deepundergroundpoetry.com

The Book of Corners

Prologue,
 
The mind is uncentric, a lightning crawled cloud of Vedic faces, mouths forming oscillations of curving gravitonic ellipses, pulling light ambience into planar thread, apportioning geometries with magnetized propulsion, tensile threads woven into the muscular fabric of the heart, coiling into the gelatin ambered spine lexicon, arching its martial finger along the Roman road that hours of resonant conversation has rolled its covalent tongue into the haunted coital corridor between us.  
 
..
 
1
 
There are days that time feels unmoored, derailed from smooth, linear transitions, into vagaries of whens and once weres, so that selves stir, like flames licking about my sacrum, seeking purchase, shadow twining a rosary about thumb and forefinger, your face full of peace and nothing, beads and blunt wood crawling their litanies, your body like candle wax in the furnace, superimposing a frown over an hour, a spark over a certainty, your breaths condensation on the mirror, glimpsed memory stirring sediment, rising through waters, disturbed by the passage of Earth about the sun, the globe of your hip turning away, moon in slow orbital declension.
 
 
2
 
I see your spirit in the clothes you left in my closet, a shirt unchanged from a picture, decades as gone as your radiance captured there, Victoria's Secret panties I bought and tore off on the same weekend visit, placed in a mahogany jewelry box like a reliquary, now, unmoored from that girl, from her spirit as a coffin, my lone palm the pallbearer of all we were in brutal hale collisions. All is changed into still, ashen pillars, gazing back towards days of bright and early vigors. And your walk through the broken fragments of memory is the final breath of God.
 
3
 
In a slant of muted light,
Upon the elder's furrowed brow,
Half in rosy limned shadow,
Half in shine, full bronze, otherwise
In hush of breath and focus
On some distant else-when,
Pate resembling a minaret dome,
Beneath the matronly arms of a sycamore,
Arms lowered to shelter,
Arms raised to cradle,
Planted by loving hands,
Surely, by now,
Themselves planted in the cradling Earth
 
4
 
Loneliness has a shape, a solemn avatar, only the housing heart knows, a memory, a secret basement of longing. Mine is a hallway, adorned with locked doors, hermetically sealed, windowless, the odd photograph spaced along its length. Abstract ghosts hovering over still faces in water stains, soft and dark as bruises, edges licked, blackened by fevered flames.
 
5
 
Midnight shadow touches the tapering wick of our hushed conversation, Caravaggio’s fingerprints about Medusa's scalene neck, ink wet, with a shudder of gape mouthed quiet before a shock of violence, of our inevitably separate bouts with the force and fragrance of each other, heels barreling before an avalanche of hours.
 
6
 
She left her shoes outside the bedroom door,
They were all I had to say goodbye to,
Lest she renew her terrible rents of weeping
Or worse, look through and past me
In cool spectral silence
 
As I drove away, I thought about stars,
Knotting the blanket of heaven,
Quiet only in their distance,
Burning in screaming torrents of fusion
 
7
 
Morning liminals climb the windows with breaths under prayer, windswept doors ajar like a toe in a dancing shoe, left dandling at the final sweep of these moments of ecstatic quietude. Vermeer brush strokes in tenderly deliberate delay, overhead, all encompassing, the layered skirt, lady of ochre and umber, in patient rivers, below a dimpled mouth of butter cream pale yellow, suspended aloft in some weary god's bloody hands, and coquettish whispers of virgin soft promise, washed and powder white.
 
8
 
Her phone activates in the womb of predawn darkness, a detonation of light, softening to a nimbus, as my pained eyes adjust. Glimpsed words of some paramour’s regard. Woes rise through the channels of my chakras, howling in animal instinctual pyroclasms, churning chill and bile black as the Styx and these fickle Euclidean geometries are old as love, and they are love, handed down in sinister Fibonacci spirals of survival genetics, our homes burn down to the bones, skins sag under the eyes, under the weight of losing each other, and the inevitability of losing everything, in stark Ovidian leaps of metamorphoses.
 
Intermezzo,
 
Watch the seasons unspool from a threadbare heart,
It's nightfall at noon and the sea is wine dark
 
And everyone takes their place between the pages of this book,
Of sawgrass waving their rippling goodbyes like an armada of sails,
Of laughter echoes in these remaining corners,
Of gunpowder flashbang and ember
 
Leave the laces untied on a rubber soled heart,
It's last call at noon and the sea is wine dark
 
9
 
As first dawn light chases shadows into sullen corners, like beggars, dreams rise and evaporate in steam circumlocutions, like pearls of dew on leaf blades, palms bent upward for sunlight and alms. Brownstones pressed shoulder by shoulder in geometric phalanx, brick denuded from kiln to keystone. I remember him, standing with hand raised in greeting, fingers approaching palm in slow, absent wilt. Smile sliding from your mouth into some ignoble recollection, a fist of introspection in the crux of your brow, something wounded in stride, in the air forced to part by your forward momentum. In dreaming of it, I thought, sometimes you slay a dragon by being a dragon yourself, but sometimes, what doesn't kill you leaves you haunted. I remember you.
 
