Hiraeth*
How
to store—is there some, is there any such somewhere
To
punch or push, to pulse or pluck sinew, no spark, sap, or spur
To
shape the mind, store the past, to keep it from fading away?
Oh
is there no slowing, no seal or staunch, for that dwindling
Down?
No way to escape the slow fading or banish the elves of erasure—
Zealous
elves, elves bold and eroding, bleaching all colour away?
No,
no one and nothing to keep the feel fresh,
Recover
the daily, the doing, the detail,
Stamp
a visage or voice, fix a feature in mind.
No
way of undoing the dimming, retaining the fever and force
Of
a lost leitmotif, the tickle of snicker and cackle.
No
hope of mooring the memories,
Of
halting the ravelling moments,
Of
stopping the ball of nostalgia from unspooling
So
as to swaddle and stifle each delicate image
Within
oblivion’s gluey cocoon.
No,
nothing, nothing to slow down the dearth,
The
dull disappearance, the final unwinding:
Forgetting,
forgotten, foregone.
*Hiraeth,
pronounced heerithe: Welsh
term for nostalgia, deep yearning, or grief; a pull on the heart, a distinct feeling
of missing something irretrievably lost.
LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS
from
“Camille,” oil painting by Laurent Dareau
fallen woman Camille
auburn-haired breaker of hearts
in a pale wood frame
as thin as a thumb
posed on a bone-white divan
behind a bouquet of camellias
gold bullion stamens and stigmas aglow
each flower’s heart reprising yours
anti-angel with hints of a halo
wing bones feathered
in eiderdown fluff
there you sit,
pinioned deep in your divan,
blooms massed at your flank
captured
it seems
if you stood
you would stumble and fall
no angel, you
nor archangel ungendered
unfleshed
no maiden warrior-queen
who outran the wind
who battled the Romans
one breast exposed
to unbridle her bow arm
you
draped in blue
are no virgin
nipple tickled by bolster
beneath the one breast we see
you, mon ange,
might be anyone’s fallen angel
who was it that angled
that empty frame in the corner
to tilt toward your blue-shadowed leg
some aged painter with port-wine stigmata
to garnish his baldness?
what patron?
what narrator out of Dumas
or the Chopin ballet?
you, lovely Camille
are displaced forever
beyond the pale
of your portrait
Burning Mouth Syndrome
Lips
that prickle and sting
to
the point that it’s painful to speak:
sore,
chapped, and peeling
along
their vermillion border.
Perhaps an allergic
reaction
to tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants,
and peppers,
staple foods in my
usual diet,
all of them nightshades
and all now forbidden.
Atropa belladonna, deadly
nightshade,
named for the beautiful lady, Atropos,
who cuts the
life-thread with her shears.
My own destiny, too,
seems doomed to be
severed—
not from my physical
life,
but from those moments
each night
when I long to savour my
favourite cuisine
as I listlessly swallow
steamed chicken and rice
and yield to the
fantasy
that I’ve unwittingly
slighted the Family Nightshade
by plucking their
cousin, the mandrake,
while weeding my
garden,
a fatal act that
according to folklore
condemns me to hell.
This as likely a reason
for the inferno
raging around the
contours of my lips
as that my own body
would turn against me,
sentencing me to a
flavourless fate.
ACCIDENTAL EXPRESSIONISM
My artist friend
finished the painting,
she said, with no
meaning in mind,
her attention focused only
on textures, colours, and shapes.
Whereas I see a sunrise
over a purple-capped
mountain,
gold splashing the
dark sea below.
I see the first day of
creation:
the primordial mound
of the earth
heaved up, just a
moment ago, from the deep.
I see the sun god
Ra in the act of
emergence,
his newborn glory
reflected in gold
on the waters of
chaos from which he emerged.
That is, until a shift of perspective
(rather like closing
one eye at a time
and changing the
parallax angle)
changes the globe of
the sun
into the cheek and
blond head of
a baby asleep
on the mountain
surface, aslant,
belly down on its
slope, an arm
and a leg hanging over
the side
as if hugging an up-tilted
mattress.
A work of art with a
life of its own
despite what the
artist intended
or the viewer expected
to see.
Sixteen
Once we made contact
again,
my former lover and I,
we outdistanced old age and arthritis:
caught up in a microburst of emotional winds
that mobbed us from every direction,
propelled him cross country
and hurtled me backward through time
to the age of sixteen.
Long-dormant sensations unfurled
like the fronds of a Jericho rose
balled up for years in the desert,
spun us into a hormonal swoon
of physical touch and deep personal talk.
Left me moved and
amazed
at the rush of
sensations I’d long believed dead.
I felt so young again.
Passion sustained, when he left in the fall,
by overheated exchanges
that gave the illusion of substance
as air molecules in whipped egg whites
both add to their volume
and stiffen them into peaks.
High-pressure emotions that filled me to
bursting
as his next visit approached.
Yet when he stepped out of the taxi,
I felt my attraction deflate
like the fall of a cooling souffle,
as if Newton’s Third Law
had reversed my enchantment,
caused me to fall out of love
with
the splat of a wet paper wad.
And see clearly how much I regressed
into flirting and
trying to please,
sending away for an
eyelash-growth serum,
excusing his foibles while hiding my own,
and feigning an interest in his long stories.
Most of all how I’d settled for scraps
that were never enough.
Today I am filled with
relief
at not feeling
compelled
to bolster my witty
and charming persona.
But, oh, I miss
feeling sixteen.
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