the syllable that opened an eye a delicious sampler
micah cavaleri
the syllable that opened an eye a delicious sampler
the syllable that opened an eye a delicious sampler micah cavaleri
Dollar Bay, Michigan 2010
Published by Dead Man Publishing, LLC Copyright © 2010 by Micah Anthony Cavaleri All Rights Reserved. ISBN 9780982701409 Dead Man Publishing, LLC PO Box 349 Dollar Bay, MI 49922 Printed in the United States of America by United Graphics, Inc. Cover Design by Micah Cavaleri Cover photograph of Sun YatSen circa 1907 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931760
the syllable that opened an eye a delicious sampler
Magic Start again in the bondage of the city lamps for tenement old garage made into a used bookstore where the rich like him are hungry and I will lose imagination to start again The boy was from Oaxaca spoke Mexican the first heroes of civilization Stop. Start again.
The boy was from Oaxaca: What is it that you think of when the savage: the run of the red dragon of a Chinese tribe the red boy naked and pretty walked behind me to the calendar kept by the cock headed priest Telhototec where Octavio had visited before me to gather notes on the carvings of Aztec soldiers and chickenwinged dragons which tell the entire history and its direction War and twohundred thousand camouflaged aryans eat Burger King in the field and spoil pristine "Have some coca leaves, General, and como te llamas?" Without a name the General is just a soldier out of place in the myth no songs no words and where is the young boy I may have lost the thread that unravels us The gray pyramid is more gentle than civilization The young boy and his young boy crimson and smooth sit on its steps
making love at night the smells are their own and the damp leaves on the ground.
Love
In another language this poem is revolting
But here where we are now
this poem is eyes and teeth
Underneath the table the line makes my heart itch
sluice of maple helicopters & mud
You Are
If I drink
waves of hair
follicle strands my intention
steal
mad potter turns my face for wax drips so
warts bloom
bumblebee
Every piece of me a word
shudders sweat
teeth littered with papers
is
You saw a Walk
well
with waves
drawn
from
the chest
in buckets teeth sweat in
in buckets
whispers
Laundry crowding the lilacs remembers seeing cloudy light
Theory waves stand and
Each eye is the time of the movement of a fan
sitting in our garden in Costa Rica after finishing Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu his dry stomach ate daytime need like an infant needs the swollen breasts and darkhaired eyes feeding the stomach with woman and stars and memories and death and oranges and children chasing donkeys the streets are not dusty cars and no orange trees there is the dead ocean opening up at night, and now the dead ocean opens at day splashing on clouds the sun’s hot life: disturbed middleaged breasts and hips the Lady with Combed Hair the Girl with the Rubbed Stomach the Powdered Girl with No Clothes a turbid, dead spring lights being just as soil’s trail of life writes a poem while a being sleeps poetry kissing moons becoming dueñas o rameras
Shines that nothing, now full
an eyelid shines in black folds painted with fresh limóns: That
is
the word, the reason isn’t needed rather than a sun or a moon: Nothing follows the old trail of light or the old trail of broken beings Now laughing, now Full with our own fruit, our own words, our own tear drops: a flood, waves of fresh black and warm colors sound
Three Letters The mail carries letters and perfume. I live in a place where there is no mail. The paper I scribble on is pounded ferns and the ink is berry juice. I sit here for days waiting for the paper to become a little bit brighter. I get old sitting here and I smack mosquitoes. Dying old hands and a slow, fat, plaqued brain. The thoughts of old men do not turn in on them. Somehow the sea is miles away and smells here: so I know I’m old. And still my thoughts collapse like beaches on my pounded forehead and my pounded chest. I remember wide thighs under sheets but the memory is somewhere I have never visited, Africa maybe. Africa is where the thighs are rubbed in charcoal. Somehow the sea is in the air with charcoal thighs. And maybe I am old. Not even birds sing. The birds' songs here are melodious warbles, not carrying any letters at all. On my table this morning, a different morning (I have aged), my pen and paper were there. I sat down and wrote a letter about charcoal thighs in the smell of the sea.
The sun passed so close to the earth, it was a mile across. Two boys stood on the monkey bars and saw the sun half beneath elms. One thought it was far enough to walk, ten blocks away. Too far before dinner. Later, in the winter the devil was seen walking north on the sidewalk. Later, in the summer the janitors tore a hole in the street for some pipes, a dump truck loaded with black diamonds grunted, the boys sitting on the yellow curb watching the hole down to China, one waiting for the wide tires to roll over his toes: it won’t hurt when the truck is moving. Later, in the fall two boys dig a hole down through the red layer of clay and the white sand layer, ages of geology, biology, noting now that they are more likely to come out in India.
Today the mail arrives. Behind it the light trail of fire always follows. The trail is a note. Otherwise the sky forgets its blue soil. The letter glows. Life in the pages. Somehow life fit in the envelope and didn't pay the postage, so now the light trail behind the trees hangs all afternoon. Neighbors complain, the sky is dead, the earth is dead, the sea is dead, why should he irradiate the sidewalk?
wait for light, because in the night old men in the old collection of sun drink beer, because no one whispers and masks give us whole wardrobes, dead friends or dead would-be friends in the street cafĂŠs drink unnoticed as any other stranger, and death is not a wonder
This note being not unlike spontaneous synecdoche, celebrates the verbal quickening in these pages, which catapults quotidian constraint, like a comet, searing the psychic field, with bold new orientation. – Will Alexander, author of Compression & Purity and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome