[Collaborative Poetic Project Between Gali-Dana Singer and Stephen Ellis. Poems written in alternating lines composed by SE and GDS]
SUPPLEMENTARY ANGLES
The sky says goodnight like this:
And the sly doesn't reply
Real perception in hearing is concealed by sounds
The star doesn't bother to wish you sweet dreams
What strength is gained by sitting in the dark
It gives away for the sake of the other
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CLOTHESLINE
City birds are no longer afraid at night
They have the air they've breathed all day between their feathers to guide them
And all the streetlights still cannot turn night into another day
Is there anything more beautiful than pieces of string too short to use for anything?
Could I change the first line? I ask myself.
[Is that a line in and of itself? Everybody changes in some strange way. Yes, of course
you can change it!]
Wait and it will change by itself, like one piece of rope into another
Like how the air between your feathers when you fly is your song
While jackhammers and asphalt rollers accompany its silent flight
A bird in Jerusalem just bought a flashlight: I know, because I heard her do it.
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MIMESIS
As the marvelous unity of silence is restored, speech becomes the companion of all that is poetic
Speech and All, they walk holding hands to the very end of the overly long line.
And silence and sound give birth to each other's sense of what the other 'means.'
'Parents need to be killed in the bud,' says All
But they die in giving birth to the children that might kill them
'Only it's too late,' sighs All, 'the harm is already done.'
Done and forgotten, harm is free to continue, and All remains, One.
'A genesis of oneness isn't an end to otherness,' sees All, but stays quiet.
So thus the Other will live.
'Vive La Différence!' a joker would say, but
Jokers can tell no truths.
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THREE-LEGGED STOOL
When the night starts closing in the middle of the day
The sun crawls deep inside the moon
So nothing can eclipse the shining darkness of its secret.
Water leaks out in proportion to the milk that keeps seeping in
Leaving transparent watermarks on its way through the sky
Be quiet! A cow's tongue is speaking!
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BLACKMAIL
The ivory sky of our late afternoon
Was haunted by the shadows of tusk hunters
All that they found were hollow corn husks
Of the long deaf ears that never heard of escape
'And never milked a colonel or a cow'
Still the disappearance trick is expected as
Sure as the tide climbs the sinking island coast
Who will expose it and at what expense? The wing or
How an inverted soldier's cap floating in the tide can remind me of my mother, is
The essence of fleeing that lasts in the dream of not burying mine
Or finding the difference between elide and evade as exactly what happened at home
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WELL-BEING
Missing a certain kind of a rose try to find it a name
The stem of a beautiful nameless flower
Will pierce you to the core and the plush bee
Will its honey make in three-part harmony
Only the scent doesn't need to be called
Always to the nose by name.
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NYXRUEN
'How does the imagination bind 'phase' to mammal life?'
Through the labyrinthine ways of true weevils
Mother mostly used to use old Burna Shave roadsigns
While my Grandfather... But why should we rhyme our relatives in this soapy way?
'Rule no. 14: Don't touch another boy's legs whenever he's asleep'
But rules are for girls, not for grandfathers.
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I DON'T KNOW
Whose mouth holds a bee to scorn the temples
Let her clavicles be packed with honey
Forget it if you can in an ordered confusion of carex
Where we hide our loving hearts within the green and growing sedge
That stings the memory before it gets too sweet
As the golden sun sets in preparation for a silver moon
Turning sham gold into sham silver and both into the truest light of dark
The night flight of a swallow's wings, lit by a star
Is as unthinkable in these circumstances as
‘How close can we be if we aren't even far?’
Or ‘Whose question the question was?’
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NOISE ONLY SOUNDS LIKE NOISE
The invisible torrents of spring grow near
Bearing unfulfilled yet promises in mind
The space projected from the eyes of fawns
Is populated by fauns protecting the great god Pan from charges of misogyny
And things that are the dreams of vipers
Smoothly slither away like the remnants of sacred wisdom
Traced by the game-sticks in a shepherd's hand
'Is there any logic in the change?' wonders the Calendar on the freezer door
I think it has much to do with pole-vaulting from Spain to Morocco
Only a note by its side 'Don’t forget to eat' testifies to the contrary
Made new again, Aieleth-hashahar, shepherdess of the vaporous eyelash
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GRAMMAR
What was the first: noodles or an alphabet?
