i. glass
Oceans spawned intentions of silica
Messy grains of crumpled cyrstals
Make me missile, make me fissile! Making ripples
with our submarinal whines!
And we took them and we shook them and we
rolled them around!
Our scraping surfing churned into
salinity ground!
Liquid bowels that blew us out sputtering
we stuttered our mouths, roasted
in the light and infinitely alone with our fellows,
the good hearted brethren, the sisterhood
the old men and women,
all of their souls ripe and beatified
all saints that filled the heavens unsatisfied,
waiting and waiting . . .
Thank-God we were found!
Delivered, crushed and bled
bones rarified, sifted, transformed,
reborn into
fire
the smelter
merged and joined
the holy union
the bliss
bubbling us
together
We are no more but
I am.
I drift, awaiting my mold,
a purpose, a verb, a process
a cooling down
from halide hot waxing a fever,
the flippering fade that shivers me
cold and no longer formless.
Cold, but not hopeless
Cold and asleep to the sound I will make.
When I find what I seek. I won�t be
broken.
Cold, stiff and rigid and
fearless -
not heartless, but patient and certain -
and destined for something to save, to preserve.
I am arrogant with the touch I was
given,
the souls that were driven hot and now
frozen, and relentlessly, translucently shown
to behold,
but in submission
humbly, humbly, humbly
I pray for my renown.
I pray for my resurrection.
I pray, but I also listen
for my renown
to become
to end
to
be crystallized again.
ii. rosebushes in the garden
We spike, a hundred poles shorn;
thorn mesas that bled, that were freed,
that were led to our grief.
The air once warm, now a frost dying.
We are dead now in all but name. Lost
are the virtues that fed us, that entertained
the mystery of sustenance. A wet spirit
drenching us, blessed with sun and the big blue
and the ball that we worshipped, now occluded
gone in the grayness, gone
in the cold damp wet that buries
our misery with winter�s mist, clouds sanity
with solitude. We weep, anxious and still
hearing the last of our children�s cries
at the cutting, the separation, the end
of creation. We weep without
blood, without tears, at the evil we fear,
the devastation of growth.
iii. tap water
warm energy flows into me
and then is stopped
filling me incompletely with your fluid touch
now but ripples across my bare
red blotches
my ribs pressed under your heaviness
our raspy breathing the sound and
feeling each single drip drip drip
from the end of your tap
iv. artist in the moment
not white not white not white but white
not white but white and brown mustard
brown mustard brown mustard background
but not white not silver not white not silver
but LAVENDER!!!
i am a genius but you LORD you did that
you made me elite yes the elite the genius
yes lavender lavender lavender but white
call it white though call it that call it white
© T. Birch 2002
|
