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Barbara Jane
Reyes EPISTOLARY dear __________, write me a hex go ahead do it risk it risk it all write what is ridiculous write what will make you appear a madman a stalker a sadistic child write the words that make your flesh crawl scrawl your lunacies upon alley walls tell me your ugliest secrets i have had enough of candied softness warm nests and babies’ beds go bare yourself to the four winds to the gods of the murky ocean to the cruelest cackling muses make me masterpieces of matchsticks of scrap metal whiskey bottles razor blades blunted write me that impossible poem make it snarl and pine make it grit its teeth and clench its fists make it creep and ooze and cover the stickiest floors of abandoned stairwells lit by burnt out light bulbs by starlight let it echo in the bones of stray animals and forgotten men bring this poem to its knees
THE FIRE, AROUND WHICH WE ALL GATHER we bring her tobacco when she calls shrill bird trill carried upon air as though her voice were a body’s warm ribcage we could wrap our arms around tight. we drop our weaving, we leave the fields. elders once brought her tobacco rolled and bound with abaca; now we bring marlboro blue label cartons. once palm wine fresh in glass jars; now spanish brandy, ginebra san miguel, calamansi and camote in baskets, salted fish bundles hung from huts’ rafters. now she is old but this firelight glows upon the face of a woman whose skin is sunned and taut; in her wide eyes we see sharp lawin gaze, in her eyes we see sky. her dancing wristbones so delicate as if fine fingers have known no field nor farmwork. she has taken a blade to her own hair once hung heavy to her waistline, now falling in her eyes in jagged tresses, now exposing earlobes and neckline, her rough woven white blouse, its polished bone clasp undone, exposing one shoulder. she is young in the night’s firelight though we dare not call her maiden. our mothers say she snares others’ husbands, our grandmothers whisper her father a bird of prey, our fathers lament she is the one they could not marry for she would not have them. she scoffed at offerings from the hunt, from the river, whose warm humid nights filled with serenade. raising one index finger to her lips in a shhh she confesses she has many times swooned to the verses of lovers under slivers of moon, ribbons of stars arranged into hunter and bow. smoke curls from her lips, her eyes are faraway gazing, the diwata has arrived. * and then she is the star maiden. and now she is the first woman, baring her breasts to feed a poisoned land. and he is the first man, father of black soil, bamboo blossom windstorm pestilence stone and confession. and she opens her body, the place from which all word grows. and he enters. and he enters. and he enters. the whites of his eyes when he discovers she is a wolf who is a woman who is the prism in his throat. the immediacy. this wanting. and from the wind’s whirls we would call her silken breath, she brings a feast of word. tree branches bend, she pulls them to her. and then she is a window, a vessel, a fork in the road, a fragrance lifting from tangerine skin. the rustle of a single page, the stillness of ocean before a typhoon. and then she is the fire, around which we all gather. and ever is she lover and beloved. the whites of his eyes when he discovers she is a shark who is a woman who is his gravity. the immediacy. this wanting. * a poet, yes. a conjurer of words, some have said. a trickster, i have also heard. for i am keeper of words. i birth them and care for them, and when these words grow strong, a bridge. just like that, a bridge. those who come to listen to my stories, they fall into waking dream, hovering between the very earth upon which they stand, and the place where the spirits dwell. story, yes, for that is what poets make, story into song. we interpret what the birds say, what the spirits of the wind speak. they step into my dreams. they come to me in firelight, when i bathe in the river, and when i bed my lovers. they tell me things no human voice has spoken. secrets hidden in mountain caves. steel and blackened stone, the noise of machines. but the birds, yes, the birds, they tell me the sky. and what of the sky, sighs the wind, for if not for me, you could not know her touch.
(t)here (the exile’s new
song) here in a city once covered with oak trees
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Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA. Her author website is http://barbarajanereyes.com. |
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© MiPOesias Magazine 2000-2007~. A Menendez/King Publication ~ |
