Tag: contact zone

David Welch

AFTER RILKE

                      —a cento

1.

not from shyness     this silence of theirs
no ear but is half broken

             and nearly touchable

air without object     a gust within God     a wind
grows now too heavy for you to bear

~

all becomes arbor

                         resurrected
             into all that may be seen

and flings it     free of sorrow     heavenward

~

antenna to antenna we posit
             this sweetness     thick at first
begrudging us

             changing like cloud formations

in course of time they break
though we     like swimmers     tax ourselves
                                                                          at length

2.

you whom I loved like an unnamed flower

                         you breeze     so full of spots

who with the dead

             by one deft touch
do we know     or do we not

I hide behind simple things so you’ll find me;
if you don’t find me, you’ll find the things,
you’ll touch what my hand has touched, 
our hand-prints will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way because of what I’m saying to you),
it lights up the empty house and the house’s kneeling silence–
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that’s when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.

Yannis Ritsos, “The Meaning of Simplicity” in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry

(via nemophilies)

Invitation

kdecember30:

I said welcome. & you
entered. before entering
the cliff cave.
Subliminal messages
will be played underneath
the music.
I wrote this scene to be
played by two scientists
discovering poison dart
frogs. You know, for the
first time. Skip ahead, the
frogs are forming a complicated
send off to the troops.
I am righting a wrong

I am ghost hunting

with a small dog that

has died of you. 

I have put

yellow tape around
Farmer’s Pond, in memory

of Farmer’s Pond. 

You said let’s dual
and I laughed but

you were facing me

and onlookers materialized