Through the window, washes
on a watercolor planet,
rainy autumn shades in spring, and
in the early evening, scattered photon showers
are forecast, a luminous return of light
from the shadow sun.
Indoors there are smaller mysteries,
trailing motes in negative space—
old-fashioned sunlight
leaving lamps and bulbs,
domesticities and peripherals,
drawn out between the curtains
to the shadow sun.
We’re squeezed like toothpaste into wires,
an atmospheric phantom network
bouncing off the sea bed and the sky,
and if we don’t pay the bills:
discontinuities in reality.
They’re deep, best not to fall in.
I remember burning forests in the wind
when the air was thick as a roast chicken smoothie,
when nature, lightning and amino acids
made single cells in starter packs,
ever changing, revisable.
But now each heart is pizza sliced in four quaternions,
one alone, the other three—
an irresolvable triangle of love.
Once on a quiet night, I joined a busload
of marsupials and monotremes on tour,
even an emu or two, and we
traveled through the window down
an invisible road to Isvénia.
Where rivers of sand once ran beneath the sea,
I saw an endless room, domesticated white goods,
infinity cubed in rows and shelves and aisles.
And in the concrete fields outside,
Audis stacked eight stories high,
driving gloves in leatherette that clawed
out of the ground,
keen to leave the parking down below.
Orchards and orchids, the air is filled with contagious scents,
and the colorblind angels of dreams
with wings of red and green are fluttering
around aspiring nectar.
Spring fish are hopping, sparrows are pecking at the carpet,
and I don’t mind that my mailbox is filled with ashes.
It’s mother nature. But if I poetize about her,
that will be me, and nothing to do with her.
At the Hotel Miramar beside the Atlantic,
breakers are breaking, storm clouds
are brewing like coffee,
and no-one is interested.
At the Hotel Miramar,
everyone must play
the piano, read a novel
in a cigarette’s glow
and occasionally set a page on fire.
The rail clatters its rhythms but the carriages never move.
They’re always here, and through a frame, a door,
a window, a hole cut in a rainy mirror,
you can see them waiting.
Telma was painting the feature wall
with essence of vanilla. Joanne was reading
a possible book, perhaps the persistence of trains,
or a painting, the persimmonence of time.
She’d need her glasses to be sure.
This is what Jandira told me—
The invisibilities will ascend from ground and green,
from fields of stubbled corn and furrowed dirt,
from the Amazonic jungle
through the tree lines to the turbulence above.
Now I’m perched in a jacaranda,
and set to fade like Carroll’s cat, the great auk and the dodo,
with my telescope trained on the far horizon
where the welded night’s creation is rising with the dawn.
The furthest sky at night is
the ceiling of our dreams,
the enticing soft geometry
of desire, and we know
its brightness, sight unseen.
The frozen stars, the years of light,
of interstellar vacuum, once swirled
with all my childish magic,
but now those future ghosts are gone,
their tinsel’s faded to a glimmer.
The i-coupé makes its debut.
So silvery and sleek, and quiet
as a mouse trying to purr,
no steering, no gearstick or pedals.
The salesperson kept on talking,
but I was already sold.
It doesn’t have a motor at all.
A universal transport moves you
to a nearby timeline, where
the i-coupé’s a little further
down the street.
What are you up to, Victor?
I’m writing a poem, Eloise,
something about love.
His felt-tip pen was hovering
over a page of crossings out,
where white-out streaks had
turned to snow capped ridges.
So much for having writ moves on.
When I see two Siamese cats,
bookends on the porch,
when I find two stoves boiling
spinach in the kitchen,
when I meet myself pulling weeds
out of the garden,
I know it must be Célia, and
she’s switched herself again.
Everything is ordinary, the rain birds
said, and I believed them, though
the morning breeze had blown
my cat away, and the wasps set up
a circus in the bedroom.
When I voiced a few concerns, they told
me that the wasp show must go on,
and when I hinted at a discount on the door,
they insisted I must pay full price.
Time is not a river in the mind,
it runs in agitated swirls and eddies,
with a little fabric softener.
We’re pebbles skimmed across its waves,
seabirds too ungainly to find its sky,
who skate along time’s surface, and
never understand its heights
and depths.
Seven memorable days in the Orion Spiral for $99/night all meals incl.
In twenty sixteen, three craft from
deep space appeared over Earth
on discrete stratospheric
trajectories.
We tracked them with lasers,
and launched several missiles
that turned the three ships to a
luminous mist, and a sunset
in glorious colors.
Found this in my letterbox addressed ‘To the Occupant’:
Here are 5 reasons to make your writing incomprehensible—