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Wordsmith
Join Date: May 2007
Location: On islands
Gender: Male
Posts: 6,606
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The oppressive silence poem
To explain the title of the post, this is probably the last poem I read in public. Several years ago and I haven't written much poetry since. (Little Mexican towns not being a hotbed of interest in poems in English)
But when I finished it, I immediately dashed down to an open reading at Bumbershoot, the annual Seattle arts festival. I got up and read the poem and there was total silence. No eye contact. I said, "Thanks for that great wave of apathy" or something and exuded stage left.
The next reader was a fifteen year old girl reading a poem about being dumped by a jerk. It got a warm applause.
I MIGHT have been the subject matter. What do you think?
BLOOD SIMPLE
I saw it first seeping
through the coarse dark
hairs between her legs,
blood thicker than water, slicker than my own,
blood gorged with life, charged with death
Did she bleed because I pierced her?
Or because she lost the child?
She bleeds red from her loins,
white from her breasts,
salt blue from her eyes,
ice green from her guts.
she bleeds copper-gold,
bleeds a dark, tarry black.
I don't know where to look.
I close my eyes to the colors and listen
for a steady dripping that deepens into thunder
as the world throbs hard in my ears,
swollen with its blood and births,
pregnant with its goods and evils.
You can taste it in the wine,
in the host of old recipes;
in any meat, any fish, any fowl.
It's a fine old stock for certain soups,
just lick it off your own fingers.
Blood on your tongue
is more a ritual than a sin,
more an initiation than a crime,
more a meal than a curse.
Under the acrid organic blend
are faint motes of other men.
Past the tongue there is no taste,
just the thick flow down the throat
and on through--a very mixed blessing
that merely keeps me alive.
Does she bleed to feed me because it's too late to die?
Or just to go where I can't follow?
It has a smell of sweat and urine,
of rot and germination,
of fish and death and sweet-sick pollution,
of things already eaten and already passed,
of water already broken,
of air already breathed too many times before...
of corruptions still in progress.
In short, of all turned earth, of everything alive.
The odor washed away by the rivers,
lost in the clean, sharp wrack of sea.
I look up into the rain, sniff running water,
hold up my clean hands to the sky.
Does she bleed some tainted form of water?
Or a more fluid form of flesh?
This dripping tactile glass of hours
winds the months, plots the periods of years,
tells the torture of aborted time,
always unfinished because never begun,
a clotting, cloying cycle
by which life loses itself in the dark.
It's an almanac I can read off the sheets
when I can't see the stars,
bright cardinal points without which
there would be no returning.
Ebbing or stemming, she's always been bleeding.
Is the spoor is getting richer?
Am I getting warmer?
In the desert blood doesn't last long at the surface.
It sinks away grain by grain,
flows into underground rivers,
forms deposits of need and blisters of wealth.
I touch the stains as gently as the sand.
Sticky and hot, it makes me feel porous
and touches my life like gravity,
draws me under, where springs flow
and mirages are formed.
Does she bleed from sin and rupture and long run downhill?
Or just straight out of her heart?
The spoor leads me up into the trees,
red splashed behind the green
like a feldspar fleck in stone.
There's bright sign on the trail,
but maybe just from other climbers.
Yet there is blood on these rocks,
bones frozen deep in the crevices.
The very particles of the stone are tiny animals,
drowned and drifted and crushed together;
lives not so much lost as collected and concreted,
all their fluids petrified, then crumpled like cloth
lifted by their dry weight, changed by their very elevation,
bursting forth and flowing red in their own heat,
spreading out to harden in black scabs.
The slickrock is carved in old flows,
flirts the eye upward like any cathedral.
Has she bled all over the sumacs?
And smeared the Western sky?
Above the trees, the trail is blackened and burnt,
runs cold as each peak points higher and thinner and paler.
Blood drops freeze into sharp crystal shards.
They glow in slightest light,
I see them sown through the snow
like rubies preserved in amber.
Am I losing the scent?
Or is she running out of blood?
The rock turns to ice, then to sleet,
then to snow, to white air
But still I can breathe,
even while my lungs freeze
I stand above it all, blowing frost clouds at the sky...
and see blood on the moon.
Is the purpose of blood to cool the brain?
Or merely to feed us then waste us away?
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(the smileys aren't meant to be negative)
