Answering Neruda (1)
If I have died and do not know it,
of whom do I ask the time?[1]
Maybe the blind man was right when Jesus laid hands on him and he said he saw men as trees walking. A rangale of young deer bucks watch from farther up this hill paved with gravestones as if the dead were sprouting before their eyes, fully-leaved and rough-barked through the lawn. Imagine a loved one, maybe a stranger, lounging in shade you throw beneath outstretched limbs. Imagine your eyes closed for death and waking, thinking only of stretching into fresh air and sunlight, sensing under the ground that you are far from alone. Maybe some might care for a stroll.
Answering Neruda (2)
Is there anything sadder in the world
than a train standing in the rain?[2]
Light roared through window curtains. Blazed down stainless-steel sides of locomotives and passenger cars. Through the glare of metal a charcoal sigh, hidden in the alloy while making the metal. Like a face ghosting window glass hours earlier, the train speeding past stucco and clapboard houses clean as bleached bones. Swallowed into night fast as they appeared. Steel wheels and impossibility of sleep. A rhythm of running. Being driven. Pause without rest. The lie of stopping once the train pulled into the station. Night’s weight in train and me. Each color, every fear in one tone. Steel grinding on steel.
Answering Neruda (8)
Then it wasn’t true
that God lived on the moon?[3]
Lunar craters gaze, eyelids filed away. We’re both captive audiences, nothing better to do than to project where else we’d like to be upon each other as we float in our respective moods of India ink. There is much I wish the moon could do for me. Rob a bank. Wash the sea into my ears until what weighs me to the sea floor turns loose and I can smile again without hesitation. Pour me a whiskey. Wash me back onto shore. Night sky’s velvet or smoke, stars gone elsewhere. Black ice crystals rasp, glass shavings and silver. Mirror filings?
Answering Neruda (9)
Where is the center of the sea?
Why do waves never go there?[4]
How long since looking into a mirror for fear of what might look back? Weighing judgment on a breath. A value system in eyes on the reverse side of silver and clearness, ready to crest and drown at any time. Given tide and a chance, who knows what might come howling from the moon. Is that wail caught in a wave’s hollow? Or is it like a joke I heard, where in hell the devil says, “Now we let people make up their own punishments. More entertaining”? The ocean where Titanic struck that iceberg was smooth and flat as glass.
Answering Neruda (18)
Where does the rainbow end,
In your soul or on the horizon?[5]
Looking west toward the Los Angeles skyline, it’s hard for the eye to discern at twilight how much is steel and glass and how much is doubt or aspiration which masquerades as light, reimagined in turn as something tangible to hold in a palm or wallet. I have an overabundance of reticence in my pockets, clanking and shifting like loose change or a well-filled keyring. I don’t want to unlock anything or feed a parking meter while bronze air tarnishes, clouds bruise midnight and violet. Dusk hides a green patina which passes as a lawn, no headstones across which to trip.
[1] The Book of Questions, II.
[2] The Book of Questions, III.
[3] The Book of Questions, XXIII.
[4] The Book of Questions, XXI.
[5] The Book of Questions, XLII.