LAKE WHITEHALL
Perfecting sunset by sunset light my brush materialized
on what was left of Lake Whitehall
where the day was witches fingers bright to the bone
shear terror honed to the tips of flared sable,
scrubbing sheen on cerulean puddles of swamp.
I muddied the lake's white laughter with burnt-umber for
spite.
Three times I repeated the scene each more manic than
before,
purple scruff and whiplash, trite, wispy curlicues,
blue and black against a white-washed, blinding Lake
Whitehall
My anger ceased and the woman I still loved
wandered off down a dirt road.
After a sandwich and a cold beer
Lake Whitehall began to
chill over.
A breeze within me picked up all the brushes
and began to skim lightly with licks of wonderment,
a rapid understatement on the vaporous lake.
Masterful strokes and stains hovered briefly, and
disappeared.
The woman I still loved was feared to have washed up
farther
down shore. But no, she was home in bed
where I sometimes lean over heavy as wet varnish
to kiss her head goodnight.
All the while she sleeps in my anger and I paint in her delight.
Love buttons can be pushed, but
not always cancelled
Cyber Shadow
Umbrielle pursues on foot,
by wire and carbon impressions,
adding bit by bit the dark beneath your feet,
desires and needs, aversions and allergies,
the gambit of aches along each avenue of life.
You color her understanding gently with button presses.
Yes, she knows about last weekend,
wants to remember your vague unpleasantness,
every private alimental annoyance,
needs to recall the limitless structure
of emotional reaction to all the seasons,
love in a hovel, hell in the Hamptons,
even the smell of things that endanger balance,
falter in a glance or a nervous twitch,
that yummy longing, cast by a silent look.
surrender conveyed by a sex shop dummy,
an itch recorded by the camera in a window bay.
Silence is a neon sign of nothing to say,
but Umbrielle can read it through and through
and study you in window light and agony
and measure x-rays frame by frame,
a face of darkness filled by ones and ohs
and oh so many nameless wonders
queries, mysteries solved by choices
clicking away at dignity, a blight, an infestation,
robberies taking place in shadow reality.
Scraps of paper
THINKING IN PICTURES
Life began to polarize one day in the lecture room
where English majors pour eyes over bits of past prose.
My honky-tonk dimension had a poetry of motion
never described by poets in their pastures.
No funky odes to a juke-box baby
as she moves and tunes her rhythmic hips to mine.
And that professor chimed in, "We only think in
words,"
to which I replied, "And pictures, too."
Dead silence and the look of disbelief engulfed the class.
"Pictures, how can you think in pictures?"
the hypocrite lecturer asked.
His tone was demeaning.
I was not of his species, uttering alien responses.
"We also think in sounds and bodily movement," I
continued,
hoping to be understood.
"Ridiculous," the teacher said, "I never
heard of such things."
English majors, I concluded, think in words
while the rest of us can only hand-signal our deaf-mute
art.
I never went back to class, but focused my study
on the dance-club floor where no-one thought in words.
I loved the soft blue that lit the juke-box machine
where the beautiful slid their bodies
up against its purring sides in total seduction,
softly, blue as angel light, their shadows on the wall.
Blindly my video memory fed on beach rock, controlling
every muscle in the room.
No flesh could ripple without the feel of saxophone vibes.
A woman's legs could strike the ground like pistons
while a sailor pumped his blue-white body to the music.
Many a night the women, one by one,
came forward to my hyper-venting horn
to lose their partners in a saxophone trance
and perform a solo dance.
The pipe and piper charmed those snakes of arms
appraising pelvic speech in peril and amazement.
Such is the power of a singular sense,
all ears in the wind or unctuous eyes turned inward.
I was Priest to every subtle motor function.
Back in my room thinking in pictures
what everyday legs should do,
I put my speechless rhythms into prayer.
Dance away your sins no matter how thin the excuse to
celebrate
for you are all the spirit you were meant to be,
so dance exalted, dance your love for Thee.
In need of a secret hiding place I stuffed it in a vase.
At night my heart returned to jazz enchanted feet,
a summer boy along the beach and a beacon on the stage,
no hourly wage too small to stop my sinusoidal flight.
After work I tried to think in words,
to scrawl a message from my soul
with risky sounds that only horns invented,
searching for the scraping tenor cries and rain-pipe
foundry works,
thinking sounds of deep-flute sighs and breath of high
Peru.
Monks illuminate their darkest vowels,
mine were stuffed in a vase,
my letters to God were never read,
soaked by water, a future flower,
soggy wads of paper where the ink bled.
Jimmy Warner's Wild Moon
Transit
Letters