First was doodles from a mood disorder
Boats absentmindedly perforated through by a lone teredo
Ma bucket's gotta hole in it
So the time can flee be it hourglass or clepsydra
Initiation by invention of the entrance of intervention
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THE KINGDOM OF THIS SIDE
Wherein one process a human cannot be alone
Unless he becomes a flowering tree by the road
Translated to anoint the dark side of the moon
By the Google translator
While bride and groom continue boiling the same egg
In two oceans to the sound of a timer.
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ON ASSIGNMENT
The weather of our being surrounds exactly where I am
Letting it be known to the stars of the Pleiades
And droplets of dew deep in roots that wait for rime to appear
Can tell the exact location to the mole and the shrew
And the difference between auricle and ventricle
Isn't more meaningful than the affinity between breath and light
That discloses in the opening of a door
And brings in as a welcome guest the future of
What's behind Door Number 3
But what is behind any door is as impossible to predict as to guess what’s in front of it
Or reach beyond selves and where is what unknown provides, wings sprout
So every home-bred oracle runs the risk of losing his face to a certain extent
Approaching return before the touch
Of frost will make it unattainable
Winged time hovering to pursue what now possesses one who cannot reach it
Forced to flee for dear life, stay
The changes that work the passage through and out and then return through them
Will take care of the forecast and of the past
Where the present shimmers as the thing to be addressed
Trying to make amends to anyone in particular
No initiation needed but the simple facts of life that hum with power
Able to push the thawed earth like a likeness of a featherbed
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CLOSE CALLS
The winged lion on the roof is still waiting for the underground rivers to rise and block the way
So he grew increasingly envious of ducks
tadpoles, frogs and diving beetles living in a neighbouring pool, who knew it would happen only
When the lion fell in love with the way water magnified the flexible effect of their orange feet
Never, never, croaked crows. They knew everything in advance
Except when the tugboats in the harbor would in secret gently touch.
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AND IN EYES WHERE A LAKE OF LIGHT APPEARS
Furled together as novices within the petals of Novalis' Blue Rose
Two words await the dawn
A luminous thread stitches 'love' to 'evolve
'When we are gone' says one to another
‘We manifest to each other, like sugar dissolving in milk
Outside the faceted glass'.
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BARE NECESSITIES
When loquat is crowned with new leaves like a letter ש
The alphabet presents primacy in a new light
Who would care to vote in the greenish aquarium? Not the small fry
Mostly they don't get the hang of it in there
‘Big fish, little fish, come on, come on!’
Animal presences forever my night nurse
And fairy tales are my Bible
Self-creating by having heart, we
Stop at the edge of the temporary rainpool
No need for a floor-plan, because milk enough is noble
And pulling the strings is obligatory
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SEVERANCE PAY
Adar comes like the joy of the illiterate
Not unlike literacy with its leaves covered with alien marks
in a dug up, barricaded park, undergoing renovation
Here we can be fresh with nature, and against it, as
Syrian maple and Jerusalem pine synchronously blooming
Let the sameness of all hired hands be dismissed.
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THE ONLY SOLUTION LEFT
No soul can actually be orphaned
No soil can be literally exhausted
No poem is a total wash-out
As no denial is final without following all levels of appeal
Go away for a week and come home dirty
That's exactly what I intend to do in a near future
Breath dislodges its particles permanently, but
the soul remains in place
Having no place it is an easy solution
Strive always, arrive nowhere, and forever hold cheap your strain
Isn't that advice too straightforward to follow?
Better to keep kissing the ground that holds you up.
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ALWAYS ENOUGH OF NEVER TOO MUCH
Icy peas hailing from the sky
Life is green and pelting
While late winter flowers meet their end
A blue cape is laid over the ground
And a white one spreads out under the sky
Pale shadow of Nature's cosmic jubilant rejoinder
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JACK OF HEARTS
The untied knot of its own teased release
Looking for a pair of skillful hands capable of weaving a web of rain drops
Giving them rhythmic intervals to measure whole moments at a time
That will bind them together even before Jack Robinson would come into the picture
Only one word away, the riddle of the text, but in interlocked receptacles of mind
Too much is going on that is incomprehensible to an onlooker
Who has turned away from it, for these two reasons:
The first too insignificant, and the second too vital to be outlined here
Or, 'how now brown cow?'
Properly rounded vowels will roll down as raindrops from the web into the hands that unbind themselves
[Or in what encrypted space does Jack Flash actually jump?]
