I want to send you
                   this silence,
                   the bold fires in the mountains
                   and the way they torch the earth,
                   the way things turn luminous
                   and entire unto themselves
                   -Eric Gamalinda, “Letters to Theo”

Follow the fall of my hair uncut since birth
Watch it skim my breasts, belly and thighs
See it pool around vermilion toes
Relish the storm clouds it forms

Like the inky-dark clouds split by lightning
You share with me in our private bardo – you are
The scent of rain – I am parched
Almonds. My “eyes never close”
I am swooning into your childhood

Where the Milky Way floats like a silk scarf
Where you formed your gods and beat the gong
To call for golden fireflies to glitter and mate
To make me part my lips and know you await

As the rock that can be felt but not seen
in Ryoanji – about which a poet writes
Of the sand ministered to by a monk’s rake:
An archipelago is that space between jade islands
That unites us as you slip cobalt from my shoulders –

I am swooning into you with eyes of open stones

The Question is:

With what Question do you sculpt the answer:

“I write because I cannot paint.”

She asks while what she is really considering is: As women lift their veils to reveal kohl-rimmed eyes in Afghanistan, is it the white-petalled jasmine whose sweet, haunting scent you and I now share?

What moves the moon to sunder itself? Perhaps the long-haired woman with jade eyes perpetually swooning behind a curtain of lace? She was “licked into being” by men whose unshaven faces she wishes to memorize. But can’t. Still, are memory’s flaws so tragic, I think. She shares a fate with clouds. She sees what is not there: how color bravely dilutes itself: how color paled like a river from a motivation unrelated to compromise.

Or was it that one hot day? When the sun liquefied into a molten light. We were wading through a river. An eagle loosened a feather. I wore a red silk sari in preparation for Kama Sutra. The water was cool against our ankles. Velvet air scarfed around bared napes. Where the river bended, I knew you would take me away from water. You wanted to be the one to teach me how: within fever, dancers hurl their bodies fearlessly courting the fall. Within fever, there exists no compromise.

I admit to many fears, despite the usual impassivity of my face. Lemonade makes me weep -- lemonade is a compromise. Once, I sat on a wooden boat watching pilgrims swallow the Ganges. The eyes of the teeming multitudes were all brown, like mine. But it is preferable to recollect their eyes as ebony. Brown maintains no opposite. Unlike black, whose marks always engender consciousness. Say, a story about Idealism that would not exist if it did not unfold through ink mimicking crows’ feet skimming across a page.

You live somewhere along my spine. I have begun integral yoga to squeeze you more efficiently from my bone marrow. I fail to see why I should always be waiting for you to reply. Something besides light exists beyond the horizon -- something waiting to ravish my avid eyes. Foolish girl, she is suddenly reminded by a raven’s wing floating past the windowpane. Once, his fingers had forked through her hair before he clenched their jasmine scent with his fist. He hooded his dark eyes as he growled, “Always wear your hair loose. Don’t ever compromise.”

You don’t need to wear saffron robes to believe: gold is consciousness. Not a symbol for. Is the embodiment. Thus, the photographer finds it impossible to capture the alchemical surface of a painting without also portraying his reflection. (Is that the scent of jasmine you and I suddenly share as the storms linger outside?) Had the photographer manipulated the image to delete the shadowy sign of his presence, he would have compromised purity into a false definition of encaustic. While at it, consider the black curve. It can be a perfect circle if you open. If you transgress. If you open. If you

If you become the brushstroke instead of looking at the brushstroke, the photographer thinks as he edges over to the other panel, what would vision reveal? I know the virgin who photographed this painting is in the audience today. So I want to tell you, the circle is the edge of my skirt flaring as I twirl. I sculpted my skirt from velvet stained the color of fertile moonstones. If I ever give birth to a girl, I shall name her Jade. Second name: Angelika, the angel who plummeted towards wet jagged boulders in order to own her vision. In the beginning was the Word, Angelika whispered. She taught me with the sweetest of smiles, Sometimes, Compromise unfolds the enlightened path towards a particular fragrance we can recover from memory.

Is it the scent of jessamine you and I now share? Once, a silver-haired painter whispered across cyberspace, “I could just rise at dawn one morning, and wearing my Philippine robe walk down to Mother Pacific, pick a few pearls from Botticelli’s unveiled nymph, blow them across to your throat, into your thorax, you who already wear them as breasts and watch the clouds roll into paintings beyond the painter’s brush. Simply licked into being with the morning breeze as our birthless gaze touches the temple of light inside the conch.”

If the answer is “I write because I cannot paint,” this is not the question to which it replied:

As women begin to reveal their eyes in Kabul, is it the yellow-petalled jessamine whose haunting you and I now share? Breathe In / Breathe Out. As if Jackson never suffered. As if blasphemy is impossible. As if you lacked cruelty when you sculpted violets above my wrists. As if I have always wanted to be enslaved by the sun. As if I hold the potential for poems keening to irradiate the sky. As if, as if sunlit cobalt, not storms, linger outside…

The lower half
of the painting
is the raven
hopping before me
with stray white feathers
illuminating
its black body

Rain ends

The sun appears
like the upper half
of the painting:
the luminous gold
of “mind as mirror”

The raven looks up
The raven looks up
to obviate a memory
(from 10,000 BCE)
of a misguided religion
ascribed to “The Great
Earth Mother”
The raven looks up
to forget the believers
who killed a boy
and girl while copulating
to roast their bodies
in ironic exchange
for new crops

The raven looks up

When it ascends
towards the radical
Emptiness - nirguna Brahman -
its wings flare
to reveal the sky
reflecting our singular astral
zone of sunlit cobalt

As much as any painting
he kept at
because, as he said,
"Just keep at it"

I treasure his
fingerless gloves

worn against
the winter chill

but opened
without regrets
for fingers that must
remain exposed
to everything
that bludgeons the world

so that paint
shall dance

so that
after the worst
has come and gone
and come again

here I am
lost in a fever
but writing
a poem
for Max:

a poem
for men
who dance with paint