birdsong

I offer my perfection, severed and apart,
the swan’s glorious neck, white, silent.
Like feather laid on feather, I build
this place, temple to my own frail god.

No one comes or goes, yet how the halls
are filled with tails of sashes slipping
into doorways. I say silence, but listen.
There is a windchime’s bright refrain,

water over stone, the wind’s desire to cease.
Peonies sugar the air. The terrazzo hoards
the day’s heat. I preen and practice
before the fountain’s pool. I am a wing

splayed and honored, without purpose.
Even my beauty is incomplete. Here
I am, disjointed, dancing, a little hen
hanging chandeliers inside her coop.

Lantern Festival

Tonight the rare moon persists, calls echoes
from every nook. Winter has stripped
the lace from the pistachio, left it
black and keen against the cloudbank.
I have cared too much about the revolution

of barren planets, the climate of the sun,
the dream of water plumbed from stone.
By daybreak I expect a cure, a dose
of ice and sunlight. It is building

that calls me now. My desk bows
beneath the weight of strategies
and maps. I will swathe the windows
with crepe, ignore the bait of star
and branch. Even the snow will lose

its pretty riddles. My lips are lined
with ten-penny nails. I wait for morning,
for the moon to melt into the west,
a pale votive snuffed by my breath.

Antonio López García

Antonio’s canvas


Boundaries collapse within my fist,
crushed like ancient lace.
When I lift my hand to the wind
it is sacred to watch
them sough the air with immunity.


I have not finished the bletted quince.
I am waiting for time to reveal
the hues of this fisted apple.
The door is peeling now. The paint
has given up its desire to oversee


the small leavings of this house.
Has it been months, already
since I came inside , since the orchard
bloomed and scattered velvet
blossoms on my windowsill?


My brush takes me beyond these walls,
past the confines of the apoapsis.
The quince will flower again
before the winter moon is snagged,
full and ripe, in her branches.


http://www.tdludwig.net/painting/lopez.htm

hope

hope, originally uploaded by mrs. french.

Oh, it has been so long since I have felt good about the future of my country. It is a beautiful thing to feel hopeful. I am proud to be an American on this day.

Ike

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has been battered by storms this summer.




Ike was a ferocious hurricane that left a swath of destruction in his path from the Turks & Caicos Islands across the Caribbean, Haiti, Cuba and the Louisiana and Texas coasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike
If you are interested in helping in the recovery effort I reccommend the following institutions~

Operation Blessing International~ http://community.ob.org/site/PageServer

Galveston Rising~ http://www.galvestonrising.com/

American Red Cross~ http://www.redcross.org/

after the water

There is a always a threshold for things
that alter us, a clean edge at the start,
the surprise of it like a blade pressed cold
against the throat. The first wave is forgotten

in the next. Fierce water rises like a wicked sun
to spread across the fields, the little houses,
the ponies with their bright new shoes.
Oh, the tumble and spill of cobbled hopes,

the surge of flowerpots and paperbacks!
And there my heart dissolves, in the unbound
Bay, like a snow flake swallowed by the tide,
assimilated so that I might wrap around the fallen

palms and beams, might taste the rust and ruin.
It is nothing, no solace, no redemption,
but a useless rag I use to blot the tortured landscape.
I will not ask for pardon, will not assume

it matters. Better I was a splintered pole,
something stark and astonishing, than this quiet
sadness that only laps the dirty hem of sky,
an imperceptible swell that bears no boat or seed.

August

sea dream , originally uploaded by Sea Dream Studio.

Beneath a coronet
of scrim spun clouds I wait
for nothing. Expectation has flown
away like millet on a parched wind.

My open hands drop only silver
shadows onto the prairie.
I am no emptier than before.
It is only the willingness to stop

the approaching penumbra that alters me.
When possibility is recognized,
met face to face in every surface
that offers clear reflection, I see

that it is but another property
of light, a coveted revision
of the familiar spectrum.
The summer sun sets

the horizon trembling . I aim
to fill my arms with gold and amber
beams, to hoist the impossible
weight of luminance back into the sky.