Duane Locke
REFLECTIONS IN APRIL 1
Noli me tangere-- the picture in my private language,
This purple misty evening scene with the stones subordinate,
Stood two people in a surplus of clothes
With mobile folds, this speaking picture speaks silence
That has consequences and urges. All language,
Silent or a material passing from lip to ear, from image
To an interior that cannot be located is
Immediately translated into a private language.
The already invented crumbles with an extension
Of a leg by a plum in white bloom, but the conventionally
Generalized confuses, dilutes, distorts the autobiographic.
Self-observation becomes a puzzle without
The puzzle’s pieces. The appearance of a vapor
Spotted with solid fragments. The leg was blonde.
Later, I would read about Aucassin radical singular
Faith healing. It was a promise of a possible closeness
That had not the Alchemist’s ancient formulations
Or his final destination. It was continuous
Without connections, only moments and gaps.
Bees hover over the plum’s white blooms, bee legs
Speckled gold with pollen. Scene arose out
Of the earth without a script, but puppets
Without consciousness gestured. Much
Interference with an extended blonde leg
And its biological credentials. It will become
A souvenir and mystical music. The puppets
Unaware of the master became the master.
The leg changed to something else,
Echoes without an origin or source.
What was close and intimate became
Distance and an object. The puppets
Had a transitory victory, but the future
Will turn the distorted moment of loss
Into impasto, flesh-colored paint delineating legs.
The forbidden touch is transformed into sensations.
RELECTIONS IN APRIL 2
Our histories are the chronicles of conch shells,
Their indecipherable whispers when pressed
Against an ear lobe.
What gnaws away the truth of our whispers
Beyond human understanding and interpretation
Are the teeth of certainties,
So all we ever know are bones.
Monk in various disguises, humans and machines,
Will arrive,
Sit on stool,
Or on the smoky misty color of curved plate glass
On a shelf between chrome,
Copy the language of bones on the flow of our blood.
The monks
Will descend,
Eat capons and drink rice wine.
The dread is the anticipation of the end,
An apocalypse or pop art painting
When all is revealed,
When all that can be known is known,
Because what is revealed
And what is known
That can be known is false.
The regret,
The indecipherable conch shell whispers lost.
REFLECTIONS IN APRIL 3
The sizzling sound
From bubbling and popping grease
Of bacon cooked
In a black iron circle with a black bottom
That sits
Above red and orange flames
On aged, weather-greyed, lichen-greened rocks
On sand, loose, but mixed
With dried cactus thorns
Was the music that became the ground
For the liquid song of the cactus wren
Sticking his head out of a cactus hole.
It was sonorous and sweet,
But to us, a dirge.
Are we in Arizona, New Mexico,
Or Calfornia, places where we have
Never been together.
Did we even know each other,
Or did anything exist.
What we have seen in photographs
Is even more false.
Must I wait for a committee
Of investigators to describe
What they have never seen
Or never experienced
So I can have a personal history
To sit on a shelf
Inside the library of my body,
Open when I want facts
That do not exist.
No, I’ll not wait, but sit and
Listen to the sizzle and the wren’s song
That comes from the marks on this paper.
REFLECTIONS IN APRIL 4
When the curled and crooked petals
Of red carnations escape or are pushed out
By fate from their labyrinths they fall
After existences with scissor- cut stems
On a tablecloth, sometimes white, sometimes
Pink, sometimes checkered in false
Italian ristoranti. The petals
Of red carnations are falling everywhere,
In florist shops, in the boudoir of Manet’s Olympia.
The fallen petals look as forlorn
As the last veil of Salome crumbled
On a parquet floor. It was pulled
Away from warmth, to be tossed
Into air, for a moment to float and fly,
And then fall from the center
Of attention to not being noticed.
The red goes away from the fallen petal.
It becomes brown and then invisible,
Everyone looks the other way.
REFLECTIONS IN APRIL 5
A scallop shell with a Venus bringing peacocks
And grottos
Might arise from my private perception
Of the writhing wheels of the ocean,
Or might be a gigantic river god
With curled hair as large as a wheat field,
Or the scene might shift to outdoor markets
With bins of soft shoes next to squid,
All shadowed by a dancing darkness
As the flaps on the tent flap in the wind,
As scenes shift in movies that guesses
Life is a continuity of the disjunctive.
I must return to contemplation of a childhood scene,
A courthouse, fake Moorish, quarter silver moons
Atop iron stems, that is centered in a city block,
Built to represent established culture and justice,
That as a child who was in love with the contours
Or the mystic rebellious lips of Persephone
And who is in his apathy to established beliefs
Named this place of red bricks Demeter.
Now the bricks rounded into towers
That appeared solid, absolute, have been
Carted to become pyramids on vacant lots,
A bank building of blue plate glass that brings
The distant, temporary clouds down to earth
Until the street lights go on at night now stands
On the concrete over earth and varied sand grains
Pushed together and related where one
The authoritative courthouse stood and handed
Out its peppermint candy to obedient children
Who enslaved to au courant fashion donned overalls
And went to schools with no texts and leaky roofs.
Persephone, not a goddess of death, but a goddess
Of life, who stands for death to the established order
That cripples and destroy life to maintain drunks
With their Dalmatians and yachts.
Persephone in an ancient Garden saw the scene
That was counterfeited and promulgated so a few
Could control the many and wear white and blue silk birds
Embroidered on their tea ceremony robes. Persephone
Was a witness to Adam handing Eve a Cézanne apple.
This event in the Garden took place while authority
Quoting prior authorities burned witches in Salem,
And anarchists cut of the thumbs of other anarchists.
The collages of cinematography create
The calligraphy of our signatures.
We become the signatory without
The origin of a ballpoint pen or body.
We watch everyone become their own opium,
Check the stock market on the evening news,
Or sing hymns. We depend on self-interruptions
For our survival. Loneliness is our abatis.
Our solipsistic happiness is the invisible visible.
home
