|
|
|
|
I want you to have direction in life. It’s not that I don’t know about loss of meaning, or loss of love, or how that might occur ...
I gave you a bear of green malachite, a round squat pebble, the size of your finger-nail, power of a fist, blue fish jammed in its jaw, an arrow of turquoise tied to its back — carved by the Zuni as a fetish for the hunt.
You gave me a fetish of pink quartz, an archaic image of horse, engraved with a hand, spiral, bird and Kokapelli, dancing and playing his flute,
and as if an omen I dreamed of four horses, round and glossy as chestnuts, their heads resting on a white-picket fence, in fall of evening, suffused in light, shadows lengthening.
The following week we saw them: four horses in the valley of Olema, placid under a vast fir tree. We gave them our apple cores, their long noses pushing into our hands, flanks of close hair warm to our touch, saddles and stirrups laid on the fence.
Yet, these horses are as wild at heart as the horses of myth that charged into hell — took you down to the underworld leaving me above.
She beckons with a saint’s open palms, Artemis from Ephesus, offering her multiple breasts like a clutch of eggs.
A fecundity of tiny animals breaks out from inside her body — dogs with lapping tongues, nervous deer and docile cows grabble under her skin,
rows of prancing horses charge towards us (we imagine how their miniature hooves would hammer us with keen blows)
lions prowl the length of her arms and there are bees settled as if sitting on honey.
So you lie, with your arm around a leopard, limp as a kitten in your grasp, a stag guarding your lair
and I lie at your left side, content. But a wild dog persists in you, the dog that sees blindly with its nose.
Guide me, in this half-known world. Ravening, I will follow the scent.
To see this woman on screen — watch for fifteen minutes her face, turn her head once on the pillow, hair spread out in a halo, muscles in her neck stiffen, eye- lids closed, silence, except for ambient sounds in the room
full of people sat gazing at the shape of her lips change, her mouth opening, appearance of her tongue, widening of her mouth, and after the moment of orgasm, eyes flying open looking back at us,
a smile on her lips, and as Breda Beban says this work is less about masturbation than Van Goch’s field of corn, crows flying overhead, is about agriculture.
I sit in the spill of moonlight bitten by gnats (sipping beer and grateful).
Desert cacti in plastic pots demarcate the patio, the oleander parts its flower.
I can't sleep — you call it a metaphysical yearning, I call it grief.
Next morning he is out there, the owner of this villa, removing every fallen petal and leaf.
|
©
of
all poems featured on this site remains with the
poet |