How should I know? The enormous wheels of will
Drove me cold-eyed on tired and sleepless feet.
Night was void arms and you a phantom still,
And day your far light swaying down the street.
As never fool for love, I starved for you;
My throat was dry and my eyes hot to see.
Your mouth so lying was most heaven in view,
And your remembered smell most agony.
Love wakens love! I felt your hot wrist shiver
And suddenly the mad victory I planned
Flashed real, in your burning bending head...
My conqueror’s blood was cool as a deep river
In shadow; and my heart beneath your hand
Quieter than a dead man on a bed.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sex...
Sex
by Michael Ryan
After the earth finally touches the sun,
and the long explosion stops suddenly
like a heart run down,
the world might seem white and quiet
to something that watches it in the sky at night,
so something might feel small,
and feel nearly human pain.
But it won't happen again:
the long nights wasted alone, what's done
in doorways in the dark by the young,
and what could have been for some.
Think of all the lovers and the friends!
Who does not gather his portion of them
to himself. at least in his mind?
Sex eased through everyone,
even when slipping into death
as into a beloved's skin,
and prying out again to find
the body slumped, muscles slack.
and bones begun their turn to dust.
Then no one minds when one lover
holds another, like an unloaded sack.
But the truth enters at the end of life.
It enters like oxygen into every cell
and the madness it feeds there in some
is only a lucid metaphor
for something long burned to nothing,
like a star.
How do you get under your desire?
How do you peel away each desire
like ponderous clothes, one at a time,
until what's underneath is known?
We knew genitals as small things
and we were ashamed they led us around,
even if the hill where we'd lie down
was the same hill the universe unfolded upon
all night, as we watched the stars,
when for once our breathing seemed to blend.
Each time, from that sweet pressure
of hands, or the great relief of the mouth,
a person can be led out of himself
Isn't it lonely in the body?
The myth says we ooze about as spirits
until there's a body made to take us,
and only flesh is created by sex.
That's why we enter sex so relentlessly,
toward the pleasure that comes
when we push down far enough
to nudge the spirit rising to release,
and the pleasure is pleasure of pure spirit,
for a moment all together again.
So sex returns us to beginning, and we moan.
Pure sex becomes specific and concrete
in a caress of breast or slope of waist:
it flies through itself like light, it sails
on nothing like a wing, when someone's there
to be touched, when there's nothing wrong.
So the actual is touched in sex,
like a breast through cloth: the actual
rising plump and real, the mind
darting about it like a tongue.
This is where I wanted to be all along:
up in the world, in touch with myself. . .
Sex, invisible priestess of a good God,
I think without you I might just spin off.
I know there's no keeping you close,
as you flick by underneath a sentence
on a train, or transform the last thought
of an old nun, or withdraw for one moment alone.
Who tells you what to do or ties you down!
I'd give up the rest to suck your dark lips.
I'd give up the rest to fix you exact
in the universe, at the wildest edge
where there's no such thing as shape.
What a shame I am, if reaching the right person
in a dim room, sex holds itself apart
from us like an angel in an afterlife,
and, with the ideas no one has even dreamed,
it wails its odd music for pure mind.
After there's nothing,
after the big blow-up of the whole shebang,
what voice from what throat
will tell me who I am? Each throat
on which I would have quietly set my lips
will be ripped like a cheap sleeve
or blown apart like the stopped-up
barrel of a gun. What was inside them
all the time I wanted always
to rest my mouth upon?
I thought most everything
stuck dartlike in the half-dome of my brain,
and hung there like fake stars in a planetarium.
It's true that things there changed into names,
that even the people I loved were a bunch of signs,
so I felt most often alone.
This is a way to stay alive and nothing to bemoan.
We know the first time we extend an arm:
the body reaches so far for so long.
We grow and love to grow, then stop, then lie down.
I wanted to bear inside me this tender outcome.
I wanted to know if it made sex happen:
does it show up surely in touch and talk?
does it leak from the mind, as heat from the skin?
I wanted my touching intelligent, like a beautiful song.
by Michael Ryan
After the earth finally touches the sun,
and the long explosion stops suddenly
like a heart run down,
the world might seem white and quiet
to something that watches it in the sky at night,
so something might feel small,
and feel nearly human pain.
But it won't happen again:
the long nights wasted alone, what's done
in doorways in the dark by the young,
and what could have been for some.
Think of all the lovers and the friends!
Who does not gather his portion of them
to himself. at least in his mind?
Sex eased through everyone,
even when slipping into death
as into a beloved's skin,
and prying out again to find
the body slumped, muscles slack.
and bones begun their turn to dust.
Then no one minds when one lover
holds another, like an unloaded sack.
But the truth enters at the end of life.
It enters like oxygen into every cell
and the madness it feeds there in some
is only a lucid metaphor
for something long burned to nothing,
like a star.
How do you get under your desire?
How do you peel away each desire
like ponderous clothes, one at a time,
until what's underneath is known?
We knew genitals as small things
and we were ashamed they led us around,
even if the hill where we'd lie down
was the same hill the universe unfolded upon
all night, as we watched the stars,
when for once our breathing seemed to blend.
Each time, from that sweet pressure
of hands, or the great relief of the mouth,
a person can be led out of himself
Isn't it lonely in the body?
The myth says we ooze about as spirits
until there's a body made to take us,
and only flesh is created by sex.
That's why we enter sex so relentlessly,
toward the pleasure that comes
when we push down far enough
to nudge the spirit rising to release,
and the pleasure is pleasure of pure spirit,
for a moment all together again.
So sex returns us to beginning, and we moan.
