zirconium

[woman lighting candles - Israeli doll at the Doll & Miniature Museum of High Point]

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.

- Marge Piercy, Colors Passing Through Us

(subject line and inspiration from Luisa A. Igloria's Memo)



This summer, everything greets my eyes as messages
curling away from the bottles that brought them.
I swallow letters instead of writing them down,
slide along walls in unhemmed sarongs. I
could blame my unshed weight on the heat --
how it drenches both bones and brain with fatigue
as thick as old curtains, as sad as old stockings,
and how it roosts in abandoned chairs and vandalized nests --
but it's been winters in the building. The breaking
of my clutch-hold on the trash that cannot save me --
it's taking place one line at a time,
my fingertip tracing the shadows on your back
cast by the sun's insistent surge through our blinds.

- pld

(A very rough, of-the-moment draft [as is the case with most of the poems posted directly to this journal] -- inspired largely by Luisa A. Igloria's Ghazal, Beaded with Rain; most of the link-phrases in stanzas 8-10 come from elisem's current jewelry sale)

Spending Shabbat with thoughts of Ali, from whom I learned the shape of these lines:
a teacher I never met, whose lessons I keep revisiting.

Ali died too young -- as does everyone, no? Although we haven't met,
the reaper is a teacher whose lessons I keep revisiting.

109 degrees today: a record in my city.
And yet I've felt such heat before, in memories worth revisiting.

The blues and greens of your lizard: see-through, yet so solid,
yet shining -- so cool to the lens, yet warm with the sun's visiting.

Rolling scraps of rejection slips into paper beads:
a lesson from my parents. In crafts, the past comes visiting.

The lizard sleeps on top of a shoe, her dreams laced with the soothing
burble of green-scented rain -- a crown of clouds a-visiting.

The taste of too-old ice cubes spoiling a glass of tea,
darkening the summer's day: All things are merely visiting.

Dawn scene with thunder lizards: a slice of a favorite morning
cool on the palm you hold to my cheek -- a variant in your visiting.

Feeling under my fingers the shine of the the painter's comforts:
aging threads momentarily silver -- the moon's light come visiting.

I am the summer's keeper, and you are a dreamer of dreams --
o, do not forsake the world on my watch. Just tell yourself you're visiting.

The heat will leave you moved and shaken, even as it turns you into stone
and then back into water, and from water into breath. To leave, you must keep visiting.

Breathing. Melting. Burning. Keeping.
Scorched pegs fall out of holes -- a lesson I'm revisiting.

Produced by Kathleen Kirk: five of my poems -- "Sweet Honesty," "At a Sushi Bar on Mt. Carmel" (sonnet), "Every Angel Is Terrifying," "Neither Fire Nor Water," and "Compact" -- with nifty photos by Karin Miller.

(a response to Luisa A. Ingloria's Preces



All week, I've been trying to steal back enough sleep --
to feather my body back into the plumage of its prime.
This heavy dullness is the reproach of rough moons --
midnight cups of coffee now tar in my blood,
3 a.m. donuts gorgon-stones in my gut.
I know how to live, but my other eight deaths
keep nipping at my heels, demanding
that I earn the honeycakes and the glass of cold milk
they never got to taste. When I do doze off,
red pens and blue pages haunt the soapy ladders
sliding out of my dreams. But all the world is a jar
of fireflies, each blink of light
a microscopic tearing
at the veils around my heart:
joy and praise will out, though they set me apart.

After visiting the Acropolis, last October, Saz and I walked back toward and through the Plaka. On our way down, we encountered a poem:



We later spotted it on several other buildings in Athens, but in this first instance, it had been spraypainted onto the wall of the Church of St. Elisseos. It's that square just to the right of the green door:



If I hadn't seen it up close -- were I looking at this picture for the first time -- I'd be assuming that the square was a metal screen or decorative cutout within the wall.

Subject line from Osip Mandelstam's The Necklace.


From my walk home from hot yoga Saturday night