“The lamp in the window is the house’s eye and, in the kingdom of the imagination, it is never lighted out-of-doors, but is enclosed light, which can only filter to the outside.”–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
The young girl
noticed,
not only
the one lighted window
in her dollhouse,
but also that its front door
was half-opened.
When she peered
through the glass
of the window
and saw a dark-haired doll,
one she had never seen before,
dancing with the porcelain figure
who was meant to represent her father,
the girl almost screamed
but held it in,
that is until
she reached her bedroom door
and found that the doorknob
was too high to reach.
“You know of course that slowness is the only illumination I’ve ever had.” — Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer
A writer,
fastening his worth
to the tempo of grass,
to the yellow leaves
separating their grief
from their longing–
immeasurable farewells
and hellos
so slow
to burn.
“Once it had been the other way around: one summer, while daydreaming a winter story, he had reached into the tall grass for a snowball, wanting to throw it playfully at the cat.” — Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer
In those chanced
moments of supple reverie,
when the seasons blend
and merge
in hybrid fluency,
and you find
the fugitive words
dancing from your pen
to annoint a page
your confidante
and vouchsafe,
then, and only then,
the ceremony
of a slow reckoning
toward most treasured intimacy.
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is, itself, the greatest of our miseries.” — Blaise Pascal
Oh, distraction,
you paradoxical bastard–
Sky laughs, stays open.
“I’d woken up early, and took a long time getting ready to exist.”– Fernando Pessoa
In the early morning, a yawn
brought tears to his eyes,
and then the agonizing consideration
of his metaphysical wardrobe,
and how he should appear to himself,
or to the mirrors held up
in the back of his skull–
Breakfast,
he crowed loudly
to no one,
yes, some buttered toast
and good strong dark coffee
before attempting anything
to do with the management
of self
along remotely intimate
psychic edges.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star” – William Wordsworth
Once upon a star,
lyrics mated with the dark–
Memory was born.
“Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.” – Joseph Campbell
Brokering
the truest gold
from the radiant core
of melting mortal want,
your life
is the poem
and metaphor
upon which
a course
is carved
and set
with infinite regard.
“After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice, than it is to be born once.” – Voltaire
On
the slow
winding
backroads
to heaven,
the soul–
burnished, braided in ash,
given to fits of symmetry,
plunged into plagues,
stuck with knives
in a circus fiasco,
hitching freights–
just keeps on going and going,
cycling through a gateless opera of lives,
herald to its own bask
and choir,
birth and death
but arbitrary checkpoints
in its endless assumption
of wonder.
“Gnossienne: A moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you because ultimately neither of you has a map or a master key or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.”–from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
There,
in the unfinished attic,
where books
have gone unread
for god knows how long
and collected the skin of dust,
you wish to discover
the story that will serve as the key,
or perhaps procure a time-bitten
map from beneath a loose floorboard,
something
that will grant you the means
to travel from the attic to the basement
and back
without moving an inch–
You,
unsure as to whom
the attic belongs
(is it hers? is it yours?)
prepare to court
the pregnant dark
in what may amount
to a confession
or tryst
that no one
will ever hear about
not
in the light of day.
