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.

Train: Paris to Bordeaux Bordeaux to Biarritz

I am chasing these trains and clouds

like little kids do,

the fright of loosing something in the distance:

bird tails,

sunlight,

traces of sky,

people.

Clouds are like the ghostly tails of gold fish

lingering-

caught fingerprints on the glass,

waving transparent

against the stillness of the sky,

and the carcasses of old citrons

lie abandoned like the husks

of cicadas in summer.

Roads meet and diverge

and tunnels give way to

scattering swallows,

as I continue chasing

these woven phone lines,

these empty train stations,

until the train breaks off,

and I stare out the back door

at the passing tracks.

Ode to Marie

Daffodils,

postcards,

sculptures,

worry stones,

tea cups,

seashells,

paper flowers,

circus scenes,

landscapes,

yellow,

light,

mosaics

she is a collector,

she is patient,

mornings when I find her,

and her bowl of tea,

that soft golden yellow

steaming in her cup,

her small body,

robe,

blue slippers.

her blue eyes dimmed,

looking out as the light paints the apartment

and sky slowly.

Or on Sundays,

after lunch,

the moaning of the coffee brewing,

her in the kitchen,

telling me stories,

brining out our simple black cups,

facing each other at the small table,

the way I watch her eyes as she speaks,

that same blue,

of the ocean in Bretagne,

some vibrant caught color,

that changes,

and shimmers,

and that I can never forget.

For having such small bird eyes, they are the first ones I have ever found,

that truly gleam,

that deep blue that is lavished with light,

like these early mornings in Cesson.

The way when she laughs,

her cheeks take up the space of her eyes,

and she is lost in the smile.

We talk for hours,

she is a good listener,

and patient

to my fumbling French,

and off tune accent

transforming my passion

into understanding.

She speaks slowly,

to everyone, and especially to me,

and her words are small

and ooze like honey dripping off a spoon.

With this she tells me her stories,

by the time our hands have become

a part of the coffee cup,

wrapped around them,

like our hearts,

holding on strong.

She has found a home here,

in an apartment that has a flat wall facing the sunlight, and the sunset,

kept hidden from the city,

from the suburbs of Paris

where she used to work.

It is close enough to an old path,

littered with chestnut shells,

and a series of lakes,

that catch reflections

of black tree branches,

trembling wind,

the entangled light,

opening up to a field and an old farm:

wood and stone leaning on each other in silence.

Places she looses herself in.

She walks to the market on Saturdays,

to share conversations,

to buy spinach,

and apples,

Clementine’s,

old vegetables,

her grandparents used to grow,

like little presents,

she brings them home.

She found this apartment from a vendor

at the market,

so she goes every week-end,

in thanks for her good luck.

She loves the color of blue,

I think from having so much sky when she was little,

and would go for long days walking in the countryside

with her parents.

That ever-changing, throbbing color.

She lives simply,

and she likes to play jazz

when she cooks.

She grew up with a harsh father,

and a need for freedom,

she has always had a strong spirit.

When she was little

instead of washing the dishes,

always slipping out with her book

on the front porch,

at her grandparents house,

I can see her there,

looking out on the emptiness,

the stars,

that always tell that it will be cold tomorrow.

Even now, in afternoons when the sunlight lags around

she goes walking with a book in hand,

knowing which street to cross,

which bumps to avoid,

walking the paths.

Her father once told her she could never have a motorcycle,

one to use to go into the city with her friends,

and one day this old grandfather of one of them,

took her into his garage,

and gave her his old motorcycle,

she came home with it,

and told her father it was hers,

and he could not take it.

She would drive around corners,

and old highways at,

her reckless blue eyes gleaming

as she tells me now.

One of her friends had a château,

and a father that left his son alone in it,

and her and her friends

would have picnics on the property,

when hearing his fathers car rolling up,

hiding in the crevices of the house,

sneaking out

through the forest,

laughing like crazy,

never getting caught.

At 18 she got married,

she believed she was in love,

in love for the rest of her life,

there are pictures of him,

in the faded photo albums,

his curly hair,

their young adventures.

