ALL RESPONSES |
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| Julia, who has been writing with Northography since our beginning in 2006, also enjoys painting. Please give her some creative responses! |
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s’over (twinge)
your silence says it’s so
(twinge)
AWOL you
or at best, MIA
[but I won’t risk hearing your voice again]
(twinge)
I put away your letters
(twinge)
last week
Now past
the scorned woman’s fury
I move your e-mails today
(twinge)
to the “History” bin
But I miss you less
than the parts of me
that sang for you
Less, (twinge), far less
than the song they sang.
I miss how you played me.
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Sometimes you paint
and my heart gives thanks.
Sometimes I write,
my words like the orange slashes
riding over blue and black.
I do not explain them, only believe
they will be their own messenger,
as are your curves and colors,
your depth and width
spilling off
the paper
Sometimes you paint,
sometimes I write.
Paint meets poem
as winter merges
into spring.
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Our traditional symbol,
life radiating muscle,
insomniac organ pump.
Unromantic notions
of electrochemical cause
and effect bore us.
No, give us mystery,
steaming blood, tendons
tugged by unseen genies.
Extreme amusement park thrills!
Manically screaming,
spinning out of control!
Shot into orbit, flying,
falling in tender terror
to brutal earth. Up again,
higher, beyond the physics
of a dreary universe.
To vibrating brightness
that blinds us, strips off
imprisoning flesh,
rids us of all purpose
but one. For this we live
and sometimes, die.
For this addictive, psychopathic
explosion in the mind,
That gives us something
to write poems about. |
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A pair of swans float out of rolling fog
between islands of salt-sedge,
fringed slashes like shocks of grain
leaning, as sea-tide turns mud plain
to rippling mirror
the way Monet's brushwork changed the pond
at Giverny, back into the dream it really was—
Here, luminous steam dissolves
arches of a still-standing bridge,
the gate chained and padlocked.
There, Monet's eye rested in
hay-stack clouds
willow-cathedrals
dangling water gardens, incandescent
melting candles of the lilies, green
sunlight effervescing
dragonfly flight-lines
all things that live and die in an instant.
A pair of swans out of roiling mist
glide along together and are gone…
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The times when eyes
begin to focus after sleep;
the wings of a hummingbird
or the first time marriage
entered your head;
scents left by you
by the mirror or on the edge
of a torn envelope
those useless words in need
of tethering or thin paper
stars;
midnight, so you can
stare at it all night;
clothes, chaos, your conquests
or clouds;
a sad face, even when
people think you’re happy;
the little yellow house
across the river, that house
where you said goodbye
to a good night’s sleep,
your father
sometimes you paint,
when living just won’t do |
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Standing here at the easel, brush in hand
The canvas stares back.
The canvas is very quiet. Quieter than me.
"And how will you decorate me today?" It asks.
I do not know what I shall paint. It is a blank, white canvas.
"Paint me away!", it encourages.
But, I do know that turquoise calls to me - and Crimson Lake sounds…
Like the taste of late summer reservoirs at dusk.
I do know that Ultra Marine is a Florida sky at 4:00 pm on a
Midsummer's day.
I know that Gritty ochre silts
And I stab, not unkindly, with Burnt Sienna -
The tan that burnished me.
Oh - but how to make a yellow burn with afterglow.
i need the heat.
I think I will call this, 'Vacation I' |
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On blue sky summers like this
with draco guarding the stars
I see the arrival of the morning sun like a leaf,
my face drenched in dew,
the efforts of night's breathing ritual disguised as water.
The sight of you within reach, naked but asleep; all the words we said, or did not say, still heating up the space between my lips.
What this is
this silence
that outlasts the rumbling of boys, the sounds of street festivals, the passing of night into morning;
this path of thickly rooted Pacific green and the mirror of life into which it leads me.
What this is
is a place at the edge of the world where all water converge
where drops the size of tears pound the earth like thunder.
I've tried to explain it
with letters the size of boulders, with ocean whispers in warm moonlights; words too furiously honest to share ... too honestly said to be heard.
Yet none of it stained the surface of your heart and made you believe... |
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Clouds, how to break open a sky.
The beauty of skin, bathed in saltwater,
in virtue. The crimson blush
of the September moon
and the heaving sigh of an oyster shell.
How the world, when it is pining
falls as silent as a canvas, and blood
like paint and sin, is most stunning
original and new.
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There's a rumor ahead, thin as a peripatetic hair
If you look straight through the brownest eye,
That if you give it some voice like singing Josephine,
You'll find a heart and some Qi at the colored center
By the lungs, by the viscera in constant jumbled motion
Tangled up with guts and occasional pinches of the blues
Wandering, a soul who reaches both feet and mind smiles. |
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You color my world
with the most beautiful hues
Sinking my paintbrush
in palettes of pinks, purples and blues
every stroke is perfection,
i simply can't refuse
I gaze into your eyes and see
bloody reds, intense and profuse
Commanding my senses,
you're my song, you're my muse.
and that is all. |
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If it were stained glass
I don't know what they call it
in the glass arts
I'll call in thumbprint
the almost dimpled surface
the small cup-like
shallow reflections
each like an image on its own
the impressionist's view
pieces of the whole
the wet smeared window view
the teared eyes view
the I can't quite make it out view
the details no longer matter view
021512 |
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My figure climbing through sunrise
Up a mountainside into vision
Here there are only whispered names
Of colors colliding like bubbles combining
I was lost on the great plain
Before coming to reason slowing
To the smell of lavender
Seething as the brush breaks its meaning
And now I walk upright
Cared for by this land of confusion
My legs ready to run
But never needing to
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the city inside a poet
is fact
yet the city inside an island
is fiction
we are tired
of death
yet we are scared
of heaven
paradise is only alive
for those who live
forever
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Say you lived in a barren house.
cold year round. Forget about
moving, you have nothing.
