Brightening

Space, this implosion—like a word 
with its walls giving way. 
—Breyten Breytenbach 

[Mise en Scene.]

Which face to choose?

Start in the left-hand corner—and speak to it
      as if to a flock of birds
deserting men in their famished quarters.

            Like doodling, the idea,

the need, is to have a beautiful shape,

            a skull that cups the hand …

 

Or start with shoes. In boxes, in graves,

             the left one only; 

one at a time the flowered sandals of children.

Or hands, severed, with the wrist hairs 

            lightly bristling.
Or simply nail the box shut and
            the hand is inside
automatically.
(You cannot speak to hands;
you touch them.
Shoes, you crowd out.)
Children tell the hours until the light
            swings bad at vespers.
Winter opens the air. Each banal instruction
            —Go to the end of the line
            and wait till I count to ten—
is clear, a knife in water—below,
the playground’s bitter primary colors,

            bright tubes and slides.
The children’s voices

            grow shriller, filling

the spaces between branches

            in the abandoned acacia …

and you feel

            you could speak to them,

            that they would even understand

the language of birds.

[But they ignore you.
They pour across the concrete like pestilence,
coiled mufflers unpeeled in a wink,
although it will be weeks before
the windows begin to drip,
lose their waxen resignation.]

It is true that in winter

their cries are sharper.

 

*

[Deep Focus.]

Start with the face before morning.

Kissed off. Crisscrossed with sleep.

Lids puffed with dreams.

The plum lip cheesy in corners.

(This is how we come to ourselves:

first the splash

then the body,

the first gulp of coffee

straightening us into humanity)

By the way of the Middle Passage

I have grown wings.

By way of the Trail of Tears

I have turned pale overnight.

By way of sale of a twelve-year-old in marriage to pay a drinking debt

I came along: medium tall, medium dark.

The face I put on mornings:

smudged orchid petal, crème de cacao,

fragrant dust.

Fingernails gilded, heraldic.

Everything by design.

 

 

*

[Low Angle.]

 

 

I want only the paint:

swirled ridges, crusts of pigment

curling off the lip of the knife.

I want my life to be 

the story of paint, concrete color:

a flying fish so orange, it’s a medallion

cast into ashes. Now I will stop biting

my cuticles and my back will stop aching

so I can paint until the sun comes up;

then I’ll take a cup of sherry to bed

to calm down. I want to lick the canvas,

grow buoyant on turpentine, make love

to every year between eighteen and twenty-five 

and paint each in its own color—

reddening branch, emerald caduceus of leaves

traveling fast over the garden wall.

I want the cerise of the poisoned berry

and the blue eel and the gray of the pebble

you must moisten with your tongue 

to bring out its platinum sheen. 

I want you to be that pebble. 

I want to put you in my mouth.

 

*

[Dissolve, and: Pan.]

I know the silence behind a smile,

the milky introductions, friendships of embarrassment

that exhaust the mind: I mean the mind

either slithers to a stop or veers

toward violins and cocoa.

This is the way of the managerial universe. 

I know how to walk there, sweep into a dimlit room

and locate the hubs of power before

my coat has been taken.

Ah, rectitude.

 

There is something to be said for a flaking croissant,

the contentment of fresh preserves and the correct 

temperature of 

café au lait

. Such happiness

lasts longer than most pleasures.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal said, 

How we feel is how we want to be heard

. I wish

I had said that. I wish I could say that, now.

*

[Bird’s Eye View.]

Step onto the ancient veldt:

kicked-up dust teasing the nostrils

with a gingery whiff of drought.

The melancholic call of the blue-crowned Trogon

who sings only when she sits on her nest.

 

Is this what’s meant by the sublime—

a skimming that shakes the soul to its depths,

a mesh of elegant solitudes?

 

Everywhere, the invisible.

 

Is it sweat or a tear which explodes,

darkens my walking shoe’s filigree imprint?

But there’s no skill to memory: Cry out

     and Echo answers.