The Shape of Rain
Page 53
SONNETS
THE GRID21
I live between two graveyards, down below
The circling crows. Plots dotted with grey-green
Stones, as symmetric as a sonnet, know
That order in necropolis is king.
I sometimes see slumped shapes surround a new
Dark rectangle in the grass. The uniform
Black huddle then breaks, milling slowly through
The yard and back to the paved paths. The swarm
Of crows flies over their stern lines. My wife
Arranged these flowers on my desk. Red
Round petals drop on this page as I write—
On column, form and ledger, parched and dead.
We’ve built our lives here, out of stone, amid
The graves we dig. To survive is to break down the grid.
THE STUDENT
So long I’ve sailed upon Posideon’s sea
And may Prometheus in Hades burn
For what he’s given me: firelight to see
The azimuth grey and aged from which I learn
And cannot turn, enraged. Why must the sails
Go ever on? Why must they fill and breathe?
And leave an innocence that rips and ails
At every sight upon Posideon’s sea?
Can I return? Divert my ship to shore?
Delay awhile upon some secret isle
Where I may raise my oars, to watch her soar?
My vulture’s vengeful flight to Titan’s trial.
May she devour the light and bring me peace.
And may his pain and my sweet youth increase.
LOST ALL AGE
It’s when I said I could do anything:
Sail the sky water, suck the apple wine
From mythic seas. These words don’t mean a thing.
When the crows circled overhead and I
Saw our reflection in and through the pane—
What does it matter these words I sing? Kate’s kiss-
Lips red as blood, soft as the black pupil stain,
Grave in her eyes when she said, “I will.” This
Means nothing. When I tried to angle all
Those words to life I found that I should’ve said:
It’s nothing baby, sing, sweet baby doll,
And we will carpe diem ‘til we’re dead.
If I lost all age anything could be on this page.
It’s easier that way, dance instead of rage.
ASLEEP
I watch you on your hands and blackened knees,
Your frame curved like an egg in the grass, planting
Our garden. Your warm fingers seed down through
Cool slender holes in the turned earth. Sweat gleams
Between your shoulder blades and you’re singing,
While I fall to sleep, dreaming. I dream you
Laid me down in a basket by a stream,
A wicker boat among the reeds, and let
Your fingertips slide my craft out toward
The current- you let go. All that I’ve seen
All I’ve done, age I’ve lost and won, all spent
In rhyme and song I saw along the shore,
Shoot sunward. You have sown a dreamer’s seed.
Don’t wake me ‘til I make the river bleed.
AWAKE
Now, as I stand beside the stream, returned
To where I was set free, an older man
Now, I wade through the reeds to open my
Veins—to let my blood speak for me. Returned
To have the final word. With blade in hand,
The cold edge glimmering, tracing a raw line
Across my skin, I will do now what my
Art could not: bleed, breathe—for all my life I
Believed it could be done. Believed. I feel
The breeze on closed eyes, the taste of red wine
On waking lips as your warm fingers slide
Along my wrist, on wounds you cannot heal—
I wake with your eyes smiling into mine,
Face to face with the dream that is my life.
All that I’ve seen
All that I’ve done
Age I’ve Lost and won
All spent in rhyme and song
I saw along the shore
Shoot sunward—
You have sown a dreamer’s seed
Don’t wake me until
I make the river bleed.
STOP WATCH
Was there a single moment that has made
A man of me? One second, Katie flung
Me kisses—left my pale lips Kool-Aid stained,
The next, my mind began to tick, my tongue
To taste and time tip toed through me. Hours tolled
Across green school yards. Thieving bells. Bells that
Taught the eyes to watch days fade, and the heart
To feel years die. And all the rest was rush.
That single moment clicked like gears behind
Her face. Now, hands and numbers circle fast;
I stop to watch my past. Oh Katie, find
Me while I don’t believe the past is past.
A single moment I saw fade to black
The moment I learned I could not go back.
LYRICS
THE SLANT OF THE SUN
There’s something about
A wing-snapped bird
Alone in the dust—
A black cat on the grass.
There’s something about
A grey eyed girl
Alone in the back—
Not a friend in the class.
There’s something about
The brown of booze
Before a broken man—
His brief case right beside.
There’s something about
A spider’s web
Across an open gate—
Mom calls the kids inside.
It’s the slant of the sun, I know.
The shifting of the Earth
In her wide, soft bed.
Come every September
She nods her head,
And the stars shake loose
And the shadows stretch out
And I notice that
There’s something about
Empty wheel chairs
Outside the sliding glass doors—
The laughter in the park.
There’s something about
A child’s eyes
The closet door ajar—
And it is getting dark.
