In Laguna
clenched fists of white-fingered
nimbus open. the palms
waft whatever fragrances the sun instilled within; a poet
transcribes the smells into the idiom of Laguna,
constructing possibilty on behalf of anyone who longs to be,
securing the porch as a catwalk where a white
shoe model,
clutching at cross-rails, poses against the broad Pacific:
so look, we’re here, we’ve always been Whitman’s
travelers,
pining after an American conveyance, breathing in, breathing
out, mounting a gangplank, lusty, under the gull caws, standing
on the aging ferryslip: Walt’s there is here, out west, here where
commuters are scarce and sand dollars and sea
pinks dot a gray jumble
where a single cypress forms its own forest, sprouting up a stony rise;
we peer into the dusk where seabirds dart, daring
a surf that surrenders
salt to the resurgent earth: for to be is to be saved by a sacred grounding
& sloped on this cliff that spikes &
spirits the air with fern.
Puerto Plata
The photo caught only the table on our hotel
terrace,
with its magic flounder, surrounded by the lemon globe,
yellow peels, leaking humid seeds. Jagged Caribbean salts
that star the black helix; helix here means
the sad glamour of the lost surface;
surface: how you inspected your black legs after love;
sad: how, under the awning, you hid your sunburned face
balming it with the healing shadow; as for lost?
maybe less so
for how this picture’s abscene yields sweet metononmy;
was it this day we carved pineapple for a surf picnic
& had a bad-ass
twosome against a storm warning?
Never mind. Or say I do. Once again, my thumb sinks
the silver catch, the camera slips from my grip,
botching
the shot; now I see what the image denies, and back
in Puerto Plata, I bask in the
candor of your green suns.
Shirred Tunic with Birdsong
the shawl catches wind
of what-if,
its fold & furrow essay the original
language of the whole fabric
& translate torque into an open-
flow idiom, as
in, the shirred tunic:
her brown eyes follow the singsong double-pitch
which her ears pronounce: the sight of its landing
alights in thick gesso, and breaks through impasto:
red-green wing-spreads,
minuscule points
and earth-toned filigrees in wet plaster,
shape the silence as a motmot sings again
Toyen’s Alchemy
for Marie Čermínová
Within
the doorway, green-cuffed
gloves hold hope & tame the wild
cat’s rage: this cat seems secured
by the picture’s calm silhouette,
as if the truer Serengeti
were a painter’s atelier—
the call-of-the-wild triptych
features monarch butterflies,
thin wings casting fat shadows
& an hourglass-avalanche of leopard spots
rises up into her, swells into her chest, rounds
out
the breasts & opens into a fantail as
the green figure, finished,
turns the peacock’s art to gold.
Gustav
Klimt’s Truth
is a glossy saint, Veritas, an all-
absorbing, ever-emptying
cipher to a never-ending colure:
she stands like a labial sentinel,
an anti-Eve with a serpent
& blue fog confused round her ankles:
the glassy shock-princess
wields
a mirror she doesn’t need
because the truth gives no
confirming reflection and
the authentic lacks any substance
beyond embellishments;
and so he paints
flowers into the blonde waterfall to point
our eyes to the strictly-surface & to prove
what a dead stamen the daisy is
without these centrifugal
wings
@ Tim Keane, 2007
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@ Tim Keane, 2007
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