Page 24 - the NOISE October 2015

Not Alone
shortly we will find evidence of life
outside of our own planet,
James webb space telescope
in 2018 beginning to search for free oxygen, frozen tips of fire.
will we freeze-frame the flame,
run our finger across its edge,
silent ghosts, the residue of their mouths zippered, palpitate, a claret cascade?
will we trip up dumbfounded
as a child who’s dropped their silver
on the playground, never looking away,
window on their back, swinging on the checker tile, sitting in their own sweat, holding
a mirror and a candle, and begin to dim?
will we be like the morning drunk, shivering fingers needy
taking hold of a mouth eager to drink?
How to scry in a dead man’s black fibrous eyes?
will we be stuck in the 400-700 nanometers of electromagnetic wavelengths, visible light, or the 20-20,000 Hz of audible noise,
now experiencing 37 orders of magnitude
in the universe and listen to the reason
why we as a moth are barrel-rolling away?
will our last night before dawn come whimpering, creeping across lambent light through
adolescent cities, dissembled bottom-feeders, embellishers, a night fearing loss across
dry oil-soaked granite underneath train tracks, then ochre spotted concrete, then cracked dusky pavement pushing
gritty tumorous stones
underneath breathless branches in July humidity hiding nothing from the sun?
in the curve of a black-timed wing beat
will broken warriors with no great war to fight
whip their ancestors with their tongues,
spell themselves through their chest, will themselves
pure phantom energy of stress and quickening, lash beyond themselves (better these days to let the snap come grinding)
like a coward’s hurt side-glance?
will we create new superstitions?
Death magic. Fear. shamans born in the wrong time. the elders off speaking to other worlds.
will we become an antithesis to samson,
gathering strength from new beginnings,
scythe to hair, clumps, nothing left to shed?
For growth waiting’s the hardest, scissors in hand, non-scratch mirror, chorion sink, the utility of emptiness.
in our glassy-eyed youth whose pink tongue drowns the heart will we want a woman straight forward as Punjab musk
to let loose her tonsils as we run stories
of oak and maple leaves catching raindrops and light?
who first to think light upon shadows,
practice the new art, name the ineffable?
How do we begin to play, compete, experiment with this violent, acquisitive nature?
will we sense the most important and least explainable beauty, truth, and quality in the other,
because no matter what we’re at,
sometimes we are looked at,
and we quiver, crumble — stage fright and then our face falls off.
will humanity’s smile sit dignified and fixed on within us, as if catching Voltaire,
the corners of his lips dragged to taut,
the lips clamping down on the thinnest fishing line in the world,
sit in the mouth that bore him language, identity, trembles with him, moans him, through us his eyes beautiful, barbed
as an old fencer’s grin, more
oil pan wisdom of an old woman’s heart?
will we find ourselves staring at our hands stuck through the squall on our palms
at an ape’s first kill, the mytilene Decree, millions of years of life zoned out
through every tiny moment of malice, feathers ending with wasps stings,
a gorgon head frozen to strike,
and the elegance of inverted stamen laid alone in death and the rope
and medicine it was never used for?
Probably we’ll at least be like the gambler, leaning in heavily on conversations, looking for a hot tip of wisdom
as if life, having finally taken notice, places a bet against our credulity.
i want to cross the galactic stream
into the arms of life,
bark and earth muddy with sweat
into a canyon river, drifting down
past walls lighted by crepuscular bird calls,
into capriccio rhythms broken by sweet alyssum and purple coneflower, and finally into a sob
as oceanic as the residue of my childhood dreams, floating in the deep waters with the unknown all around.
that’s how i want myself, breaking
from the survivalist mentality at a dead run
for the surf and it’s pull, admitting that sometimes i’m the last person i want to be with.
— Jason cassella
Waiting
waiting for you is like waiting for Barolo
from misty, fog-shrouded, snow-cloaked crags; i face an eternity of staring
at the bottle in my cellar
biding my time for that perfect moment
when you’re finally ready to be opened;
the moment which might not come —
but even then i need to wait while the decanter slowly opens you, oxidizes you to perfection; eons after eons of contemplation,
as i wait for you to travel the long road.
i just want to drink you already,
and have your molecules in my bones
like how i drank the wine
from a vineyard that was watered from
the ashes of the dead and
the bones of lost seas —
or the atoms of the risen christ
flowing through my veins after the eucharist intertwined with dribbles of mavrodaphne;
i am impatient and seek my fill of you.
But i have to wait, and
the waiting is killing me again.
why do i always end up in the position
of waiting for my desires to be fulfilled?
i never asked for God to teach me patience ... Yet, clearly, that’s my cross to bear ...
Again.
24 • october 2015 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
— Vladimir Erimou