Domestic Mysticism:
A small frog in the sink
interrupts my grandmother’s chard-rinsing
while outside, rain falls in a cement birdbath.
I am there, here, but where.
Domestic Mysticism:
We go by
second or third names,
nicknames, name games,
and no one can know
to speak our first
which is a face
not a sound.
Domestic Mysticism:
I cannot agree on anything
abstract. But reeds at the edge
of an estuary, the saltwater filtered into standing
up to wind, to day
in a painting of Cape Cod, I imagined I could enter,
drown beneath.
Domestic Mysticism:
Fade of burgundy print
patterns a soft sheet.
Everything seems
and seems to belong,
as a color belongs to its fabric,
silver to a spoon,
or, I have been here.
Also, the limit to description,
definition, inscribes itself
in a pattern which can only describe
its repetition, petition
for asymmetry, repletion.
Domestic Mysticism:
Silk button in a drawer, silk flower
sewn onto some mistake
righted.
Stray iridescence, vagabond jewel in cement, I have absorbed you
through my foot bones, pain prayers, wandering out here
in the urban gardens, (I’m not tough–)
Only resting now inside a bus, well lit and filling up,
home and homelessness cycles as breath, a string strung through a shared sense.
A string around my wrist broke long ago,
and this was how I became a consumer
of gels, foams, glitter, with nothing to hold onto but a vision:
gold nugget replica in the museum, a cigar box painted black as a piano,
purple feather and netting of a felt hat in a window, ordinary, extraordinary
nimble things without presumed significance, between ownership
(blue-finned fishes teething on my limbs)
and my perception an object
too, a carbonate bubble lined in layers and layers of ether,
everything, everything, and isn’t it how.
The world’s a-thunder and I find refuge only in lightening. The streets swim with stray dogs and books moisten into amoebic sutras of suffering and persistence. I don’t know which direction home lies, I’m that close to the equator. My pants stick to my legs as I throw a borrowed and broken umbrella in the gutter; the banyan trees do nothing to keep me from this warm disintegration of sky.
In lightening, or in the moment just before lightening, I imagine a silvery cave, a geode suspended in space, no other ground or gravity. When it cracks open to reveal lavender, its silver going matte, I see myself inside it and maybe a desk and chair, split from wood or wrought from iron by the electric moment. I stand upright in the isolated diorama and think, I could fish for stars from here.
Or in another time, I sit at the edge of an ocean amongst palm fronds whipping in the gray wind. A waiter comes to me to give me his uniform which I do not want. He strips down naked and sits beside me. We cannot see any fish in this ocean, we only see mute crows battling day.
Alteration
In the sky a dilemma. Fountains rush by.
Home from the tournament beasts seek quiet.
Writing covers the desk.
Your colonization of the infinite
is a romantic departure.
I ask you to permit the image
and the alteration of time.
-from The Red Gaze. Please excuse the lack of proper formatting here.
“Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.” -Merleau-Ponty, from Phenomenology of Perception, p. 235.
Warmth inside August rain, a living room open to the visible spectacle of rain. Warmth wants a book, its particular pleasure, made to be made, wants sentence more than plot. Floor-wood breathes in moisture and warps, ottoman-leather seems to want to come back to life, as an animal. The animals here sleep, soft burls, and the rain ceases inside of them. Without moisture I cannot see. Without daytime I cannot.