With great delight I sat in her shadow

(Alternative name: Shadow dancers)

I’m going to fathom the Korean psyche

Once and fully, for an era of emotional revelry

Hae.mi, deliver me from the ritual

 

 

Where discovery is the fertilizer

Of the red blood in the rawest apple

Your cheeks to string me with ornamental majesty

 

 

At the emergency of poetry

At the threshold of clairvoyance

There is an empathy between your breasts

 

 

Where time is dense and flighty in-between

The feathers of the long agonizing months

The short breathless cycles taking you back into the artistic source

 

 

There, poetry is an oxygen of embracing

Irrationally more than we can have

With more moistness of vision that we can comprehend

 

 

A last luxury of feeling something sublime

Hae.mi, the trees will sink their trunks deeper this winter

And I will stand in solitude among their tall haloes

 

 

Pregnant with what comes next in woman’s world

A lily of the valleys of time and hope.

First Snow

There’s music in the first snow
Like the foam of Seas, it’s ethereal
Letters of rock and water to Woman
To Man, a sub-music of the blue
Skies and clouds and seas

It’s the gulls of the cosmic rain
Variations on what winter means
The death of ease, the struggle for comfort
Unless in darkness, you find yourself?
We stepped over icicles of white

We felt it in our breath, sang our songs
It is cold to be forever young
And inside we are still so young
Sun-bleached are we not, we remember
The feel of winter on our laps

A humidity in the back of our throats
The jaded hope that this too will pass
It’s a faith of nature’s cycles that’s for sure
There’s music in the first snow
And release, release from so many things.

The vivid things that never change

 

Lights out. Shades up.
The bloom in your heart is running
A weather to look at,
The sun peaking through your dreams
A cosmos to deliver your thirst
Boulevards closed. Souvenirs sunset.
It’s time for starts to earn your trust
Perceived by feeling, instead of sense
Allowed by intuition to run wild
The instinct that loves the dark
Lights out. Shades up.
A revolution of the years gone
The time left, its so slim now
The trees cannot wait till morning
The inherent opposites are coming to fruition
The bloom in your heart is dripping
A sudden world without time
Where you existed, immersed
From any future, simply ever-living and being.

I Lay Roses Across my Belly

I could live on bread and water
Rice and dal, bare essentials
Habitation of sustenance
Wonder of childhood
Morsels of divine association

Sacred foundation of the body
Raw materials of
Elements like flour, salt, oil
The meditation diet, water and fire
Or the Mediterranean diet

Olive oil and red wine with dark chocolate
Moments of food like pure vision
The pause of hope through
Long winters, where the light deprivation
Must be treated with other

Senses of life, bread is nourishing
The pagan morsels in your mouth
I dislike going in public
When I am hibernating
And require ageless cuddles

And making love like
Knitting a body
A miraculous body with veins
And a face and a purified heart
That gazes intently at you.

Lines for Winter

I’ve chided myself to compose
Lines for winter and for hearing
Myself speak of the cold
And how society touches

The snow without tongues or hands
The tune that your bones play
In the long waiting for Spring
And where you will end up

Through succession of seasons
Walking on a carpet of white
It’s anonymous to be
But a snowflake, that laughs

At the moon’s gaze in the night
Or lights up like a mirror to the lights
Of a city, tonight it’s getting cold
And you find yourself hearing

And walking with deep thoughts
Nothing but the deep thoughts
You have grown old on and accustomed to
There will be no winter stars

To light your fire, you will have
To do it yourself this time.

Winter Camped Under Various Stars

Come winter with your
Dry months of cold winds
I will take you in my room tonight
Lay you down where the Moon holds

Gray laurels and champagne for one
Graft your stony roots of granite
To my weary bones that sing
Of crystal towers, and eucalyptus trees

And frozen over rivers of marble piazzas
Let me watch the crowds and
Children with rosy cheeks
And that I’ve heard the lament of the land

So vast and so white, in the stillness
Of a silence that is the breath of night
Come winter, with your
Cascades of lovely snow, frozen councils
Basilicas of frothy twigs waiting for spring.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/winter-s-fairytale-303358298

Give Avalanches Here

Now shivering fancy turns
Her weary head to Winter’s forms
Which lurk beneath suspended Suns

A latitude of white grace
To blanket all yesterdays with layers
With the tumult of ice in flight

Dear snow, where is the rainbow’s ray?
That flung colored fluff, I rejoice
In all that nature leaves us as bright

The bitter cold, and her eccentricities
That with a frozen butterfly’s magic
I must depart, Like a smallest housewife

Into the grass, where existence became
Lost in self, with only
Natural powers to mangle me
Or the choice ignorance of my own designs.

