Showing posts with label gold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gold. Show all posts

Friday, November 5, 2021

Sift



Distinctly the pad of her hand

the inside of her thumb

tapping like a tambourine

white dust exploding upward

each solid strike

and dare ask

why do you do that Grandma?

She liked wearing an apron,

To make it all smooth and loose

or something like that

she said.

The white powder 

was not flour

on my parents' kitchen counter

back then the oven made

TV dinners 

better than the microwave.

And as I sift

through the coarse grains 

of the collapsed sandcastle 

of my own making

where I grew into

adding on and adding on

but built too close 

to the tideline-

there was nothing 

softer than flakes of carbon and gold

no solid memories endured 

the crashing

like white shells

of me. 


Painting by Granville Redmond, 'Talk at the beach' c. 1931 in Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Golden hour


Bathed in sepia lamplight,
the skin tingled,
the spirit sighed in its sheath,
all was glimmering and gilded,
and the branched bars became
too much to bear,
when stacked so high.

Under their long skeleton boughs,
shadows shrunk and lost
their cool blue,
leaving exposed all the sheltered bodies
that dissipate through the hours, only dissolving
in the company of leaves,

until all gathered-close
in purple pools of night,
fanged beasts,
like dead languages,
creep out through the white pages,
now folded, and saved. A place
keep our warmth inside.



Painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Plea bargain


Their life’s journey is a treasure quest,
tough to solve for any X
with all the mortal obstacles.

They hunt for hints by feeling
for warmth on fingertips, and continents.
Not coming near a single solid clue
that was graspable within 
the fingered seams of coast.

Their tokens stacked tall,
They have amassed considerable ease
and yet

Nothing seemed more natural
Than making maps with more
movable lines, theoretical angles
and following the footsteps before
like ants
Inevitable colonizing, war was natural.

The wrong place at the right time.
Mountains make them move another way,
the learning left no trace

Of the gilt progress. 



Image credit(ed) By Jacob d'Angelo after Claudius Ptolemaeus[1] Nicolaus Germanus (www.polona.pl), Cosmographia , 1467 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Friday, July 28, 2017

Golden Fleece


It becomes hard to breathe,
As if my chest walls
Resisted
The intrusion of more volume.
It is known,
My metronome sways slower than
The standard,
Which causes pause
To those listening for life by standards.
It becomes questionable if I am alive
For a full moment
It becomes obvious, this is my restful state
That alarms professionals of standards 
and not enough.
It was by the elimination of blur,
 the rolling together of static
and the burying down of heart that dams
persistence through rivers and veins.
The flow of water and words,
wind and blood run around without reason.
I should be dead,
They all said without saying anything solid,
Like stones and bodies
To remind us of sinking feelings and roots,
Settling and silt.
It was the iron 
will and heavy hand of world
carried just under the skin and cages. 


Jean François de Troy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Friday, July 21, 2017

All complementarities aside


We tapped into the human genome
And are now mapping the brain
But you know we won't find love there either.
They scared us with the hole in the atmosphere,
Cosmic rays, acid rain. They tried terror
By burning down the forest before the cure
For cancer was cultivated.
The ice melts and minerals reinfuse themselves
Ionically with purpose, freeing radicals to cleanse
Surfaces.
Then this standard A brain met a utilitarian snaggle-
What’s it for? What about changes?
Yeah, the gold was soft after all.
There was common wetware
And we always knew how copper conducted itself
Generous with friction and actions without touch.
Entangled in the overhead wires,
Thought is under webs, like lines that meant complex
Life that we thought
we could emulate all the folds and it would comfort us
knowing love was no there to be found
nestled in tight corners and, residing
rather closer to a paradox between intelligent design
and first thought or dream.



Image credit By Smithsonian Institution from United States [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.
Info via Wikimedia- Chandra telescope x-ray (2005)
"The Chandra image shows a bubble of hot gaseous supernova debris (green and red) inside a more rapidly moving shell of extremely high-energy electrons (blue). These features were created as the supersonic expansion of the debris into interstellar gas produced two shock waves - one that moves outward and accelerates particles to high energies, and another that moves backward and heats the stellar debris. The relative expansion speeds of the hot debris and the high-energy shell indicate that a large fraction of the energy of the outward-moving shock wave is going into the acceleration of atomic nuclei to extremely high energies. This finding strengthens the case that supernova shock waves are an important source of cosmic rays - high-energy nuclei which constantly bombard Earth"


Friday, June 9, 2017

The currency of pretty


How could you be so Beautiful
and not show anyone?

Why do you squander this Gift
doing nothing powerful
with it-

You don’t have enough to spend
frivolously, you said.
Our investments differ dramatically.
Meanwhile, I have been saving up
All my paper money
for disgraced tears
the old fashioned way.

Only trying to help you get
A head of yourself.

Your advice is not the flotation
device
I need to keep a heads up.
I think I am too heavy, too deep
to let it Be. Do not worry about me.
I would happily dissolve back into the sea
as in, dis-
appear
coming back again and again in tide,
leaving crumby trails of gold.

This was you being ugly,
or just one of many duplicates.
Monotony blinds anyone who sees just
silhouettes and small talk, grains as significant-

Personal preferences aside, you should see
Yourself in this light.

Instead we blow off the complimentary
and make glass castles or ballerinas,
all so fragile where thinnest.
If only we could trade
places
matter and Purpose
melt in twisted hands,

beauty was nothing new.




Photo credit by Graham Crumb/Imagicity.com [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday, March 5, 2017

She seas you


dreamt that you brought me
a bag of sand
for my hourglass

the gold flecks sparked, alit by
the sunlight in your eyes, whereby
the ocean leaked

and the bag was empty...

certain it was you.




Painting by George Bellows (1917) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Eve(ning) (Haiku)


Under bamboo ribs
the Fall; leaves expose yellow gold
slanted shadows lie.




Attributed to Kanō Eitoku (狩野永徳) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

A round of a pause


Magic elixir, quick fixer,
there is no cure.
It is fatal, even tragic,
there is no real magic
in metallurgy,
by standard,
gold gets warm to the touch, silver reflects
soft and such-
Just ignore
those that keep score with trinkets

As alchemists insist upon
what is made is nevermore
than before
enduring and manipulating
the use
while passing through,
by hand.
The philosophers’ stone

Mostly taken for granite.

Painting by Luis Ricardo Falero, Study of a Witch (19th century), [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

And then...

  Change is like that strong smell of cut grass or chopped wood that stops you still. Patterns, a symbol can be an illegible sign,  at first...