Communal Sight #5: New Growth

Turn inward

  You are not what you were

I look at familiar hands

  and see cold stranger teeth

Who’s changed?

I am not a vine

  green-tentacled, wide-leafed

  turning and twisting my sticky-sapped leaves

  to follow the glowing fire of your sun.

Who’s changed?

What if you too are the same

  could I have walked wisdom with you

  and not known?

Even the greenest plant

may nurture, tenderly, a festering sore.

Communal Sight #4: Prophecy

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Isaiah 5:20

The words are small black spirals

delicate and strong

pegged up neatly on clothesline

like dead birds in a witch’s angry spell

they move no more

cold, dead, bitter, strange

their luminescence has drained out

long fingers pluck their flesh

they are empty hulls

  waiting

  fill them

invisible liquid soaks their cracked cold skin

they bulge, fill, flatten, bloat

soft curves become taut points

Each knife thrust bends

they are strung out in black, familiar patterns

they are still strange.

Communal Sight #3: Valse Triste

I have waltzed for a long time

spinning in emerald circles across the floor

my skirts stand out, my jewels shine

I have danced too long.

The world tips sideways

the music shifts

now I am dancing death

in geometrical, poison-green patterns.

my hands wither

my jewels cloud

my hair dulls

my flesh dries

"come, who will dance?"

join me in my crazy circles

patterns of a maddened mind

music from twisted strings

we all dance here

some are more shadows

some less flesh

we are caught in a skewed pattern

Communal Sight #2: Scherenschnitte

I have silver scissors

delicate as wire

sharp as ice

I cut careful circles and perfect squares

neat

geometric

separated

I cut out all the words you ever spoke

I cut out all the portraits of your face

I cut out all the moving scenes of action

            all the tears

            all the drama

            all the scripts

When they are all cut out

I will drop them into the deepest deep

and watch them float away like birds

  Then I will smile and smile at you

  and never say a word.

Note: Scherenschnitte is the German term for the art of paper cutting

Communal Sight #1: Each Hundred Years--

Each hundred years

we look into another’s eyes too deep

and turn away mind-torn

blundering, blind, we frighten passers-by

they see old souls closely riding on our face

            the world explodes

            stone shattered, light scattered

            hands tremble, dissemble

            breaking, shaking

            crumbling, rumbling

Old Foundations Halt And Stand

we land, breathless, bruised

hold tightly to warm earth

rise slowly, forget nightmares

renew dreams, walk free.

Unfortunately, sometime last century,

some morning clear and cold

some young innocent looked sweet and deep

into a double lens, saw eyes and earth

and knew them

walked gravely out into the pale new light

and delicately smashed to powder minds’ foundations

we drank them bitter

Now every day

we look into our mirrored eyes too deep

and turn away mind-closed

polite and straight we mingle with the crowd

we’re all old souls inside a young façade

Communal Sight: Attack of the Body Snatchers!

Have you ever seen that movie? It inspired you to poetry immediately, right? No? Well, maybe I'm a little different. Anyways, “Communal Sight” is a collection of eleven poems, most of them written in response to an Honors class I took called “America: Site Under Construction.” During our discussion of American history in this class, we watched The Attack of the Body-Snatchers and discussed its relationship to the Communist scares of the 1950s, especially the loss of trust in societal structures.

            In reflecting on our class discussion and this movie, I started thinking about the emotional impact of damaged trust, which extends beyond this particular time period. Part of what, to me, makes the movie so horrific is the transformation of and betrayal of intimates; mother and son, close friends, lovers, etc. However, this emotional destruction continues today whenever a trusted person betrays another.

In these poems, I’ve tried to express these and other related ideas; the impossibility of really “knowing” a person, contradictions in how people see each other, the emotional betrayal, and the loss of foundations for trust and community.

I'll be posting the poems one at a time over the next 11 weeks.

Dickinson Thoughts

I

I saw you

Standing there

And wondered

That you smiled.

Do you, then, have no care?

Or does pain pass as lightly as a butterfly...

and vanish.

II

Laughter springing up like wine bubbles

effervescing from a bottle

deep within,

rises to vanish in the clouds

or sinks to drown within my well of thought

III

Every poet

is different

each one has their own mark

sad, peaceful, or merely drifting into nothingness

each one treads the path

of deepened thought.

IV

It is good to dream, but not too much

or else the soul,

reveling in choruses of thought

should cease to hear the birds

and feel the earth.

7/28/97