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.

Poem

New York Absolutes

Cloudless night and I open a window
to hear the ocean. I am warm; I have had
a dream of you. The stars are
countless as flour sifted on to black
velvet. I see the Little Dipper
and now and then meteorites shower
over the water to the northeast.

One star blinks.

And from it I measure all others.
This Cepheid is my reference point;
the magnitude constant night after night.
I wonder what my eyes refract,
what they reflect:
the meteorite streaks, the geometric
Ursas, the pulsing star which draws near,
spawns other lights, red and white,
and roars over the house
towards JFK International Airport.

No new star
or plane blinks in its place,
only the void
of my loneliness. I ponder
the finite set of variables
I sought answers from and watched them
fall away into some ironic cloud
that is no black hole
just a separate flight.

Beauty is in the eye (and ear) of the beholder

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1772684

Poem

Lovers and Aliens in Tijuana

“…for charity after all is only a word.”
-- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

1.

The full moon was there above the Coyote
Mountains and asked, “What have you got to say
for yourself?” Celina was there
and her friend Brad but I was the one
who loved her: that was what I had
to say for myself.

2.

Con la luna solamente para luz,
we had to feel our way along
the concrete building, the walkway into Mexico.
Halfway across, footsteps thundered
all around us in the dark;
there was nothing to hold on to.
Out in the border fields the moonlight glistened
off the water in the gullies and trenches.
I thought of postcards received from friends
from their faraway places: Venice and gondolas,
the Seine river and Paris park benches,
and an Alaskan lake surrounded by mountains,
waterfalls and streams where you could only
enter by plane or bird.

The sound of footsteps passed into nowhere.

3.

In town we walked past a line of taxi drivers
who would take us anywhere
for a dollar, rows of lawn statues for sale,
and inexpensive leather shops.
Campesinos, their heads bowed,
milled the alleys and streets
with their eyes fixed on us –
us gringos.

I stopped at a strip joint.
Celina shook her head and grabbed his arm,
yet I was the one who loved her.
The moon’s reflection blotted out the head
of a naked, Rubenesque woman on a poster.
I thought of all my distant loves:
my sixth grade teacher, Ingrid Berman,
and the picture of a pretty woman’s face
in a wallet I bought for my Father
when I was nine.

4.

In Rosalita’s bar there was only a bartender.
In the corner a TV showed
American football.
Celina and he sat together, kissed,
held hands and whispered things
I could not understand.
But I was the one who loved her,
a abrazar y besar la luna.
The salt on the rim of my Margarita glass
stung my chapped lips. I watched the game
and wondered if the moon would be out
to guide the way home.

5.

A little girl with a dirt smeared face and ragged
flowers in her hands approached our table.
“Cuanto para las flores?,” I asked the girl.
Celina said, “No, you’ll have every kid in Tijuana
in here trying to sell us something.”

But I was the one who loved her.

I looked at the girl – the thin dress, the bare feet,
the brown eyes – I reached for my money.
Celina said, “Ah, go ahead, you know everything.”
But I didn’t. I didn’t know anything at all.

6.

When we left
the moon was behind the clouds.
Y el cielo negro observo nuestro viaje.

7.

Walking back into America
through that cavernous border building
the world separated for me

into those who could love, be loved,
and those unloved:
the two people feeling their way along ahead of me,
the little flower girl, all little flower girls,
and every alien running past me in the dark
bound for some new beginning –
it was all an attempt –

and I, quemada por la luna.
I, alone, but not alone,
who loved only that
which I could not possess,
let the woman ahead of me
go.

sculpture: The Hand of God by Auguste Rodin

Mari in the Hand of God

All that we are…

You breathe and I design
your hand juxtaposed
against the sculpture,
two white, naked bodies
entwined in the marble background.
If you were a statue
you would be these
wrapped figures of smooth
light and dark
curves and sensuousness,
still cold, still hard, defined
in a final design
of expression. And the Hand.

All that we are…

You breathe and I design
a moment in the hand
of my imagination: a careful
sun, glittery sand, pelicans
frozen over slinky waves, you
in a tank top and cut-off
jean shorts. If you were
alive you would be on
a blanket in the sand, toes
curled deep, grains scrunched. And
the Hand.

All that we are…

You breathe and I design
the hand of my imagination
where you are uncoiled,
now warm, now delicate,
sinewy. And sexy.
I write you into this sculpture
of form by Rodin:
the varied interpretation
of a single form, my
desire for you in my hand.

…a shadow that never leaves…

Reversing Falls

The Reversing Falls are better described as the Reversing Rapids. They are a result of the area's large tides (28 feet) and a narrow gorge where the mouth of the Saint John River meets the Bay of Fundy. The gorge is slightly dammed by a submerged ledge.

At low tide the water level in the bay is lower than that of the river and the river flows naturally out into the bay. At high tide the bay is at a higher level than the river and the sea water pushes back up into the mouth of the river, reversing the flow. The combination of this reversing tide and the underwater ledge result in an amazing display of rapids and whirlpools.