There’s something about
The moon, the sea,
And the civilizations
Uncovered by the tide.
There’s something about
A will to carry on,
When a wing is cracked
And the cat is on the lawn.
THE CONS OF SHADE (a lullaby)
May the message of a little lily
Under wooden sidewalks on an afternoon
Wrapped with raindrops,
Speak to you.
Crowded under footsteps over
Lily’s head, watching passers-by
Curse the sky, Those grey clouds
Make them cry-
She’s reaching up.
Reaching up to you.
And she says:
When will you learn this life has just begun
I’m happy in the shade
But I’d like to see the sun.
I’ve got potato bugs- come for tea to see me
At least they dig the dark
Cause now it’s all we’ve got
We’ve got to learn, got to learn
To dig the dark.
Her neighbors are potato bugs
Sifting through the murk and mud
Loving the cool damp shadow, black
Deep down below.
Their lives are trapped in blindness
And they’re quick to remind us
That
the dark is just a place
That we learn to outgrow.
They’re reaching up.
Reaching up—
LEAVES ON STONES
When you said you’d rather burn
I barely listened.
Talk of death seems so far away.
Nothing more than a wisp
Of atmosphere.
Sucked vapor, like words disappear.
I said I’d prefer a stone at my head,
A chiseled name.
Let my bones shoot like stems
From beneath the sod,
From there I’ll reach
Through the simple plot of God.
But let’s not talk of that,
Bones and smoke and belief—
Let’s put it away, out of reach,
And once more into the breech.
But fire I thought: I’d be untraced
Nameless and naked.
My one precious possession transformed
To ash, and free to fly.
No lies, no façade.
I become the simple plot of God.
Leaves on stones
Footsteps stepping over bones.
Every life leaves a trail.
Mouths of words
Tongues are flying like startled birds.
Every life leaves a tale.
Don’t forget.
Forget there’s an end.
Don’t forget
The time we have left.
THE OLD IN
I’ve placed a fountain in my corner of career.
It chokes and gurgles a mechanized groan.
There’s a chi that’s said to stream-rush rooms
And turn attempting to achievement.
I’ve stopped watching TV in the evening,
For it’s sure to strike me down with disease,
But a pill of ease is offered if I will
Accept dizziness, headaches and slurred speech.
Out with the old—in with the new
Too many years gone by to not to
Little did I know all the different ways to go.
But I don’t know…
I don’t know.
I’ve started reading my wife’s happy books
Left above the toilet, at the bedside—kitchen table.
They say some law is attracting them to me
Like sunshine fingering into corner shadows.
I’ve begun a regimen of vitamins,
Little pellets, gold as sun-lit water that will pump
My heart-blood, skin and bones with youth.
For like food, my potency—is breaking down.
It’s alright,
I’m just weary to my bones.
You think I would have learned by now.
That nothing new ever stays,
Just as it arrives it runs away.
Nothing good comes from running.
If I remake, recreate, keep myself remade,
Maybe in the end I can say:
The more I changed,
The more I stayed the same.
THE REASON
Teetering upon a step ladder
The sky blue drips down my raised arm
Over my head.
Reaching high,
I am making the ceiling disappear—
Making a home for clouds, winds,
And flight.
I wonder if this faint hue of paint (the color of all above, hot July afternoon),
The delicate, airy, transparent wisp of it
Can fool my little boy
Into thinking that he might be able to see
The drifting constellations just beyond the
Painted layer of firmament,
As he lies upon his back,
Staring up from his pillow.
I hope he considers the possibility that
I may have painted the universe for him too,
Upon the hidden 2x4 rafters above—
Just an extra stretch to the plywood beneath the roof
Where planets, spiral arms and twinkling myths
Wait to be discovered.
But even as the reach of my brush heaps puffy cumulous into the clear,
And trails out vapors of cirrus that tangle up in the corners,
I see that I am slowly becoming covered with sky
As I create it,
And space seems slightly complex.
For this sky,
Streaks of it lining my arms,
In my hair,
Upon my cheeks,
Falls as fast as I can raise it.
And I can see right through it.
I’ll try to tell him about this one day.
The reason I erased his ceiling.
APPENDIX VII.
ELLIQUI
The Elliqui word Itonalya means immortal. But when the word is broken into parts, the etymological depth it reveals reinforces and mirrors the culture’s long, enigmatic past and rich legacy. The word is old. When it debuted is difficult to trace, though we do know that the earliest Itonalya tomes used the term as far back as forth century BCE.22
Itonalya is constructed of many words and meanings all from its Elliqui root word, itonel.
itonel, (ē•to•něl´), adj, n.- forever, eternal
itonalya, (ēt•to•năl•yä), n. immortal
it, (ĭt), v. revive
ito, (ēt•to), adj. - again / ever
to, (to), v. - age
nel, (něl), n. adj. - more
a, (ă), v. - encircle
al, (ăl), n. ring.
ya, (yä), n. - delicate, fragile
alya, (ăl• yä), n. - life
It is also hypothesized that like many Elliqui words, the word itonel influenced the Latin word aeternālis, and later the Old French, eternytie, until finally, in English, eternal (about 1380).
