You Told Me You’d Be Home By Ten
Original
Watching you in the shadows rip your poems into pieces, tossing them like blossoms cascading into a bucket of glowing coals.
The shadows of your hands flutter perfectly against the wall, the shadow of your fingers tearing shapes into pieces, tossed up & falling down, the sun at two o’clock highlighting shadows like birds sliding down the wall.
Nobody imagined your face streaked or the palms of your hands covered in coal dust.
One torn fragment flies through smoke and sticks to your streaked face in the shadow of a cherry tree, the bucket heavy as an anchor, the last of your words going up in smoke.
I fell in love with the maps of distant time, unexplained distant time & the Neolithic, I fell in love with the Neolithic – your dark hair,
Dark as some mystery strain of ancient wheat shimmering in the coolness of twilight, pressing your toes and fingers into the clay floor, stretching your body from horizon to horizon
Balancing a voluminous golden disc upon your delicate, curving spine. I’ve learned the language of discs and cherry blossoms, your fingers and smoke. I bury my animal cry.
Your shadows are hunger.
The eye blinks once in the gloomy shadow of the soul’s laboratory. A shattered disc showers fragments. Clay – no, not clay – gold. Hollow doors open and close, concealing this world. You seize the universal remote. Your fingertips press TV channels bright as a sun. The Clay Channel. The Gold Channel.
You gave me an indelible precision I mistook for esoteric ambiguity. Shadows conceal and reveal. I gave you tools for repairing machinery. You asked where this machinery might be found.
In the Legion parking lot snakes fall from the sky. You sing them down into the branches, how you sang! They wound themselves down, sliding and wet, their hearts tinted with gold, zigzagging into liquid angles and spitting hieroglyphics, falling upon your shoulders like rain loosening your hair.
Cauldrons along your spine bubbled over spilling gold. I was drawn as if by a magnet to your magical hysteria on the night you promised you would never shatter again.
You raved about a coastline where we might find ourselves half-buried.
You ridiculed mannerism in cinema but never did you ridicule Suprematism. In the shadow of a tower you open a drawer filled with soft gloves and the sounds of night. You pull charcoal up to your elbow. The Suprematism of your eyes lined with kohl.
A movement crosses the palm of your hand dividing stone from water. Your breath fills your spine with heat, a motionless reflection shimmers, spreading to the edge of a stone radius.
Your blood has not forgotten this stone.
I read Neolithic in full in February and it took me ten minutes to read with a fairly brisk delivery. I have edited it substantially (and spontaneously) for this posting. I hope I have conveyed the essence of the poem even knowing how much is missing…
Lyrics by Bob Dylan from I Want You & Don Quixote by Pablo Picasso
Alternative ending:
Or:
Although cubistic, these artworks pre-date Cubism (and Sam Cooke) by roughly 7,000 years. Hamangia culture is a Late Neolithic archaeological culture of Dobruja (Romania and Bulgaria) between the Danube and the Black Sea and Muntenia in the south.
Cubist image: Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), late Spring, 1910
You Send Me by Sam Cooke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNco-e2CXuo
I do not claim credit or copyright for original source material in this post.
I read a quote by art critic Robert Hughes comparing painters: There is more death in a Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion…
Then I heard a song by an artist we saw in concert. Who spun magic, jewelled webs we fell into after chasing each other through twilight circumstance. Twilight and traffic.
The labyrinth ruled by Janus one level below.
The shadows jousting on the street didn’t remind me of your fingertips, or your January dancing, or your honeyed cake.
I didn’t make that joke in the elevator.
Carried, like some tragic Pieta, into the stream. The playing of a wooden flute sounding in the reeds. My hands flat against your skin. The temperature slipping.
Forbidden music within your temple as quiet and still as polished stones. Awash in the fragrance of whispered moments. As shiny as a silver bracelet, a tunnel, a hook.
I’m not even sure I heard anything.
Did such music ever exist.
I’ve never wondered how my fine shoes, sewn of ancient parchment & soft as a silk purse, got so wet.
Nor have I contemplated Gustave Courbet’s
Trout.
Or the absence of all that is not
Trout.
While gazing into the eye of the fish,
A future sun.
Credits for original images: The Trout by Gustave Courbet, 1873. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958, based on the play by Tennessee Williams starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. Skyscraper and Tunnels by Italian Futurist painter Fortunato Depero, 1930. Pieta by Michelangelo.
I do not own the original images or claim copyright. I have created new images for non-commercial purposes of commentary under Fair Use provisions of copyright law.
I remember when she said,
I’m sorry to interrupt your relationship
With Bob Dylan.
Did you possibly imagine (you couldn’t have)
On that youthful, sun-dappled afternoon,
The rays of an ancient light caressing your skin & inspiration, when you were
A skipping stone striking at the perfect angles & gaining your balance,
Amusedly & perfectly crossing a warm stream at the edge of town,
The water fresh and the fences down,
Driving home after closing time…
The years marking your skin in ways the Great Depression & the
Enemy marked your psyche, past an abandoned brewery,
Seeing the quiet streets coming up fast like a flood, silent as a submarine,
Balancing on wet stones, laughing as you splashed & driving home
After closing time, to a lonely house, impervious to depth charges,
Past the dislodged bricks of the abandoned brewery,
Imagining that sun-splashed afternoon & shallow, sparkling water,
Your children crossing streams within darkened rooms,
Finding their balance, in ways the enemy
Marked your psyche & warm afternoons caressed your inspiration,
An ancient star illuminating quiet streets, starlight splashing,
Streaming into and beyond abandoned spaces,
Rays of an ancient light driving you home.
I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:
Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.
Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.
Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one’s self.
O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:
You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.
You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.
You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.
I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love’s
Hands.
That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering God,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.
That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!
All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!
From: I Heard God Laughing – Renderings of Hafiz
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky