I am learning,
or perhaps unlearning,
to believe wildly
in the fresh crop
and siege of miracles
that are happening
right under my eyes
every day.
If I fail to see them,
if my self-limiting perspective
narrows into a myopic squint,
that’s on me,
and I shouldn’t blame
the miracles
for my dearth of vision
and lack of imagination.
Outside,
an orange poppy
trembles
when drops of rain
kiss
and silver
its petals.
A child bumbles
along a carpet of fresh grass,
its cherubic face
lit up like a Mardi Gras
lantern
as she journeys newly
into the world of toddling.
A wrinkled hand,
roped in vines
of blue veins,
clasps
another vine-veined hand,
husband and wife
of sixty-four years,
this simple gesture of
you are my home
repeated over and through
many moons, laughs,
and tears.
Gulls bop-ambling along a shoreline
as a fishmongering choir,
the thousand broken azure
fingers of the sea
reaching toward
a glittering bounty of washed-up shells,
clouds as wooly prayerbeds
holding the incalculable breadth of God,
an anchored ballet of lotuses in a pond,
autumn winds turning stray leaves
into golden migrants,
stones nobly
carrying the true history of the world
in their gray silences,
the riotous joy of children
playing in the park,
a religion of its own
with no pulpit
or doctrine required,
that person
passing you in the street,
or standing next to you
in line at the supermarket,
who is you,
how they hurt
and struggle
and dream
and wonder
and worry
and grow scared
and want to be loved
just like you,
humanity
the simple common denominator
which is infinitely greater and richer
than the big-budget, whiz-bang
special effects, spectacle-scope,
my-religion-is-bigger-than-yours
form of miracles
that so many eyes
are turned toward,
breeding the skinned, reflective laments
that our souls, brute
in their divine, unrelenting wisdom
and foresight,
pose to us repeatedly
(sometimes
as inner screams,
sometimes as rippling whispers):
How much you missed today,
my love, there were miracles
everywhere,
right under your eyes, your nose,
at your fingertips,
but that’s okay, today is today
and it’s never too late
to embrace the wild gospel
of revolutionary seeing.
Optional Post-script: After you finish reading this, play the song “You Sexy Thing” (I Believe in Miracles) by Hot Chocolate, and wherever you are, the car, your living room, your office, the supermarket, commit a simple, joyous act of revolution and start dancing.
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized
|
Tagged dance dance dance, dreamscaping, i do believe in miracles i do i do, John Biscello, love is real, miracle-crop, poem, the revolution is here and now, the school of unlearning, Walt Whitman was a badass visionary
|
All the merciful Marys
gathered
at the brisk pool
of light
and through
the silvery meshes
of tears
recalled
the angels
to mother
the favored arc
of true grail
and unflagging love.
I haven’t
been sick like this
since I was six
or maybe nine
that deceptively mild
hazily pleasant
heartbleating ache
and motherseek fever
that takes you
to that tender place
of breezy white flags
and euphoric yield
and there, you,
the fever-softened six
or nine year old
is inspired to climb
the honeyblonde vines
of a girl’s pigtails
up
and up
and up
into that secret attic
so nourishingly dark
and quiet
where you cloister
in a nook
and allow your fingers
to register the heart’s Braille
by rowing across
the musky, yellow pages
of books
harboring timestained
print
pulsing
like dollops of viscera
and beads of skin
beneath
the ginger marvels
of your touch . . .
And you stay there,
just as you are,
a future child
of no tomorrow,
a purveyor of dark, trembling matter,
and golden drifts of snow,
you stay there,
quiet, happy,
unfinished,
somebody’s ink
bled through
the slow fever
of dream.
Where words fail
touch
registers
the seismic heft
and molten seize
of hands-on
earthquakes.
I would like
to get
to the place
where I am no longer
writing poems
about you
but rather
printing them
in rabid cursive
directly
onto your skin
with the sharpest
most inviolate
part
of my tongue,
tender sketches
wordless
in their braising arc
and flush.
I kneel
before her
and begin
to wash her feet
slowly
in the silver blood
of crushed pearls
and upon my cheeks
can feel
the delicate papery
drizzle
of peony petals
which she sheds
as if garden
to the moon’s weeping
hymn
and star-fed choir.
She wrote
as if webbed viscous
bits of her soul
got stuck to the words
and so
you got to feel
the raw organic
matter
of her dreamlife
and lush
panting inner
delicately charred
the sort of hunger
that cannot be faked
or taught
only risked
I am here
sitting
under my favorite
olive tree
in the park
the one with
craggy grooved
armor for bark
and eulogic boughs
for arms
and the leap
between the thought
I could be in ancient Greece
to
I am in ancient Greece
is not far at all
and I thank god for imagination
as I soon forget myself
and watch a hawk
ghostgliding
across a wooly pride
of albino lion
clouds
while in the near distance
I hear
prairie dogs
popping off
like five alarm
squeak toys
and I am here
nothing more
summer in my throat
and in my eyes
and ears
I am here
a privileged
witness
enjoying an embarrassment
of free riches
beyond mortal claim
or measure.
