|
|
|
Over The Gray
over the gray and blue rotting wood
of rooftops and beyond
snow like a squall of dandelion tufts
black birds on bald branches
push themselves into the wind
a sky of stringy purple clouds
I turn from to face you
what if I knew your secrets?
this present I offer you
the burrow of my body
what if you told me piece by piece
the offense of touch
for memory is fangs in your jugular
what if I knew your secrets and could see your child face
gathering stones in a dirt pile
to pitch against
this death world
the sting and strap of your father's blows
my body and quilt no match
for the refuge of brothers and sisters
gathered in one silent room in one silent bed
twitching breathing tracking for shadows
the narrow strip of light
beneath the door
what if I knew your secrets?
could I smooth and glue piece by piece
the jagged shards of your heart?
The Twins
The bodies weigh less than 32 ounces each
and one is hooked up to mechanisms
that force breath through the lungs and throttle
the heart while the inner cranium spurts blood.
She phones daily. Two hundred miles away
nurses tell singsong tales about the color
of the shit on the diaper bigger than the body.
Doctors speak in bold percentages, yet their
dispatch breeds static. She waits
by the phone. The cremator calls
to sell her on the idea of two for the price
of one. She can't believe his name
is Mr. McHoul. The cry arrives
beckoning her to pick up
the ashes. She and the father cradle
the wooden box over the sand dunes
and empty it. She gets down on her knees
and sucks his cock. They can't have
intercourse as she bleeds and purges
the after birth tissue. The sand stretches
sinking and mounting. Tender cinders
of bone vanish in shadows. In the wind.
Lost evidence. She fingers the inflamed scar
below her umbilicus. Tugs of flesh
and thread. Proof.
Anna
Every evening
the world is created
under the black
and purpled sky.
The glassy prism of daylight
belongs to a child
in China. A girl child.
Searing herbs mar her
torso and arm. Love
potion and proof.
She gnaws at the arid breast
of a woman. Seduced and delirious,
she dares coddle the girl.
In her own hell, she returns
the cawing infant to the basket.
Binds the cloth tight
about the body
to be collected in the rush
of merchants and trains.
She may live, with good fortune,
until evening is created
above her. Our black
and purpled sky, while we open
our eyes to the glassy prism
of her morning. Perched among a flock
of orphans, dwindling
whimpers and rice water.
Vowels
A red, E golden, I green, like sea foam,
O, omnipotent purple, and U blue.
A red like pomegranate, lips, man-o-war,
rust and trust gone to hell. All that is obvious.
E fronds of light, the stratum sky
before my lover departs, walking the tightrope,
lust, a quilt of sand.
I where I drown if I am brave enough.
Because I am a woman. The womb
I return to is vast.
O, the empress, velvet, the wrath of her curls
against your memory. How you contain that.
U is blue, like us. At dusk, tender. In the dark,
the sky is perfect.
Variations on Rimbaud's "Voyelles"
Climax
In Inuit, there are over six hundred words
for snow. Exigent for accuracy,
I want you to know the flourishing moon.
Lily in the sky. Burnishes the stillest night.
The hushed, brisk air.
I wedge my head outside
my window, rest it on the sill.
The bounteous stars, brazen.
Inept adjectives and metaphors.
A night where even six hundred words
would lack the precision
of the world's glow.
Snow Angel
My quilt, a snowdrift,
and you, the mastermind
of snow angels.
How your face stuns me
even in sleep, flawless. Your hands,
tender as narcissus
petals which let go
in the wind. To twist and twirl
your hair and watch you like it.
On the dip and climb of your voice,
I could thrive. Ascend
into the snowy sky.
Curl into the sanctuary
of your opal eyes.
And these raw words
prove the thwart
of being human.
And holding you, the grace.
Tribal Markings
The sovereign pierces his own genitalia
with ray spines, while the sacrifice,
steady, a top of the world, gazes out
past death. The high-pitched yammer,
the craving, coils within the green hues
below. Her blood saturates.
To prove myself, I’d get between your legs
and make you wish I’d avoid your eyes.
Blood let my tongue, glazed and drugged
in pleasure. Mute as a girl, like the time
you asked me to projectile fuck
a stupid, fleshy, fifteen-year old kid and I did.
Bound at the eyes and flailing swords,
this card came up as me. A fortune
like the natives make selling Cola-Cola
six quetzal a pop. I climb Temple V,
the tallest. The Tikal jungle spreads below,
whistling grit, sweat, and thirst.