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FOREHEAD ON BACKWARDS
Days when everything gets out of hand, even punctuation marks
Gravity loses its way, and mountains begin to float
And the only thing to save the world was the one I lost on my way from the market
[You mean the apple that fled and hid inside a star?]
No, it was a blood orange that refused to become my faithful nose.
The truth of life is that all-night neologisms can never sleep, but always dream.
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THE DIARY OF A WEDGE
Does illusion flex when magnitude does?
Thinks the Sphinx watching over a scarab, making his way through
A porcelain plate of scrambled eggs
That is a family breakfast scene for you, a primordial scene
Where parallel perceptions cannot be rendered perceivable
The enigma tends to collapse, and gravitational attraction doesn't help much
In effect, ultimately, the Underworld is overdetermined yet underwritten
The golden rim of Bavarian porcelain outlines this entirely:
Every trope has four, seven and eleven counter-tropes, all lined up in a circle
But the egg was there before sealing the death of Koschei the Immortal
Null and void, finally, where both invested and withheld.
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REMEMBER WHEN?
Waiting is all about trust
Trust is not having to think
Thrice. Twice is completely enough even for limp flower-heads
Growing in Once-Upon-A-Time Land
Where the drought happens once in a hundred years every twelve months or so
Beginning the day after tomorrow.
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MATTER OWES ITSELF NOTHING
A lot of thinking won't make things simple
A lot of sinking can teach you to breathe on the surface
A lot of surfaces can make a square thing round
And that's the best thing that can happen to a super full moon in a dream
It loses its creases
And increases its opportunities overnight
While increasing the inevitability of breathing easy
Through the damp scarf of the birch bark
Whose leaves are the growing part of pre-modern nuclear precision
Appealing to the luxurious taste of the ruffed grouse
'For the moon is a duck egg in a sky that has orange feet.'
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POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
Cypress wounds smeared with blue
Shimmer in murky swamp water
Of another hemisphere
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Florida cypress is golden, Iranian cypress, silver
Jerusalem one is dusty and rusty
The toenail polish that all of them wear is of a Prussian hue
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CONCORDANCE
That was beginner's luck, to find the right word
I used to look in empty cans, until I realized they were empty
I started to seek in full pools, until I saw that I was a fool
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For illusion is full of what is all too real
Yet the water does not distinguish between one and the other
But of the rose, profoundly androgynous equipoise in fluency
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FOR THE SAKE OF LOVE
Intelligence struts to ridicule all
But no one can beat an Indian starling
Or a Greek adorned with a harsh yet beautiful syntax
Pansies shine in the corner looking quite sensible
Like dark lipstick, bright fingernail polish and a single silver earring
On Wednesdays pay attention to small details
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PINOCCHIO
As wooden puppets move their heavy jaws
We wonder if they smoke dragon candles on their days off
Trying to overcome bashfulness that eats them up like a teredo
And makes the hole between human lips that blow the air that propels the sound of words
'Don't forget the essentials, my heart: earth, water, air and freedom to bring fire
'And never forget to caress forever the beautiful blush that tints the face of love.'
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LOVE LETTER
Love letters are the preserve of living art objects
Strawberry preserves are as old-fashioned as snow of summers past
Starlight in full sail provides the candle-power flowing through your hair
Yet no one can tell where is it going and why
The secret of growth principles is that they are forever a secret
So no one can be bothered to ask: 'What's the point?'
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BEHIND THE GLASS DOOR
Sinking fingers deep into the impalpable black
The indeterminate ear hears whole the pleasure, peril and task
Of being just that: ear, fingers and nothing more
One on one, one in one, one with one, plus one 'and' one
That's easy, there can be no mistake
Where all is in error, everything has to be right.
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TRUE TO THE CORE
An alphabet glitters, laughing like a star-field in the dark
Does it matter what alphabet it is?
The alphabet of a language you do not understand
Or the one you try hard to forget
In other words, the one that comes to you most naturally
Will never offer you anything you didn't ask for.
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CAN WE HAVE OUR COMPASS BACK?
'Whites start and win' announces the pawnshop sign
To contest in words whether men invented gods, or if gods made us
And the truth as always hides somewhere in between keeping mum
We stay silent about what we know, but speak without end of what we know not
Gods and men are one, while women
Know better than to take either seriously, possessed always of their own true fullness.
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HOME AGAIN
With all the years in this body lived
The knowledge of the hedgehogs and of squirrels
As like the quickness of all small mammals on which I would stake my soul
To feel in their brittle bones the nearness of flight
And walk modestly barefoot through the grass when sky is blue
For 'nowhere' is the only direction the compass needle shows for those who seek.