Though scholars have translated Itonalya to mean immortal, I suppose if we wanted something more accurate, an attempt might read like this: revive forever more to the fragile ring of life that encircles age.
Hence the Itonalya blessing and curse.
Here are the first stones of the Elliqui avalanche to come. With the Heron Atheneum at Upper Priest Lake, Idaho, unearthed, and professor Finnley’s team working tirelessly, I anticipate addenda and corrections to the lexicon below.
Photo courtesy of Graham Cremo, ©2018
Tomes of the Heron Atheneum
Photo courtesy of Graham Cremo, 2018
Elliqui alphabet book
ON TRANSLATION, PRONUNCIATION, SPELLING AND USE OF ELLIQUI
“There was no need for language for our hearts knew love, and fear was not yet made.”
—The Silent Author
From the Toele.
True Elliqui in its Original Mode, was a language based in thought.23 It was, to the best of our ability to define, a kind of telepathy. The Itonalya called communication verceress, meaning communing, or conversing in thought and feeling. Elliqui itself translates as the language of thought. For several millennia, immortals practiced the art and could commune with not only each other, but with the stars, and the source of their love, the earth. They could, of course, speak and understand many other languages of humankind, but the gift of true Elliqui provided immortals meaning and a hope for their long lives—the language was the music of their paradisiacal earthbound existence.
When the rebellion began against Thi and the earth began to fall silent,24 the Original Mode began to fade. Each year that passed, Elliqui’s potency lessened until, not long after the fall of Wyn Avuqua in 1010 AD, the stars, the Earth and the voices of their kin fell silent.
According to Dr. Loche Newirth’s writings,25 three figures shaped the foundation of written and oral Elliqui: a great blue heron, a First Born sage named Belzaare, and a mysterious immortal called The Silent Author. When the rebellion against Thi began, and it was clear that the Original Mode of Elliqui was dying, it is said that the language was sung to the Itonalya, Belzaare of Vastiris by a gr
eat blue heron. Belzaare took the bird’s gift of song and began the arduous and forbidden task of recreating the sounds and ordering them into words. Thought impossible at first, and later an abominable sin,26 Belzaare constructed the basis for what many scholars have called the sound of light. Many years later, another Itonalya known only as the Silent Author, drew the corresponding runes and characters to Belzaare’s sounds.
Oral and written Elliqui are obvious departures from the Original Mode, but when used correctly, the pathways to the ancient’s verceress are opened. This all that remains of the Original Mode. And it was hoped then as it is now, that by preserving what remains of Elliqui, we might again regain our true connectivity with each other, the earth and the Hereafter. Or, as Queen Yafarra, daughter of Althemis Falruthia of Vastiris, “Elliqui is the path that will enable us to speak to the earth once more. Elliqui is magic.
i.
PRONUNCIATION
The following is a key to Elliqui pronunciation. There are several differences between the sounds and how they are written. The reasons for this are multifold, but suffice it to say that when telepathy meets oral speech, sounds represent a vibration in the psychosomatic connection as well as separate emotions and responses. The Silent Author has written several documents demonstrating the extrasensory nature of the sounds and their relation to shape in the telepathic continuum. What follows is a phonic structure. Perhaps by outlining these phonic characters and setting them back into the tongues of humankind, we may find a way to rekindle the original flame of language that was once silent but communicative beyond words themselves.
CONSONANTS: TONES I-IV
C :
C has the value of k as well as the value of s. C followed by y should be pronounced as a long i: Cy (sī). There is no Elliqui character for the English letter c, therefore k is used. It is thought that early translators determined a telepathic distinction with words containing the hard consonant sound of k/c. These distinctions are subtle and vary on the tone of following vowels, where the k/c sound forms in the mouth, and its particular stress in the word. Therefore, my transcriptions attempt to follow organizational foundation of the early translators by separating the k rune into the two English characters of c and k to further enhance the sound’s extrasensory properties. see Y.
CH :
This digraph sound is a single rune in Elliqui. The sound has the value of church, chatter, crutch. see SH, TH.
G :
Elliqui’s g is predominantly akin to the English sound in gain, giggle, hug. However, there is one important distinction. For words that signify beginnings, or newness (gen, gendel), early translators used the English g to function as the sound of j.