TINTAS

- Verse -

if your road is wine-dark & you drink
& your blood is sunlight & swimming

if the little freedoms that form you
taste like clean winter air

if the whole of time finds itself & disappears
in the geometry of your breath

if you are prone to becoming
those things you always doubted

if genuflection is an artform
& you place all questions inside it

if politics gives you equal measures
of epiphany & raucous fatigue

if elegance identifies itself in you
but you refuse to answer the call

if mirrors frighten & distill your neurons
one by one until you flee

if dragonflies look like holy vessels
& you pray to the sheen of their wings

if fame is one of many myths
gathered in your fist like grapes

if the will is a symphony performed
by all that your mind has not touched

if morning has no meaning beyond
the scents you ascribe to morning

if repetition is the name of doubt
& you believe at your center

if everything is faith or faith's envoy
& faith is an insurmountable fact

if a window can contain infinities
& the self is a window

then safely you might describe your
rootless nocturnal ruminations as human

& you are suited to improvise a love
with which to trim & shatter obstacles

& the universe is moving toward you
with an invitation to the day

[ from Joseph Robertson's An Archaeology of Sense ]

SEISMIC PATTERNED

I saw you as a child today
seismic patterned cross-section of self
passing the height of your dreams
you flourish in fountain gravities
in colors of subtle hue

a breath of accretion
stills cowering worldly dusts
in your presence displacing
a humid neon
with the cotton lights of youth

[copyright © 2000 Lainey Johr]

In sighing for the country
there is nothing more beautiful
than a cowboy feeling verses
in the shout of a pale evening.
When the cry hides
behind the thought,
when the cry hides...

Kesi, continued...

Other Works

• Buy Me the Possibility of Your Transcendence

• from Desire

• Filming

• Re: Affection Apparent