SONG ONE

 Did the gods drop you from
a great distance
                         into my arms?
Are you a creature from another universe?

I was watching the ocean
and how indigo sky drools
lavender toward the horizon.

This world is a beautiful place.

Traffic hums along the road,
sunlight flickers across your forehead
and those uneven cheeks look like pages
turning, buffeted
                           by light and color.

Does turmoil erode your eyelids
from inside?
                           Corrode your pulsing neck?
Are you from another world
and wish to enter this one?

I hold your weight and all your long
knobby shape in the warm sand.
Wrap my arms around you
                           like petals
of a tulip around their stamen.

You're calm. Your eyes open
and they're dimensionless windows
all opaque pupil and
                           what
are those longate shapes
slithering around their rims?

Are those demons' limbs?
Are they beasts of Paradise?
Are they wormhole views to another planet?

Are you looking out and I'm looking in?
Are you looking in and I'm looking out? 

Oh close those eyes! Go back
inside, block off those slowly
spinning orbs. Shut the windows
and draw the shades.

Let me lose myself in
                           trucks downshifting.
Lose myself in the sun settling
over a lazy beach, in orange-yellow rays
glancing off aquamarine grass and angling
toward your
                           drowsy face.

I'm not ready for big changes.
Not ready to jump off
                           cliffs.
                               Even if
the signs say "Happiness."
"Joy this way."

Why do I ache
                        if this is so fine?
Why do I feel an eye opening in my chest?

Did the gods drop you in my arms?

Your face looks ordinary,
jaw and concave cheeks
of a fragile and hot-eyed child.

 © Clive Matson 2007

SONG FIVE

Can you remember for one day?

For one hour?

                        Does frigid air

blow through your brain and your bones,

rip flesh off and chatter on

to the ends of the cosmos?

                        In those far reaches

one small ear listens through faint

hissing of neutrinos and hears

the words I whisper.

                                  I adore you.

Adore your flesh, your fleshless bones,

adore you even when skeletons clatter

like rock chimes in the wind.

That cold wind

                          winds clock hands

around and forever around and with every whirl

my lips shape the same few words,

can you remember? Can you remember

for even five minutes?

                                      For one minute?

Does sweetness land on your skin

and turn to vapor?

My body and my soul turn to liquid

and I enter your every pore! Volumes

and candy volumes, delicate taffy streams

pour into you and go where?

                                                Right through?

                        Into thin air?

Does your mouth remember tourmaline lips?

Does your tongue

                              remember the question

poised on its tip like a moth with wings

quivering and then fluttering into the vast

                                             emptiness?

                                             But it's not

                                  empty.

The moth is that void and its wings

caress every thought and every atom

committing their shapes and sizes

to memory and waving

                                       flags

in a parade down Main Street.

Does asphalt remember the imprint of feet?

Does the chick remember its egg?

Does the egg remember soft down in its nest?

Does your blood remember

                                              its course?

Can you remember for even five minutes?

                  Even rock remembers

and turns every morning

toward the one bright spot of sky

a single grain that hasn't heard

"I love you. I love you. I love you."

SONG SEVEN

The mirror thinks that's me?

                                             What happened?

How can you love me?

How can you love this face,

this flawed body, this flesh vessel

sloppy topography of blackheads and pores,

unsculpted valleys and rogue forest hairs,

bruised echo of long-ago?

My nose more

                        fattened this morning

and the glass shows these eyes

that see so clearly

                             dully dulled

from those once dark, lucent sapphires!

Nature spun her thread overnight

and placed another faded strand

in the drab web that fans from my eyes,

each thread

                    the tracery of a terrible doubt.

                                    One doubt

drags its counter-thought down

down to the dungeons with

my former self,

                          lovely shadow

of a remembered dream!

Once these breasts were firm cones

with beacon tips

                           pointing straight ahead.

Now they're year-dials pointing

at my tired feet.

My youthful self drifts

around inside a drooping bag.

These too-generous hips, are they lovable

when you squish palms

                                      right through to

bones that preserve disjointed scaffolding

of that ripe, flexible woman I was once?

Right through each squishy stratum

over the years when I could run

like an antelope and ascend trees

looping branch to branch? A monkey

who can hope now only

to wrap legs around one trunk?

And my hands! In the veins and sinews

through this parchment skin

                        do you see galaxies?

Do you take these budding claws

in yours and does love make you blind?

No, no, your eyes are perfect lenses.

Where there are spots, you see spots.

Where wrinkles, wrinkles.

The mark on my hand marks

where the crone starts

                                    her slow, loud

cackle through my bones.

This dusty flesh turns gray 

while I still breathe and move.

Can it be you love all the beings

habiting here?

                        This tired one, too,

whose shoulders slump with the weight

of all this body endures?

Can you love the ghost of the woman

who once filled this sad sack

with a happy swarm of bees?

Whose honeypot would overflow

at such an almond glance?

Does the ram care the age

of the mossy trunk it rubs on?

Does the rosy fungus push its crowned column

through rotting, ancient humus

                                    and not care its years?

Does the lake glisten between massive trees

the same 

               as it does between saplings?

Do these thoughts

                               fall away

like my blouse dropping to the floor? 

Why is my blood dancing?

SONG NINE

Why did I think I could wait?
                          Why did I think
things would be different? A door
opens and everything changes.

Wind blows down canyons and that
flip-flopping leaf with tattered edges
                          mimics
my heart. Geraniums wilt on the porch.

Text says I have no faith.
Guilt says I had no desire.

I say the moon shines with its same
cool, enduring light.
                          I say night whispers
its jasmine song and the same notes
serenade the air around my ears
as around yours.
                          My words no weaker
than sand blowing across the sidewalk.

Your calendar crowded up overnight,
did I think that? Did I think
trucks wouldn't come on garbage day?

Do you hear your head's electrons
and not your rib's wisdom?
Have mountains flipped over the sky?
Have I fogotten
                          warmth in chest?

Who sits under the burbling fountain?
                          Who leans on a lamp post
rubbing finger along jaw?

Even in shadows the archetypes
show total assurance,
                          even those seated
in a train's plastic seats, knitting shawls.

I'm sitting inside the Amazon with legs stretched
on the stone floor of a dried pool,
eyes on her coccyx.

If this same hunchback moon
rises the same tird up your sky
tell me,
                          tell me across grief's stretched fabric
how do I endure?

ow do I know that wasn't
a hungry tour and I've returned
to caterpillars and moths in molt?

How do I live beyond
this tear-dewed diorama?
                          How does a blind fish
swimming in its heavy water
see the beautiful scenes outside?

The pump chatters as it chugs air,
"I don't know, I don't know."

This world poises on a razor of uncertainty.
No foundation, no concrete slab, no
composite board to dive from
                          we jump
from the brink into the brink of brinks.

This is the nothing behind the nothing
from which everything arises.

Feathers ruffling in the wind
a house finch
                          perches on a roof gutter
repeating trills and whistles
and ending on its long power note,

"I don't know, I don't really know."