Poem of the Month

Solitaries

A half-golden window. Lined, shadow-speckled
The gray corona’s eye lay, paling at the sill
There must have been roaches, cicadas, air, squirrels,
Oriels and ants almost dancing to breezes.
Higher in fronds of gold, among stones,
Youth among the many-hidden lives.

Her yard under years, a foot stirred the stones.
Though she is planted in the morning room.
There God and his greenery are dreams powered down.
In this little box streams the golden rod
The air in nodes of hay, poking
The finer draperies. The art is rich.

Here is ache in shinola, nomadism canned –
And here death isn’t as dark. Just a flash, a dampening.
Embarrassingly numb, an easy affliction. Solitaries
keep hours on this side of the glass, knees buckled
Eyes set to horrible peacefulness, metered and
round, blue, discernable only as a tear
in the fabric of the reclining chair by the ottoman.

-Nina Alvarez

2.14.09 etre-vouloir-dire

To be tired; tied to oblivion. To be outfoxed by mediocrity. Seduced by law. To be the last sure thing you knew, and to let that go, trading it in for tighter straps that only sometimes worked.

To be so full of something, call it conviction, that you knew language would be yours. To be so full of something to say, and to not say it, to not know what it is or what it needs, to be blocked from the heart up.

To want, more than anything, to say something real, Realer than real. To say it all and say it once and say it.

To say how hard it is, all of it. Every ounce of it.

To say how slow it is, how long, how the small things that breath is us become shallower.

To say how much like a dream, like a play. How real we believe our acting to be, how vague our lines, how indecipherable our motivation. How quickly we can turn farce into fantasy, parody into paradise, and then back again. And how we are always poised for the turn, whether we admit it or not.

To say that I once was…something. Alive, bold, barren of tedium, a biter of flesh, a caller of ancient names. To say that I gave it up for a more restful night, for the paradigm sold to me in a package of virtues. To say I was eclipsed by what I was.

To say I don’t need you, stander on this stage. You in your purple garments, you with one hand to a powdered lady singing falsetto, and one eye to me with my broom and bodice. I don’t need to be so consumed in the play as to betroth myself to vapors.

-Nina Alvarez

Waste is not possible
Like molding bread
What we do not eat
we are not fed

Choose large portions
more to savor

Choose  company now
Solitude later

Make more words
long, willowy wands

And dance with the dharma
on samsara ponds

-Nina Alvarez

Orange

At the beginning of my life, all dwelt in orange. I swear the womb, my first room, my mother, my eyes were orange. I used to call out to the places on that warm light surface, depth was in the surface, surface and depth, one.

Yet how is it that we think we can articulate childhood at all? It was a different country, a different eon. We lived in fascination always. Fascination of the breast, of orange walls, of mother, of the enormous house, the back porch that rocked like a high ship, the front door to the outside where jungles and strange playfellows grew.

Fascination of tadpoles and small frogs, minnows and silver light in the creek, rainbows in oily puddles. Fascination of the hill that fell for years of running down the long back of our house. Fascination of grasshoppers and never any real separation, never outside of me, never me other than it.

In this way children are like animals: in love with their prey.

They say it is practical and imperative to structure the singularity of childhood, when god was an enormous distant white man who loved me even more than my parents. It is practical to structure God, ask why he never showed up but never stopped floating around the rafters of our church.

I have a mind to go back to the haunts of my first six years and sit as silently as possible, make myself stiller and stiller until the chaos of my eons since distills and I can hear the echos of my original thoughts. That hunger that knows no separation from the plate.

-Nina Alvarez