Au Marché

"Look at your eyes. They are small, but they see enormous things." -Rumi

Goldfish

8 months ago

I was molded differently:

to dry heat sunsets

and afternoon thunderstorms,

lungs deep

of aspens and pine

and the weight of being closer to the clouds.

When life was like a restless summer breeze

nights of insomnia

pages and pages,

reading,

waiting,

for this:

and now,

this easiness,

these late night bus rides,

taking off my shoes to run

and catch my last bus home,

this uneven feeling of solitude

and fulfillment.

Wandering the full length of the city

catching metros

and the feeling of flying

as it dives back into the concrete tunnel,

lost in the sliding doors and wires

of a curved grey

vertebrae.

The need to keep wandering:

looking for something

always someone,

someone new to meet,

someone to change your life.

Entangled and entangled

in people, sunsets, cigarettes,

the blurred spaces between us;

eating up stories and memories

like popcorn in an old movie theater.

I have lived too much this year to keep still

to keep languages on strings

and sew sentences

everything lately

has been mixing together.

The weird way

my brain humms

like a bird

when I am alone at night,

a thousand

thrumming, caged wings

of these ideas and people

I have met, and stashed away

who are just waiting to be forgotten

I can’t believe that one day,

the way these sunsets fade with tea,

the way my host mom transforms

our bathroom into circus tents,

will all unravel and fade away,

and maybe

one day,

I will be able to tell you how I felt.

The way I felt when I discovered someone new for the first time

that beautiful deep feeling

I have filled an ocean with.

Of all the crumpled observations

and sketches that fill my head:

the way these old French houses

have changed with the seasons

and each morning as I pass them

still have more secrets,

the lonely attic windows,

the one misty morning

I discovered fish in the pond

at thabor,

that feeling of magic,

lonely lamps in apartment windows,

the reflection of the trees on the sidewalk at dusk,

late bus conversations,

the taste of mango orange juice after it rains,

the way the sea looks at midnight,

when no one is watching

and the golden white rocked sunrises

and misty blue mountains’ of the Mediterranean.

Things that lay scattered

like those goldfish in a lonely park pond,

caught in the reflections of clouds

that turn into nothingness at night,

left alone in the dark

to think things over.

Sky Circles

The way of love
is not a subtle argument
the door there
is devastation

birds make great sky circles
of their freedom~ how do they learn it?

They fall, and falling they are given wings

Rumi

Train: Nice à Marseilles

The symmetry of the ocean

hanging off the edge of the train tracks.

Clouds and sea fluttering in the windows

like butterfly wings pressed against the glass

but I am the one trapped,

watching the fisherman

and docks pass,

girls preparing to dive,

children skipping stones,

the old man searching the edge of the rocks with his bicycle

a dead fish maybe? sea glass?

or the reminisce of metal cans, broken bottles, and cigarette butts

like washed up shipwrecks.

Les Champs Libres

these windows are so wide,

you can almost see the skyline of the entire city,

the empty spaces of a vertebrae,

how much space I hold:

50,000 moving, sleeping, aching people

caught in edges-

phone lines, cranes, and shadows

as the horizon moves across buildings

descending the sunlight into the darkness,

the tops of buildings drowning in light.

A poem for Neruda:

The ocean-

night-

the city lights catch pieces

of the mouth,

that tumbles

its echoes

into lace curtains on the shore.

Lost in the black blue

it folds itself against the sand

like open palms

soothing, and searching,

finding the creases, and freckles,

and places to kiss, caverns to place

its hands.

In You The Earth

Little

rose,

roselet,

at times,

tiny and naked,

it seems

as though you would fit

in one of my hands,

as though I’ll clasp you like this

and carry you to my mouth,

but

suddenly

my feet touch your feet and my mouth your lips:

you have grown,

your shoulders rise like two hills,

your breasts wander over my breast,

my arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin

new-moon line of your waist:

in love you loosened yourself like sea water:

I can scarcely measure the sky’s most spacious eyes

and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth.

Pablo Neruda

"The great relevation had never come. The great relevation perhaps never did come. Instead there were the little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark"

Virginia Woolf

I saw cranes, horses, fields collecting rain, shacks and gardens, trees skinny and crooked from the wind, baby vineyards, and rows of white winter trees, farm houses made of red stone, lawn chairs and old men, long rusted sprinklers lying abandoned in a field, phone lines like swallows, lost rivers, old rail cars fire truck red, and rusted turquoise left like open paintings in the daylight, the mounds of uprooted tree trunks, lonely cemeteries, and yellow sprouting fields, things starting to grow again, and passing into the vibrancy of a flashing window.