Excavations 3 & Night Journey

Excavations 3

A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves
the attention outside the poem.
– Robert Creeley

At night in my bed
in the dark
I fell through a space,
many spaces
some glued to time
as though to become
almost a quilt
of many colors
many stories.

(I died many times that night.
I composed many poems that
preached nothing promised nothing)

Later that day my dear friend said
It must have been a case of dysteleology.

I loved that.
I wrote poems around that.

Later he left me for a
Dark Lady in Sweden.

I refused to accept it.
I didn’t believe the ontology
of departure.

Listen my friend said later:

A poem begins in exile
It flies around on invisible wings
& takes dumps on your head
any number of times.

When it lands on earth it
offers only its naked being.
Believe this, somewhat.

That was my friend the poet
who flies about just over my head.

Joanna came along later
& says:

if you must make poems
consider the spaces
that lie beyond the
words, unknowns
holding the chalice
of a mysterium,
a parataxis
of nonsequiturs.

Embrace the silences
that haunt, an oceanic.
Try not to deploy nouns.
(remember Gertrude Stein)

If your poem has no beginning
middle end it might be a
success though not with the
poetry police

who wear long faces,
wield mean red pens
on the lines of the
rejected, unclean.

I love it when Joanna says:

isn’t it luscious when a poem
doesn’t have to mean
but just be there

like a Rothko or Pollock
or perhaps a Klee.

We’re dining in the
Bistro of the Winds.
Having the Gouda & wine.
Its nighttime & we
don’t have to go anywhere,
like a poem.

 

 

Night Journey

What do you want from me, Dream
That you won’t let me be?
— Federico Lorca

I have endured the edges and mirages of daily travel.
Have paced hour by hour in the worn shoes of
anomie.

But your voice, Lissa. I wait for your words
each and every one.
Haven’t we witnessed the light, the shadows
in a togetherness some call love.

Haven’t we trusted one another with
our temple of the future.
Shouldn’t we be able to touch the rose
without fear of thorn.

All this I ask but receive no answer.

At night in my dreams I undress you
but only from a great distance.
What is it that refuses our closeness.
What unspoken darkness lies in my
sleeping self.

About

Projected Letters is a literary magazine dedicated to publishing the best new and established writing from around the world.

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