welfare of the world

Had I still been younger, I would have
still wanted to change the world.
Time has a way of showing a little
at a time, moment to moment 
letting me scale what can be done, 
what can't.

I write quiet poems now. Burning still,
I'd like to believe, in an almost imploding
kind of way; far from what I once had been:
immortal in being 

so much younger. wide eyed
out in the streets.

It has been years. 
And I have come to understand the way
the body, too, comes to understand:
how some stories are longer than we are.

Like violence.
Kindness.
Unconditional.

Some moments I wonder if a poem 
does make a difference in the world.
The kind that is enough to move a shadow.
Or are we deluding ourselves
believing we worth as much as a star.

It is possible
we don't. We are 
alive anyway.

Like every other little thing everyday:
leaf still on a twig, blade of grass,
weed, ant, housefly, guinea pig, 
farmed chicken, stray dog.

Who gets to say which life matters more.

Some stories, by their nature, are
truly longer than we are...
No one can really save the world and live 
to tell all the stories beginning to end.

An Occasional Prose

Recognising Envy, I chose to stay clear 
from her table where she is entertaining guests.
The lights are low, her jewellery sparkle 
her loose bun calling attention to her nape, also
inviting fingers to finally unfasten all that hair.

Stumbling upon another poem

Stumbling upon another poem
while wading through all these daily
words, like warm tea on quiet
afternoon feeling like a respite.
Like an adolescent lost (again)...
If all the doors were open, there

would be more than mere 
associations.  All of us might have 
trouble from all the remembering.  
Lucy van Pelt; and of her father whose got
a reputation, a plane tree; also, others.
Here, a poem on water, on ocean, perhaps
in a jug, in a well.

To Drink

by Jane Hirshfield

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink. 
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek--
it is the same--
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass,
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.

white

the mornings are white.  and i try to shake off the remains from last night.  difficult when even sleep cannot make the forgetting.  when the waking is by a dream where i was calling in a makeshift

bedroom in a makeshift house.  the entire scene breezy noon, blaring bright.  the bare walls, raw plywood.  and plastered, bond paper size cut-out pictures of newspaper comic strip cartoons. the likes of peanuts. also a 1980s rock and roll star with a large nose. the pictures appeared random.  but 

possibly not, they all have clearly drawn noses.  in the dream i was showing someone the room.  and disturbed by the sight of the pictures, i called for her, i called aloud and i wake up in 

a morning white.  the curtains drawn, the room light with tempered sunlight.  i find myself in bed alone.

there is a street

i ask her to read a piece of the new work, the work about a city, re-imagined, not appearing the way it is, appearing translucent, unreal.  she is a local, in many ways, i am not.  i think i see the city only now, even though, have seen it many times in dreams, in re-imaginings.  there are many things i have missed, many things not known.  she used to take me to the streets and show the alleys, the secret corners of Chinese men and herb women, among others.  streets for textiles only, streets for glass, streets for cutflowers, streets for these, and streets for that.  streets for motor bolts, for rubber slippers, for half starving children, for pet fish, for castoff rags, for fiber ropes, for stolen goods, for dogs, for women, for fruits, including the seasonal.  also including the dark and darker stories i can only imagine under the naked bright noon.  she had spent fragments of childhood in these streets, their eccentricities.  i had spent hours with her, held by hand lest i get lost.  the streets, the entire city, always a novelty.  i ask her to read a piece of the new work, the work about a city, re-imagined, not appearing the way it is, appearing translucent.  this is unreal, she says on the piece about the infamous red light street.  i ask why: is it because you want realism?  she cannot make up her mind. 

a temple of dragons

The red temple of dragons sits atop the city.  Above the known residences of the elite overlooking the city that sprawls itself like a net for all the working middle; that spreads itself thinner as it goes farther from the Uptown and closer to where the port-less edges.

T, though no longer as militant, and I couldn't help "reading" the landscape while climbing up the red stairways of the red-pillared temple:  how myths were, or have become, religion; how a culture is strong and vulnerable, how art is, how economy is.  No lengthy discussions; only many fragmented ideas.  Some photographs.  We tried de-constructing the temple:  turning it into the highest temple of the folk Sky heavens:  Agyo's; or the dragons, turning real, the last protectors of the temple under siege.  We've had had more conversations on culture and the comic book (as cultural by-product) the past forty-eight hours.  

Inside the temple, a kowtow.  And the scent of incense.

For a moment, at high noon, at the foot of the stairs before leaving, T mentioned a word I took for dusk.  

We went to another temple, a coral-stone church; and then another of the most recent architecture, a hundred white walls like dominoes on top of a land that used to be sea; all in two hours. Then it was time to send off T to the airport, to the parallel universe I once had been.

Along the way, watching from the window the road edge curves and the stiff street light posts, I realized I liked lines.  Literal, visual, two-dimensional lines: the way they are drawn against a backdrop of negative space.  "Espasyo," T said.  

The sky was so clear, it was white and cloudless.  Marching the beginning of summer.


On my way home, the dusk in the city was a gradation of the lightest  yellow, to cyan, to a sober dark blue.  No tinge of red.  A waxing moon was rising, thin and white like a clipped nail.   

Things of Light

Lately I’ve been remembering things
Of light: Sundry shining things:
Coins, pebbles, marbles in a glass,
Fleeting glimpses of mottled mornings
Of floorboards newly waxed,
April shower dripping on a poinsettia path,
Shafts piercing a maculate afternoon of acacias.

Clouds roil and rain stains the parchment
Sky of a dry season (thunder rolls
Across the horizon), but the glinting discs
Of lightning long remain in my recall—
The moment glancing on the well-worn
Edges of my window sill—still chasing me
In my smog-blurred somnambulant noons.



Marne Kilates

time keeping

 there is a kind of peace in running and in being with one's dog.  in spite of all the humidity one tries but cannot avoid.  and later, in the high of noon when every thing is so bright it hurts the eyes.  and every thing else is lazy, and balmy, and not wanting to move.  good to sit on the couch by the window with a glass of water.

(and come friday, a performance for women's month.)


(come saturday, the beginning of the graduate school trimester.)

(tuesday, T to fly over and talk about graphic illustration.)
     

but in the mean time, here.  zagajewski in his so many things breathing in between the said.  the consciousness and the sense of present-ness a construction from memory.  lewyka, the comic(?) banality of the tangible  where "[c]urls of apple peel slide off the table on to the carpet, where they are trodden into a fragrant mush."