[mysterious creature]

      ***

I don't know how you felt today.
I've seen a stern face.
You left to play in another room.
You haven't said goodbye, neither did I.
The gestures that we draw
in the corridors, overlying --
out of the scant lines
a mysterious creature
moves exactingly, beguilingly untamed.
Animated by our shadows,
bound to us, yet free.

---

With some help from MSW.

The poem

      The poem

What a joke, this poem's no good
yet it claims its title.
As the day was that slipped through
yet it claimed its number --
I met a friend. I tried a rhyme
and it sounded mumbo.
Is there a method to disprove
this madness makes no sense.

? The clay

      The clay

The teacher shapes
alignment out of the muscles
the flat flow of gravity down the hip
the relaxed shoulder
What makes the body aware of
the triangle of the navel and the ribs
The once fleeting balance takes root

The teacher's pulling guidance
How can it take root in the fingers

? Mathematics

     Mathematics

Mathematics is also like this
To start from plié
To connect the tendu
To do jumps in the evenings
Push-ups in the mornings
To cry before exams

Mathematics is also something
your eyes grow into or out of
A tour assemblé

Mathematics is a friend
That is waiting for me
a decade, a century
in the books on my shelf

When I call her name
Only a rail track responds
That we once traversed

onomatopoeia

       onomatopoeia

some words -- call out:
round, loud
or screeching traction
or precise, pertinent
or subtle, evanescent
or in the end
awe

calls coming to shake and point
in the direction
like swallowing a throw

sounds only hiss
shushing
isn't silence



--- [updated July 9, 2019 with G.'s help]

falling asleep

falling asleep

How to pass from this world to another world?
The numb blankness whose weight sinks into the pillow.
Untie the dark blanket and let it fall down the spar,
get the rig running. Then, carefully, pull yourself up
and tip-toe to the mast, descend the Jacob's ladder
to the main course, and balance out,
and once it is safe, jump into the blue ocean.
The splashing, at a loss of nautical,
and swim disarmingly back
to the brown keel.
And climb the wooden castle,
and once the kite has settled,
mount on the stone castle steps.
The steady stone bed,
the hot day blows noise
from a distant crowded market.

the future of poetry

the future of poetry

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

We only believe what we see with our fingers.
Will the children of ours need words trembling
and resembling nothing but the cold wind,
the whisper of the night?
Today, poetry is the quiet when the wind gives
to the dawn. You sit in a sleeping gown,
poetry is staring at the brushes
through the gray blue, the first blush of the light.
Today's poetry is this silent exchange of caresses.
But the future of poetry is disquieting.

Words are voices of a well rehearsed dance
or of stumbling in a role. Today we stage language
with puppets, overwhelmed with half a dozen
that we draw by strings, taking turns. We insist,
poetry belongs to the sets and stage lights.
I dread of letting you in, because everything exists
on the outside, in the light.

The dramatis personæ of future poetry
are a theater of the inside. Imagine
that all of the earthly space is the surface
of a sweater, that an angel pulls off
inside-out, revealing the myriad of dimensions.