Synaesthesia
Long shadows, dry wind.
What am I looking at?
Nature contained, sloped.
Tree poised between tuning forks.
Gold standard, measured
against sky. Excess
burned off. Who’ll spend
the light? Shed layers
of topaz, azure, many
shades and hues.
It’s all right we don’t
get to it. Nobody does.
That tree vibrates
at a higher frequency.
Street lights
bright against bright sky,
dark whisper in
crowded room.
~
First line/last line
“Yes,” I said, “isn’t it pretty to think so?”
It was a rhetorical question but she took a long drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke in my face in reply, tiny concentric ringlets that seemed to enclose me in a cone of smoke, her eyes gazing from the center of the cone, words rising to the surface clear as day — words there was no dictionary for, compressed bits of emotion, little flecks of light mingled with disdain.
“Ahh — and you’ve felt this way… how long?” I stammered, conceding the ground she’d yanked out from under me, in response to which she mysteriously cupped an elbow in her palm and opened her mouth but made no sound. She removed a card from her purse, placed it face-down on the table, and seemed to float from the room.
~
Juan Ramón Jiménez
In spite of endlessness
snow, Yankees, salt
he lost his gonads.
The colors ran. He tripped
over a hole in the carpet
covered by dish suds.
Without eyes or buttons
he suffered to think,
but the absences wavered.
In the balmy endlessness
how soft a wound
his tongue left.
Snow, marmalade, salt. Lost
in the jerky endlessness.
