From the series, Japan Poems.
Slices of lives
quartered and drawn
into fugitive impressions
and fleeting spells,
the footfalls of strangers passing,
of ghosts echoing blurs of transit
among street corner edges–
In a world of ceaseless turning,
distance quickens pace,
before being absorbed
into the prevailing plot
and advanced symmetry
of expectant pauses.
From the series, Japan Poems.
The world disappears
in the space between first sip
and still life, adrift.
His native habitat was a window by moonlight. He would crouch there, gauzed in night mist, his fingers always poised upon his chin, as if rigging speculation, or some unresolved quandary, and he’d find me, writing at the kitchen table, when everyone else was asleep. In the beginning I was frightened by his presence, but then she told me he had been visiting her family home since she was a child, he was simply a spectral extension of the house, and all he ever did was crouch outside the window and stare in. It was as if his entire existence was predicated on this singular activity: observation. I was no longer afraid of him. I understood him. Empathized. One night, I was compelled to put down my pen and go outside to approach him, cautiously, with a sense of care. When I got to the garden, he was gone. If he had ever been there at all. I moved toward the window and peered in. I saw him sitting at the table, writing in a notebook. He was too absorbed in whatever he was scribbling to notice me. The privilege of absence kept me at the window for a long spell, a portrait of longing which I could only imagine.
From the series, Japan Poems.
Within the grainy pitch
of the lost highway
we the tellers
traffic with liminal vim
and want
to engage the narcotic lore
of stories found searching
for a haunt to call their own.
From the series, Japan Poems.
To see sharply, with peak resolution,
limits both the capacity
and company of vision–
Imagination’s most supple asset,
it dreaming proof,
dwells in soft focus
on the solitary edge
and cusp of vanishing.
From the series, Japan Poems.
In the hospitable equation
of a bicycle, lighted doors,
and people we cannot see,
a hypnagogic nocturne
forms fluently of its own accord,
begetting incalculable solitude
and lore
to the trespasses of dreaming.
From the series, Japan Poems.
At twilight,
the softly paling into summer plum sky,
sliver of moon suspended like
a bone-white boomerang in the distance,
narrow street courting its void with dignity,
what kind of dream is this
that reminds you there is nothing to do
except savor and cherish
the lucid fragments of this floating world,
its mysterious grammar
and subtext
in sublime accordance
with the prevailing volumes of silence.
From the series, Japan Poems.
We practice intimacy
in scales,
from a near warmed distance–
a concentrated swath of light,
calling us forth,
entreats our internal orphan
to find fugitive solace
in the softly respiring aura
of solitude.
From the series, Japan Poems
It is in these moments,
when the pumpkin orange glow
of the lanterns softens the streets,
and the bicycles lined up in rows
compose portraits of ordered symmetry,
that the night turns in on itself,
and with it goes I,
breathing in the ghost
of life’s passing
to tenderest sublime.
From the series, Japan Poems.
All these arrivals
and departures
gauged to give edges
and form
to the prevailing plot twists
and turns of our lives–
In self-made labyrinths
we wander,
and lose ourselves repeatedly,
if only to encode
marked passages
onto the tablature of time.
John Biscello 