Painting by Marianne von Werefkin
Who or what holds strings over us,
lifts our arms, crashes
our bodies together?
We move as we must, enjoy
the dance even as we resent
doing it. Perhaps the “real”
marionettes on stage enjoy theirs too—
they come alive, blood circulates,
ideas birth where there had been
only wood. My lover will be
famous, perhaps remembered
like Wateau. When he’s dead,
no one will know what moved his hand
when he would have preferred
to rest. I can’t say what moves
my own hand or why a dark
blue light can wound or delight me–
we keep trying to break
whatever holds us against
our will. Color, a scissors,
almost cutting us free.
– Kenneth Pobo
Author’s Note:
“Marionette Theatre” is from an ekphrastic collection of poems that I’m currently working on. …
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Hands
We weave our fingers together before we fall to sleep
and I notice yours, nearly slender, your infancy thinning.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////I did not notice the shape of those hands
————————————/////////–that gave you to me, that still hold so much of your story.
Your life line, your love line, both too small for me to get
a good read in fading November light.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////It is the back of my own that concerns me—now
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////more my mother’s, her mother’s.
You tap my palm in drowsy patty cake—mark it
with a G!
/////////////////////////////////////////////You will have no memory of what yours will become.
Connective Tissue
I might be smothered by
////////////////////////////////the love she causes.
Mornings I struggle out from under, our heavy sleep
breaths pull it down, down, and down overnight.…
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They called it something brand new.
Said it surpassed hard candy, snuff flicks,
or huffing Jefferson airplane glue. Pink
lemonade, a chaser: “It gives you a nice blank
feeling,” said the bleach blonde on QVC, quite
unlike snack cracker, creme filling or Mars
bar, clumps of wet sand squeezing through
the sun burned toes, erosion on the banks
of hometown rivers; they called it something
almost (not quite) Frank O’Hara with no sweat
in white linen suit, buzz cut and serendipity, ripping up
Lotto tickets on the sidewalk because there’s nothing
else to do. “But only the fact, that there’s nothing else
to do,” they made Frank say it “nothing
else to do.”
In a moment some cube of lemon light went
down, on cue, dappling the basement floor, about four
by eight inches fugitive from dirty casement window to
concrete; it was like that, and nothing more, although
they swore up and down it was so original, nobody
had ever seen it before; not in the purest torpor of three
thirty death in the afternoon, nor bubbly gin fizz
as bas relief etched out of pores, when you
know it in your funny bone, they said sit up
ram straight as a biker passing through, they
swore under a ton of sun, it was a new thing, a new
thing too precious to waste, or hesitate; I bought it
for awhile felt quite silken, as folds of alien skin.…
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The Meaning of More
We stack glass jars in the hallway,
fill them with fireflies and nails.
From the bed, we discover
walls move like water.
The blanket is a psychic’s tongue
draped across our legs.
What is more but what we can’t
really touch, your body sliding
down the shower wall,
where you end up when you
are gone. Spaces left
unstirred down my back.
You can bury me in your mattress
and dig me out later in loose threads
unstitching music notes,
the cigarette-glow
of need. We are objects
just like the things we keep
stored in attics and boxes,
these lonely trinkets, bed sheets.
Keep the pillows from long ago,
your lovers’ names sketched
inside each one, languages
of dead petals, wild pearls.…
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I
The sun
cracked your blinds
in my absence
like a pistol shot
and light showered your shadow
with curses
no different than my coming.
In both our parting,
in our irretrievable going,
my sun sits, fraternal, impassive,
impaling all life
like my love,
on a tree cracked with ribs.
In this way, commissar, we
return our losses to the great void.
We, of all who are
all faceless in our unnaming,
a people of wind and air.
In this i make sense of
the tv and
the newspapers depart
disposable in our forgetting.
In this way my excesses are forgiven
and history buries the dead with the binding
of our tongues!
In all our melting absences
i have nailed this history to
the forest of our delusions.…
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Anxiety announces itself with a desperate dog paddle
when there is no water in sight. Some alarm code pierces,
and creates a black hole in you, whooshing.
All those restless moments freeze you,
remembered in your limbs as reasons you should not,
dare not face a fall.
You know fear like a personal guide to pain who spins
out the complicated story
that sits on the edge of one truth.
But there are others.
Suppose that one day you try another ending
that is just a little experiment, a small kitten-like thing
that is curious, and tenacious.
Suppose that you can dance with this different ending,
and that a breathless swoop
reclaims you, a sudden unexpected tune
ends with the sound of feathers falling.
Just suppose.…
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