At some point, on summers when for months she would traverse

the French countryside,

she lost him.

She found this apartment.

She is a collector of stories,

of language,

of people,

backpacking from one village to another,

cooking,

talking,

sharing that same ecstasy of

nature, and exhaustion at night.

Meeting village children,

seeing pastures of sheep,

reflections of trees,

misty fading hills,

she is always a part of it.

On the doorstep, there is a blue tile, and a panting of a sun,

she found it somewhere near the border of Spain,

to her it means home,

a memory of walking, some point

when sun and earth and sky

mold into her at night,

this tile that welcomes me home,

as I open the door,

white curtains

and open windows

that paint the apartment golden at dusk.

I breathe in yellow,

and love,

and that warmth

I feel at night as I snuggle against my bed,

perfectly fitting my exhausted body

like two small hands around me.

Her home, her collection,

I love spending hours discovering,

finding her in the afternoon,

on the steps,

reading in the last

square patches of sunlight,

how beautiful she is,

her quiet small body

glowing with that soft burning

serenity she holds,

that I find, in the quiet,

her house,

full of cooking,

jazz, books,

and little stories,

postcards lined up,

and spaces left to fill,

to be painted every morning differently.

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

Jack Kerouac

Ode to Rennes

I found you,

in the secrets of your roads

twisted and old,

carved by people

and windows;

laundry,

and phone lines

half erased,

but lingering

like something

mysterious

on your tongue.

I have lived in awe of you,

my lust for adventure,

and wandering

lost down streets

for days,

watching

rooftops

and chimneys,

red and black

and continuous,

moving up and down like mountains

against the sky.

I searched in you

for something,

and only could I find

my eyes,

drowning from you,

words filling my body,

and finally,

quiet.

Space being redefined

like paintings:

renaissance clouds,

and jazz,

umbrellas,

and cafes,

graphity,

orange bursting sunsets,

sweet tequila,

and cigarettes;

into a place I could fit in my hands at night,

smaller than the moon in my window

or my front porch in the summer.

You, lustrous you,

who transformed my body into curves

and poetry,

echoing silence,

and concaved,

like the way the

blue molds the sky

round, ripe and infinite.

Blues

The rain curling up with me in bed,

the Sunday blues again.

Here they watch the winds paint the clouds grey

like the men painting circus posters on the sides of buildings.

Winter Train

Like an old projector:

black branches

and white smoky sky

flashing together

in silence.

Train to Paris

The surprise as the dark blue morning sky gave way to fields of snow, “Il neige, Il neige!” cries a girl, the mother looks up from the newspaper to smile, not seeing the window, or the magical white watery sky, the dusted fields, and red rooftops.

Looking over the puzzle pieces backyards of houses and apartments, washing lines, and lawn chairs strung about, gnarled trees, church steeples and stone houses, making cities, like cut out squares of a Picasso painting, things unnoticed and scattered along the train tracks.

It was winter before I found you-

the shadows of white sky, sleeping fields,

and the phantoms of trees:

a passing train

of tired people,

two little boys sharing a seat

while their parents cling to the bars

and each others eyes,

with a loneliness.

The way the mother looks at her two sons

and up to greet her husband,

as if all this was worth it,

that they have given it all up.

le lac

Running until the wind seems to be holding my heart in its two hands, I come to the clearing, around the corner where the road bends around the old farm, where the trees open up to a small lake: half lost in the smoky sky, the mossy limbs transforming into black reflections lingering on soft blue, ice in patterns, and mist brushing over into the distance. Sitting down, I watch the perfect symmetry as the branches greet each other in the water, the liquid light of sunset trembling in the distance. The clouds are blowing over the soft blue sky, and across the branches that dangle the husks of nuts in winter. The air is clear, and crisp, but the water blurs the colors and the reflections, changing the light: glace blue, to gold, to soft wispy pink, and then the deepest blue, drowning me into its vibrancy, as the day turns over into night.

