Colors

I open Shakespeare, turn over Christmas giggles and lovers’ quarrels,

And race to that favorite song of all

Philosophers and philologists

Who have no clue about the meaning

Of this god whom Poetry built by hand—

They will stand till death to dribble on their collars,

Bloody the hands of their amateur ilk,

Contaminate pools of queries.

A castle rides the clock in Denmark,

Where even the goats are mad,

Where hills are painted green like Eden,

But smell of Stalin red.

–

Next, I zip the DVD case open,

I go for a Golden Age,

A mother of “vulgar” apocalypses,

Revelations on the railway stretching back to the incandescence

Of Socrates and Fawkes,

Of all the First World’s Samsons—

I smile, I hear postmodernism’s sentries scream and spark,

Helpless under History’s trains.

A cannonball catches lace in Georgia,

Where not a whip is still;

A palace mocks a chanting phoenix

That burns in Stalin Red.

–

Shostakovich, screamed by strings

Over a hundred rings of time,

I think of Shostakovich—marched across a million lives,

Once, by recalcitrant ghosts in blue—

In this moment

Smothered in TV sounds

And familiar verse;

He accuses me, with a symphonic phrase, of Yeats’ demons’ empty guile.

Can wisdom cool the veins of rodents

That bite all devils’ hands

While waiting for their moment to paint

New worlds in Stalin Red?

–

Yes, wisdom-affiliated music maker,

I am just that, a rat with nose in page

And half an eye on screen,

Although I feel a little more

Like a powdery green orange

On the Michelangelo David’s head,

Because my irony and war music have rotted me,

And I’ll be touched by not one identifying hand.

But a rodent isn’t fairly used as

An unflattering metaphor

To show me as a sewer walker

Who smells of Stalin Red.

–

I’ll leave the rat to what it is

And be what I am as I gaze at white stars through

Little lighted perforations in the unlimited ceiling of my silence,

With its gaggle of faces

Contorted, faces of minds I carry alone,

Each a box-Andromeda

Of misty shapes and timeless wailings:

Sentimental weirdness, I suppose.

The catch to knowing feeling having

In spinning passing Awhile

Is living, secret, in a silence

Stopped in Stalin Red.      

–

But what about our colors’ truest meanings,

Behind the meanings that all become out of cavities in our hope,

That all narcoticize us when our blood is the mace of questions,

That all are wombs to pagan truths our memories’ waters wash into our moral dreams,  

That all emaciate without the nourishment of hours,

That all expand despite neglect, despite our bleaching them with aims,

That all abuse us with illusions of light and motion,

That all mean little, really—or they kill us over time.

I see a few, all 2-D, cutting

Through ephemeral sheens,

In technicolor now remastered   

For clearer Stalin Red,

–

Through sheens becoming bloody shadows constantly, invariably,

Cutting through sheens and blossoming in my mind—some into men

Whose fossilized moments were of light and nothing,

Were of seventy years that became only forty, only twenty,

Were of seven thousand heads that became one and a pack of Yours Always signatures for Mums, My Darlings, home—

Some into limping burning scaly giants

Some into water on Mars,

Choking our ultimate eventuality—will our extinction fade?

But death is the final understanding,

The great “Aha!” in sleep,

And then our waking, that is freedom

Found last, from Stalin Red.

–

Or—can I honestly end even a pipsqueak argument against our eternal earthly being 

With a dwarfish truism like that,

Do I comfort myself with more unknowing lies,

With incognizant words prompted by a dozen blog posts:

Science, politics, news, music, literature—

Subscriptions free, all notifications on;

With words drawing power from glass,

The prism of our joy.

Do sleepers wake on meeting Nothing,

Or are there only dreams;

Coalescence—is it found in white or

Black, or Stalin Red?

–

I highlight Shakespeare’s “silence” with a finger;

Shostakovich is overtaken by Bach;

With the Goldbergs’ singing some rays from a window match the syllables of my name;

They play on a shelf’s lily standing in a red vase where a fireplace should be: beauty without empathy—

That’s too Whitmanian: the sunlight doesn’t know my name;

It knows nothing more than nothing, what all of them know:

The accusing Shostakovich, and Shakespeare, and Scarlet, who won’t be human again—

But do I really know the meaning of any color?

By any voice that opens stitches;

The delirium of a lis,

I know one gets the smallest smallest smallest sense of

The shades of Stalin Red.

