Thanks, Ken!
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 08:57:21 -0500
>From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: peom of sorts
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>In a word--staggering.
>
>ken
>
>-----------------------------
>Ken Wolman
>Miercom
>www.mier.com
>609-490-0200, ext. *8-14
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
>> poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rebecca
>Seiferle
>> Sent: Sunday, February 05, 2006 11:21 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: peom of sorts
>> Importance: Low
>>
>> well, since Dave's mentioning the dodo, and while the rhyme machine of
>K.
>> Barry, who may be related to Halle Berry for all I know, did get a
>little
>> on my
>> nerves, it's evocation of those quaint features reminded me of some I
>> love, so I'll
>> post this which I wrote recently, so, chaotic and all, my only excuse
>> being its
>> mention of birds
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Rebecca
>>
>> I could say
>> you are this red bird which flies by, lifting against the heavy weight
>> of the rain which has turned the world grey, for days,
>> as the water on the railing soaks my elbows,
>> you fly by, crying out, improbably crimson! streaked as if you took a
>bath
>> in a canister of pain, and your wings and body rise and fall in a
>short
>> ascending and descending, start and stop, as if the breath
>> that your singing required made your flight hesitate, almost
>asthmatic,
>> or I could say
>> you are these geese which walk by, having fallen to earth, lost in
>> a blizzard of storm, their wild honks circling
>> going nowhere in a winter that was being penetrated by spring,
>> thunder and lightning! and so they fell to earth and walk, loud
>> making of defeat a triumph, down the snow-covered street,
>> I could say
>> you are that mockingbird I heard in summer, fleeing
>> the sweat of my love for you going outside into the sweat
>> of the August night, at 4 in the morning, shattering the quiet
>> with innumerable cries, black and undisclosed in the blackness,
>> of that nexus, that location that only my heart can locate, spinning
>> around like a needle of iron in a basin of water, when the world
>> is made of nothing but water, and the voices rise out in the dark,
>> that finds you there,
>> I could say, even when splashed with my blood,
>> you danced like the young turkey buzzards that mistake
>> their black and white feathers sprouting out of their heads
>> for a permanent crowning, as if kings forever
>> in the realm, of death, how murderous
>> you were! and how savage!
>> but you are not any bird,
>> and if you say you are a bird, or if I say we both are,
>> it is because of the singing like this,
>> but I think it's also because
>> in the realm of birds, only plumage
>> differentiates gender, there all gender is an appearance
>> and a performance, birds have no penises, and their cloacal
>> openings which in each are the same suffice,
>> just as the opening between us,
>> wound, or sweet sweat cunt, whatever, was enough
>> to give birth to all these voices
>> winding their way through the ruins, the small cities, the tormented
>> small villages, which we also made, for the truth
>> is you are not a bird,
>> and when the red bird flies by, with its improbable
>> song and color, or the geese make a triumph
>> of where they must walk, or two mockingbirds
>> become a forest of variegated voices, it is because
>> I think of you, it is the only way
>> I could touch you,
>> as if the world touching me were your hands holding
>> my face in your hands, as if
>> in saying or singing
>> as if I held your face in my hands, you know,
>> o beautiful one, that face which you do not know, which
>> persists, shining, beneath your masks, the gaze that you believe
>> does not exist, even though it plumblines into the depths
>> of all my strata and all the wells of darkest water, you who
>> I know where you are, and how, and feel by mercurial
>> ganglia and oxygenated breath rising out of the red marrow
>> of the bones, even though no one else knows who you are,
>> even though you don't know who you are! incredible woman
>> I could say calling out in all the voices stolen and borrowed from
>other
>> birds,
>> you are that tree I painted when I was too young to know
>> I was dreaming, a strong reaching out of the earth, and each of its
>> branches
>> was a bird, wide sweep of wing unfolding, heron type beak raised in
>> swirling
>> song, five of them birds or branches, a tree of birds, and all with
>the
>> dancing
>> of girls, you are that endless girl, shy with bold disclosures
>> beneath every one of your siren painted masks, but
>> the truth is you are none of these things,
>> you are like no other being that has ever walked the earth,
>> you are the only one
>> I have ever loved like this, the only one that if you walked by
>> and I were dead, my bones in the ground, moldering
>> to worms and dust, would cry out at the touch of your footsteps
>> and call out your name, the only one that is my weather, my
>> constellations,
>> my waning and waxing moon, and the only one who has ever looked
>> into my interior face, the only one my interior face
>> has ever gazed upon, somehow, one night,
>> when it seemed the universe held us finally, rocking together,
>> in its oceanic palms, though it was only a dream, but such
>> a reality that I do not know what to call you or how to call you,
>> you only you, woman, who
>> for one moment came into my woman's arms,
>> and who can sing of this, and in what language, where
>> what is feared is not death but the beginning of life,
>> which arrives as never more than a dream
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