Art

Monet at Giverny 13-16 /16

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
and Death shall have no Dominion.”
Dylan Thomas

Monet at Giverny
13-16 /16

fish aloft like birds
skimming wet sunshine

spring’s first swallow
rising from the depths
to snatch a golden note
quivering in the air

thunder raises dark ripples

lightning a forked tongue
insinuated into paradise

an apple tossed away
caution thrown over the shoulder
as sharp as salt

winds of change

that first bite
too bitter to remember

timeless this tide
this ebb and flow

oh great pond-serpent

biting yourself

forever

Remembrance Day Flash Fiction

039

Remembrance Day
Bistro 20

Previously published on
http://commuterlit.com/2015/12/wednesday-remembrance-day/

The old man watched a drop of red wine slide slowly down the side of the bottle. It was November 11, his birthday.
…
Seventy-three years ago, Father John had taken the boy’s ear lobe between thumb and forefinger and pinched the nail deep into the flesh until the blood ran.
“This afternoon you will go down to the bamboo grove and cut a cane. Bring that cane to me and I will bless it.”
…
That night, the boy woke up. Snuffles, snores, and an occasional sob broke the dormitory’s silence. The bamboo was a long, cold serpent drawn up in bed beside him.
…
The next day, he awoke to his seventh birthday.
…
Father John beckoned and the boy followed him to his cell and knelt with his hands stretched out like those of Christ on the Cross. The priest struck him with the bamboo cane six times on each hand.
“Your Savior, blessed be His name, suffered more, much more for you,” the priest sighed. “Examine your soul. Find fault with each flaw, for you are unworthy. Remember: the eye you see is not an eye because you see it,” Father John droned on. “It is an eye because it sees you. Christ sees you as you kneel there. He sees. He knows. He judges. Examine your soul with care and stay there until I return.” The priest raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross in the empty air.
…
The boy spent his birthday kneeling before the crucifix in prayer. He contemplated the wounds of Christ. He imagined each blow of the hammer and imagined the pain of cold nails biting into his warm flesh. He tasted bitter vinegar as it dripped off the sponge, gasped at the thrusting spear, felt the lash’s sting as it fell across his flesh. He became the flagellated Christ and knelt before the crucifix, staring at himself eyeball to eyeball in the same way he looked at himself in the morning mirror. The crucified Christ gazed back at him, his brother, his soul mate, his double.
…
After an hour, a red drop of paint slipped slowly from the nail hole in Christ’s right hand. The boy blinked. The red drop trembled then fell.
After two hours, Christ opened his eyes and smiled at the boy.
After three hours, salt-water formed at the corner of Christ’s eye. It glistened in a sunbeam that entered through the cell’s narrow window.
After four hours, tears began to flow down flesh and painted wooden face.
It was Remembrance Day, the boy’s birthday. He was seven years old.
…
Seventy-three years later, the old man sat at the table. He watched the red wine trickle down the bottle. He remembered it all and his tears flowed again.
…

Monet at Giverny 5-8 /16

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
and Death shall have no Dominion.”
Dylan Thomas

Monet at Giverny
5-8 /16

wisteria and his curly blue locks
Narcissus clad in an abyss of lilies
imperial his reflection and perilous

slowly he slides to sleep
merging into his imaged dream

a vaulted cathedral
his earthbound ribs
the blood space immaculate

night and day and sun and clouds
leapfrogging over water

something survives
sepia tints
dreaming on and on

exotic this sudden movement
Carassius auratus flowering

Clos Normand and the Grande Allée
closed to him now
folded his flowers
their petals tight at his nightfall

dark their colours
mourning for his mornings of light
fled far from him now

can we soften this sunstroke of brightness
le roi soleil threatening to blind us?

rey de oros
the sun glow braiding itself
an aureate palette

a susurration of leaves

Monet at Giverny 1-4 /16

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
and Death shall have no Dominion.”
Dylan Thomas

Monet at Giverny
1-4 /16

his lily pond
a mirror shattering
shards of clouds
flames beneath the lilies
fractured fish

the executioner stripes evening
a+cross the sacrificed horizon

in blood we were born
in earth will we rest

our flesh turned to bread
empurpled this imperial wine
streaming with day’s death
these troubled waters

green footprints the lily pads
a halo
this drowned man’s beard
liquescent

like the gods
he dreamed
he walked dry over water

flowering goldfish
this thin line of cloud

maples flash ruby thoughts
ripples flowing outward
as heavy as a henge

this altar tumbling
downwards
through a liquid sky

Obsidian’s Edge 28

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
When reason sleeps, monsters are born.

