"Why,even small change is weighted with
scolding in their ragged voices
of marriage, memory and tombs."
More Perihelion:
BobSward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Ecstatic Permutations
Every night women in love gather outside the window
No one in all the group seems to be speaking--
bLue
In The Garden of Love, Venus, Adonis
Where was the hush of a world brought to a halt
It was a sort of metaphor
Neither the actors nor the audience knew what was coming next.
The snow falls and no one comes back.
But who is that young one, pallid,
Why,
Think of only this:
When on those white and sudden afternoons
Last words
and it is nothing special; coming out is what stars do, clouds,
the sun when it builds up the nerve and then just has to blurt out--
the formless, incompleted loves
amounting to a song.
They had chosen all their colors for this day and they sang
without end and with little apparent meaning.
Yet they do, really, love
understatement 2b
lifted out of its
fall from that hole in the sky.
their own salt hearts, brittling the trees--
and the solitude in that tall vegetation
quibbles with the spirit:
fill and empty, fill and empty.
is self-pity refined to Fire.
Nothingness, could weather any temperature or fire.
It's not one of the realer nothings, only something missing.
This melancholy moment will remain.
Each one's forgotten love was a mirror:
a green countlessness.
disagree over what lies ahead. It is morning.
Anxious, he drops a coffee cup, white fragments at his feet.
The radio goes off and on. The rain
of time goes by. Twilight is but
understanding what is meant
wrongly.
in the middle of the afternoon, a white room
somewhere in the dreamlike, liquid world.
Petite black and gold angels sat on her slumped
shoulders and sang lullabies to her.
suspended in the air; a porcelain
blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The naked light, the crack in the wall,
the lines in the hand foretell the future.
What tumbles through is icy and swift
and holds the sea behind its barrier, the very moment turning numb,
shivering and hoping no one
who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
is cold, but she is patient, waiting for
whatever is in hand to be worked out.
Say, Doppler Effect;
this always grabs their minds. Yes,
she bends a benevolent glance;
it corners like a dream.
Down the road and in the next state,
warily, formally, circle the old bone.
posed never long or nakedly enough?
No one can tell him who his mother was.
So that within each dream is another, remote.
It is intolerable having nobody present
to breathe the smells and the heat.
even small change is weighted with
scolding in their ragged voices
of marriage, memory and tombs.
Once otherwise--
it's over, fallen leaves, forgotten weather.
Just to die!
To deaden the shock.
This is the smallest point in the sea.
to be kind and to forget, passing through the next doors.
bird may whisper, a frog rasp,
wino
hums the steady mysterious
into a trembling, luminous confusion of bright tears,
many a self holds its breath in this room.
The grasping hand
is wrong. Madness is what sparkles.
in broken black and white, a shattered parquet.
None of this is true.
Is there anything earthly that can't be made to rise?
A baffled sun is struggling to come out
and will again, but not today, thank goodness, not today.
_______________________________________________________________ Oratorio By and For the Survivors
Human presence is suggested
A young girl can be heard
A ruminative environment
Projections of water
Silhouettes of former inhabitants
How we daydream
What it means to dwell.
What it means to inhabit,
A girl in a white dress spins and spins _______________________________________________________________ Painted Visions Owing Something To Mystery
The landscape's preoccupation:
Reminding us that
A floating pair of figures
The most legible signs:
A sort of slippage or stutter _______________________________________________________________ The ear recognizes all sounds of pure tone
one wave coincides
the open palm striking
the chirrup
we are surrounded _______________________________________________________________
inseparable from a sense of loss.
The camera obsessively scrutinizes,
struggling to comprehend.
sometimes speaking solo
or catches the eye
surrounded by a cyclone fence.
eerie emptiness
with wavering striations.
suspended in midair at different angles.
Making some of the words unintelligible.
Houses seem less stable
breaking to a rhythm all their own.
become oddly compelling
repositories for thought.
Their faces let us see
a life interrupted--
circles and arrows.
returning to retrieve what we can.
Pushing through sandbags,
trying to understand
splashes and veils of color
long concerned with domestic structures.
What drifts into the ear,
a landscape thick with fog
lapping off the coast.
Effluvia of earth and sea
before they are washed away.
like suddenly being plunged deep under water
to be absorbed by a whirling vortex.
lost in a moment.
still life in the foreground,
cut up and imperfectly collaged,
fit together like warped pieces.
what is nearest to hand
presents as empty containers,
which are so accurate
breathed onto the paper,
bent on reconnecting
with their material purpose.
glimpsed in adjoining rooms:
their elongated outlines
the confounding of masculine and feminine,
each covered with a grid of blue.
We have reshaped the behavior
to meet the wildness within us.
tiny stamped words and phrases
run slightly askew,
the green interrupted with purple;
the paintings appear to separate.
activates the fragmented images,
looking for all the world
like a vehicle of desires.
with the pitch of the voice
the voice utters a prolonged tone
rolls from top to the bottom
the surface of water
sixteen complete vibrations
of a house swallow
exceedingly acute
notes of a piano
obliquely
the lowest whisper transmuted
from the ultimate source
the echo may be heard