©2007 by Mark Fleckenstein
Acknowledgments:
A number of these poems previously appeared in Sticks 2 and Sticks 3.
I
Another Page Illustrated by
Fire
Ritual: Love Poem Disguised
as Winter
Ritual: Healing
Crepuscular
Morning Light
Self Portrait: Letters
Line Drawing
II Poems for Isabel
Looking for Falling Stars
Dreaming in Flesh, of Flesh
Self Portrait with Coffee
Prayer in the Rain
Another Page Illustrated by Fire
Lacking a voice to invent the usual
suspicions, the door opening, light
moving through like spring wind,
this is how I'd construct it:
no walls or windows, only holes
and white, infinitely white furniture.
The slate scratched clean.
The language simpler, basic:
muscles, linguistics, pathology,
light, the condition of memory.
One man's story is another's
erased memory. The context varies
with the map. "There’s something
for each of you out there."
This is family.
Ritual: Love Poem Disguised as Winter
I want the heart almost as much
as the breathy space separating each beat.
Your face above that.
Warm almost Greek light.
A place to hang myself.
I was not the cut-off lock
of hair that fell silence-riddled
into clothes and undimpled smiles.
From this life I want to make another.
First light a dull razor through tap water.
Up again all night sawing the room
into furniture, the same mistaken conditions
making the same mistakes possible.
Cognitive despair, the usual finger
up the ass like just-spilled coffee.
Is a puzzle a paradox or a specialized dictionary?
You be the judge.
The stories are all lovely exaggerations,
elegant catastrophes of the heart,
windows pretending to be invisible
wishing the blue air beyond, heat.
History is always in the details:
torn baby pictures, a smile borrowed
from a neighbor, swallowed words.
"You were looking at me without my head."
Useless as we are, we are.
Morning again: light, God's laughter,
coffee. Clothes making us up,
re-telling and forgetting the same story.
If thirty years equals one sentence
yes, I'm still walking: if by land, with
both eyes closed. If by water, sleepily.
These are the same shoes, socks
and untied laces. From here to back there
to here is harmless: small metal parts ground
precise, polished. Useless replacements.
It's that lonely time of year again,
hesitation all around like the wrong clothes
for a party. We used to speak, air passing
back and forth, a sailboat for questions,
rowboat for thoughts, fog like good luck.
Where were you? I was I, drowning knee deep,
hard of hearing and not uncertain this wasn't
hope, wasn't the promise I wanted.
Looking up through bathtub water the over-
head light could be the sun, moon
or mistaken lightning. I do not wish
to die just yet. Without my glasses or shoes
or the towel. Adam imagined Eve
transliterates to even, evening,
event, eventual. Sometimes an apple is just
an apple, a serpent, an exaggeration, a worm.
City lights flatten against braided clouds.
Stretched against each other, breath whispering
to loved skin. It is a mild night, absent stars.
His arms imagine a falling star, the soft weight
of her legs and lips, fresh against him, a wish.
As if he were to stand, eschew his frightened
wings, not argue air, or think windows de-
liberate air. As if he could commiserate, spell God
and deliver what a pair of hands, lips, closing eyes
teach. Kiss and tell. As if every, any world in that moment.
There is always coffee. The clink, aroma, brown and light-
er conversations. The possibility of history, beyond
nodding hair, the idea of smoke, whispering, caressed
paper. Watching her thinking. Her eyes. In some countries,
staring is indelicate intimacy. Hands feigning sight, blinking.
If a star fell on top of your life, an untidy blessing
with arms, lips, eyes, and raw grace, words
become thoughtful accidents. There is no light,
there is no light, no unburned words, just ashes,
prayers to everything and how long it's been missing.
Mark Fleckenstein lives in Arlington, MA. A previous chapbook, The Memory of Stars, was published by Sticks Press in 1995. Some of the poems in the present chapbook are part of a manuscript, Fallen Stars, which will be published by Cervena Barva Press in late 2008/early 2009. Email him at markfleck@yahoo.com.