Vacation

I'll be away in Ireland on vacation until October 1st. Take care.

Poem

One Forms to Feel You

The clock tower watches me wander
around the center of the city
in the clinging heat of late September.
The tower glows in sunlight, leaves
shadows as black as the inside of an eyelid.
My breath collapses in the parched air,
dirt and dust settling on the cobbled street.
I stop to reset myself in a café. Red wine
crackles down my throat and for the first time
I smell the windless ocean, hear the murmur
of waves. The clock tower chimes
at the hour. In the waves of memory
and heat, I see you arrive and the tower
shimmer and lose all linear shape. You
wave to me as if you have known me
all of my life, “Se você é mais do que
minhas mãos podem sentir; Se você
é mais do que eu ousei ter só pra mim…”*
I sniff my wine, take a sip. The tiled roof
of the tower falls away like fluted scallop
shells, the plaster walls melts away
like cream cheese. The clock tower’s face
rolls back and forth as if in an earthquake,
leaps from the tower wall, zooms and soars
above the city like a flying carpet disc,
stopping only for me. I grab the hands,
my dark red lips kissing the wind
then the face of the clock until we rise
over the city. It is a fast ride, a slow spin.

*From ‘Mais’ by Cáh Morandi

Poem

Inside Out (pra Cah)

1.

Your hair tosses
in gusts of wind
with the white backs of leaves
and the hair of my limbs,
some storm must be rising.

Your hand tosses
the pen across the room,
frustrated, blocked, unable
to love well
at all
or what you write.

Your mind tosses
thoughts, memories, moments
back and forth,
adding and subtracting
into a null set.

Your heart tosses
its walls in and out,
in and out
and your hat into the ring
which you chase in the wind
all the way to Pamplona
to have it stampeded
inside out.

Your soul tosses
back and forth between lifetimes,
trying to catch glimpses
of you
and others and any fears
yet to discover you this lifetime.

Your body tosses
you and your lover back and forth
in fits of pleasure,
the unmoving need
to sweat against another,
the moving need
to be sweat against
by another.

2.

August, after midnight
your hotel room shakes like an earthquake. You are
awake, someone in the room next to yours
is making love and your room shakes. You hold
your breath and the stars go black one
by one and the moon conveniently
backs behind clouds. Your heart pounds
and your hotel room shakes, someone in the room
next to yours is making love. You are awake.
You hold your breath, the clock
is silent and your dreams forgotten.

August, after midnight, your dreams are
forgotten, your heart pounds and your hotel room
shakes. Passion, you think, is a moving
experience. You chuckle aloud. You are awake
and you make a mental note about the eternal
something or other of things. Your heart pounds
against your chest, the sheets, the mattress, echoing
in the bedsprings, and you breathe into your pillow
to vent exhaustion. The clock is silent
but you know daylight or the couple in the next room
will break soon, you hope. You are awake
and the room next to yours is soundless
except for the rush of laughter. You wonder
what the joke is, hear the words ‘inside out’
and more laughter. The clock is silent and your hotel room
begins to shake again. Someone in the room
above yours is making love. Your heart pounds, you hold
your breath and light the stars, caress the moon.

Poem

Your Desire

Heel to toe,
heel to toe. The space
between strides can be measured
by your shadow on the sidewalk.
Your hands swing at your sides.
You feel the tiny blisters
on the tips of your toes
that never healed, bled
and the nails lost. Heel
to toe you walk the city, the sun
full out on bare head,
sweat dripping off hair
onto neck and back skin, absorbed
into clothes. A child
shoots a rainbow of water
from a toy squirt gun, the cement
a bright, reflected gold, pleased.
A park fountain spits at small kids
dancing in the manmade rain.
An elderly woman crosses the street
without looking, cars passing
around her without stopping.
She wills herself to the other
side, oblivious to threats
and tumbleweeds. No one thinks
nor dreams in this
straight-ahead-
heel-to-toe heat.
Everything is
a thirst.
Nothing real
but your desire
to drink in
whatever comes
your way.

Self Portrait

Poem

Awareness

1. Morning dew

Morning: be.

Apparently
this is how I am to be:
a dirigible’s existence, clumsy
and weightless. Things should
be
just so
as I like them to be.

I am obsessed
with the periphery
of my vision:
what is not there
but was.

I,
not to be
desired; whatever
I am meant to be
but was not meant to be.

My mind
is the slam of a screen door:
eager and exacting, what is
not there and what was.

My soul is
irreconciled with this life.
The light of each new day
cannot forgive the loss
of love in me
each day.

2. Evening falls

Evening: come.

