ON A WICKER ROCKING CHAIR...

 

On a wicker rocking chair

grandma takes a breather at noon

fanning her jolly smile of moon

with a piece of cardboard, the air

teeming with glowworms and dust.

The fan stained with sunflower

oil. 

      In the porch shaded by a bower

of orange jasmine,

                           she smells the gust

of perfumed rain and mangos and sea.

Flies and words land upon her fan.

She talks with herself sipping tea:

"What a scorcher"-and stares to the sun

shining red through the sky. On the rocking

chair my grandma nurses a nap stroking

my straggly hair, a black cat.

                                             She beguiles

the boredom with a big moonglow smile.

THE LAST DREAM OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

 

 

"Thinking of rodhodendron forests in Piccadilly" 

(Virginia Woolf)

"In broad nightlight 

                                  tonight

chatting with the realm of darkness

my words have taken in the colour

                                    of rhododendrons

bordering late-blooming paths, 

                                          abandoned castles,

mossy bridges where the crows

                             land brooding at sundown.

In broad-dim nightlight

shall not come the moths

 to flit around the tired splendour

                              of my words,

words tinged with the pale pink

through which, oftentimes,

                    the faces of memory

entice Hebe into the forest of Elvedon,

faces as pure as the stork flight at dawn, 

                   faces with susurrous voices

of blue-girl in darkness...

this is you around, Percival

this is you, Rhoda?.

faces that whisper me

with a seraphic language

                                   of wave or ringdove.

And I whisper back to them 

                        like buttlerflies smouldering

 in the candle flame to be ashes"

THE GOLDEN BOUGH

 

He lost his soul

walking into the woods

but he realized the woods

 itself was his soul

and while losing his bearings 

in the dew-laden thicket of larches.

pines and elms

 he came across a golden bough:

 Aeneas-wise, tried to break it

and somehow to descend into the Averno

and bestows it upon Persephone hands 

in return of kissing her asphodel-scented nipples.

He couldn't tear the golden bough

apart from the bark 

and it dawned on him that bough

was not his fate nor even descending

into the Averno...Let alone

to kiss gloriously a goddess

in the inglorious darkness.

POEM

 

A roll of fog over the downs

smelling of sea.

A flock of green starlings

outpace the sun,

the sun still yawning 

among the wet aloe fronds.

A mopish bobcat stares

at the fleece-like clouds,

his slick yellow eyes

 plumb the depths

of beyond...

And there, uphill, nearly floating

over the fog in motion,

with invisible scissors

I snip the stars.

SYLVIA

All the monkeys of Emile Borel

now are tapping away 

randomly

at my keyboard

pulling off the poems

I was not ever talented

to write

as a token of my love

for thee.

POEM

 

A Claudian sunset

a punnet of fruits on the windowsill,

a white nag can be discerned

grazing afar along the horizon:

beacons of light in a benighted world.

Undulations of shaded valleys and reveries.

A moon-caressed gnomon

as the phallus of some forgotten god,

god combing the goldfields of memory

where, naked, cavort 

all my past and imaginary loves.

Susurration of willows over the gleaming water,

stentorian voices of rivers that swell in the night,

the night coming down like a wound tiger

who stares, melancholy, the orange gloam of dusk:

beacons of light in a benighted world.

The dreams I didn't dare to make real

have turned into crows.

THE BREAKUP

She turned up all of a sudden

as a broken fingerpost announcing

the safest path to nowhere.

And she smelled so good

 in the summery breeze

as the poems I have no written yet.

But she glanced at me like someone

that scrutinizes a face 

of a missing person in a wall flyer.

On the tarmac, kissed by the rain, 

still glistened the shadow of her last word.

POEM

In military fatigues, the poet

trains his metaphors

to survive banality, transcience, void.

Unfazed by the noise of defeat and rain.

Inebriated by his own daydreams.

Though the golden spark, lost,

and the undertow of sadness, stronger:

he does not raise yet the ad digitum

to the shadows.

He still dreams of swanning off

with a mermaid, even brushed by age.

A belle dame sans merci

Enthralling the path without path,

the preordained beauty of love

with deathless death and no love.

                                                                      

*

His uncertain voice

besought to a certain night:

'What's the smell of the hours passing?

Has the touch its own memory

as Keats said once?

Why am I here in the same muddled being?

Why am I not the others?

When i shall be basking in the sunshine

of my true self?

When I will stop stampeding 

like horses through the fog of time?'