A Short Report From Mile 30
"We're the only things - leaving religion out of it - we're the only things that know spring is coming" - Jack Gilbert in an interview with Sarah Fay, in The Paris Review
At 10, no thought of mortality yet. His face, uncreased and drenched with talcum powder, flash frozen - how bleary eyed that halogen brightness made him, in black and white, and forgotten in an yellowing album, which no one looks at much anymore, in a far away homeland.
At 20, a night of drunken delight in energy. And chafing at the lines that kept him from Dutch paintings lining the walls of museums in foreign cities, nearly all facing, inwards or outwards,the sea. Also, being unacquainted with the stigmata that is being anointed by a woman's wetness.
Now at a itinerant 30, loved moderately (by few, here and there, and vice-versa), he stands in the woven shadow of a red bud tree in the first flush of spring (the color a woman turns if only one knows how to touch her), and prays for a few more miles, in the course of which he can learn how to, fully, accept gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world, and to bring news back from that distance to this mile.
March 7, 2008; on turning thirty in a Southern spring
My Poems
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A Headland Haiku
A fleet of snow geese brush
a charcoal arc across this
glittering canvas of snow.
Why am I reminded of her
Eyelashes, pointed skywards,
And closed to morning sunlight?
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Confession After The Movies
"I held her and held her and held her,
Convoyed at terrific speed
By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us" ~ James Dickey
His lacerated heart aches to believe, and weep into its withered hands, once again, with the strange pain of daily joy, as it sits at the edge of a bed, in another roadside inn, doubting,
what innocence can be found in this landscape of secret assignations, these arenas of desperate lovemaking between him & Radhika, Radhika & others, others & him? And what laughter born of sly
touching under white sheets (corpses, elsewhere, are carried to their pyres under white) can hold back the rainy night waiting to shred open the ampoules of unloved seasons like it does to the tender buds of spring trees?
Blood hurtles through the opened blisters, a diver deep in the wreckage of years, with their lies and their self justifications, with their oil-halo signatures spreading over the body, a floating garden, if only
now barren.
My Poems
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