Brocatelle

 

 

 

They tell me the hay is the hay of stick

and softness. That you can sleep there,

hide there. Make love there. Count your painful

days there. And there was a feeling I kept

as close as a skin. Close as cancer,

kept quiet under my little hat of hairs.

That luxury is lust. And that excess is

indulgence. However much I want the

lumph gland as small as the sun

it holds red tissue like a jar.

 

And I could know the grass, hoe heavy.

The bells of the church, heavy. The shapes,

the arms of the fundamentalist, all heavy;

their Gods mighty. Saw no other thing

but the beauty of the day. The brilliant

purples and reds of the she-wolf bougainvillea.

The red bracts, all fragile. All important.

 

It is orthodox this love virus. Found holy

in the urine of birds. Carried far by wind and rain.

Fidgeting like the bow spirit. "Care for me",

the entire live cycle. Monody. Single song.

Yet today I am so mortal. My secrets mortal.

I can express each and every moment as sorrow.

How else to wish out loud but to do so in the

present hour.

 

I tried my goddamn hardest to spell love.

Twice. And twice it was misspelled.

Had a child out of wedlock that I can love

and send greeting cards to, with a woman I

cant stand. Ergo, becoming human

is an acquired delicacy.

Reviews

[Tree]

Just dense with vivid imagery, brimming with sorrowful–– earthy, fleshy human images. But that last stanza stood out even more than the previous stanzas, and it was heavier, sadder, yet sublime, ––– and it had to be, I guess, in order to balance the weightiness of your vision. Thought provoking work here, D..

[jacob erin-cilberto]

"becoming human is an acquired delicacy"

and somehow the hors doeuvres i kept getting at the cocktail party made me go home early and feel ill..

been through three marriages ...relate to this..
and it makes me remember the first wife...in my hippy freak days...we were going to change the world..but all that relationship did was change my world.

love the imagery in this...it is tight and visual. "found holy in the urine of the birds"--- great line...and the urine just spreads...and we get hit in the face and the heart with it.

[Ken Simm.]

As complex as a carpet of words laid out. Describing and commenting on the events of a place that could all have happened in the time it takes to read this. Woven words, dense and hanging with memories, thoughts and reflections. This is about as good as it gets for me. Wonderful.

[Marie Anzalone]

Profoundly and quietly powerful, dana. My mind followed courses from a summer hayloft where I used to hide from a psychotic ex-boss to a veterinarian's office handing a pet owner the x-ray with the bad news. I walked several miles of regret and questionable decisions and ended up on a few that were unquestioningly right.

About that last bit. I have a poet's heart. I tried to love a novelist once; we almsot married. We did not speak each other's language, it turns out. Does not mean we loved less. Just differently than we both needed. Said novelist has 5 kids 1/2 a country away. Two will have nothing to do with him. Looking at his story, looking at yours; my own, even, I wonder. Things like life trajectories, and purpose. Maybe those other two weren't here to meet and know him, but rather their step-father, or someone else? Maybe life needed what he could give? Maybe the woman he did not love was supposed to be in his life just long enough to bring forth the two he had with her? Would any other life trajectory have brought me here, again watchign sunrise over the Sierra Madre, working every mroning on putting more stitches in this patchwork quilt of hurts of hurts and failures, trying to make it again into something that might actually offer some warmth again to someone? How many hours go into the creation of our own solitudes? And in thre face of what Khalil Gibran called, "Life's longing for itself" when he spoke of Children, would a piece of paper between you and the mother really have made that young woman a more viable citizen of this marvelous universe? She is of you, she is part you, and she wants to acknowledge you. That is amazing and beautiful, and I expect scary as hell sometimes. But I know you by now. You will wrestle it down onto paper and show us how to be more human somehow, by it. I think we will forgive the misspellings for the message. i think you may also be surprised at how we learn to spell when we aren't looking. Even if it is with different variations of the words than the ones we were trying to use, originally.

tiny correction- can't missing an apostrophe