Love & Echolocation

Summer 2008, January 2010

Sometimes I write poems where the protagonist is, arguably, a bat experiencing relationship problems.

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All distance disguised as desire,
all travel disguised as salvation,
when silence passes for separation
and your own voice hums like a distant station —
love, or echolocation?

I have sucked all the nectar from this angular night, I
have caught the quiet moth on the wing —
in blindness descended from blindness unshaken, in
a silhouette dreaming of a destination, in
love or desperation —

When the color was drained from your monochrome film
and you laid it out bare on the table,
trading shapes for shadows, trading shadow for sable,
calling gray-on-gray an exaggeration
was this love or an incantation?

I shout and I witness the edges of things
come boiling back from their old locations,
after one long moment of hesitation —

In the humid air of this alien night,
before we discovered the myth of flight,
your silver shape, in fine gradation,
in a room of lines of demarcation,
was this desire, or isolation?

Out From Babel #2

May 2009

More on the Babel problem. See #1

Out from Babel strung like a broken cable –
Up from the burning rubble of a shattered sun –
Jacob's ladder fallen to its lowest rung.
Who called it Babel and kept their tongue?

In the trough of one dune we forgot
the crest of the last. We sang harmony
with the wind and lost each note
before the arrival of the next, and
only in a perfect balance of dusk
could we grasp both day and night…

In those first days of the Annexation,
it was a common sight: two men would greet warmly,
even embrace – but thereafter
gain no understanding. The one
might see his friend turned
to madness, the other mocked viciously
by one trusted, or a foul demon
masquerading as one he loved.

To the observer, both strove patiently,
and with goodwill – yet it would come to blows,
and blood in the public square. And when the fog
was lifted, the terror that followed –

This and other madness consumed us –
The fall of the tower, too:
when one blueprint became, in our fractured eyes,
five hundred clashing structures…
How could it not? I myself capped
the fatal pillar, granite braced by a wooden arch.

Overnight, without knowing, one city became
thousands – each man a lost tribe unto himself.
That the babe still knew it's mother's breast,
We counted as kindness.

Out from Babel #1

February 2009

In the tradition of finding new perspectives, and with perhaps some debt to Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash (very little, but you should read it anyway).

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Cool tree blowing in a lyric wind,
Babylon choir on an outstretched limb,
Blue sky stretching like a desert hymn
With no color of night or morning.

Like a coward the desert slipped out
from our footsteps and returned
the following night. We carried our water
in mason jars and we slept like masons
and we hummed like open jars,
for we could place no word before another.

Still I treasured most keshrai, meaning waterfowl,
meaning gone from our silted streams and embittered
ponds. Each among us carried one lost
word from the mother tongue, and as must
made other words to cover this,
until his mind was whole and
his throat blank as riverstone.

So one was named Aqueduct and another
bore Arbalest, and we found Song
among six scattered parties, each with no
reckoning of his kin. Aimless we tracked
across unknown spaces, bereft of distances
and times. In the drive to know, one man gave names
to every grain of sand along our path.

These names, too, were lost,
for he perished before we reached the deltas.