Tentatively...

...sunlight spills in,
a honey trickle, warm tickle
on waking sighs and
flutters, lighting

(a breath and realized beat)

gentle flows as
thoughts rise against
a viscous black tangle,
unresolved.

(An unveiling of eyes
reveals
....)

For now
I'll live in between
breaths,
heart-beats,
the hidden stillness of my lives.

I'll heal slowly stretchingly spreading out so
one day again I'll fly.

Jeremy Reed

some other poems -

oranges, lemons, limes

1          It is a means of resolving light-planes,
2          you standing in the green interior
3          of a pine kitchen, looking out at how
4          she sits writing at a garden table,
5          shaded by a white umbrella, the door
6          you stand in turning yellow-lime

7          from a leaf-flickery, blond luminous
8          sunshine---her involvement, not yours.

9          Inside, the visual compensations shift
10        your awareness, oranges grouped in a blue bowl,
11        a lemon, lime, things that C憴anne
12        might have arranged on a white cloth
13        find here their natural dispositions;
14        the radio's tuned to another continent.

15        Dark and light: you wouldn't change
16        their properties---the peeled orange is sweet,
17        a sharper taste of sunlight while
18        she strokes daisy-heads with her feet,
19        leaving you to rearrange
20        oranges, lemons, limes and then retreat.

the swan

1          ANDROMACHE, I think of you. The mirrored stream
2          which once reflected your heroic years
3          dehydrates to a trickle. History's
4          in dry-dock; berthed in a tangle of piers.

5          As I was crossing the new Carrousel,
6          the notion of things lost became a truth;
7          old Paris had so quickly disappeared
8          I was reminded of my vanished youth.

9          Round by the barracks, the town's vertebrae
10        were visible: its roughed-out capitals,
11        builder's debris, bric-?brac, fireweed, grass,
12        smashed columns devastated by vandals.

13        And on the site of a menagerie,
14        I saw one morning creeping to my lair
15        in that first pink light when a roadgang starts
16        with drills and sledge-hammers to smash things bare,

17        an escaped swan, broken out of its cage,
18        flip-flap on the pavement with webby feet,
19        and soil its spotless plumage on the ground,
20        its fractured pinions attempting to beat,

21        before it jabbed its beak into the dust,
22        thirsting for streams, blue lakes, its instinctive
23        places of homing, fast electric storms;
24        the drenching sparkle that will have it live.

25        The bird seemed the symbol of Ovid's myth,
26        stretching its convulsive neck to the sky,
27        snake-like, accusatory, biting the air;
28        reproaching the gods with the truth we die.

29        Paris changes; my black mood's permanent.
30        New highrises, penthouses, can't atone
31        for straggling suburbs, scaffolding, raised blocks:
32        my memories weigh on me like a stone.

33        Here by the Louvre, I feel the irritant
34        oppressive image of the swan; its mad
35        gestures of a delirious exile
36        trying to turn up a culture gone bad,

37        and of you, Andromache, torn from the bed
38        of your great lover: winded like a slave.
39        Pyrrhus stamping on you, Hector's widow,
40        crouching wide-eyed beside an open grave:

41        and you Jeanne Duval, tubercular, sick,
42        I think of you lost in the opaque fog,
43        tramping the mud, searching for Africa's
44        luxuriant palms, harassed by a dog.

45        I think of losers, the ones left behind
46        by time's remorseless boot, those who lie down
47        to suck a wolf's tits, men consumed by grief,
48        public orphans who like dead flowers turn brown.

49        And in this forest, a barbed memory
50        shrills like a horn; my blood cells start to roar.
51        I think of sailors shipwrecked on a reef,
52        convicts, broken poets and many more.

broken hearts

There should be heart-shaped rooms in which we sit
as a collective to repair
the damage done by love, and half the night
we'd exchange stories, share a common pain
that's always different, but never less
in how the ruin's total, like a house
slipped off a cliff edge to the sea
or like a turtle that has lost its shell
but keeps on going, making tracks on sand
to find a refuge up beyond the surf.
We're all suddenly disinherited
from little ways, familiar dialogue,
security of someone there to share
bad news, rejection, a red letter day,
a downmood's tumble of blue dice,
or someone there to celebrate a quiet
in which the meaning is in being two
without a need to speak.  But out of love
we seem to be falling down stairs
that never terminate. He left or she
took off with someone else, it's like the blow
will never stop arriving in the heart
as an impacted fist. We'd call the place
Heartbreak Hotel, and hope to patch the scars
of unrequited love and leave
a little less in tatters, disrepair.
I'll find the place one day, and book a room
and talk amongst the losers of a face
I can't forget, and of a special hurt
bleeding like footprints scattered over snow.	

-- Jeremy Reed

one and nine, fading.