When I was a child
I climbed out of my bed
onto the sepia-colored carpet
and walked out of the house to the end
of the walkway and listened to the night.
I heard only the tumultuous crash
of Purgatory Falls, the water
a steady cascade into a green pool
with a muck bottom, overhanging tree
branches, streaks of pollen and the dance
of waterbugs and mosquitoes. When I was
a child it was easy to forgive and want to be
loved.

Purgatory Falls, Mont Vernon, New Hampshire

Alex

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20723212/

...poor Britney. The delightful Free Press...

Trip Through Your Wire (U2)

In the distance
She saw me coming 'round
I was calling out
I was calling out

Still shaking
Still in pain
You put me back together again
I was cold and you clothed me honey
I was down and you lifted me honey

Angel
Angel or devil
I was thirsty
And you wet my lips

You, I'm waiting for you
You, you set my desire
I trip through your wires

I was broken, bent out of shape
I was naked in the clothes you made
Lips were dry, throat like rust
You gave me shelter from the heat and the dust
No more water in the well
No more water, water

Angel
Angel or devil
I was thirsty
And you wet my lips

You, I'm waiting for you
You, You set my desire
I trip through your wires

(All I need...All I need)

Thunder, thunder on the mountain
There's a rain cloud in the desert sky
In the distance she saw me coming 'round
I was calling out
I was calling out

Poem

The Belief in Eyes

Why do I believe
one of your eyes is exactly
proportionate to the other –
right, left,
shape, size –
an optional illusion?

Each its own conduit
of flights and journeys,
shapes and hues caught
and lost, jagged endings
released in this mirrored
moment and the next.

Without breath, answer,
there is still the right
eye or left, full of anguish
for something lost,
believing I am lost
in there, somewhere, too.

Missing Joe Strummer

I was listening to "Yalla Yalla" by Joe and The Mescaleros just now and
it depressed me that it's been nearly 5 years since he died.

Here's one of their best song lyrics:

Death or Glory

Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the
world
And ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl
Love 'n' hate tattooed across the knuckles of his hands
Hands that slap his kids around 'cause they don't understand how

Death or glory becomes just another story
Death or glory becomes just another story

'N' every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock 'n' roll
Grabs the mike to tell us he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this-and it's been tested by research
he who fucks nuns will later join the church

Death or glory becomes just another story
Death or glory becomes just another story

Fear in the down sex
they say lie low
You say ok
don’t wanna play a show
No other thinking
was it death or glory now
Playing the blues of kings
sure looks better now

Death or glory just another story
Death or glory just another story

From every dingy basement on every dingy street
every dragging handclap over every dragging beat
That's just the beat of time-the beat that must go on
If you’ve been trying for years we already heard your song

Death or glory becomes just another story
Death or glory just another story

Gonna march a long way
Fight a long time
Get to travel over mountains
Got to travel over seas
We gonna fight your brother
We gonna fight til you loose
We gonna raise trouble
We gonna raise hell
We gonna fight your brother
We gonna raise hell

Death or glory becomes just another story
Death or glory becomes just another story

Death or glory just another story
Death or glory becomes just another story

(Lyrics by The Clash)

Poem -Sobre o sol de Toscana

Place

‘The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove
than the hunger for bread.’
-- Mother Theresa

I find the nature of love
bewitching
as any lover
must yet others find pleasure
in each other in a place
I do not know.

I see them:
the young couple carving
their names into the oak tree’s
hidden side, her hand in his;
the elderly couple with the matching
white sailor hats
perfectly still on the park bench,
his head in her lap.

I feel them always
in a constant persecution
that brings me to this
natural phenomenon, this hiding place.
And how do they keep silent
with each other? Are they silent
within? Do they suffer no
turmoil? They leave me
to read, write and talk incessantly
about what I cannot…no,
have not experienced,
always questioning the place love
comes from, goes to
and the silence.

Poem

Monomoy Point

1.

Standing on the point
the dry fragrance of salty summer
beach grass draws me
to its weathered paper-edged sheaths
the way the build and break
of the waves bellowing reveals:
the whip of wind, the murmur
of a motor boat, the scrunch
of red sand underfoot, the hum
of dozens of dragonflies –
a barrage of the invited
and uninvited.

2.

In a boat anchored along the point
the doldrums of openness
and loneness are measured
in intervals of silence – minutes,
hours, whole days – a sobering
stillness except for the constant roll
and clap of the ocean against
the boat and the evolving shapes
of passing clouds: a building, cars,
a baby carriage. And marked by
intervals of movement – the bob
of a deer’s head beyond the lift
of a dune or the frenzy of a dense school
of bluefish boiling the surface
in a savage feeding – that feeds me
with what survives
and the permanence of a companion
at arm’s length: silence.