The geometry of evening

Walking tonight under the yellow globes of sodium street-lamps sends our shadows careening over the regular up-up-across-across of the drab red and pale grey underfeet to ever-shifting intersections before and behind and beside in the autumn-falling grasses which themselves hum in the breeze and in their subtle dark-net ensnare the earth. Though our seven selves are pavement-echoed fifteen-twenty-eighteen-nine-twelvefold in alien mercurialisms which outswifting escape, the ungoverned dynamics of our catastrophe uniquely yield one stable solution, and our steps fall into phase with the almost-cadent ambient chirrup of of a frog on high bricks.

9 July 2007
[edit: 11 July 2007]

Tuscan parallax (draft)

This is wine country. Sesquicentennial vinyards, row on glistening row of grape and ancient trestle, and the emerald river cleave to granite-verdant Alps and beyond to clouds a hundred whites which drift in azure infinity, shifting nigh imperceptibly in stratospheric breezes. But parallax' twisting deceives the eye, and the thin grey muck of a dozen nations distorts focus and stands as still as the sky on double-paned protective glass.

3 June 2007

Winter-verdance in Blackwater

Thirty meters down, the river crashes over into thereuntil invisible ecstasy, roaring against the final bottom-rocks and pooling, foam-specked and spent, in a fathomless stillness. Thirty meters up it is already swift but glides, affectionate and smooth, whispering as it cleaves the winter-verdant hills of moss and that same black stone with irresistible carresses. But where I stand at the cascade-fulcrum, the cold dark water moans its babbling anticipation of that eager three-fathom climax, rushing-restraining with profound enthusiasm over a bed gentler than that below the falls but no less unyielding; so, looking up and looking down for a more suitable position though the slicked moss and the river's sighs and my own half-finishedness immobilize anyway, I wonder: are you -- am I -- the rolling black water or the fixed black rocks?

23 May 2007

There's another slant of light

Ms. Dickinson wrote of a winter-e'en light-slant and the lingering echoes of dirge in lightless cathedral deeps. Perhaps it was so in Amherst, but as the sun drags its last claws deep across Oxford (it is May, but May comes too early here), that slant evokes not oppression but the enharmonic majesty of a Tallis motet, and as the golden weight rolls off the bronze and stone and glass of the city's glittering spires I resonate in the acoustic perfection of a High Gothic meadow.

19 May 2007
(edit: 28 May 2007)

Orthonormality in Chicago

The mile of perfect orthogonal buildings with expensive stores below and expensive offices above juggernauts down Michigan until it crashes soundlessly against the park, where I stumble about a hill that rolls down to the orchestra pit and clumsily portrait. Five meters from me the old woman moves to her place, settles on the grass, and from her bag requisitions a knee-high folding table -- a plastic glass half-full of deep red wine -- a small loaf of crusty brown bread -- and as she takes her private half-Rubiyat, her unthinking repetition becomes effortless familiarity, her unfeeling precision transcendent grace; she listens, and Bach echoes in Chicago.

07 May 2007

Sovereignty

To linger in a gallery with good works is philosophy -- stand in the right place and you can engage a hundred worlds and know that, Leibnitz be damned, this is far from the best of all -- but tonight my transcendence was interrupted; there were far more bodies in the room than I'd have expected in this town, and my tucked-in elbow still somehow caught a man in a coat and tie who was looking at the door. My plastic cup threw just a few tiny drops of cheap Cabernet on the girl's bare foot -- insufficient for Johnsonian epistemology but soft and now beconstellationed in purple -- and I remembered when I'd seen the private God of these thousand-dollar canvas universes make another girl, not in oils but in wine -- Merlot nose, Shiraz lips -- one night, and the next day sell me for the cost of a Parisian dinner my own little Montmartre -- not ontology now, but metaphysics.

05 May 2007
(edit: 10 May 2007)

Poetry four-hands in Greenwich

I was in London; hadn't seen her in months, but I knew that now she was in Paris. Through my lens, two twenty-somethings, embracing, consecrated a park bench below the Greenwich Observatory; the Prime Meridian lazily bisected the park ten meters away, so I imagined that instead it went right between these two, just like between me and her: such poetry! A fortnight later I would go to her and she would drop me like the hangman pulling the trap -- no! drop convictions like the guillotine's blade on my neck; a fortnight later there would be something interesting in this photograph, another stratum in which the image could fossilize so I, poet-paleontologist, could rebuild it for museum-children with small sharp tools; a fortnight later it would be more than me and these two and the old observatory and the imaginary line and the upside-down London sky and the shutter firing for a half-seen metaphor; a fortnight later, I could write the rest of this four-hands poem.

27 April 2007