The gods and goddesses feast
on the humble. Slaves, bastard children,
women. This ritual courses through societies
like blood through an insatiable body. Like a spell
of passion. Our ancestors teem in an execution
so successful that the sun continues to rise.
Stone Itself
Does Atlantis exist?
And the hands of the builders
of Angkor Wat, Tikal, Machu Picchu,
are they chiseled and strong
like stone itself?
Why are holy places cold
and quiet? Damp hands
clasp like stingy merchants
or open to sky in prayer.
Why is my hand so sexual?
A multitude of penises,
tribunes of azure veins.
I pride its threads
of wrinkles, the tender
folds, my life line
.
Engraved landmarks
of survival. Arid wood,
sand. My hand
a hungry mouth.
Blistered and Bruised.
A birth canal.
Quang Duc
His friends laced his body
with liberal amounts of gasoline
while he sat lotus style
not a nerve twitching
and struck a match
on the dusty Saigon roadway
his flesh and bones disintegrate
leaving a mound of ash
unstirred by the stagnant air.
His plea to the divine light
Passively dwelling within each
Body of Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime
Hushed with the absence
Of his own body.
One Person
Up against world
we meld into a silence
so cold it burns.
Our species finished
to a surface reflecting
what is no longer there.
One person got up
from front row center
and walked out laughing.
January 16
Fluttering from the door frames
of each American household
a piece of cloth waves,
"I am fierce and righteous."
Inside, T.V. sets target
in on the warrior president
mightily banging his golf balls
on the green of Kennebunkport.
In schoolrooms, the children
struggle. Snared by hard-bodied
well-spoken white men, they shuffle
together their combat gear.
A sixty-two degree January morning
unnerves me. The sky has vanished.
A madman exists.
Our plugged in Mecca espouses light,
color, radar bleeps. We partake
in the new age massacre. Awake
to a "beautiful day for bombing."
Shards of flesh dangle like bait
worms from torsos. Mutilated toddlers
screech for mothers whose robust bodies
crackle in the chemical heat.
Our children burrow to safety
beneath their quilts. We close
the blinds to the ashen drizzle.
Do we sleep?
Steel
Angel,
your voice a magnet
to my heart.
But a cold demon.
Violin
Violin
child tucked
into the elegant costume.
But the hoe
scrapes the earth
he feeds on.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Child
The child has a smile
swollen like my heart.
Red and wide and wet.
I have three lives
to live
and one child to raise.
The child scrambled
among other children
in a playground of color.
A child and a mother
are one.
A child and a mother and a revolution
are one.
How does one describe
the solace of birth
and the labor of growth?
The child's giggles
or his array of compassion?
I thrash about the park,
the apartment, the laundry room.
Barefoot and cold. Wanting
to find myself.
My child, your clear eye
is the one absolutely terrifying thing.
You wring it out.
Fill the vacant nights. Shrills
instead of stars. Or sleep.
I know the wisdom of scripture,
the worship of the world.
But I know, too,
this child is gravity.
The child grows,
spinning intricate maps
of promise.
At the sight of this child
before a mirror, pushing the black silk
from his russet eyes.
The moans of his first love.
He sweats with fever.
I am at his body. A leech.
A sponge. A river. I reach
for his pungent breath
like a prayer.
I was mother, all through childhood.
I was hungry.
I was with child.
He nuzzled my cheek. My throat.
The sun is rising.
The child must be waking.
Variations
On Wallace Stevens "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Daisies for Kim
To shun the sting
of your father's death
we rode
among the Berkshires.
I. Phone Call
We slept and woke
in night sweats. Rough deep coughing.
The blanket a sponge,
the ashtray spilling over.
I soaked the bed sheets
in the bathtub
where the dye
ran the color of rust
and blood and brewed
coffee.
II. Tender
Motorcycle. Scolding cylinders.
Luminous between your legs.
Remove his helmet.
Little sister.
Kiss him deep.
Grey as sky. Marble slab.
III. New Jersey
We rode. Dipping and rising.
You sat patient.
Vacant colored earth merging
with the dingy autumn sky
and your salt gnarled hair.
You sat patient
while the dangling crescent moon
vaporized.
In murky light our breath
moving in impermanence
moist and glistening
your eyes on the dashboard
glass.
In the cemetery, the air clung to us
like an absent lover.
You wipe your lips.