The Evolution of Churches

Before,

le plein cintre

half formed of clay

and stone,

like the opening of hands to sky,

churches made of rocks

impossibly placed

in alignment with the stars--

an open cathedral.

Now churches growing towards god,

the gallery of kings

rebuilt higher

and higher,

carved and beaten stone

statues reining,

as if birth rights

gave them the power

of divinity.

And these have diminished:

facades full of poles, and ladders,

and the molded, half crumbled forms

of these immortals,

while rocks

learned to hold sky.

11:30

Drivers passing a cigarette

in the shadows of

streetlamps,

and glowing bus windows.

Fingerprint Skies

I am sometimes lost in wonder, when the sky looks like quick white paint strokes, half brushed against the blue, like afternoons lost in highways in Denver; that two places can share the same sky.

I have found ways Denver, and Rennes, mold together at night, sharing heartbreaking full moons, and blood red orange sunrises that burn between the trees. The way my host mom and my mother, both love jazz, and sip their wine really slow. The soft way they both listen to me, their blue eyes, their small lips. The way they love simplicity, images, postcards, dreams, beautiful things, placed around their homes, like secrets and treasures. The way I feel when I enter the yellow warm apartment, like when I curl up with mom at night, looking at her collection, as I listen to her heartbeat.

Like on Sunday afternoons, as the sun and I discover my host mom’s stories, her worry stones, paper flowers, and feathers. The way my host mom and my mom laugh, that full face, wrinkled eyes laugh. But my mother claps her hands, and laughs loud, while my host moms is still like a little mischievous girl, giggling at a trick she played on her father. They both are teachers, they both have come from childhoods full of hard men, and need for freedom, parents who smoked and fought. Their strength, both raising families on their own, and trying to give their children a childhood that was better than theie own, a wholeness they have been searching for. The way they both love walks, my mom watching the geese settle over the lake in the afternoon. The way they get lost in books.

This year I have lived like a ghost, transparent, and observant, not quite cut from my roots, but stretching out of them, and untangling myself. I could never leave Denver behind, the mountains, my family, my memories, and I could never leave English completely. As I sit on a bus, surrounded by French, I am secretly writing poetry in English. America is a part of me, and living here, thousands of miles away, I finally understand that.

There is a strong difference between the U.S and Europe, perfectly defined just by space. Here everything is put together, houses like slits in the city. Rooftops rising, and falling, and filling up space, streets so crooked, and small. Sidewalks are crowded with tables for cafes, people walk everywhere, there is a thrum of footsteps. You are lost in the secret spaces of the streets. I can drive for 15 minutes in Denver, and still not be able to hold the sky and land in my hands, but here, just out of Cesson, I am already in the mossy woods and stone barns of the countryside.

In the U.S it is space, roads, and highways, skyscrapers, and country sky. After you loose the cities, you are lost in the sky, there is nothing for miles. Our liberty and hearts breathe, we drive fast, we want to feel the space. We don’t walk, and we are always pushing further out, taking up the space, the sky, we want to discover everything, we are more young and ignorant. But that is what makes us so happy, we are naïve, everything is beautiful, undiscovered, and reachable. In Europe, you take what you have, what space, you are polite, you don’t build skyscrapers to block the sunlight. You avoid eye contact, you love the ones you are close to more than anything: with passion, and respect, everyone else seems to live in shadows, in robots that build and breathe in the city. They are missing the loneliness we have in the U.S. the undiscovered desert, thunderstorms, the isolation of the stars, somewhere lost in the middle of the mountains.

But what I love most about Marie, other than her compassion, and cooking, is her sense of wanting to loose herself in time and space, as I have felt so many times back home. Going for walks for months in the hills and ocean sides of France and Spain, she meets people, and builds a relationship with the sky. Her small exhausted body folding into the bunk beds, full of silence and contentment. The way she has an understanding of old trees, languages, and the need to make new friends, new perspectives. The reasons for why she welcomes students into her home, like opening her door to the world, she says, and I understand as she tells me this that she really believes it. This experience, the exchange of cultures and ideas, is so important and beautiful. Those moments we are completely in understanding of the other, where words slip and fade, and ideas and forms seem to mold together. The way I look at the sky with the same beautiful adoration that she does, even if is soft blue sky reminds me of summers and road trips, and her of hikes in the countryside, we still stand at the glass windows in silent awe.