10
 
She rises at dusk, silently prowls the confines, I watch the wan orange light through the bow in her legs, shadows folded over breaths, under the heavy pall of hotel air conditioning, and beneath the anvil of your hips slamming home, I enter you, and between us, the hand of God pressed firmly against your flexing abdomen, head canted slightly, as if listening to some inner musics, some bit of recalled harmonies, a fine mist of vagrant electrons, leaping between atoms, and you enter me.
 
11
 
Sunlight presses fingertips into leaves,
Unscrolling from their birth cocoons,
Palms against the coarse bark,
Fine columns of ants marching about the knotted landscape,
As if gravity were a morning afterglow,
Rivers of refracted light against my pores,
Cupped like mouths, and all in silence
That would seem impossible,
Other than it was,
And it is,
And pales in comparison
To a moment studying the moving contours of your face
 
12
 
Unshed tears on the surface of your eyes, you are bright and pale as glacial ice, cut into metrics of bone, beneath a soft dune of skin, and some nights my ache wanders the house, passing through slanted squares of smoky moonlight, in search of the memory of your features, that hold the artist in me captive, pulling me in and in, to those tidal pools, swept into your every motion. I'll kiss the life journey in all your tattoos, even other men's names, and trace the calligraphy of your scars. And in the mornings, my hunger still searches, gently catching fire in slanting squares of sunlight.
 
13
 
Pearlescent fibers in my grandmother’s knotted hair
In top bun, blue white in glaze of sunlit
Profile on her shoulder, a cherub's beatific face
In such halos of warmth
That ring her,
Upside down, I'm smiling in low beveled convex
Of her tortoiseshell glasses,
Her hands are stone in soft pumice,
Hard as thin edged paper
 
14
 
Quiet threads stitched through everything broken, you're asleep, I can feel behind the door, a weight, a distance, you're standing on the roof, arms raised, swaying side to side, from your hips, stomach bare in a cut off, singing tunelessly to windblown leaves, and dreams shuttle me there, on some reciprocal current, in held breath, on wings, shattered at the pins, now I am behind the door, silent threads through everything I am, and still subtly broken, seams held a weak smile, rippling behind the quick iris, just below the still surface.
 
15
 
Hold me,
God of blessed intimacy,
God of windblown leaves,
Who's somehow traversed the fettered globe
Into the hollow of my arms
 
Your form somehow feels both fragile and invincible,
Its organic pulses a galaxy of tensile weave and weft,
Of cord and silk and soul
 
And in this moment, bearing witness to you,
To the blood pulsing through a vein behind your ear,
To your breath on my cheek,
Your feet tucked between my legs,
I am a cloud drifting past the sun,
And I am the black moon that turns its face away from the sun,
To keep from bursting into flame
 
16
 
Umbral rings about the eyes, deepening their tread, I am aging like tree rings, night by night, I've drifted in sleepless durations, counting the days of absence that failed to overturn the waters of the earth, in dowsing searches for you, through a lens of inexorable haunt, listening to the unburdening of songbirds, cold stones in the riverbed, pantlegs rolled to the thigh, a boy carrying a bicycle, chest high, a father absently turns the knob on a door that's floating by, everything continues after the flood, with immediacy, without sentiment, after each tipping upheaval, as heaven yields up its host in rapacious avatar, everything diverts its course, by resigned consent, by wordless adaptations, everything but the pain I'll keep in irrational defiance, to deny the march of linear time.
 
..
 
Coda
 
And every day eventually becomes a fragment,
In this book of corners,  
All these moments I inhabited,
Now inhabit me
 
I am a spirit possessed
By spirits,
Of wisdom,
Of rage
 
And there is no one else,
But me,
No friends, lovers
Or family
 
Quiet moon satellite,
Pale and radiant as a child,
As a grandmother
 
Wind ambling over stone
And bracken,
In wayward shipwrecked reveries,
Blessings without border,
Borders without memory,
To live and abide,
With fulsome purpose,
Without agenda, to be
And to be
 
And I am alone,
Wind,
I am there,
Bracken and stone,
And it is all within me,
Now,
Filling with continents
And oceans
Of solitudes
 
Warmth on the back of my neck like a gentle hand, and on orbiting satellites, and upon the face of the Earth, makes no distinction.
 
And death is there, in the closet stacked with empty shoes and photo albums, vellum pressed against their faces, in the street of the town in the city, hushed tides lap against closed doors, and in the out breath, the open wound, and the past, haunting the dark room, makes no distinction.
 
And dusk is a match,  
Slow flame descending in dimming somnolence
 
..
 
The Book of Corners
By
Daniel Christensen
Written by DanielChristensen (The Fire Elemental)
Published
Author's Note
I wrote this a paragraph a day for the first half of April, alongside friends that were doing NaPo, as a kind of moral support. By the time I got to it's current shape I figured it was quite long enough, as I am sure you will agree. I hope you enjoy.
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
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