by James Welsh
Can these words break
your bones or could this
stick never hurt you?
The dancers step out a rhythm
written words are hidden in. The stage is
a spitting image of a page, the edges cringed
at the thought of public speaking.
This is simply the way the game is
said. The singer hums to warm
her voice, her joys bubbling at the surface
of her tongue like a taste would.
The fountain does not
speak, though, until it’s given time.
It’s only then she follows out the
measure lined across a page, the
staff written as notes in the margin,
the ink hardened as resolve.
We hide in the thin thickness of the paper,
meanwhile breathing and
tapping out words that are
worlds longer and skies higher.
March 11, 2010
Branch Gives Way to Leaf
I am someone’s son, but no one’s father – I’m afraid
of the day saying I am someone’s father and no one’s son.
My future bores into my buried grandfather
clock, twitching its hands to pass
the hours. I like to think its oak stock
is seed and it will resurrect in branches,
dancing in winds that are chilled but
still steel up the warmth like gin.
But I know the days of being grandson
are already gone. I was too young to
know him so at least I can’t forget him.
They say a branch ends at the reach of its arm.
But when a leaf
shatters and
rafters across the fields,
who’s to say
the branch stops growing?
And who would
guess it
was time
and nothing else that
willed the
lush wind to
push that feather on?
September 9, 2010
Breath Fast, Stomach Full
The clock’s hands are waving at me,
all two of them in their honest glory,
never missing a beat, a heartbeat in
which things are buried, the stories
of my people past and future. All
this is no more than what I want to
know of – the
love isn’t there if everything
else is, I think.
At least, that’s what I’ve been told.
Because two things
cannot breathe and dream in the same place
at the same moment, unless they share
a mother and who says brain and love
are brothers? Drummers move the clock
along, the doorbell only bringing in the
noon from the cold.
I look the clock in
the face. I don’t think it can
tell a lie. It only dabs
its eyes as it insists that now’s the time
to wither my flowers and dry out
in the pavement to look presentable
for the dinner bell.
Burrowed in the Sun
I watched the sun
wash all of the dirty dry,
the spurts of green
dying in growth until
the weeds coffin
into the ground – limper
than hangman’s rope.
And still the sun
widens its precision,
turning all the
rocks liquid. Even
at night, the lights
hang there in their
aching suspension.
The city fountains
its lit windows – the
light-switch
flick
flick
flicker of broken
streetlight staccato –
all the lights heavy
in the sweaty summer
evening, waiting to
fall back down
to the ground in
morning like widows.
April 15, 2010
Calm During the Storm
…train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng…
-Molly Bloom
It wailed as loud as
whisper, passed about
the chamber like a
rumor, until it autumned
down as thunder –
the law of gravity loves
his company.
The skies all around
thunderclap applause,
hands squeezing out
the friction of scribbled
lightning. They live
as quick as lust
can. The wind kickstands
the clouds, swirling
the motions up – a mountain
mirrored in the
clear lake beneath.
There are few songs as
sonorous as the rumble,
the thunder’s chorus
rusting in the rafters,
humbling me into deep sleep,
an ellipsis beyond words.
Yet I still love the
flickers of daylight cutting
through the midnight thunder.
April 25, 2010
Calypso for Excuses
I remember her jumping up, quick as
some slug gummed down with table salt.
Her eyes of ocean blue were swept beneath
the torn carpet as if for me forget before
I could write this. Those tsunami eyes
splashed what it was her mouth couldn’t strum:
“You wanted to get lost like Odysseus –
I’ve been waiting for you like Penelope though,
drinking my coffee slow, sleeping off the sleep
that comes earlier and earlier at this time each year –
when the wind whistles away, walking its
way to work, whispering our names
into the oak trees for all who are near
to hear and see. The leaves are
shakes and rattles now, each a windowpane
in the wake of some train’s roaring whistle
muscling its tracks in the
snow glowing along the bend.
I would drink my hair as the wind
blew the strands across my face –
I would sip on the hair and keep on waiting.
I’ve tried eating oranges to taste away the sadness.
I ate them until they tasted like
I imagine that red would.
I’ve waited the days down, my thoughts
spinning hard, spinning the hour
hand on the clock around in a dizzy,
until I fell asleep in the bedsheets
of the apple tree’s shade, until
the night rusted dawn and the day –
and the wait – began again.”
Cat Got
Cat got my foot –
find it hard to run
away from my problems
so I have to walk beside them,
talking to them
beneath a copper moon.
Cat got my writing hand –
got to learn writing
with a pen stuck between
my teeth, writing
more than I can chew.
Cat got my ears –
got to plant my head
against the floor, finally
feeling the sound waves
wash me all over.
Cat got my smile –
have to learn sprinkling
that twinkle in my iris
so that people woul
d
have to look me
deep in the eyes
to see if they
made me smile.
Cat got my “cat got…” –
I’m now whole and full again,
but like always and forever,
I’m sitting here
crippled in dependence.
Chimera
Our marriage? It’s a chimera – it’s
not enough to say that it was never
meant to live. All things – even
the beautiful pottery – are meant to
fall and break. No, it is a chimera,
in that it should have never lived
to begin with. I see that now,
as we step on our memories like
the crumbs of china,
waking up the baby in the
other room. But even with this
madness, the two of us will still
wake up in the same bed tomorrow.
It’s going to take you
saying “I don’t love you”
to be the noose to straighten
out my spine. It’s going
to take that sentence to make
me pack this bag and leave.
September 9, 2011
Cold August
This cold August rusts the pipes
lining the roof of my house.