Francisco de Goya.

4:00 AM

… scrabble of agile ruminants goats their basket weave ribs alive on the grass roof of the neighboring azoteas or wandering these cobbled pathways with knife-edge stones and broken all ten of those sea-faring bottles that managed to reach this land though they came floating from a distant shore each with its message lost now and he waded through the incoming waves this god-like ghost emerging from his white-cap snow bank to stagger in the moonlight where a child’s world lay buried like a bone as sharp as this black knife that slices the mind into two twin towers of tall sunflowers trapped in this wet clay rag of a body that binds itself in a fine film of glacial fire where incarcerated birds strut in the rib cage their robin red crests as distant as the light of a hurricane lamp in that moment of silence before an opening door snaps its sudden match of light and the tick of the death watch beetle gnaws at the beams of the worn out house that the earthquake cracked into a thousand pieces though one wall stood still and the alarm clock over the fireplace clicked a death mask for that anonymous face that raised both hands and threaded the black lace of the mantilla through the golden wedding ring as a finger nail of moon shredded the clouds and the body’s house slowly broke down in an unending dance round and round the garden where the teddy bear trod on his partner’s toes and the undergrowth tickled the china doll’s fancy but the garbage can intervened and dust stained the vagaries of a brutish existence both sharp and nasty as a devil’s scissors severed angel wings and tangled this skein of wool that pulled the church bells pounding their celestial hammers into a sea of wind while the sea parrot spoke in a tongue thick with anonymous flames that flickered a trigger of song while flashes of sound sparked twigs from the tree that flamed a joyless overflowing river of unknown light while the brown bear danced to a pipe and drum dance across bamboo marimbas that shimmered and shone and lay fine layers of music and dust that grew beneath bare feet as new flowers stoked a confessional of dust and gave it new life in a resurrection of the body into a world where everything is remembered and nothing is forgotten or forgiven … for how can we forgive if we cannot forget … or forget if we cannot forgive …

Lily: Flash Fiction

Lily
Bistro 14

One morning, in the Jeu de Paume, LJ found his own true love. The sun rose in Giverny and cast rose colored petals across the lily pond. And there she was, his Lily Marlene, floating in that watery space, her face framed among the lilies.

He remembered what she used to wear as she waited for him, standing beneath the lamplight where he could see her. He recalled their tender whispers and felt once again that wave of love sweeping over him. His tongue touched base on his lips and he swallowed his saliva: so sweet, her resurrection. She lazed there among the blossoms, each flower gigantic beneath the Japanese footbridge. LJ gazed on her, that Lily who toiled not, nor did she spin, and sighed as she rested there, cushioned among the lily pads, a work of wonder in a watery labyrinth of fragmented light.

He remembered the night they sent him away. “All troops confined to barracks,” the notice said. He thought of her standing out there, waiting for him. He remembered too that first encounter with the enemy when fortune rattled its poker dice leaving them to fall haphazardly, never to be recalled, yet not falling by chance, and the cast dice turning into flowers, red flowers, that stained his knife crimson. He gazed at her as she lay there, a conjurer’s trick her floral eyes pulled from a dark sleeve and floating in a pantheon of mysterious magic, a thicket of flowering water.

Each day he came to the Jeu de Paume to pay tribute and to see her reclining on her lily-pad. Very soon he saw her everywhere, coy in shop windows, languid in pavement puddles where raindrops rippled her eyes, couched among the floating clouds as evening stole color from the day. She became once more his Lily of the Lamplight and, as dusk’s shadows stalked street and square, he kept watch at street corners, from dusk to dawn, hoping to see her again, highlighted in the early morning by the rising sun.

LJ dreamed that one day they would walk together, hand in hand, at noon, perhaps, when the cathedral wears its strawberry suit, or in late afternoon when a blueberry blush descends with prayers and bells to sound the magic of Vespers. But it wasn’t to be. One evening, in a fit of despair, he threw myself into those clinging waters and sought her side. Dark bells rang out their bull-frog chorus as he plunged through shadowy waters in search of the light of her countenance there, where dusk is a violent bruise, scoured purple and red across the horizon. Yes, he followed in her footsteps, his Lady of the Lake, and became one with those waters.