Cradle baby. Cruel sky
will not absorb
pain like this.
Rain
It has been so exciting
here with you
every one of you
who have come
to bury or dig
rapt in the rhythm
of rain which mingles
with traffic and sirens
and Spanish or pounds
through the forest
and dampens the sheets
like your body
charged with ions
entering a salt air dream
where I wash into spirals
flush into the wells
of your black eyes
Wedding
If I could walk with you
among the erotic slopes
of sand.
Coarse and charred
amid the carnage of erosion.
If I could descend the gully
with you.
Where buffalo grass oscillates
in geometric perfection
as we rise to emulate
the abrupt transition.
Ground and sea
together and separate
in the same tender moment.
The azure sky
stripped of intrusion.
Every molecule quivers
like a memory.
If I could walk with you
on a winter beach.
Seals barking.
Sun bath.
Tidal flats.
And take off shoes.
Feet numb
to get closer
to witness
the nudge and bliss
of the mammal.
The one that lives
in its own skin.
And if I could walk
further still.
Parallel to your vivid stride.
Moments from touch.
An anomaly of trust
and sensual rush and forever.
I pick up a skull
fractured
with grating wind
and the kick of stone and shore debris
and search for missing pieces.
Pinochet
Pinochet cut stomachs open, dumping bodies
into the Pacific where they floated,
intestines exposed to be feasted on by ash gray
albatross who dip from stringy purple clouds,
peck on healthy chunks of flesh. Fresh arteries
glimmer like lava in the blue-green sea.
He is a man of power. Did Pinochet cut the stomachs
open? Vulgar incisions knifed through the lean
tanned bellies. Did the hot blood work
through his porous hands? Who cut stomachs open
and dumped bodies into the Pacific
where the vibrant red trailed heavy
from supine men shocked and dying
into the salty tides off the Chilean coast
to prove Pinochet is a gutsy man
who will not tolerate a distaste
for himself?
History
I was born in a gully
daughter of a nymph
in a sapphire hail storm.
My father, Robert, burned up
the coral sand dunes
in his '84 Toyota pick up
to coddle my contorting body.
He named me hawk.
I fed on beach plum nectar
and rain water.
The twist and twirl
of cousin Tara's skirt
as she tarantelled
a mosquito goddess
through the scrub pine
damp and ghost chilly.
Aunt Susan wove a quilt
of Buffalo Grass.
My mother dis-
integrated.
I seduced a puma
fresh with hunger
the scent of Lady Slipper
and clung with infant grip
to his sleek coat.
We slivered through sand,
dry wood, fir needles.
Our teeth stained blue
with berry pulp,
to the banks of Slough Pond
and lived like wild angels
in water. On land.
I have studied poetry and creative writing at SUNY Purchase and with the late William Mathews at CCNY Graduate School. My first interest in poetry sparked from the beat poets in my late teens. Their unbridled language and subject matter evoked in me the yearning to better understand the construction of poetry. One of my favorite poets is W.S. Merwin. His poetry is consistently calling the reader back into the now of the experience. In his poem “Snow” the speaker of the poem faces his own aging, welcoming his whitening hair as a generous season, not as an end, but as a glorious moment to be celebrated. There lacks an expectant self reflective quality of the past, yet exults the moment of this serene season. Merwin’s poems also speak to the western world’s ambiguous and paradoxical relationship with the environment: The worship and serenity of nature in contrast to its need and greed in debasing its natural resources. I was assistant editor of The Purchase Poetry Review 1991, and have had poems published in “The Prospect Review”. I have done readings at The Nuyurican’s Poetry Café, NYC, ABC NO RIO, NYC, and have headlined a performance at The Telephone Bar New York City in the early 1990’s. I have headlined three readings at The Mews Café in Provincetown, Massachusetts and have also read at The DNA Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts.
It is unattainable to name all of the authors that have moved me emotionally, intellectually, and culturally. I literally kiss my dear books as I end them. Reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes evoked my grandmother, who was my primary childhood caretaker. As I read McCourt’s autobiographical story of his life in Ireland at the turn of the century, I could hear the thick Gaelic brogue of my Nana. While she lived, I lacked the mature appreciation of her random tales of “The Old Country”, Dublin, where she spent her childhood, fatherless and with seven siblings. McCourt’s story resurrected my Nana. The ample amounts of death and suffering experienced by the Irish at the time, and the limited bounties of love, often nestled in an adolescent crush.
Dianna Morton
|
