I swear I’ll be there for you downstream
where the rocks are smoothed by time.
© Chagall 2017
Tag Archive: time
I’d once written
Why write a sonnet when a scream will do?
and now I am thinking that an opus is unnecessary
if a mere aside can convey ample poignancy.
Such uneven lines but they’re scented. Where is the real?
I remember Mary even through the haze, how steady and rock-solid
she was, I could hug her and nestle deeply there for hours, or days, spent many a lifetime contemplating her most heavenly face and rubbery delicious lips and cheeks and long stretches along the neckline; I need meaning in each moment – I suffocate otherwise. I hesitate to take the time to narrate a deeper story for fear of failing to convey anything and therefore would regret having wasted our mutual time. hers and mine. Shouldn’t we simply abandon our search? Nubile rubbing of the nubs is how angels beget – it’s allowed there within the confines of wingspans, celestial light like champagne ices me pink from head to toe, I’m a garnish to her night on the town, I dance and rock hard like the fourth horn in the section, I am simply sunglasses and quinine water atop bitters and rocks, I jiggle my shoulders in beat sometimes rather than my waist and hips, or sometimes just a nod, a tilt of the head like this – see that! Hear that? Oye! Oye, Marie? The figures are jade, intricately reptilian, self-referencing, Escher-like in their wrap-around. There are older turquoise figures that you would think would be younger. She once made me a hot drink of sweet white maize water and freshly ground cacao, sugar, without chili. I sipped the thick chocolate while she unbraided her hair and rubbed scented balm on her breast. I remember the desire to write and to play music, to create in a world so filled with creation, a desire so intense that it overwhelmed me and incapacitated me such that I was unable to respond with anything meaningful. Ambition birthed and squelched. In her presence I am inspired to leave behind some remnant, an artifact memorializing my having been here, a monument that captures the light of this day, the song of this hour, the perfume of the tilt of the sky, the spray of life from her lips when she cries out in joy, my joy is her.
© Chagall 2017
To fulfill the destiny of the other
without consideration for ever having to fulfill one’s own
made for a far more spectacular life and so we chose it
without any regrets left unconsumed by actuality.
Sometimes it rained darkly in the seams of horizons stretched
like tired eyes across cityscapes, she blinks away drops.
A puddle is a place to dance – we pas de deux, slosh …
slow feet drag through heavy water.
Might I kiss you here? This place on this spot. See how words
convey no meaning at all! Lips, before the fountain, respectively.
Years from now the others will correctly say it’s Dijon
for look closely – see it, do you – the carousel?
© Chagall 2017
I have an odd dynamic with my father-in-law:
He is a 90 year old man but a very new soul, whereas
I am merely half his age but my soul has traveled twice
by thrice his. Our interplays are often quite quirky.
© Chagall 2017
I find I
am torn
perforated
ripped along
dotted lines
Someday
I will
reassemble
sans
seams
© Chagall 2017
Snow, an extended heaven-sent sigh
expresses its passion as a function
of the angle of its fall; precipitation
begat and chilled by the wind, a fluttery
jitterbug afoot overhead. My scarf wraps
twice to warm me, beguiled amid words that
form between flakes, they speak you know –
to warn me there just ahead is a hand
reaches out to embrace but the space between,
the chasm divide is too great, still we blow,
still we fall to the ground, a powder, a mist
slowly wisps away in time, nestled deep in the throes,
in our throwaway wraparound world we propel ourselves
deeper each time we fall, backwards off-stage I trust
you’ll catch me never let me fall,
I would break along dotted lines …
snow from afar
each little star
is snow.
© Chagall 2017
The little horse has passed, still her harness bells summon
snowfalls shared, quiet leas, and the long dark nights of winter.
© Chagall 2017
She loved Frost but was less equivocal about the end,
choosing water over fire and ice.
© Chagall 2017
The light is soft here as if all the world is heather
askance, atilt and askew. I stare at a door ajar
that invites me to slip in now and then, and I do.
I float on a tone, bulbous sound beats against time
measured in gulps, a three-quarter waltz paced regularly
when I least expect it to. I wish you eternal lavender.
Life offers life on the gentlest of palms below the wrists’
hollows so slender and kissable. Cheeks intended for cupping
dimple and provoke the protrusion of lips for tugging, to daub,
pull and pout. The colors around me begin to lose their soft-edge,
sadly. I hear the click of the door lock, not certain which side I am on.
On the down beat I gracefully swoop with torque and suspension,
sinew and skin and blood, at work in miraculous union.
© Chagall 2017
The balloon from her last birthday
I’d left to bob on the ceiling,
over the years had withered and died,
and now resembles a pink snail on
a white-ribbon leash, there
in the corner behind the bookcase.
© Chagall 2017
Alphabet City 