City Without a Name of Winter

Watching the crowds in their dark jackets
I can tell that winter is on its way
There are no grey laurels left
We just wait for first snow
It will seem beautiful then, novel

As it traces our footsteps
In a frothy whiteness of magical grafts
Marrying concrete with the skies
You will have parts of the world
Unmelted by sunrise, just a snow-covered

Precipice of cold, we endure this
With a voluntary patrol of visible breath
Under my breast and belly I feel grateful
To have a woman at my fire
It’s the pulse of the earth I miss the most

In those harsh winter months
The smiles and small laughter of spring
It’s a city without a name that freezes
So many people more sad without the sun
I can tell that winter is on her way again

Like minerals that forget to sound their last trumpet
My blood will not freeze, I will walk on.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Winter-139159678

Winter

Winter
How long have we known each other?
On the ground
Bare and with throaty snow
Flakes to fall on my stubble

Of all the aches I held dear –
Dragging your silver-shine
Through long hard months
Of the northern-land
Into apparent hibernation

Winter
You know my white shield
Of my held heart
Like a held-hand
Of another’s inner-spring
I sell my cattle
To eat my plants for another day
Teas that light me up from the inside

Winter
Breaking thin branches
I know your cloudy days
Won’t last forever, just an empty space
In my memory
As if I were snapped from my roots with ice
My foundations of rock
Glowing thick with harvests of water
That will trickle down
Into a luscious spring-bed.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Winter-139159678

A Breath in Snow

As I walk up the rise into the silence of snow
I bear witness to transparent snowflakes
The bright falling breaths of our shallow lives

The paper tissues that dabs the dips of fate
The snow is deaf and blue and white
It licks the oxygen from the brittle ground

Swishing your lips is your remedy
For that whistle in your hollow chest
Our body is a blanket of snow for winter

Our body has been all the seasons
Of water, stuttering down the miles
The swollen river of all nestled and snapping things

I suck air back into the spanking sea-breeze
Of the twisted motionless spitting paths of winter
A sky flipped open for our shared afternoons
With no scratchings, only the rustling of an emptied hope.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/snow-75022732

Dragonfly Debts

After the battle, of many lonely years
The solitary times no longer worry,
It’s only grief and a slow dying
Facing snow, I know the color is white

A dirty walking road of dusk and clouds
There is too little light this far north
But I am old, I am finally old –
Too many places, communications are broken
*
Family is scattered, but I cannot read
My books of grief, there are too many poems
That sound the same, too many days
Each piece of spring it will return

I cannot grieve forever, my moving eyes
Return to important things, the beauty
Lost in my studies of the world, one must
Still seek joy, the greater good, across
*
The passing honors, I will reveal flying blossoms
Pollen in the wind, lost faith returns
I am drunk in the debts I have made
Nature’s drops of water, dragonflies

So little time to know each other
We should not part, happiness and I
Bliss with unusual you, I watch butterflies
Go deeper and deeper into a field of flowers.

Photography Credit: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Dragonfly-187356316

Not With Your Foreign Wings to Shelter Me

Beneath sentiments better left, unsaid
Untouched like some dead weight
Beneath the rubble-fields of battered words
That amount to little more, mere memories

They are not tangible, precious, or alive
But constrict me from the inside
Let them try to pronounce a winter of hurt
For a floundering of spring, yet to be

With fevered heart, let them melt away in summer
Clang shut eternal gates of love, forever?
Yet, for all that, trust shall come again, as ever?
With nostrils of bleeding gold, for rich rewards?

You will not appear again, with that dusty mantle
Of golden olive skin and pouty eyes
I am sick of dissipating you in mere fantasy
As blind as I ever am, a prelude and a requiem, or a preface
Where my luckless touches, touched a foreign woman’s shore.