Dreams

Juggler

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Juglar /  Juggler
(from Land of Rocks and Saints)

1

 In the beginning was the word,
and the word was tossed in the air:
a dove over dark water.

It grew as it descended,
turned into tongues of flame,
each of them licking
at the listeners’ hearts,
tearing them apart.

Sleight of hand:
this deck of words, tossed skywards;
jacks and queens tumbling,
caught, tossed up again;
words, nothing but words,
this pack of wolves descending.

2

 Lips part as words draw blood;
red wound of the open mouth,
a rose in spring’s garden
bears us down with crimson scents.

The spirit is trapped in its cage,
flesh and bone binding those wings
with their urgent urge to be free and fly ….

“… you would have seen …” he says.

And so we see: the sea, white horses cresting,
St. James riding over the mountains,
bone on lance point, spear bloodied,
Moorish chain mail bursting asunder,
El Cid advancing on his foes.

Words join with words,
become joint with gesture;
they plunge into our chests,
grow tight round heart and lungs.

Juglar: In Spain, the mediaeval juglar was musician, singer of songs, juggler, and general entertainer. The oral tradition still thrives in Avila and in places where the rhythmic and musical emphasis of the spoken word is still important.

Talking 4

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Talking with my mother in an empty house

4

the room is alive with light
a halo of sunny sainthood
gilding old furniture

rich gold sunlight
sparkling with dancing dust
enhances silk flowers

polished scarlet tongues of fire
call for your presence
yet you are absent now
I am the one who dusts them
and adds to their gloss

 do they still throb vibrant
 in the early morning light?

 indeed they do
dust rises from your poinsettias
and dust angels dance in the sun

how many to each leaf?

 I bend my head to look
and sense dry leaves brushing
rough lips against my face

Talking 3

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3

our conversation this morning
a sun-dried Roman aqueduct
no longer capable of carrying water

I envision brown sacking
lagged around leaking pipes

your words are lifeless kites
earthbound: too heavy to rise
each sentence: wasted
movements of lips tongue teeth

dead soldiers gone over the top
my thoughts hang like washing
pegged out on the Siegfried Line
on a windless day

I am afraid of this enormous barbed
wire fence growing daily between us

Talking 2

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Talking with my mother in an empty house

2

The postman knocks on the door
then thrusts a letter through the letter box

when the letter falls to the mat
the dog leaps upon it and snaps her teeth
ripping the intruder into soggy bits

am i now the intruder?
will invisible bandages of cellotape
make me whole and readable again?
will i survive in the words of your song?

mother, you are still a swift river of blood
flowing within my skin
and bordered by my bones

Talking 1

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Talking with my mother in an empty house

1

pale and delicate
much too frail to survive

an early butterfly
blows against your rose bush
and is caught on a thorn

the white of its shredded wing
a sudden shriek
bleeding snow over the garden

did you write those words to disguise my voice?
am i the butterfly?
 does your writing echo my cry?

thoughts pound through my head
like waves on the shoreline
each spoken word
a grinding of tiny pebbles

 

Fall

 

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Fall

Just one leaf dropping from the tree
and the fall a call of nature and no freak
chance of fate. What throw of the dice
eliminates Lady Luck? None at all,
or so the poet says, lying there, indisposed,
his ribs cracked hard against the wooden
boards of the porch and his right foot
caught in such a way that the hip slips
slightly from its socket and try as he may
he cannot stand but lies there in the chill
evening wind, a lone leaf, getting on in age,
plucked from his tree and cast to the ground.

Golden Angels

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Golden Angels
(from All About Angels)

They stand beneath guardian trees
their saffron garments glossed with gold.

Hands cupped, bodies bent,
they softly swell as they dip
beneath the rain.

They speak to me:
wild prophets from an ancestral book
that I believed in when I was a child,
but no longer understand.

I try to read the aroma of their lips,
their slow, small growth of gesture.

Their wings are traps
tripping my tongue
preventing me from flight.

Run, Monkey, Run!

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Monkey Turns Down Promotion

 “I hereby appoint you head of the asylum.”
The young office monkey with the plastic stethoscope
was dressed neatly in a white sheet.

“Dr. Freud, I presume?” Monkey held out his hand
but his witticism was lost in a flood of water
flowing from the flush and over the floor.

 Monkey stood there, paddling in piddle.
Inmates with crowded heads and vacant faces,
fools grinning at a universe of folly, paddled beside him.

He wiped a sick one’s drool from his sleeve.
The office boy spat on his hands,
slicked down his hair, and placed his stethoscope
on monkey’s heaving chest.

 “You have no pulse.”

“How do you know I have no pulse?
Surely, you cannot hear my heart
for you have a banana stuck in your ear.”

“Speak up!” said the office boy, “I cannot hear you:
I have a banana stuck in my ear.”

 Then monkey felt fear.

Daylight diminished and waters closed over his head.
He spurned the proffered paw,
the life belt thrown by the offer of a new position.

Exit monkey left, pursued by a chorus:

“Run, monkey, run!”

Monkey Teaches

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Monkey Teaches Sunday School on Mondays
(With apologies to Pavlov and his dogs)

Younger monkeys e-mail elder monkey
and expect an answer within two minutes.
Elder monkey drools and writes right back.

 He is turned on by the bells and
whistles of his computer.
“Woof! Woof!”
His handlers hand him a biscuit.

Elder monkey has grown to appreciate
tension and abuse:
the systematic beatings,
the shit and foul words hurled at his head.

The working conditions are overcrowded.

Elder monkey is overworked.
Yet he has managed to survive,
to stay alive and fight
what he once believed was the good fight.

Now he no longer knows:
nor does he drool anymore
when bells and whistles sound
and his handlers bait him with
an occasional, half-price biscuit.

 

In Absentia 3

 

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In Absentia 3

Questions

I hear her voice, delicate, distant.
I run to the sound, jump on the table
in my usual spot by her play thing,
but she isn’t there. He’s there, damn it,
talking away. I can see him, smell him,
I hate him, his other sex perfumes,
but there he is and when he stops talking,
I can hear her voice. I move to his play
thing. A shadow, I can’t make it out,
then her voice again, my whiskers stiffen,
I lean forward and sniff, but no smell,
she has no smell, and scentless, I cannot
sense her, I bristle and she calls me, calls
me by my favorite names, and mews, I mew,
but I can’t smell her, and there’s no sense
of touch … is this the hell all pussy cats
will suffer … shadows on a screen, a haunting
voice, memories shifting and dancing,
no touch, no hugs, no sense of smell …
and nothing solid … just shadows and absence?