LJ still doesn’t know who drew him forth; but when he emerged, he sensed that all had changed and that nothing had changed more than the viewer, this once-young man, now old and arthritic, typing away, one finger at a time, battering his key-board to recreate the wanderlust of those day-dreams wrought sous le Pont Mirabeau, along the banks where the Seine flows, or up by the bouqinistes and the Marché aux Fleurs, and past the Marché aux Esclaves where he searched for her, but he didn’t find her and raindrop words bounce off the page as photos of Monet’s Lilies bewitch with the staring madness of her drifting hair that floats through the cathedral’s eye, through the great rose window of Notre Dame reflected in the waters where his Lily still waits and holds a place in the rippling river for his un-drowned heart.

Obisidian’s Edge 1

At the Edge of Obsidian

“everything burns, the universe flames,
nothingness burns itself into nothing
but a thought in flames: nothing but smoke”

Piedra de sol
Octavio Paz

“todo se quema, el universo es llama,
arde la misma nada que no es nada
sino un pensar en llamas, al fin humo:”

At the Edge of Obsidian is the second book in The Oaxacan Trilogy. It was published in 2005 and outlines the events of a single day in the City of Oaxaca (Mexico). I have always loved the Medieval Books of Hours and wondered if they would transfer themselves into a book of hours based on a day in a place with which I was familiar. This is my effort to do just that. I will publish regularly from this book, beginning at the beginning with the church bells and the early morning light that waken the sleeper from his dreams.

6:00 am
church bells

The alarm clock shuffles
its pack of sleeping hours:

a clicking of claws,
needles knitting outwards
towards dawn’s guillotine;

a knife edge
sharpened on this keening wind
sets my blood tingling in my toes.

Bright jungle parrot,
its querulous caged voice glimpsed
darkly through dawn’s looking glass.

Tochtli was caught by the ears
then thrown against the second sun
sizzling in the sky.
His sharp teeth burrowed,
burying themselves deep in the fire’s red light.
The second sun turned into the moon;
now we can see Tochtli’s face,
simmering in its dwindling pool.

Old myths, like languages,
grow legs and wander away.
They gather in quiet corners,
in village squares
where the night wind weaves
dry leaves in endless figures of eight.

An old man now,
I dream of white rabbits,
running down tunnels,
escaping the hunter’s hands.

When my dreams break up,
they back themselves into a cul-de-sac:
a wilderness of harsh black scars.

Dream words:
scalpels carving
red slashes on white-washed walls,
trenchant shadows, twisted dancers,
old warrior kings
bent into pipe wire shapes.

Suddenly, beneath my balcony,
the handy man
tumble-dries a tv ad
in the washing machine
of his song sparrow throat.

Dreams

Dreams are important in Oaxacan mythology. 
Do we create them ourselves?
 Or do they come to us as celestial messages? 
Can they exist without us?
 Or do we form a symbiotic relationship.,
each dependent on the other?

Eight Deer or Tiger Claw / Ocho Venado or Garra de Tigre is a Mixtec Hero;  
his name is composed of two parts:  
(1) day name (ie the name of the day on which he was born) Eight Deer and  
(2) nickname Tiger Claw.  

His symbol in the códices is a small circle with a comma like a tiger claw. 
Nuttall is the twentieth century editor of the Zouche Nuttall Codex  
in which Eight Deer’s history of conquest is recounted. 
Nine Wind / Nueve Viento is another Mixtec Hero  
and the founding father of the race, according to some códices.

Dreams

Once I stole the nose from a sacred statue;
today I watch it cross the square attached to a face.
Eight Deer walks past with a fanfare of conches:
you can tell him by his donut with its little tail.

A shadow moves as zopilote wings his way across the square.
I caught him once on a midnight bus;
he begged me to fold his wings and let him sleep forever.

A gringa called Nuttall sells tins of watery soap.
Her children fill my days with enchantments:
bubbles born from a magic ring.

Eight Deer, eight years old, sets out on his conquests.
Nine Wind births his people from a flint,
or was it the magic tree in Apoala?

The voices in my head slip slowly into silence.
Sometimes I think they have no need of me,
these dreams that come at midnight,
and knock at my window.