On a Lovefeast of Yesterdays, and: Seven Cantos on Silence as Via Negativa, and: Ode to My Namesake on the Other Side of the Universe

On a Lovefeast of Yesterdays

No word for the scent, we say, on a road of dipson our way to the sweetest spot in the foothillswhere we ate spice cookies, airy, crisp as autumnwith cakes baked right next to the blacksmiths,a hedge-maze by a church with an acre cemetery—none of it tasted bitter, rather, sweet without smokeswirling in our lungs, without honey-laced beeswax,nor the rolled cigars lying asleep in their boxesfor shipment, nor barrels of molasses, nor hickory,not tar or nougat or malt whiskey, not gingersnapsor chocolate chess pie or black sugar. We relisha lovefeast of yesterdays, pin up elusive syllablesof fragrance wafting through avenues in searchof loaves or leaves cured in bakeshops, the housesof shivering air elusive as an aroma of nostalgia—mulching a ferny floor in the hills, a festive crushof tobacco drying with a brisk sweetness of angelsobserving us with eyes on a world where the name

  of a thing is not the thing itself.

Seven Cantos on Silence as Via Negativa

canto 1.(Neither is the word silence equivalent to the loveliest of lovely days  beginning with love and lengthening with the light  where an open parenthesis never closes—

canto 2.Neither is it an invisible flock of small en dashes  flying in hyphens of horizontal light to a skylinewhere little nothings brush the air with em dashes    as pauses or broken spaces        and caesuras where sound vanishesin a pear-shaped curve of the world, this eardrum  pushing against the reverberation of cold winter light on the floor—    pupils dilating in the unfastened ink of the dark.

canto 3.(The fog in a green church of wind on the sea cliff—

canto 4.In a grove, feral lorikeets in a red-gum eucalyptusfall silent, awed      by a solar eclipse in winter—sunlight        dims in a kelp forestwhere swimmers drowned, their legs tangled by ribbonsof silence,    undersea deaths by apnea—

canto 5.Phenomena in antithesis to silence—      white noise of engines spinning in turbines,    a dial tone on a rotary telephone the color of oranges,thunder rolling over foothills, signposts telling the miles ahead,       and a memory of sweet-tongued heat    pooling in a jar of early summer marmalade,pink lemons whose rose-quartz flesh shouted with honey—        maddening honey of sugar and roses, a mineralmatrix of molten sweetness.

canto 6.    Silence is a dashed grammar of punctuated roses,brackets blossoming without desire      for closure, or fragrant elision and contraction,        ellipses in the motion of an eye      petaling across quartos folded        one inside the other as mutual offerings.For a spring season, I wait on God to speak a word,      i.e. blooming, blooming, blooming—      wherein I also learn how God repliesin the manner of an open parenthesis      which is no sound at all. (My presencewill go with you, and I will give you rest—

canto 7.The quietest room in the world is not silence.    The word silence is not silence.Such irony—cantos on silence        verb and verb so much sound.)

Ode to My Namesake on the Other Side of the Universe

A woman with my name, Karen,lives on the other side of the universe—probing non-small cell lung cancer,

microscopic radial scars, magneticresonance imaging, liquid diagnosticplatforms for biopsies, designing

new cures in her field of cancermedicine. As her quiet counterpart,a poet on this side of the universe,

I wonder if angels hover by her faceat night like mine while messengerssoar under low evening clouds, laughing

in a swirl of lucid dreaming, updraftssoaked in the intoxicating fragranceof mad honey flowing out of portals

of lost Karens—extinction of loves,the vestiges of sea-faring pilgrims,polar ice caps melting by degrees,

the delirium of time itself flungin starry vectors of the inevitableshot through to the survival

of eponymous...