The rain – a leaky kitchen faucet
turned on to wash these grimy hands –
comes down in fallen bed sheets
to cover the chilled morning and talk
it back to sleep the way a mother would –
just not as good.
Yesterday was desert, the way
the heat stuck and crawled down
the short sleeves of my shirt,
spinning webs made of beads
of sweat down our backs, reminding
me of late mornings and giggles
we shared before, along with
the ones we haven’t had yet.
But now the rubber rain bouncing
off the roof – scoop up
the jacks before the
rain bounces twice – sounds
the same as rolling down
snowy hills did in my youth –
a rolling stone gathers no moss
if it’s covered in ice.
The crackle of the rain lingering
in the shingles of the roof, it’s
the static, the grey snow that
glows on my broken TV, causing
me to put down the remote,
pick up James Joyce,
read Molly’s soliloquy
and believe.
But now we’re growing dull
around the edges – with grey
in our hair and a faint to our
talking. And sure, we
could meet halfway at the café,
but I know she doesn’t like
to come outside when it rains –
and she knows that I don’t either –
so until this monsoon ends,
I’ll miss her the way the
sun misses the moon during the day.
Color Me Blindness
Color me blindness because my hands are eyes
and my palms are gloved
and I suppose my sight is also.
All I want to see though
is the spectrum to your
patterns. If only I can warm
the silk between the friction of my fingers
like cats lapping milk between purrs.
If only I could stop playing blind beggar, though,
especially with this moment
still billowing on beautifully,
the furs furling and unfurling in the winds
like tattered battle flags.
November 9, 2010
Colors (An Old Man to His Wife)
“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?”
-Pablo Picasso
You were in the corner, crying until your eyes crimsoned
and I wondered if the sun – in all its ambers and orange –
would rise today – like a flower – or hide amongst the auburn
mud, the khaki stones, the withered tiger lilies in goldenrod.
You only used to forget shoes, staining feet with fern green,
holding olive bark like playing cards between
your fingers, doubled over with laughter, burgundy
in the face from smiles and giggles. Aquamarine
was your favorite stone, reminding you of the sea
near your snowy summer home in Beverly –
a town full of rusty piers and champagne houses.
Now though, those are no more than denim memories
fading away into some sort of mousy
magnolia you’ve already forgotten, doused
by the old age, the ivory hair,
the lemon chiffon paint peeling off the walls of our house.
But though you’re forgetting things, and you cannot bear
to think of the things you’ll miss, I have colors to spare,
I have colors to mix with yours – your greens,
my yellows together make the most wonderful pear.
Dancing for Writers
I write the same way I dance:
preferably sitting down.
My weak knees are bully, having
pushed me into a desk chair.
You know, some glue up the
walls, calling their cubicle a castle.
They hallucinate wars between the sheets
of their reports, the paper weights cannonballs,
felling the stray notes like trees.
I go steps further with my words.
I wrestle with my sentences, pinning
them down with periods. Or letting
them flap free, not bothering to paperclip
the wings. I grip the pen so hard
I bleed out the ink, let it sink like
ships into the paper’s pulp or whatever
it’s called. I press the pen so harsh it
drips through. Now a backwards sonnet –
perhaps a better one – is on the other
side, glued there, too full for any more food.
Without saying a word, writing’s the rough
growl that dries my throat out.
This is my life
and it will be my death
regardless of whether
or not I can sell it.
But writing has killed
many writers
in a way
the war never could.
And I’m not even a shadow
of that good.
March 28, 2010
Dancing Swans in the Sun
She was dancing swans in the sun,
which settled in its wedding bed on
the ocean yawning, stretching
with a lazy blue and red. On one foot
perched, she spun string in the
wind that leans on the cliffs –
the wind coughing on cigar smoke that
curled and hooked
the skies above. Some
called it the evening, but we
called it the wind’s fondness
for hand-rolled cigars.
She leaps far and leaves the world for
two seconds pawned from this
beach we’re standing on –
two lovers against one world.
Power in numbers,
the saying goes; at least, that’s
what I’m told. And though the
night sticks to us
hard and fast, she knows
where the beach holds its
ragged seashells and waltzes between
them as the waves swell
their chests and pound the shores –
I can feel the sound sink into our
souls like the shipwrecks strayed
across the seafloor of
this forgotten bay.
This harvest moon feels warm
the way a rainbow does when
it runs through dying storms
which forget how to beat their drums.
I can see swans roam the moonlight
that lights the water asleep
against the beach – a beach
within our arms’ reach and all
we need for a world.
And it’s then she falls for the first
time I remember – she falls into
the love I hold like a wreath
between my arms.
At that, the beach felt warmer as
the skies blushed embers.
Days Stretched Long Like Shadows
For an hour or two, I
walked in the wheatfields –
the cousins’ dog
barking like seals,
thrilling some crows
paddling the waves of grain –
their fallen feathers
flocked together
in the autumn wind.
The dog sees a scamper of grey
and a minute and a chase later
it had already caught its
breath – along with some rabbit
stuck like gum in its jaws.
Oh, I love the honeydusk,
how it drips slowly like that color does.
The fields of grain were all waving goodbye –
I waved back at them as I walked by,
walking with the dusk, arm-in-arm,
for the longest day ever.
Desk Scribes
Rap, rap, rap.
I tap my finger on the desk, chatting
in morse code with the tanned oak.
The echo laughs with me.
Even after all of these years,
this desk still boasts the blush
of lumbering, limber tree lumber –
although now in peaces it rests.
It holds my ledgers of writing,
confusing the ink with its roots.
And those ledgers? They’re biting
on a weather of hopes. And those
hopes? My heart is tightening
its screw through them, and
the hand is still turning.
And that smell – that smell of