I tell her we need three days, alone, uninterrupted, in a pink stucco motel.
She giggles. Why pink stucco?
I don’t know, pink stucco is what I see. It’s you and me and the motel with the pink stucco exterior that looks like something out of Candyland, bubblegum pink in some places, pale ruined pink in others, and there are plants outside our room, and one is hanging from a rafter, I think it’s a geranium though I’m terrible with plant-classification, so for all I know it’s a ficus or a spider-plant–
You’d know a spider-plant–
Would I?
Yes–
Okay, so then this plant that’s definitely not a spider plant is hanging, and its vital green color wonderfully contrasts the pink stucco–
Where is this motel?
Good question. Maybe Flagstaff, maybe Malibu, maybe that locationless place I dreamed of last night–
Locationless places are hard to get to–
True, but not impossible–
Six impossible things before breakfast, she chimed, what had become our mantric refrain of an inside joke.
So, she continued, we’re in our Flagstaff Malibu locationless motel room, and . . . ?
And we stay in that room, for three days, alone, uninterrupted, and tend to each other with inspired vigor and unrelenting attentivness.
I think I like this motel, continue–
The room is our private, shared womb, you understand? We strip ourselves of our histories, we shed malignancies, sing our deepest bones, exorcise curses and haunts, we bare the pinkest of ourselves, the pinkest griefs, the pinkest wants and desires, it’s that safe place where innocence has a chance to ripen, flush, tremble, to be itself, fully and wholly without all the fucking inhibitors and cancers that force it back into its cocoon … we will exhibit delicious honeyed sensualism as we give Eden a make-over, because we will be, for the brief time that we are in the motel room-womb, the first and last people on earth, we will be nameless, just scintillating conduits, yes I threw in scintillating there because I know how much you love that word–
I DO love that word, I love saying it aloud–
Well, we’ll say that word and all other kinds of word aloud, we’ll live through the words, aloud, real-action, live-wirey, word and flesh will become one, biblical shit like that happens in the room-womb, and you know what else?
What else?
We will set the machete butterflies free, and they will whirl around in a kaleidoscopic siege, all sorts of bright, bursting colors, and while we make slow, holy love they will flutter above our heads and bodies like prayer flags and colorsoaked amens.
I stopped, my heart pumping, my fingers twitching. She took in everything I said, her eyes sighfilled, lips slightly parted.
You know, I clasped her hands in mine, at first you captured my ego. And then my imagination. Now my heart. You do understand that I’ve fallen in love with you?
No you haven’t, she was superquick to dismiss, though in a sweet voice. You’ve fallen in love with an idea of me, a poetic projection and fictional facsimile inspired by the flavor of my characteristics.
Wow, that was impressive. All in one breath. Almost sounded ready-made.
She smiled, I smiled, then I said–Okay.
Okay, what?
Okay, if you say it’s that, then it’s that.
She lapsed into one of her famous silences, lips pensively pursed.
She laser-gazed into my eyes and blew through the back of my skull, each of its hidden rooms lain to fiery waste by the arson of her gaze, and I, too, became famously silent, a couple of celebrity mutes were we.
Then I saw an unbroken tear-line silvering over and down the ridge of her cheekbone, a glistening slash that extended down her cheek and jawline.
I suctioned the side of my face to the side of her face, rubbed my dry cheek against her wet one.
What, I whispered in her ear.
Do you mean what you said, she whispered back.
Yes. Pause. I don’t know.
I don’t know isn’t very reassuring.
I know. But there’s also the yes. The yes came first.
She weighed my words.
If you mean it if you really mean it…
There, the rest of her words were washed away in a torrent of tears.
She shook. I held her. She continued shaking. I continued holding her.
I’m so scared, she said. So so scared, you don’t even know.
Me too, I said.
I’m a coward when it comes to love, she said.
Don’t worry. Love makes cowards and fools of us all.
You too?
Me especially.
She began laughing through her tears. Making her laugh was one of my favorite things. It gladdened my heart.
She sniffled.
Is my nose running?
No, it’s still on your face.
You’re such a smartass, she pinched my cheek.
It’s one of the reasons why you love me, right?
Yes, she gently concurred, it is one of the reasons.
And no, your nose isn’t running. But your eyes are.
Love usually makes my eyes run, she laughed brightly.
Love IS notorious for its relationship to tears. But that’s beautiful, right? Because water makes things grow.
Yes, that’s true. You always have such a beautiful way of looking at things.
Trust me, I don’t. That’s just, how shall I say: your poetic projection and fictional facsimile of me inspired by the flavors of my characteristics.
Fucking smartass, she kissed me. And then kissed me again.
I pulled her in close, said–So, pink stucco motel, three days, alone, uninterrupted. What do you think?
I think, there she paused. I think locationless places are very much worth discovering.
Meet me
in that rarest
orchid crawlspace,
that parting cloister,
where we could
fuck the fiction
out of one another,
and leave behind
a glissando of puddles
in real-time.
