INTAGLIO
(a love song for the living dead)
My Sweet engraveable
You
depressed below the surface smooth
to the touch
saddest at
that
carving
craving elision
so that an impression
by design yields a
cameo afloat
you
are what you are not
an image in relief composite
of
loss
re-leaf what
a good tree does
reel off one
good reason one
last fish
real if
you're
loved
says
the velveteen rabbit
real if
you're
ending
your
rending a
remnant collage
I
know a Paradise when I see one, because I've seen one.
The
trick is now to see another till I see One again. (1)
the sunken treasure
of
a semi-precious life
vitreous
excised
from inside
which is to say brittleness + luster
I've
entangled with the dying
light
think
tango
the big dip
(One) per
lifetime
my
drop-dead Lovely
prized-consolation kisses
goodbye
the art or process of executing
the
art of losing
just
enough
printing (die-stamping & gravure)
done from (done
for)
the image sunk below
the
surface
lowering
the body
(absentee
voter)
formed from emptiness
Beauty has three possible endings and only one of them is bearable.
(2)
I mean cut
into
which is to say taken
from
cut it out
the
five points of a body
star
or human doll
cut from the flat felt of skyscapes
by
this I mean
those people-shaped places in midnight
traveling
twice light's speed
(half
godspeed)
Captain
Valentine will do everything possible to avoid turbulence. (3)
a shoebox full of hope &
sweet minutiae
tucked
under one arm
kindly reupholster this fabric
everafter with
more
minutes
a soft landing an
impression
from Earth I would like
something of a garden (she
grew basil from seed for you)
sole
paradise served
whole
won't hold us so
hold On(e)
1: Donald
Revell
2: Larry Levis
3: Anonymous
flight attendant, Flight 1431 Chicago to Salt Lake City.
__
AGAVE DESERTI
(a questionnaire on xeriscaping)
One put lost love & locusts
as the fill-in-the-blank response
for describe last year at this time.
For what season do you feel now?
Someone said I've had a hand up
August's blouse. Another responder
noted the yellow jelly sun.
When asked where are you?
someone replied: canyon-steeped
like a good tea. The soft lips
of clouds at the edge of certain skies.
Another mentioned The ski lifts
of his eyes.
What season do you feel now?
Winter crickets sprung from cages.
What kind of music plays against time?
There were, as stated, crickets & hip hop
& a half-dollar's worth of wisdom
gathered on the Russian sage
of a pretty broker's lawn.
Which month is a good kiss?
June is a pretty-broker late-arriving
& itching to leave.
What color does that make you feel?
So yellow: that sunlight, a white car,
and the sense that one could drive
& drive.
What might constitute a good weather?
The rain of cheap (poetic) champagne.
If a body were a house...?
Sadly, she might slip by
the motion lights
without tripping them off.
Whose radar is this
& what does it track?
The disappointment
of sparrows, a spill of lilacs,
fallen apples turned
to wine out back.
Rest easy, the crucial questions
will go unasked: How long will the kniphophia
stay in bloom? How do the living motor around
on the fuel of the dead & where, pray tell,
might it take them? If we were really were doves
wouldn't this re-claimed desert
be some kind of complete, some very divine?
____
INTAGLIO was rather coincidentally or
mimetically an exercise in excision and textual windows and doors, plus
a little collage. I wanted the poem to recognize the more obscure but
deeply-cool definition of a variety of grave as well as the sculptor and
print-maker's take on that term. Death, sex, art, and print—who
could ask for more? But since I'm greedy, I went for Revell, Larry
Levis and Captain Valentine—and yes, that actually was
the pilot's name.
AGAVE DESERTI came from an on-line poetic
questionnaire, a talk with a hip hop aficionado, and a front
yard in Salt Lake City, Utah (hometown of the poet) which was trying to
get honest with its climate and the annual rainfall and the desert plants
that should grow there. |