The Bones of Bashō
Do you recall the year everyone
became a poet? I
learned to measure my speech in iambs
(pentameter mostly
finding this quite natural really,
akin to freeform but
without the occasion descent
into chaos). In truth
I prefer Japanese poetic
forms (always have), prefer
the brevity that seems metaphor
for an entire land
and its people, who are themselves small,
drink from small sake cups
in small houses, and dance in short pink
sakura rains. Bashō
could've been Emperor. I study
the ghosts of excisions
left by his pen, pledging fealty there,
and in an age of free
bandwidth and struggling to impress
the (il)literati
by quantity versus quality
(you forget the Super-
Size-Me rules?) I hide my loyalty in shadow.
Just as we've managed to
whitewash Jesus of Nazareth from
that toasted chestnut skin
and brown spiral curls a Jewish boy
would've had a couple
thousand years ago, so do we praise
poetry born of pen
pricks and closet away our slivers
of truth...so do I speak:
ordinary iambs disguised with-
in the bones of Bashō.
on Being Gentle
Sitting beside my grandfather, young
and impressionable,
I watched as he made morning biscuits,
learned how we treat those things
as yet unformed. Calloused hands kneaded
dough clouds with delicate
gestures, coaxing their chemistries into
angelic loft. Feathers
from cherubs' wings could be no lighter,
and surely the gentle
flourish of flour atop patted mound
mirrored his gallant match
striking the edge of tinderbox and
swooping to cigarette
tip. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
and come now the rising
of fragile perfection. Spotted hands
capable of men's wars
turn the after work to temperance,
and, through him, this girl-child.
Opus 1, No. 11
I feel vacancy sliding inward,
the smell of old hymnals
and wax that never cools lingering
in the hollows. Fingers
and their tips tap buttons to release
memories like Jacks in
boxes, reading yesterday in the
Braille of flesh pressing
closer than the Holy Spirit. Is
the psychology of
need the thing we come to feed or to
wash away? That grey fear
lies like the pulpit - sorry, puppet -
and I've lost the strings that
keep me dancing. Father, on your feet
you condemn these sins brought
into your house. I can't find the dark
safety, confessional,
and that place where absolution falls
in tiny beads across
the scarred floors of my soul. A good thing
the voyagers and fools
haven't yet spotted where we store those
for safekeeping. I'll take
what small victories land within these
solemn fingers; guarding
absences like seats saved in high school
cafeterias or
virginity reclaimed and gifted
as the new moon passes.
Opus 1, No. 13
The sum of these moving parts tricks me
into believing that
the whole may be other than pieces
counted. Among shifting
kaleidoscopic images, I
search for a static frame:
past, present, future coalescing
in some immortal grief
or perhaps only the scalpel of
a bored god and her art
full of contrivance. Ghosts leave so
slowly like scents of perfume
clinging to old letters and tiny
hope. Such a fragile mechanism
we tender to others,
this belief in a thing crafted from
blood and bone and stardust
and its ability to result
in the mating of souls,
and in that bright moment all we are
becoming all we could
be. Quiet now, angels are singing
and I shall count no more.
Opus 1, No. 16
I passed a long night, spending minutes
like pennies as if they
would somehow fail to tick into hours;
I always regret them,
the hours lost to sleeplessness and days
following. Fog occludes
what thought I might possess, and I end
up prone to tears. Running
from daytime truths seems harder in the
dark; hearts beat with a more
tender rhythm under Morpheus'
watch. Now how love affairs
with our vices shield the soft under-
belly of attachment...
better than the confessional or
confessing with our knees
spread. I mean bent. Don't mind me; I've had
too little rest. Making dawn
as welcome as arrest once hunger
and filth begin to wear
on a fugitive. We lie burdens
like baggage long meant for
disposal in corners we can't reach
until the nights we can't
sleep, and there's no god to help us then.
In nomine Patris,
I'm a saint waking just as you dream,
hiding unquiet flaws.
∞
I once kept an old compass — less from
necessity than some
obscure affinity for true North.
A compass does not lie,
wanting always to be near that stuff
whence we all happened once -
the bellies of stars - and I wonder
if that’s why your skin glows
when I draw near, like the mad needle
of a frail compass that
forgot its use ’til called to service,
and I think, yes, that’s it.
You light with the dust of ages past
skating beneath your skin,
calling like to like in mine. Heat blooms;
the nuclear fusion
of some extragalactic novae.
And who needs a compass
anyway as you move beneath my
surfaces like a prayer?
Noted
I watch the girl-child scratch out notes,
virgin pages seeing
more action in a week than I've seen
in a decade. Touched by
Mnemosyne, she has the gift. I
love hearing her; watching,
I note that all great scores are tragedies,
offerings of love
unabating and unrequited
or losses unassuaged.
I'm reminded of the cats and
the sacrifices they bring
to lay at the altars of threshold
and slippers. Mice and birds
give up their tortured ghosts to stare
with vacant sockets, footless and
wings broken, at the bottom of my
rubbish bin while I praise
felines for fealty. They are hunters
who seek only to please
like the girl-child, who strikes bright chords and
dark twins. I wonder if this
is how empty highways feel - longing
hidden between the bars.
