SILENT EAR
Poetry Alert! Notes from the urban underbelly, written on an overpass. The new paint-over repels urine – in your face scum!
Sludge works on its way to the top, climbs over the fence on a ladder of sirens, roaring traffic slightly seasoned with distance, leaf blower mosquitoes, conversations that might be back handed publications, all landing within conscious thought.
Somewhere back of this melee is a mood that never was, perhaps wants to be, but nowhere, no chair for it to land in. All the hopes and dreams and horrors learned, rolled into a whiffle ball that sits placidly without any chair at all. I'll leave it there.
A front yard bird arrives and there is company for doing nothing. The dull glow of a red geranium, half lit in fleeting shadows somehow calls that mood madness. Too dramatic. If it can be packaged and sold, why there it goes, off to take its place on: all the world's stage, pay with bit coins if you got 'em. I hope it's useless.
Flittering in the wings is another song. Last night it arrived in a harmonic structure that, like the sound of a creek, had slipped away, maybe not very interesting, scum, sludge . . . back into the fundaments of water itself . . . pushing up, yes, a red geranium.
Certain sounds that have their own meaning await the silent ear.
UNSILENCE
Of all the words that never were, let's imagine one that passes through walls unseen, calling both sides together. Who would believe it? Such a fairy tale might be the tinsel sheen, unbelievably red in late afternoon, of a passion flower vine. A certain crack in the usual dimensions. And so begins an avant-garde washboard played with metal thimbles.
Molecules of this backyard dimension have been arranged in accordance with observed parents, siblings and others. Everyone in the same boat: Rub-a-dub-dub, light is the unmoved mover, cannot be outrun because that's the dub-a-dub of it. Whatever “it” was called for something that passes through walls as though they weren't there. Not a comfortable feeling.
Various animal friends are hanging around. I am focused elsewhere while reading. Not to be ignored, there is a loud CHIRP and a bird perched on a rock near the feeder stares at me! I wonder if some sort of spirit passes through appearances. And so it seems to be: Write! What?
I don't like this, but on the other hand, who am I? This collection of fairy tales inherited, cherished and passed over, along with sirens on a ladder. The very locality is a definition. And of course my name, recorded at Saint Mary's Hospital in San Francisco, with its title deed. So there everything is secure, in its place.
My friend chirps loudly again, glancing briefly, then flapping away. There is a difference between automatic writing (an oxymoron), an Ouija board, and having the guts to follow a direction maybe deemed insane.
Wouldn't it be fun, just think of Hansel and Gretel, to find the flow of an avocado seedling stretching up its leaves through a question crook in its stem. That harks back to a cymbidium birth, surrounded by tall spears of leaves obeying the laws of light as we observe them. Photosynthesis. The glass slipper. Stretching up, aching for the sun in that birthplace of shadows, twisting through that insufficiency, finally the triumph and to exist until that day of rescue, transplanted into this pot by my feet. To be the Subject, etched in pixels, of a photograph sent through space-time, illusions in asynchronous communication to appear regardless of fences in Beijing where, according to Yahoo, 6% of my viewers are.
Evening shadows and scattering light, melting edges that flow together in a rhythm of dimensions.
Laughing words hide behind simplicity. Like anyone else, I am multitudes, cherishing songs, stories, the Eiffel Tower, the Pentagon, the International Space Station, and a history of cities, glaciers, childhood friends, pain of birth, libraries, super markets and noisy neighbors. Note the missing beat, pride of Thelonius Monk, and I proclaim authorship of it all. So much said.
It flows like the Nile or the Mississippi, broad and calm, barges and mysteries, floating debris. Birds peck in the feeder. The air is moist. “In addition to the heat, dry conditions and wind gust exceeding 50 mph are expected in portions of the Intermountain West . . .” says the NWS. Someone driving a car with a loud rap down Benton Street gets second gear rubber. I am multidimensional.
The very walls of this back yard fence are a mockery. They cannot impede sightless vision. Words that speak of it are a mockery. Dimension is a laughable term that lacks an arm splint. So it, too, should hide. The molecules of it are yellowed newsprint hung in a dusty frame, applicability that varies between mathematical rigor mortis , Orion, and a slice of Swiss cheese. And methinks an echo of shameful gratification. Who remembers the Linotype days of hot type set in lead?
Oranges are glowing now, over the fence, in our neighbor's darkening tree. Spheres of familiar reality are a baseline Sitar drone, think of a fossil fueled tabla beat. It begins even early Sunday morning when our neighbor to the left fires up his motorcycle. Listening carefully while the engine warms, the counter-beat of misses blends toward a full throated thrum fit for the freeway with a certain pride, even though it's a one-lunger and certainties of this world proclaim mind's comfort. For awhile.
Until it dissipates in Mississippi traffic. And all the while Orion's stars anchor an Egyptian pyramid, seen through a dedicated shaft, their applicability as inarguable as the fleeting beam of light that now illuminates our dove, one black staring eye, a galactic
whole that gazes straight through me, sightless vision, back yard fence a mockery.