Sidewalks

They serve us in silence humbly

Though we cut off their limbs

To walk on their faces.

The Secret Wisdom of Hope

You have counted all the demons here,

All the scorched and reeking

Sprites and satyrs

Marching this lightless night

In perfect line on ardent feet.

You know they will be on us quick if they hear us,

Detain us with ropes of iron and starlight

As they’ve done the rest we’ve loved.

Those cords can char the toughest dermis,

Braided as they are with metastatic lies that spring

From the disillusioning germ, what was

Once the scourge of Salem’s kitchen wives,

Once the throne of Nicodemus.

Because of the beasts’ untruths, two thousand phallic altars

Float as flakes on wind, spin toward a quasar;

Aphrodite’s lovers burn in pieces,

Olympians hang limp from trees;

Yet, if you could rise

(I know you would, but only if)

And in rising choke the monsters’ fire,

You couldn’t save a single pleasure—

Each will eat itself anyway, in time.

No, but from the shadowed hour

That shouts ahead

Of the creatures-in-file,

Shield the keys instead—

“What if,” Possibly,” “Perhaps”—

The keys to old Nalanda,

Where Time lullabies the sun.

Will that young light wake here,

Where gods, themselves, have died?

Check your pocket before we go.

Do you hear a jingling there?

We cannot wait here on the hill.

We’ll make it to the river if we’re quiet,

Down there, to the East of us

At the end of the valley.

It’s not far—nothing’s far.

What is distance in a dream?

Follow me there and wake,

Now knowing you’re asleep.

The marchers’ starlight burns a little

Brighter, now their hour is nearly up.

Say nothing, and you’ll see me again.

Give them a word, and see nothing more.

There’s no need to hurry,

As if you’d be left to die of waiting,

As others have, or so you’ve heard—

No need, for death is near as day.

See there! The moon, it glows in the ripples.

What is darkness in a dream?

Step in and open your eyes.

You may wake and it still be night—

But if the moon can shine without a sky,

Well, why shouldn’t the sun?

The Golden Glow

I know that California fires are not as likely as a Wilde line or a Yeats to beg

Their own smoke for a glimpse of a thunderhead,

Or strati for a view of the stars;

What is one’s need for distant light when one is the sun?

But I’ve watched a fireplace flame go off to fade

Like the heat of a seed thrown by a dying Loa

Into particle-wombs on andesine waters—

The flame has asked, shivering in stifling flakes of gray,

For just a little bark or a toothpick carrying the nutriment of inferno’s breath;

What it has achieved there, wishing upward, downward, outward

As it has faded into the coalesced universe, the originating universe—

Faded as California fires finally fade—what it has seen:

Light before light is heat, is light at all,

What the poet and the pyro become

While pouring themselves into stars. 

The Fiercest Thing

(In Celebration of a Thirty-Year Fling)

Falling transformations:

Street lights become leaves of silver fire,

Prayers become things of equal heat in children’s beds.

The questions underneath may consume them well before their bones are silver fire—

Can love be fiercer than faith?

Frosts wake every day in fallen city shadows to eat dogs that dig in alleyways for buried bells,

Frosts that wear the skins of Satans, Michaels, and other gods

Whose wings deceive some thousands who call them for sanctuary in snow,

Call them for the boons of all gods—

Can love be fiercer than disillusionment in snow?

Most lives fall into being, drop as unnoticeably mutilated Monets and Michaelangelos with meanings all unknown to themselves.

From then on they are daily scarred by clearer things: by skeletons of worlds they live to death,

And by other truths that carry us all, with time, to where our dead worlds burn on splintered years,

Truths carved into mountains by minds, now ash, who helled their own worlds to life–

Can love be fiercer than our daily violation by realities?

Does love fall on the spaces left in hearts by dreams dropped on the streets of empires long extinct,

And light their blackened centers, burnt to a silence by Time

And other delusions, burnt like all the other things we sink our hearts into,

Burnt in frost if not in the cinders of other hearts, silenced by time—

Can love be fiercer than voided dreams?

To answer when I see the star that Elpis holds to light her silver falling sands—

I see it now, in the union of souls that from a hundred eventualities maintain burns,

Souls joined like seas and seasons, like truths and glances.

It reminds me that perception can, more completely than our fires, incinerate an existence—

Love must of all things be the fiercest, if it can survive the gaze of the mind. 

Louis Arevalos

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