The sun shatters into a thousand pieces

of gold from the sky

illuminating the people

at the café

(hazy light, and the smell of sweet French cigarettes

people moving through water)

Untitled

You of

twisted

roads,

secrets,

stone,

phone wires,

laundry lines,

statues

green and crumbling,

blue number signs,

old faded doorways,

metal balconies

and black aching trees.

How can I understand you,

the way you hold cities

and people,

in your delicate,

skeletal hands?

The way your monuments

rest in the hard,

ancient

hearts

of your people,

passing within each other

like shadows:

buses

and cigarettes at night.

The freedom of the dark cold sea,

filling them--

drinking to feel.

I cannot understand

these barren emotions,

the way the smoky clouds,

and desolate trees

blend days together,

people together,

into brown and black.

You,

who carves me at sleep

into solitude

and questions.

"Well I have been searching all of my days, all of my days. Many a road you know I've been walking on, all of my days. And I've been trying to find what's been in my mind as the days keep turning into night."

Alexi Murdoch

Le bus

This freedom,

as I take the bus into town,

no obligations,

places to be,

people to call,

riding to the soft sleepy shadows of the sun through the windows.

The lull of stop and go, sliding doors,

paper cut out apartment buildings,

every stop I have seen a thousand times

and yet still so foreign and beautiful.

Half dreaming

as the bus moves its way to the city

carving next to the river,

the old stones

grown green and mossy,

my fingertips tracing the windows

the lights,

the moon,

the jigsaw puzzle of this city;

the sun sneaking in through

the cracked windows,

the bustling terraces,

bicycles,

the quiet shadows of people

making their way home at night.

The feeling of estrangement,

and the freedom I get from it,

riding the bus into town with no one to see

and nothing to do.

Dimanche Aprés-Midi - le début

As my host mother pours the coffee powder into the canister, the doors and windows open, letting in the soft autumn air, it feels like home. In Fall, with the sighing trees, and the hazelnuts cracked open on the sidewalk, I feel like a part of me is being wisped away. My corpse shedding with the leaves, and scattering across the square, leaving me to think. Today the clouds are sailing across the roofs of houses, the chimneys, old rusted red tiles, the cocks that tell the direction, and tangling with the church spire. I sit looking out my window, a cup of coffee in hand, feeling the time pass. People sit at Les Cessonias leaning over their wine, cider, coffee, arms leaning on the table, heads resting against their hand with their cigarette, you can hear the men laughing, see the bar man, with his apron, standing smoking in the doorway. A few cars pass, bicycles wandering through the square, parents with their children, legs dangling over the backs of the bikes. A motorcycle flying down the street, and the same old man and woman taking their walk, to the church bench, looking out with squinted, soft eyes, hands wrapped around their canes. It smells of the old leaves, the sweet cigarettes, and of coffee.

The Collector

I have learned to make a collection; out of all the things I have unturned like stones over this year to discover their secrets. I have filled myself with people, memories, stories, feelings that passed so quickly, ones I never felt before, and never want to forget. The silence I have built within myself, some soft humming that keeps me safe and content when I am alone. The way I have learned to unravel all this, these sunsets, and places, and people, the ones I miss, and the ones I will miss and the way life seems less confusing, as I fill it up with meaning. I have been searching, for meaning, and this year I have learned that life should be built of such beautiful moments, when two people share true human connection. I never want anything else but that. All I have of this year is nothing concrete, but some pieces of stories, scraps of poetry, photographs, conversations, and all those people I have shared something with.

"There was this also: a secret sense of the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer nights at twelve and one and two o'clock when the seats endured alone in the empty theater. The enduring is something which must be accounted for, one can not simply shrug it off."

The Moviegoer Walker Percy