Learning to Forgive Is A Hard Row to Hoe
This may not be up for long. My MySpace site blog is down for "special maintenance" -- so be it. I can't seem to find Jonathan's workshop site to post this to, also. This was written a little while ago, and I just want to see it. I'm hoping to work it into something for the book, Una poca de gracia/ Bit of Grace, of new and collected love poems. I like to post poems to that site, especially the ones I'm working on, which is why I call it, "The Poems, the Whole Poem and Nothing But the Poem." This is the first poem-poem I've written in a while. (Our anniversary's coming up this weekend.) Enjoy.
Realization In The Garden
"The more passions and desires one has,
the more ways one has of being happy."
-- Charlotte-Catherine
You didn't love me in New Mexico.
Somebody else's sapphire hung
in that pair, their stories, untold,
as you fingered the ware of that blue
design. No present for me, those guilty
shining eyes, those earrings for her
in an art shop you had shopped before
with that ghost of a girl, dead then
a handful of years. Who was it?
I asked the crystal, a desire so fine
and unspeakable. What heart on the radio
stalled out on a smile? Your cheating heart,
a better choice of soundtrack. Inexplicable
or else. What shadows on the dimes
of your eyes on that silent drive across the plains,
the dry deserted desires pasted on the barren
landscape; our caught sweaters lingering
in the bins behind us? We were going back
into our futures, I believed. I was
already past. Our past now, a deserted mile.
How many memories does it take
to fill this box? How many tears and
words to chisel and burn
my impression into your life? My thumbs
playing here upon the nestle of your neck.
You didn't love me in New Mexico.
Now, a double rainbow reigns
in Colorado in a cliche you created real
for me from that long-dead lover. All my seeds,
borrowed from her. No small memories shared,
split before the fire and wax. Now my rainbow
(I want to say) splits open the seasons
over this hard-loved plot of soil
with its single albino corn stalk,
beautiful but doomed. Do you love
me now? My hands in the soot and soil.
Good earth, as my grandma would say,
worked, wanted, blessed by sweat,
our desire taking root. That something
in your eyes again, hanging pendulums
of smoking topaz so hard to leave.
7/28/06
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Realization In The Garden
"The more passions and desires one has,
the more ways one has of being happy."
-- Charlotte-Catherine
You didn't love me in New Mexico.
Somebody else's sapphire hung
in that pair, their stories, untold,
as you fingered the ware of that blue
design. No present for me, those guilty
shining eyes, those earrings for her
in an art shop you had shopped before
with that ghost of a girl, dead then
a handful of years. Who was it?
I asked the crystal, a desire so fine
and unspeakable. What heart on the radio
stalled out on a smile? Your cheating heart,
a better choice of soundtrack. Inexplicable
or else. What shadows on the dimes
of your eyes on that silent drive across the plains,
the dry deserted desires pasted on the barren
landscape; our caught sweaters lingering
in the bins behind us? We were going back
into our futures, I believed. I was
already past. Our past now, a deserted mile.
How many memories does it take
to fill this box? How many tears and
words to chisel and burn
my impression into your life? My thumbs
playing here upon the nestle of your neck.
You didn't love me in New Mexico.
Now, a double rainbow reigns
in Colorado in a cliche you created real
for me from that long-dead lover. All my seeds,
borrowed from her. No small memories shared,
split before the fire and wax. Now my rainbow
(I want to say) splits open the seasons
over this hard-loved plot of soil
with its single albino corn stalk,
beautiful but doomed. Do you love
me now? My hands in the soot and soil.
Good earth, as my grandma would say,
worked, wanted, blessed by sweat,
our desire taking root. That something
in your eyes again, hanging pendulums
of smoking topaz so hard to leave.
7/28/06
Lorna Dee Cervantes
posted by Lorna Dee Cervantes at 2:37 PM
4 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Lorna,
Had to delete the first post. I wrote it too fast; came out weird.
What i wanted to say was: Beautiful. Just what I needed to read to help me through "a time" I'm going through.
Thanks for this comment, Diana. I think I wrote it, and posted it, for that reason -- without knowing it. I knew it was a "poem" in that there was something I wanted to say, to get said, both for me as well as someone else.
Somebody somewhere out in Blogville posted a quote on indigenous American poetics and the trust in the transformative power of poetry, the knowledge that poems are supposed to help make you a better person even as they do so many other things. I've been thinking about this, a lot. Not to block off access to those other ways of perceiving that poetry can crack into -- all the chance work I've been doing and the sheer delight in phonemes divorced from the morph-, but to give one's self to that otherness of the poem that imposes from the outside as much as it's grounded in the personal.
Send me some poems! I miss reading you.
L,
Thanks for writing back.Tell me where and will do. Would love to send you words.
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