Variation 47
Remembering de Chirico
Afternoon of heat the village asleep
Lovers drifting through as though
A dreaming
I have seen how geometry shapes
The light
Footsteps making pale shadows a
breaching a negotiation
It took us forever to reach there
A plaza straight out in
Its blaze of sun
The journey unrehearsed
unread
There is no haven signaling through
0nly a heaviness of air
Guarding itself
I have seen how moments carve
How they break apart
The quiltings of memory
0f the lovers I have asked
What of the spaces through which you travel
What promise in the words across
A desert of
Unmoving sand.
Variation 52
Human perception is a saga of created reality
Don DeLillo, Point 0mega
Seeing then. A bringing to bear
Innocence of world exposed to
A rapacity of gaze
I am one of them. Sightseers all parading our guilt
As what there becomes
What believed
I remember our talks deep into thickness of nighttime
Earth reclaiming its primal
In unseeingness of dark
How you said to perceive is to seduce the otherness
Into comfort of the familiar
Is to dress the naked in clothing
Of your choice
Your unspoken need
How you said there are times when a degree of blindness
Gets us closer
How Magritte is the best of us
How a looker morphs into a knower claiming rights
Of ownership
And the knower, the one who loves the known
Wanting only acceptance
Of such love,
A meekness in the transaction
A surrender
I remember the mirage In its glisten its promises
I think again of Narcissus capturing his beloved in
unresisting water
How he imagined what he saw
How I stare and stare at this pond wind mashed,
Offering nothing.
Variation 54
Rather the flight of the bird passing and
Leaving no trace, Fernando Pessoa
The Keeper of Sheep XL!!!
A shoreline a sea lashing as moon zooms in a seagull
Swiftly from west to east and onward
I the human alone here with only mind and impedimenta
Of memories
So much baggage so fierce the will
To control what lies
Unowned unbought
Unviolated
Bird will have none of it
Great flapping wings in a swirl
Of fast feathering
The words I call my own rush skyward
To claim a victim
A snaring as though the talons
Of grammar can prevail
And already the failure
Already the blur where beak and brazen eyes
Had told their story
There is a dizziness to these moments
World and its messenger saying only calm can save you
Attend to the mysterium
Of presence & loss,
A cousinage.
Doug Bolling’s poems have appeared in Posit, Indefinite Space, Streetcake, Juked, Basalt, Literary Heist and Swamp Ape among others. He has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and several awards and lives in the environs of Chicago while working on a collection of experimental work.