Thunder, iron-hued, while a collection of dancing turns in field clearings. Alabaster breath, leaves pull west and fill.
A look, melic. Morning billowing like sea smoke, the universe reflected in your bearing. I see who I will become by the way you favor talking with your eyes. By the heaving of bark and twig.
We tear hue over electric strain, depth dripping silver, while I cradle my spirit, among other things, brush thudding around us.
And rain, clinking as it blues across
my cheek.
It will be how they remember us.
There is glass over dirt here, clouded over
with the voices of ten thousand souls.
I see straight through that window after
a regular scan.
In the white clearness of an afternoon, the blankly moving people walk around with their souls scraped clean.
Half of themselves.
We only look to the dropping of the sun, so we can sleep it off or press our organs, dipped in ink, onto a page.
(How brilliant could we grow?)
I’ve taken to drifting off in public places, and once even prayed myself to a cycle of REMs that barely ended.
A whitewashed tomb, this reckoning is, and us.
Cold air seeps, and then, a breath toward the sea.
Like a clot in the back of my mind, molassesleak, watery haze, I wade through
an aurous-lit kitchen. Idle statues through windows,
chalked, flushing vermilion in this early morning rise.
We would lay our heads in the trees, under the heaviest of pillows,
just to sleep.
Mechlin lace folded, the wood table, a sweetness still hangs. Scent of cloves. We can’t keep it back, clouding over like a hum in our hands. Carried like stars, it glows up and over our ears, until all we hear is light pouring across the sky.
This is the reflection of tears: mirror undercurrent, quivering water in the brain. Not amniotic, but gradually, a thawed constellation.
Shading over everything, we bow without watching to gods who aren’t watching.
How to breathe with all this quiet filling my lungs? Faces like soil, our skin leaking rivers.
Streets, thudding with the beat of light,billowing pale, worn fires off the side of roads.
A summit in the back, brown rain from prayer dust
circling the hordes, their holy shawls.
I left the black behind, worlds screaming
with leftover souls.
We hunt to feel a calypso pulse,
anything like pressing water to our faces.
Sole of my cracked heel scratched with the heat of withering blood, on their hands, dead mist. Their eyes, hollow, watch while I do not fear.
Rippling, the tar hammering hues, you've always known I'd come. Deep, the water breathing out like a lung, at the edge of the lake, it flickers; rolling novas in a sea-flushed forest of color. Everything we came for. And then,
the sheer-hushed ivory morning, lacing our eyes up to the sky.
© Lauren Bernhagen 2012
My heart beats in a circle,
and I wait for the drum of
grey in my chest cavity to hush
and see.
This is how we live our days, charging everything into light sockets while the bread turns black and the window sky outside dampens into a cold husk.
I don’t want this to be about the winter or how my soul is all of me, how I just can’t catch it yet. This is how the blue hue, seeping from an outside sun, leaks.
Bodies were made to step along, like the sheerness of water and light. Where the air warms and nightbirds sing.
We are them in many ways,named for past lovers, who fought each day with their spirits lit up in a flare of revel to keep it all close. (There is nothing new under the sun).
I pay homage each time I see you in the hall and when I sit with my back to the bedpost and reach up to hold your hand while you pass from throb to thought.
This room has been walked in before, and the walls ache just like the rest of the world. It is the freeze of the death; the mourning of blood from our thoughts.
This is a hotel of hearts. Choose carefully, choose nothing?
I walk until I reach the dawn.
On 94, I thoughtOh, the states are two planes, and I am driving up the shape of the border. (We are only colors on the map.) Did you know city lights sink loudly and pulse because I leave the house? Well, they do. Now I am in the flat part where the buildings are cold and look like a semi-truck should be parked out front.
In this hollow car, I am waiting to be chipped into a batch of ice, so I can be the bright puddle of home that I was in the month of the bells.
At the top of the world is the face of the lake where the water looks at a dark sky and remembers.
These vents of ocean that
I seal up, often, are
what’s made this room inside me
dark and
folded over.
Smut steeps, clamped into shapes from my fist, and the light hue in the corner only catches at the golden cow when I watch carelessly.
If I flip the latch and the metal inlet swings open, this room changes. You said you loved me with many doors, and I asked how that was possible since I’ve ripped all the frames into slips of paper and lodged them in crags and under the geologic fault lines.
But I see now that the earth is simmering joy and you love widely. This night is only gauze we can carefully sling back and wind around our wrists before it aches.
The tallest trees have roots in the sky.
With two days in my palm, I’m starting again in the blurry heat of a cold winter night on the back porch.
Pull back the shade from the sky so I can see the status of the atmosphere unrolling.
© Lauren Bernhagen 2011
The sea flush shudders with thefractures of bone or animal husks, the lost furs. Only the edges uneasily cover themselves before the sweep of water. There is a dark space at the base of the tree, after the sand, where the hollows were found, and I treasured the blank, glazed leaves left over from a flare of a summer. (We shift to pitch the green.) The ash on the doorposts softened at noon, so I massed the arrowheads together, took down the flags, and brought the buckets meant for rainfall and other things back inside. There is a maturing of the deep, the soil is creaking an aged bond. We can’t help but pool the lake in our pockets and carry this hurtling reservoir in heaps past the branch cavities to the door.
What I buried is pressing to light.
I've been seeking truth in several areas regarding the Lord and His love as of late. I've felt pretty cushioned by the Holy Spirit this last month, like I have pillows on all sides of me. There's really no other place I want to be right now. I know this poem is loosely tethered, but my heart is very much in this place. Trying to aim for truth.
If you're going to walk on the white
side of the curb, by the gutter,
and search for deader plants
behind the sewer grates, slowly,
then I will wait. I guess.
I halted in this frothy glasshouse,
damp
before it was silent, but still
deadening in the weight of
its sliding sheets of pale
or thin light. I sat between the vines
to be in the state of the glorified
libraries and the tilting cathedrals with their
fallen doors, the basilicas
that have torn down their
own wallpapers and repainted
curious images of antiseptic gods
on insubstantial sanctums. We
could always see through
the fake beams the modern chaplains
innately rooted like boorish
trees that snake through the Amazon.
Looking up the curved, impressionistic
dome toward the keynote core that
leveled the force of the angels, you
told me of how it used to be, how it really is -
deep - rumbling down through the stratums
of the ocean and latching on to both
sides of the continent (and we are covered
still). It is an exquisite following.
The smell of the hickory pew
and melted candlesticks is what
I remember the least.
Nights too, it seems a risk to sleep;I remember you walking by the cathedral, head down, a bucket of clouds and oil smeared above. You were waiting to be strewn by my brush or hand, rearranged and altered in the white spaces. But it never worked, really, Or at least that's what you said.
It was strict, the way we walked; only your shoulder remained obscene, but I never wished that or our perforations away. And now you sit on my bench under the spruce, a cup of cold water in your hand that you won't look up from.