Poetry became more of a focus after my spine injury. It has largely been occasional, written on request for various collaborative shows when I was living in Rome.
The piece reproduced below is the first part of a longer work, "Psyche says."
Psyche says
so much appears
to be missing here.
Psyche says I am tired
of these colors that remain
invisible to eyes,
of those others that fade
too quickly for words, of the words that linger
too long for breath.
Psyche says I live
in a chamber of cloud. And what did the someone say? Married
to a monster. They are never wrong, the oracles.
Abandoned to the mountains, fled to the mountains, the high peaks that would pierce the horizon. The clouds ashen, etched into the pulse of sky. Here, where hunger knots. Call her what you will. See her beside herself, and again, the hunger, fear, see her perched on the crag, listening to what wind, swirl, sobbing, what voices bearing what tide....
When I close my eyes
I see the fractured lover
holding the fractured beloved,
their wings you call gossamer or green.
Psyche says
the wind as it moves
through the depths of the pines
and the movement beneath the wind.
Beside herself. See her perched on a twig that does not break, or see her turning
toward him, turned
to stone. That a mouth, that a moth
may emerge from the broken mouth,
to be followed by others, my sisters, and others, so that we need not despair
to die.
We are lunar, sing the moths,
mere reflections of light,
yet our wings that are eyes
beat air
and we continue to circle the fire.
"The Names" was the catalog text for a show by Thomas Lyon Mills.
The Names
The speaker has left the building,
said the painter of empty places
I see leaf, say leaf, see stone, say stone
Said the painter of darkness, these passages through rock
are carved by wind, by water,
by sweat and hand
Said the saint of stone,
these passages are glyphs
incised in rock
by the dead’s warm breath —
feel it moist on neck and cheek,
and the mouth pressing forward,
and this tongue that is not mine
Said the group of nine, we would elaborate
an alphabet of numinous songs,
of fire and stone, of chalk and rustle,
of splintered trees and burning leaves,
and of roots, falling
into air
Said the sower of worlds,
I am the rower of souls,
and said the rower of souls
I traverse these forgotten rivers,
the red seas and the dead,
in a boat of burnished copper
An exacting change is required
In this dark that shrouds darkness
as the light veils lightness
the face of the figure I feel
I cannot see
The oars dip, submerge
and circle in silence
They trace the edges of a wound
They trace the letters of a word
