was falling apart from your
reading of it. a little adoring destruction.
my head was as heavy as galaxies
i wanted the seashores the mountains
the midnight to open so that you could see
this undivided light above
how light the raindrops’ contents are
how gently the earth touches us,
they seem to prefer us to linger in this
moss green seascape draped in velvet….
Heidegger must be right, Being truly exists;
and nothingness? that will be left for poets
to intuit. i only know that the moment you try
embrace me, we are smeared by stars.
luminous milky sky and summer winds passing through
the eleventh floor. you alone know what my face
hides, a face i didn’t know could be beautiful.
summer golden and ill-adorned
i wanted to hide within myself so deeply
that fortune could not find her hands
around my throat. i don’t know how the moon
always finds her courage to step outside
on nights like these, with all those
small blasphemers howling out her name
from leaf to leaf, ignorant of aquinas.
for all their faults, they seem more skilled at
accepting eternal recurrences of the same event
than i am. they always fall in love and
put up no resistance.
These are the principles of harmony and counterpoint; they have nothing whatever to do with composition, which is quite a separate activity.
but that was the way to another life.
she wakes as the founder of a still
rocky plain. her long coat flowing, her hair
moving like eel grass, or seaweed
in a shallow cove. thoughts drifting in and out
of rooms into the open air.
she rises and falls
sways further, and
further away each time.
o the things i drive her to, and
call her back from. my thoughts
always floating like dark balloons
in my sleep, deep and fecund.
she arrives every now and then
to help me, reappearing like
an avatar. a naked avatar, laughing
and obscene. dressed in a green
wrinkle of seawater, lit by a huge moon.
i can finally see the spring again,
past those unloving men who taught me
how to love. the earth grows red with poppies and
overnight came summer! all because, long and
peacefully you looked at me, enquiring about my sorrows,
never speaking of your own. tenderly you stroked
my shoulders. i remember your looks on those
evenings and the way you pointed us home, like a lighthouse.
to our house a little away from the road.
we will rule each other wisely, won’t we? and build great
cathedrals or small shacks filled with water and sand
along the peninsula, the kind dark seas.
full moon over oslo in the middle of february, and
i have so little poetry in me that i’ve settled for writing about
writing instead, and how it bums me out. i wanted someone to come here to
show me a holy something; a peach or a lilac branch,
give me permission to think of bears and misbehave for a while.
i can’t do it by myself. i mean, i’m ¼ genetically kite i think, i need to be
carried and dragged and propelled and so on. right now i seem
to have caught on something (i hope it’s a mint tree) and i wish
more than anything to have inherited more kite-grace.
thinking about having a peat bedspread (i’ve even googled that
the other day) makes me remember the way i felt when
i put my feet into the marshes, and the feeling of that memory makes
me all fuzzy inside. it’s a scandalised kind of happiness, you know,
like shit, can i just get away with that? at the same time
i sit here wondering if there is a poem in fingerprints and
shadows of the moon. some kind of b&w, 2d poem, that’s
embarrassing & beautiful. it will be weird
but trust lives by its own impossibilities.
it will be so weird.
I
they were right when they said it began with a song, sung by not-entirely-unholy muses. they, the soft footed ones, who bathe beneath the flush of our imaginings, somewhat like a waterfall. a place where nothing is ever over. people come from all over to witness this, an event both unsurpassed and continually going over the edge. this is us. this is how it began, starting from out there -
II
all hours claim dearly, this moment. the meeting of Nothing and Infinite. in this region that is only ours, lips and eyes portended a limit - and the spectrum of the sea. thus the muses began to sing of an opening and closing, the creation of the Great Chasm, into which the infinite fell
nothing is like this world. near time, we meticulously formed a new thought: swim. it must be infrangibly lonely, yet smooth and held in a way that requires no senses. in swim, there is only one wish, the wish for a strange sky to shell our secrets.
the growth of this chasm continues today, with the expansion of our universe. with the million copernican revolutions that continue to bombard our knowing. that time is relative, that quantum particles can be in one space and not, that space is curved and colours do not inhere in objects themselves but in the chemical transfers in 2.8 pound of electrified pate, creates a space between what we know and what we ‘know’. so the muses must continue the song, which is the only abstraction to our own moments of knowledge
III
was it then that wine came into it? or just the first inkling of something dark, sweet, silent? whispering vague promises of completion? in the long history of divinities, this was the first aesthetic away from devotion. the falling into eros.
yes we drank. we drank into blooms into sky burials into broad paths and we were still thirsty for more. time saw our greed and began its ransom of us (and so it followed, that all children will be born to ransom their parents). how could the boon be paid? with sex or water?
it overpowers the mind the thoughtful counsel of all the gods and of all human beings in their breasts. between our teeth a barren sea seethes with its swell: the mingling in love with Erebos. having bedded with Sky, you gave your seed onto my tongue and i began to speak. of these things i was told from the beginning, of these things we were born first.
IV
nature herself was in love with us and gave us no freedom. standing motionless at an angle to the universe, i saw this as crisis. i was unready for the unconditional and thus began the great hunt and capture of freedom - the going across and downgoing.
but you draped the clouds over your shoulders to push it into a hidden well. you said, there lies the infinitely free, inside the watery well. and here i am. you may have anything you wish, but not at the same time. how we began our exploration into the either/or then, and ….
o how i loved you then. your voice that sends all the birds aflutter. i enclosed you with many arms and spring arrived smelling of jasmine.
full moon on the second of January.
eyes that do not turn or close.
it rises over the ferns and the
sheaoaks on the harbour
pencilling in the edges of the woods
like a face without a body
or a body without wings.
we lay in our cabin counting the
preys of a nearby bat
by the speed of its gleeful
echo-location, its rush and
flutter of wings
in the mild rain.
it cannot see us, down here, under the
haul…though i can’t be sure.
waiting for dawn
the neutral angels are guiding these constellations
towards an ethical beauty, a mountain so lightweight
it can only be described in scent. just like those women
who love you, slippery as fish and silver. here and now
they tell me of sorrows of an unknown generation,
from the tarmac, from on high.
darkly the grey-gold of your pupil enters into love,
i managed to steal something of you. i say:
wherever you are it is november; springs seasoned
by verdant lichen and elegies of the jutting rock.
what i ignore glows in you
regardless it glows.
i was born to belong nowhere,
to walk along rocks, waves,
the ether of luminous plankton
upon the bed of the sea.
i existed here before this day broke
over you, untouched like dew.
but the sun rises and i am of a new language
re-establishing verbs with proper heart. right hand
over my breast, i fetch coffee and
yoghurt while you read the news:
“Hyacinths will save us”. the earth
must love us after all, in diamonds and in coal.
to paris, like a sea creature taken
by the wind, then snapped back.
the hidden sun here knows not
my hotness for earth, which i keep
closed and secret.
you, who are so believable,
eavesdrops on all the languages,
tangible and intangible. you who hold the
infinite pace that spreads, and spreads.
like death or Rodin’s garden in winter.
like your slow breaths in the night,
such faint music. how to transpose it?
in what time and which key? better
to let the silent stay, i think, and keep it
as a strange&wild phenomenon in the
middle of spring, disguised as rock or
a climbing scrub. mute like the hours.
‘love’ is not. ‘eternal’ is not.
you do not obey to meaning.
