grace #5

staring on a sunlit pond, wet with scissor-kicking frogs;
 
two small pigeons whisper morning grace
above my finger draped lips

regarding several snapshots in a small gallery

These photos, Mr. Death,
represent a startling departure from any previous series, the diversity of which,
over the years
shared the singular quality of an unselfconsciousness.

It is redundant to except your environmental studies;
some metal church chairs and a bloodshot colored coffee cup;
even as they progressed
from utensil portraits through the most tender conversions,
until one realizes how you've both confused and empowered the Astonished
to reveal the most austere abstractions
for concealing enormous pathos;
a cipher of the light which caught that spot inside your wretched intellect,
unteased by the inevitable, reflexive meddling’s
of a mildew-yello'd syntax.

A padlock hung from a chain;
a pig colored pipe and a burnt shack on a beach.
The Vertical series . . . Nights of Madness, swallowing fire and stripe-sleeved Sirens; the world caught on the tip of a pin, unsure if it must swallow itself in pieces
or wholly explode.

These portraits which seduced me with their sensuous violence;
the fetal shapes you poured into the disenfranchised prism glass, still now uncurling in the dimness of your licorice lighted box;
you did not script these things
and simply shared a sense of title for the very confirmation
of their existence.
You were a hunter, I was the cook.

It were a time before the first synthetic invention;
when dance still swept a ghostly stage
like the magnet covered moon; there,
inside its fluid mask, a pair of raw emoting holes;
the soliloquy still years away;

the script now sits in the envelope on my desk.
my fingers roll like drumsticks on the countertop;

words through the half open window;
a voice says, "come to the altar now, come give the bride away."
You are a roiling water on the stove, immortal sleeplessness;
a restless eye;
I am your true friend. 

Permit me time enough to wake from my dull considering;
roll my dense psychology across the round and jagged edges of your newest sentences.
Truth, I would hardly know the lion by its claw, yet here you are;
and I am Sancho, by your side. 
Understanding always comes later to Sancho;
and there can be no truthful satisfaction of this glorious ceremony
(festooned in vases overfilled with ivory lilies
and forget-me-nots )
before understanding.

the egg

 . . . a Russian doll grins on a sill above the candle in my reading room; bright colors stain the eyes and apron, shawl and round babushka on the smooth curved surface of the paper shell.

Was here I learned from Pushkin how the hungry mud devours wagon wheels; from Dostoyevsky how a uniform consumes the soul
. . . from Nabokov, a modern verse, now hung across the carcass
of an ancient melody. . .
all these things a paste and paper doll portend for me.

A second candle, now as useless as the dusk;
a thin red line bent upward, to a smile;
a finger rising from the yellow pages of my book;
a pot of red paint and a hungry brush;
strokes my stubbled chin.

Which one of these things is a clue . . . how will I ever know?
Up there on a dusty shelf, a puzzle sits behind a pair of jet black eyes;
an answer to the number of archangels fussing over Jesus on some tiny pin?
a map to where the line between cruel Truth and morbid Hesitation lies?
A doll within a doll within a doll within a doll?
. . . or empty space?

or does my candlelight prepare me well enough
to know her simply by the wrinkles on her frozen face?

Inside your silly mocking shell there is a scheming calculus;
a diabolic nothingness with a ruby paint-pot grin,
a purple shadow shoved against the plaster wall,
crisscrossed to distraction in some vague yet busy Ukraine scrawl . . .

a hollow'd egg,
inside of which lies far more possibility than chance;
and so I simply watch the purple shadow dance.
A Russian doll sits on the shelf,
and I'm supposed to solve this for myself?

a day

(for you, Emily)

When an image is arrived upon; undressed and caught speechless inside a jar;
when reflected light bounces mad as a fly against a pane of glass, unaware if what it craves
remains just outside of reach
because the ear is closed or the tongue too thick;
when a baby cries or a drunk turns anxious in his sleep;

when a bright day in the country stands menacing in its silence, its deep perspective, its dead silence;
the cows and goats on the grass mere holes in cow shapes and goat shapes
under a shade tree spangled in sunlight, too dazzling to touch.

Is the space out here, from where the music froze;
and where Lots wife, nameless but for this
dissolves into her pale white shell;
illiterate instructions from the lake of dreams and contradiction.

where a young girl cries for help to put her shoes on the proper feet.
Not a sound from there but the light of her small beautiful feet.

Let the confidence of a time before we spoke of Time carry her softly across the field, across the white grass,
to where your eye plays with tricks,
and see in perfect silence that unity, destroyed
in the hushed
ruthless unfolding of the clover.

© Jeff Thomas 2009

daydreaming

A beautiful mid-November Sunday out here
on the north shore of middle Long Island.

The air is crisp but not bitter cold;
the sun unstoppable;

the water is a dark teal stretch;
a twisted drum head of reflected daylight

stabbed by even spaced staccato tips
of white capped waves.

A single cloud above all this floats weightless
like a guillotine

tractatus

people don't want to hear the truth
because they don't want their illusions destroyed    
- friedrich neitzsche


Punch:  . . . but how are you so certain some illusions aren't cemented with the Truth?

Judy:     But isn't EVERYTHING an illusion! And what about Aboriginal Dreamtime?

Punch:    . . .  from Kant to Wittgenstein . . . one wonders how we even stretch these socks across our feet.
Aboriginal Dreamtime is Wittgenstein . .  without the soundtrack;
like defending the Ninth to the other Ludwig, the one who lost his ears . . . (should he be grateful for our effort?)  . . possible to achieve, but only by the forfeit of gloomy Friedrich's sacred sense of Truth.
Faith! I've seen such Truth at work inside the snow globe of a mixed up girl . . . imagine all her truth delivered
absent the illusions locked inside their petty definitions. We may one day find our Truth inside such a dream, but we might also starve.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Punch (ruminates):

I'm told she is a cluster of epitomes, nothing less or more, woven of the braids she twists from integers of sound and light,
from integers of taste and touch and smell and time;
Pure order stretched from Chaos like a comb through sheaves of knotted curls; the private dialogues she scripts to keep the god-head metronome appeased;
a syntax babbling over round and pointed stones; the stubborn river bed
is her I'm told,
just her,
and nothing less and nothing more.

And could not be human would she have no special word for each of these events, these pearls;
and from this Order stretched through wild knotted curls, 
the all-elusive comb against the hoary grains of noise and light, who
spilled a violet shadow-stain onto the virgin page . . . and all who saw it held that it was right,
with just a little something odd about the nose.

But what is Human should the candle be a lightless stick? . . . a page of music absent assonance or rhyme, an arbored crown without a plumb-bob pacing time?
 
To Wittgenstein, could not be Human in the smallest sense,
could not fulfill the requisites of unfulfilled content,
 . . . . .   (for whatever else is human then  an un-fulfilled content?)
and by his definition all she ever stood for is the fine print on the game-box lid;
and by his very definition is confined unto some superficial peg hole
on a cribbage grid,
for which in all her confidence my rosy wild haired and speechless girl
has dressed him up in a soldier's stripes and epaulets in time for tea and make believe.
. . and this
this 
. . . all I know of being soulful in an artless world.

regards

Dear Intolerant,

. . . the inevitable cannot see the obstacle.

 With best regards,
Time