Ageing
Sometimes I feel like I'm ageing, backwards, i don't know how we can go forth when we're sinking so fast under malevolent ignorance And spring is shining so bewitchingly. When I think of Spain, which I do in my sleep, in my dreams, in my everywhere, I see women in black all clean with ardent faces and a smile below all that plain pain I hear Spain, their tongue-driven voices rambunctiously them. Please dear humanity Do not let them be splayed and Agonized like death clouds again.
Heart
As of now that rising sound Below my neck reminds me of Baku, And Boris my remote cousin. It is that I’m not breathing like I should be. It is like it happens apart from me. I stare and listen hard to that whine. It’s as though I’m carrying Geronimo up high on CaveFighters Hill. Only the lonely would complain and only the lonely will remain here in a vast vat of love of understanding and profundity, a way to live for you and me. Stay away from green eggs and purple devastation. Don’t, like a cavalier, give your heart away to the hawks. As Katherine says in The English Patient the “heart is an organ of fire.” Be sure to keep that organ with another: to cast your lightning into each other’s excited airs.
Some Times
Inspired by The Rolling Stones
“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need”
It’s like I don’t write a poem to explode out It’s like I don’t write a poem to complain in It’s like when I start to hear the call to write I start to float it’s like to float inconspicuous It’s like pieces of time and what’s mine join In a moment of homeostasis overtime It’s like poetry is a sublime coming together. Feast and famine Holding place in this oneness A permanent addition like a mission Which we can make when pieces of time And what’s mine align in homeostasis sublime To be ours for hours making such oneness rhyme.
How Sarah Saw to Herself
Roses
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at night in a quiet room she sank deep into the lights of dreaming, to hold on to what she was finding out about seeing colors, nuances shaping up in the night. Her always wide eyes. Wheezes knocking at the doors of her chest like shutters flapping in a Texas wind. The decisive whack of wood. Even when nobody heard her hear to say the fabric of what she was coming to know to think, When she was all locked up little in those taffeta clothes, tiny buttons and plackets, tight around her. When she was bending her toes around, wriggling them, just to tell how she saw to herself. To remember the smooth spots that she knew she knew by heart but only when she was alone those times fitting into herself while she was in the corner coming to settle into herself. Just knowing how she was in that light of hers darkly, paddling the peeling moments like a sailor and starching the intricate fibers of memory with near collarbone precision. Her voice a feather of tulips in the morning.
There Came This Big Rush
So when and if then, there came this big rush, a rash of factors which took you back to a giant shadow of memory on the waterfront, California light falling and breathing in, then, it was when history was, seemingly sublime, in the kind of closeness we would die for, then, but it was happening, here, now longshoremen big armed talking like veteran labor leaders. Tillie Olson said a Mrs. Dalloway idea, pondering soft. It was all bodies and more, beyond the blue line, blessed. It was people living, bulging themselves. In mass, together, out loud voluptuous: It was real life warm out of the factory lasting like Sunday hotcakes.
The Breath of my Blood
These two years Have thickened me, left me bewildered, High and dry as the debris in an elephant’s eye, Ringing unanswered bells in white hell halls. How I wanted to run again And to seem determined. How the breath of my blood Stiffened and I came to Look nice without my old exotic, That fire in a thin emphatic face, Those lingering lips and know it all eyes, How my feet grow restlessly stiff How I sleep with oxygen How I have gotten permanently Sick dramatically and unrecoverably smitten
It Was He Who Knew
It would be Blake who knew It was the body which made us fair, More than stray stone bullets. His world was so physical His inner light transfused matter Into a moan of joy rushing in To the plenty of us all so physical That each petal of our being Sang itself way before Whitman Blake grew the Cartesian split into harmony. He made us big again, Big in our girth and our worth. He would take the full nine yards of us: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough,” he dared. And he feasted and saturated and wept sublime to encounter what he saw with a naked burly view. His path was not to split body and soul. Nay, he wept the veins and nerves whole.
William Blake, 1813
The cloudy shores of today
If life is now more of an adverb, Participles all stuck in the sun, Wrapped sticky in virus, All we say now is how we see it Not what, since facts died with Trump So verily how we find each other is the final Dusty piece to play for dessert each to each It’s Kafka au lait in the cloudy shores of today.
©2021 Linda Chown
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