Stonemason
Love is like a stone.
If you heat it up, it stays warm for a while
And can seem like the source of the warmth.
Love is like a headstone
It is shaped and
Given a name, the before and after.
Everything is a form of love.
Many deaths and loves are adorned with stones.
My beloved would lift and cut stones,
And get paid to do so.
To the sea that wears pebbles smooth.
We’d journey to the stones
That would turn out to be softer than love.
Love carries the names
We carve into it. Love carries the softness
We learn from the killer sea.
Love is pretty like a stone
Its rotund outlines are easy to love
As I came to love the woman I did not know,
Who had crocheted a shirt for you.
I could see your dark skin through the pattern,
I fished it out
And you caught mine in turn.
I spent some time living skinless
But now I’m a stone
And I miss it no more.
I composed an ode to divorce
And to hairdresser’s scissors. Ode to the warm scarf
And wool socks.
On Light
In these dark times, many complain about
the lack of light
badmouthing all that is white
as tainted and stinky
yet, many have seen
the flash of white bone
as a knife or an axe breaks the skin
a root, so white
underneath the soiled surface
shiny animal skin
revealed beneath the thick undercoat
and the luminous skies reflected
in a silty puddle on a forest track
and the white rabbit mom plucking
the white fur off her dewlap
for her hairless newborns
and the sedative white of a bandage
over a fresh wound
and the pale of a body in the face of death
a cadaver, washed and adorned
as soon as I start talking about this
I feel like a squeaky toy –
squeezed by someone
for a sound, whiter than white
or at least for a squeak about
the stars,
which have nothing to do with this.
Bathtub
“Why-ever did you fail to clean the tub?” Mother would ask.
After having a bath, its ceramic sides would display
The deposits of something to be ashamed of:
A greyish halo, an unevenly winding strip
Like a hand-written line
To describe the body’s dirty nature.
And you were acting as if you were clean and new.
As kids, you’d tickle each other.
Share a bed when the parents left
Getting used to the smell of another,
To the closeness and impurity. To that
Which comes from nothing.
Later you learned to wash standing
Under the stream of water, in the transient foam.
The communal black hole would swallow the body’s filth.
A relief – has it passed? I should hope… Perhaps it never was.
Invisible things are so much like fiction.
Yet, something would still collect on the walls
Little by little, the tiles would reveal
A dirty photograph of the truth.
The animal lurking inside you would say – us, animals –
We don’t clean the walls, we don’t polish the trees,
The shrubs, or the reeds we inhabit.
Nevertheless, once every six months the truth of the dirt
Would leave the animal speechless. It would come to its senses in the nude,
Brush in hand, more poses than you can imagine.
A black hole would suck the photo gallery in:
The remains of skin and soap, cosmic dust. Down would gurgle
The secret life of a man who’d wash here, and
Life in general. That, which one is, on the way to becoming oneself:
Embracing oneself, dirty, having become dirt,
Shedding identities and scents.
The bathtub would shine clean again, ringing like a bell:
“There is no dirt and there never was.
Let’s embrace.”
And all this would fit into simple:
“I’ve cleaned the tub.”