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YES?
Who knows what mock orange scorns more than anything in the world
'For example,' oranges know that they are orange, in honor of the sun
Examples mock those who think they are exemplary
Do fruits believe in God, or is their sweet juice just 'creatio ex nihilo'?
Is there a contradiction, by the way?
Only by way of confirming that the center and its circumference are the same.
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THE WORD, THE WORLDING
The place of the soil where the soul grows
Unscored on celestial maps of the Netherworld
Shines with slivers of shattered quartz, or stars half-buried in the ground
Be careful when you gather them in the palm of your hand
For they are as sharp as the eyes of a hawk
Watching the movement that doesn't make sense in a sentence.
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THE GIFT
What kind of being is being on time, asked earthworm
The ones that hold out against oxidation, said a voice upon the air
Are different from those who thrive on the emotions of despair, but
Wishing to rust is the surrender of trust! Certainly, we can
Prevent late chrysanthemums from losing the ground
Let them swallow the air as the earth gives them birth.
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IS THIS HOW HEGEL THOUGHT WE SHOULD LIVE?
Who was it throwing words on the wind like a scarecrow talking to sparrows
It was ravens screeching at the moon from desire, my love
'Never ask a question that you don't know the answer to’
The answer that there has never always been a question for
Told the wind to the dry bough
Because although pine cones probably, you rarely find doughnuts in the forest.
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NEVER ASK WHAT IT IS
Yes. * [this is not the first line. Although it 'could' be.]
Actually, it was. In the beginning there was 'Yes'
I want you to do me a small favor: When I know what it is, I'll ask.
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[So it 'is' the first line? Can be, quite naturally. Let's make it so.]
The poem is writing itself like the world does.
Yes. The favor I didn't know the details of, has already been completed.
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A PEARL IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD
I feel like I'm going to faint every day in the past right now
Told white chrysanthemum to the cloudy water in a glass.
A cloudy wall in the grass is something to talk to when it gives me notice
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This is the only thing to do when there is nothing to do.
Except 'when always with nothing to do' went and watched Melvin Wills shuck oysters
And that is just the thing to which I do not know how to relate.
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MOSTLY IN ALEXANDRIA
Like a swarm of toy terriers in the clover
No one knows what will come next
And the cleverest of all don't even bother to look forward
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They just knock at the nearest door
To ask for direction to the Temple of Misunderstanding
Where the note on the table says 'Have a seat: You're already here.'
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LOVE
What effort does it take for grasses to grow?
For the umpteenth time the air questioned the earth
Water stood by and laughed, as rain, while the sun waited for clouds to clear
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The grasses sang something tuneful all along, they didn't care
In the meantime, photography was invented
It sealed my fate.
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NOW FOR THE TRUE PART
A rose by any name won't be a rose
Nor necessarily even a flower [the name will be a word]
in the absence of attention or any other irreversibilities
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Flowers make seeds that grow plants that make buds that always burst into flower
Sea is a constant reminder of the simple truth
We are just here, put together by constant motion, and remaining so.
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THE BENEFITS OF HIBISCUS FLOWERS
In the easiness of touch, what do I expect?
Some kind of obstacle, I guess
I expect nothing but feel perpetual enchantment
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That goes unnoticed in the superior nature of the eternal obstacle
Naturally, love will be complicated even when there are no people involved
And even more so in that case.
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WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND IS GOING TO ANSWER THAT PERENNIAL QUESTION
The shadow of lavender sprig on a canna leaf produces the crisscross of illusionary life and of
Having gone crazy eventually, in the strain of holding hands under the sea
Otherwise known just as dry air without boundaries or restrictions
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Can we call it 'breathing'? We're 'under quarantine, after all, those of us who 'don't vote'
Why not if there is nothing better? Words are like that in their overbearing irreplaceability
No end of temperance to legacy: 'Hey man, why'd you cut the engine?’
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IS LOVE MEANT ONLY TO SEEK ONE'S OWN GOOD IN THE BELOVED OBJECT?
My star is a hibiscus flower. Let’s see how this works out.
Sawing the wrist with a blunt razor blade could I imagine the aftermath?
We often see red when the sky is blue but not a flower
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The mathematics of the human eye are closed for a winter season
Glass was once just an idea that no one had thought of yet.
And transparency was not supposed to be discovered
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