A SHORT STUDY ON SYNAESTHESIA

A SHORT STUDY ON SYNAESTHESIA

Like a writer unable to translate ideas into words,

the composer Ravel, awoke stricken with aphasia—

he could no longer translate patterns into symbols.

His new music, trapped forever in his head.

Notes descend, an angry rain piercing his skin.

La Valse, a premonition of madness coalescing

into the dimensionless existence of a Cartesian point.

We dance around the emotions.

                                                            Remnants of earlier fires.

Is it love or lust? he asks. Think of the blind man

who saw scarlet as a sounding trumpet, or the woman

who heard chromium light & turquoise when the wind raged,

and the walls between the senses come tumbling down.

Decide the dual physics of light: wave pattern

or photon particle? All shadows contain the color

of the object casting the shadow, and its opposite.

Separate emotion from logic & fully understand neither.

In a dark room, Newton reduced light to its true colors

& sought alchemical algorithms to equate the frequency of sound

with wavelengths of light, then blamed Pythagoras,

only to imprism himself: a small boy at the seashore distracted

by metaphysics of smoother pebbles & poetics of prettier shells,

while the great ocean of undiscovered truth lapped at his toes.

Aristotle wrote emotions carry their own logic.

Why was he afraid of metaphor; how did he dream?

He’d deny the music of daylight at sunrise, or the taste of sunset.

The idea of color constancy is an illusion. The artist seeks the truth

of light. Ask Kandinsky about the optics of fretted chords.

Or Nabakov of the long “O” of the alphabet at orgasm.

The logic of emotion is beyond our control.

To approach a paradox: one hand clapping with the intellect

is to either see       or to not see                        in the dark.

Try to write an objective definition of love, rearrange

memory, mix metaphors midstream. Drive Aristotle crazy.

Ask what the stars sound like.

                                                    Describe the taste of darkness.

Plato was right: we are prisoners of our feelings.

Plato was wrong: sometimes it is better to let go

the sacred chord of reason. To be lost. To surrender

            is to find your self again.

no idea when first draft was written 1999?
rev. 10/2001 2001 Transfer Magazine, #82, fall issue

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

DOG DAYS OF SUMMER

not                quite             noon

the temperature spikes                        another ten degrees

hammer in hand                 I can’t get these windows  open

in this august heat I think of how Tennessee Williams’ women

survived                     naked                               summer

regal liz  poor drowned natalie   vivian eternally blanche

in this three-digit weather                 we learn to appreciate

the minute increments toward                              body heat

    we depend upon the kindness of air            through lace

         and window screens                             stripped down

             the long vowels in sentences    into slivers of glass

           practiced stance in cold showers  

                                                               compared it to chi’i

ate raspberry sorbet at midnight               chewed our nails

                                                                    myriad tongues

of fans tasting the four directions                          for breath

  the pale aftermath of sky no white spaces between words           

                    our eyes covetously transgressed

     the condemned lintels            of imagination

                             and the desire for inspiration

                                                          we hung damp sheets

across doorways and windows bared our necks 

                                                                       to any breeze                      

                                                                                                                           .                                                                                 a truce

            said it’s the right kind of night for                a fire           

                                                                             or murder

           doppelganging in the canyons         the siren’s song

                                                          stitched into a shroud

the cats flopped down     blamed us for the heat       

at tailgate parties

we learned to foretell the future in ice cubes       

     we changed the lyrics  

        crushed mint beneath our heels   slept with the tvs on

          hoisted beer skyward                no one ever chooses

                their family                                neighbors or love

when the screen door slams      it’s not hypothetically measuring 

   the temperate distance between yes and maybe

my neighbor                 retrieves his small son from my bed 

reconciles             with his girlfriend

                        they stop by                     grab the ice chest

                                                                                               I crawl inside

                                     fall through the spaces between worlds

8/7/94

This had justified margins and was set up to look like lace. Doesn't exactly transfer here.

2001  Transfer Magazine, #82, Fall issue

THE QUARRY AT REGENWEG

THE QUARRY AT REGENWEG

                                —for Jan Bogaerts

With that feeling of déjà vu, I came home to a land

bright with flowers and heather bogs wrested

from the distant mouth of the North Sea.

The wind lifted my skirt, verifying my sex,

as I gathered metamorphic rocks—

once the backbone of mountains—

reduced to lining these raised roadbeds.

Strangers, we were sleepwalking the fields;

the cows watched with indifferent eyes.

I saw you radiant in the afternoon light,

your camera, like a bird poised for flight.

The alluvial grass frantically waved

as if to warn us of lions and dangerous currents

hidden in the transparent layers of history:

this ancient riverbed where the golden armor

of a Gaulish warrior from the quarry was dredged.

We made allusions to walking on water,

I stood in the arena of the mirrored afternoon

wondering which reflection to trust,

afraid to find myself on the other side,

like you, no division between the sexes.

The pantheistic September sky hissed,

wounded by the forthrightness of distant steeples,

all that blueness leaking back into the sea.

Like salmon roe, mountain ash berries,

enflamed the carnivorous sky.

The milky horizon blurred until we

once again were sleek silvered fish

readying for that final incestuous journey.

We forgot about extinction,

hypotenuses of triangles,

or the collapsing of time itself.

Like lowing cattle, eager for salt,

the wind licked at our legs.

But it was time to return to the barn,

we had no arms to let them in—

only the dark, knotted tide rising

over the shield of grasses

and defeated stones.

1/29/93 & 8/13/94
2000 Transfer Magazine

THE ENTROPHY OF EMPTY ROOMS

THE ENTROPHY OF EMPTY ROOMS                      v.2

                                    —for David & Rose McCaffrey McBride

There's something of that peculiar weight

of age that falls upon us as we

enter the rooms of abandoned houses

as if conversation from another era

abruptly ceased and found tongue again

in the silence after a point well-taken.

What survives us most accurately

are things ordinary and plain:

the particular way everyday objects

resonate with newfound significance.

How a death in the family

anchors us to what is no longer there.

On a coal-stained wall, a sooty relief of a clock,

& the shadowy remains of a crucifix—

as if the silhouettes themselves

Resurrected things not intended

to witness the end of an era—in a cigar box:

post cards from the World's Fair,

snapshots of children, dead horses and cars;

a spring bonnet & veil, matching gloves,

tea china still waiting on the sideboard.

A clouded mirror dreamily eyes

the round face of the sky

& a streetsong of rain escapes

from clogged gutters with a practiced ease

drawn from the nostalgia of the past.

rev. 2/2001

2001 Transfer Magazine #81, spring issue