Pure sex becomes specific and concrete
in a caress of breast or slope of waist:
it flies through itself like light, it sails
on nothing like a wing, when someone's there
to be touched, when there's nothing wrong.
So the actual is touched in sex,
like a breast through cloth: the actual
rising plump and real, the mind
darting about it like a tongue.
This is where I wanted to be all along:
up in the world, in touch with myself. . .
Sex, invisible priestess of a good God,
I think without you I might just spin off.
I know there's no keeping you close,
as you flick by underneath a sentence
on a train, or transform the last thought
of an old nun, or withdraw for one moment alone.
Who tells you what to do or ties you down!
I'd give up the rest to suck your dark lips.
I'd give up the rest to fix you exact
in the universe, at the wildest edge
where there's no such thing as shape.
What a shame I am, if reaching the right person
in a dim room, sex holds itself apart
from us like an angel in an afterlife,
and, with the ideas no one has even dreamed,
it wails its odd music for pure mind.
After there's nothing,
after the big blow-up of the whole shebang,
what voice from what throat
will tell me who I am? Each throat
on which I would have quietly set my lips
will be ripped like a cheap sleeve
or blown apart like the stopped-up
barrel of a gun. What was inside them
all the time I wanted always
to rest my mouth upon?
I thought most everything
stuck dartlike in the half-dome of my brain,
and hung there like fake stars in a planetarium.
It's true that things there changed into names,
that even the people I loved were a bunch of signs,
so I felt most often alone.
This is a way to stay alive and nothing to bemoan.
We know the first time we extend an arm:
the body reaches so far for so long.
We grow and love to grow, then stop, then lie down.
I wanted to bear inside me this tender outcome.
I wanted to know if it made sex happen:
does it show up surely in touch and talk?
does it leak from the mind, as heat from the skin?
I wanted my touching intelligent, like a beautiful song.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Maintenance Man
Do you remember the machine the way I do?
How it drives towards the horizon
beyond the vanishing point that I can't even make out
The machine that struggles to quench its thirst with sips from a
smoldering sun,
a copper pendant that dangles between its breast.
Wire weave spider webs over the open mouths of pipes
that run and dive around landscapes
clouded by plumes of gray smoke that threaten to sew shut our
eyes,
that stretch for miles and miles of titanium highway.
When he descends on us,
all the parts of the machine,
we do not move.
Not a single red bulb lights.
There is no siren's song
to distract him from this job at hand.
Everywhere
there is a sound
of screws that shake in their bolts,
the low whir of belts that caress the wheel,
valves that warm hands over spark plug crackles.
He traces his fingertips over our iron flesh,
run them in and out of spokes.
There is no Love in his smile like the way
I've seen chain tenderly spoon gear.
There is no hatred in his Eyes
like the dull pummel of piston's fist against cylinder.
I have watched him forever
as he sails his very small boat astern of mine
not because I am the best sailor,
but because I don't know how to describe the wind.
I am no thief in clever disguise,
just another component with no capacity for uprise.
He laughs at me,
and begins
to strip me of my plastic coating,
peels back my skin
so nicely
that I can see the reflection of muscle and sinew across his pupil,
methodically works his way over my body
and listens to every chunk of flesh
slap against the ground.
There is no pain
when he splits my face down the middle
and cracks open my cheek.
He leaves me naked,
unnamed,
a well-oiled machine,
just the inner systems of a body
happy to be rid of her plastic coating,
and hands me this memory perdu to nestle somewhere between
unconscious creation and deja vu.
Then he ask me something I've heard before.
"Which one?"
he says.
"Choose."
And he points out
lion's roar, rainbow trout, cicada,
farmer's crop, hot wind, mouthful of cold water.
But there's something in his voice
that I seem to understand from before
that in choice there is chance,
and though he says
no one has ever succeeded
I take my chances,
and choose
human.
How it drives towards the horizon
beyond the vanishing point that I can't even make out
The machine that struggles to quench its thirst with sips from a
smoldering sun,
a copper pendant that dangles between its breast.
Wire weave spider webs over the open mouths of pipes
that run and dive around landscapes
clouded by plumes of gray smoke that threaten to sew shut our
eyes,
that stretch for miles and miles of titanium highway.
When he descends on us,
all the parts of the machine,
we do not move.
Not a single red bulb lights.
There is no siren's song
to distract him from this job at hand.
Everywhere
there is a sound
of screws that shake in their bolts,
the low whir of belts that caress the wheel,
valves that warm hands over spark plug crackles.
He traces his fingertips over our iron flesh,
run them in and out of spokes.
There is no Love in his smile like the way
I've seen chain tenderly spoon gear.
There is no hatred in his Eyes
like the dull pummel of piston's fist against cylinder.
I have watched him forever
as he sails his very small boat astern of mine
not because I am the best sailor,
but because I don't know how to describe the wind.
I am no thief in clever disguise,
just another component with no capacity for uprise.
He laughs at me,
and begins
to strip me of my plastic coating,
peels back my skin
so nicely
that I can see the reflection of muscle and sinew across his pupil,
methodically works his way over my body
and listens to every chunk of flesh
slap against the ground.
There is no pain
when he splits my face down the middle
and cracks open my cheek.
He leaves me naked,
unnamed,
a well-oiled machine,
just the inner systems of a body
happy to be rid of her plastic coating,
and hands me this memory perdu to nestle somewhere between
unconscious creation and deja vu.
Then he ask me something I've heard before.
"Which one?"
he says.
"Choose."
And he points out
lion's roar, rainbow trout, cicada,
farmer's crop, hot wind, mouthful of cold water.
But there's something in his voice
that I seem to understand from before
that in choice there is chance,
and though he says
no one has ever succeeded
I take my chances,
and choose
human.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)