Saving 45¢ is a big deal for you.
Out of paint pots rises
a serious possibility for color.
You are hungry for color.
You are starved on dun.
Your shoulders ache
to lie down in the plush
of blues, rose, golds and white,
to shake off the daily story.
There’s no narrative in color.
It’s all Buddha-Now. All
lyric look-here, Look-See, Look-
and-Feel. This, too.
The hand is as moved as the eye,
and wants to touch, insists
it can trace rows and brush
bristle if allowed. It isn’t. |
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The day the east wind snatched his black fedora
Rolling it down the street like plate spinners china
Was the day black seeped out of his life
Letting colour rush in unabated
Out went the hand rolled Cuban
The fur collars
Swirled in Grandma’s quilt
No longer the thin man
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Your heart beats are irregular, they tell you,
the pang you think is where the fault line
broke open. You think it is not urgent
yet but could become so:
a good friend only a few years
older has a pace maker. This surprises you
despite the joints made of titanium
and the ache in your back. Aren’t we
still young, what ever happened
and why is your heart worn and wrinkled,
polished to a soft glow, no longer
a sputtering flare in the night.
That heart on your sleeve is rubbed soft by
your grandson. It belongs to your stories,
the Earth, and to you. Tuned to a jazz beat,
it leads you past grief.
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My fascination with contrasts...
The ice on the steps, the cold wind on my back
my light down jacket staring at the warmth of your living room
still standing outside the slightly open door.
The copper of your hair, where suns meet their glow;
the clean canvas of your eyes; the long trail of mistakes in mine.
The engraved mahogany details of the inviting chair
where I could sit and stare, at you and myself...
It was early January and the air was dry, though
nothing else would feel that way...
In perhaps the longest dusk of my life, I stood there
watching your lips asking me why, why not this time;
In perhaps the fastest fire on earth, I saw
this massive redwood of possibility burn to dust.
I walked away, backwards. Why not?
It wasn't you or me but everything
that seemed more right than us.
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The Brightness
We are all blind
in some way
some say
I know I see red
but not the way you do
unless you are one of us
It may be
others are different too
blues more vivid for some
Did you ever see
the flickering
of adjacent colors not lit
Did any one ever
disappear into another
like it was never there
Brightness
that seems the key
everything gets lost in the dark
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The Augustean nights will come, bright and sad
like the blue of your eyes, like the lost tunes,
like all the past words of love that ran to hide.
After all, a thousand years, following the fight
nobody remembers the agony of closed lips.
Only the buttons of my shirt will be dripping wet
and the copper clouds of your smooth voice
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I got a call
the other day...
My mother broke her hip
She slipped
two-thousand
miles away
flying
in
the air.
I said,
"I love you
very much...
We'll speak love
every day."
Every day..
She slept soundly
til she
didn't...
Why this is
we do not
know...
Anguish rises,
yet truth
is
Sometimes reasons
there are
not...
Gifts of time
and closure,
seemingly, forgot...
Joy comes
in
the mourning
the darkest
moment...
night
A universe
of
rainbows
in my new
mother's
eyes...
paints peace
within
my soul..
dancing with the
grace of feathers floating
on the breath of God.
Heaven's light
glows ever
bright...
I see
I give
I live ..
I
love...
I
feel
My Joy...
I
RISE.
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It's St. Valentine's Day, and blue of winter's love
is filled in, once, this winter, with red.
Transparency of feeling
is responsible for the lack
of silence, today,
as midwesterners tell each other,
"I love you". |
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You held the brush lightly starting with dubs of golden yellow and ochre,
then, you added a muted pink.
Those were the first colors you laid around my heart.
All was beautiful and sun-filled,
then the bright light blue with splashes of white came,
a blue happy sky with small puffy clouds.
The rich reds you painted were the passionate moments we shared,
then turning into a yellowed orange but still warm color.
More blue but this time darker like a summer evening sky.
The first strokes of black bleed in through the blue,
the nights we never spent together.
Your brush filled every space,
overlapping the colors and my emotions.
The good, the bad, the passion, the waiting, the hopes, the despair,
they all found themselves on this canvas where you trapped my heart,
a beating heart that you filled with pink and red.
Smacked in the middle,
feeding itself on the shades of colors and moods that surround it,
while all along the passion and you, became a crescent moon, beautiful,
but too distant for my heart to reach.
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You held the brush lightly starting with dubs of golden yellow and ochre,
then, you added a muted pink.
Those were the first colors you laid around my heart.
All was beautiful and sun-filled.
Then, came the bright light blue with splashes of white...
a blue happy sky with small puffy clouds.
The reds you placed as in a swirl
were the passionate moments we shared,
turning into a yellowed orange but still warm color.
More blue but this time darker like a summer evening sky.
The first sign of black bleeds in through the blue,
the nights we never spent together.
Your brush filled every space,
overlapping the colors while overlapping my emotions.
The good, the bad, the passion, the waiting,
the hopes, the despair,
they all found themselves on this canvas where you trapped my heart.
A beating heart that you filled with pink and red.
Smacked in the middle,
feeding itself on the shades of colors and moods that surrounded it,
while all along the passion as you,
became a crescent moon, beautiful,
but too distant for my heart to reach.
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