The Feminizing of Race
In this southern house with its southern heat
and humidity, we are three white girls
with Afros. We look close enough to some
privileged slave brought to the Master's bed,
her granddaughters slipping between white legs
into the light of being. Another
foremother may have passed on the halos
of wiry brown nimbus; her eyes spoke
some ancient secret in an otherwise
blank face. Starched lace collar. Heavy cotton
wedding dress covering skin colored brown
like my morning coffee, warm and awash
with the clay of this land. She is native,
chooses a white husband and though he is
poor, her sons are born free and theirs after.
A hundred years on I fix morning curls,
the product of pomade, the oil from some
sub-Saharan tree, and convoluted
genetics. Incomplete dominance, it's
called but I skip the lecture in favor
of saying, "Just don't brush it. Please." We are
a house of white girls with Afros not so
much the woman-child with her sleek
Aryan blondness, the recessive blue
eyes and pale Germanic skin. She is by
definition something akin to pure-
bred stock, recessiveness requiring
as it does homogeneity, while
the rest of us suffer the expression
of our painful past. A student once shared
a story in class. Written by a black
woman and called "White Women, We Don't
Want Your Tears," it offended me if only
because I know you better than you wish.
Revising Histories
Mine is the land of clay stained forever
red, a just below the verdant surface
wet earth held together by the blood shed
from our history. We do not say slave
or Ghigau, choosing to irrigate
truth like driving piles for flag posts that stand
unadorned. Vini. Vici. Vent. Only
this is not Caesar's land but the land of
Viking raiders and Celtic kings exiled,
the wild nativity of their kindred
oceans from ours. And yet we do not count
the prisons of princes among other
dark helotries. A slave is still a slave
regardless the shore on which he's conquered
or the master he serves. Ever have we
all been shackled to someone or playing
in the ignorant sands of eminent
dominion. Over my land ripe with fruit
smelling of summer and things the ghosts of
mothers and generals will remember
even if we don't, gray skies hold heavy
clouds pungent with coming rain, but there are
no flags to bring inside. I wonder if
old would be Pictish chiefs miss theirs.
Yesterday I passed a 200 year
old church and thought: even Sherman kept you.
Moonchild
I have dark hair and a mouth too wide
for submissive kisses,
eyes best kept veiled lest truth peek out
into waiting voyeur
orbs. I could pen an expert treatise -
Enigma: Origins
of Self-Defense Behind the Skilled
Employment of Cosmetics.
I like my masks and the comfort of
anonymity. Safe
sex doesn't always mean condom use
if the heart is better
kept within the fortress of one night
stands with no names exchanged.
There is power in a name. Mine
requires high level clearance
and signatures in blood. And triplicate.
And a firstborn heir
during a waxing crescent moon. Leave
me be during the full
or don't, but I can't bargain the price
nor discuss its later
benefits. For what shifts the tides
blindly commands more than our tears.
Every Ending (and none)
I learnt why women weave burial shrouds
meant for the coverage
of their own bodies; their hands, younger
and less experienced
(in theory) than those of their elders,
would perhaps perform work
of (in practice) lesser beauty, lo
tho the years bend themselves
in kindly dispensation towards
old age, and none can say
when the last knot be tied. I could spend
untold years in ardent pursuit
of perfection; measuring head to toe
and embroidering
the flowers of my narrative,
but women no longer
stitch the cerements of death, bury
themselves in Bloomingdale's
suits of lavender tweed (amethyst
earrings, first drawer right hand
side) with precise bidding on playlist,
embedded homily,
and what to serve at the wake. We are
given to directing
social affairs (women). Bury me
on Lavender Mountain
and think no more of me, but before
that, when I grow old and
frail, wrap my living bones in lace,
a gentle touch with strength
bearing rare force, and I shall recall
the softer touch of love.
Ambit
She had a habit of speaking in
keen (parentheticals),
not so much deceptive as streetwise
slipping the important
points within those minor curves (and just
sometimes smaller affairs
to be canny). He kept track of them
in her margins, lead
scribbles and arrows pointing to truth
(or what he thought came close
to the core of her).
In hindsight, he always thought of her
dichotomies and how
cleverly she disguised her terrors
inside those subtle arcs
(because we seek skeletons inside
closets and not charming
turns of phrase), and he wished she had known
of his ellipses...gaps
between her (oblique) deviations
and the safety of his
margins...but he kept to the edges
and tried to decode clues
in her juxtapositions...muted
(but contrasting) breadcrumbs
leading to the everywhere of a
psyche sketched between dots.
The Death of a Poet
The death of a poet slips past us
with little enough note;
whose obit will read "she tended bar
on 23rd and was
a poet" anyway? No one knows
the skill it takes to win
a Rhysling Award, but everyone
knows what's in a Cosmo.
The death of a poet breaks a limb
on the Linnean tree
of life. Species: homo sapiens;
Sub-Species: Poet. No,
that can't be right. Sub-Species: Poet,
extinct. Better. Breathing
continues in a rising-falling
pattern undisturbed. Quite
disturbing, poets, if unremarked
their deaths. Certainly best. But
wait, you think, this poet was my love,
and that changes all things.
©2014-present Stephanie Wright, All rights reserved.