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.

Artist leaving residence

The artist leaves the building.
This time he is
wrapping up
his canvases, colors, and
hairy implements.

He loads and stacks,
lines and lays his tiles, some gently
until tightly packed
for transport.

Some of them,
he jams in just seeming
to fill in
any open spaces he sees.

His neighbor, the lady
living below him,
paints furiously-impressionism,
she is no artist.

She tries to finish
her own piece
before he is gone-
before all falls muted,

from above.
Heaven forbid,
the muse is moving on
to another scene, landscape

perch, set of white walls,
half empty canvases,
or another artistic
aesthetic altogether.

Painting by Thomas Prichard Rossiter, 'A Studio Reception, Paris' c. 1841,[CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Witness whiteness

Who is watching?

I feel-

Enough.
It was
-not needed
              any more
Love
         you sooo much
rains    candy,
Sugar name drop not

Justify
Too

it is complicated,
intricate, entanglement-
through
close contact-
intertwined
and inevitable.

You see. You do.
You are-I am too.

Kiss me
Aloud
if you can

in this tension
of Presently,

Let me
             land-

(softly) Held,
holding

your gazing heart
that embers
                    Into

Ashen skin
before

All of This
living in sin
bore witness
To.

Finally,
just

what do you wish
to be called?


Painting by Franz Dvorak, c. 1927 in [Public domain].

See-thru

She turns to words
and they turn on her-

And in that deafening silence,
it was too serene
to make a scene.

Paper froze
on her
and condensed its icy pulp
into a dull reflective surface
whereby sharp-windows-
the squinted eyes
circled in hoarfrost
which blurred
the edges
of a thousand panes,
simply knowing these as
thin margins between
virginal definitions
making lighter 

inside-out.




Painting by Maurice Cullen, 'Moret, Winter' c. 1895 in Public Domain. 

Two a.m.

I wake up early-
earlier than usual.
And I assume it must have been the moon
disturbing my sleep, with its intrusive and
garish moonlight on high
and the ghoulish nightmares
all rising to the surface.

When it finally rains, I am comforted
by the cloud cover,
which will luckily tuck me in tonight
and I should sleep tighter, making for more
muted sleeping conditions
with this welcome addition of white noise
atop clean white sheets.

It pours. It hails. It is dark.
And I wake-too early-
still-wondering
why this sinking icy feeling holds me here,
alert and anchored.
Awake. A constant pull, resistance and an
uprising washes over me, cold chains snap
forcing me violently to the surface,
gasping for air.

My two eyes try to adjust
to the bright white light,
where windows make mirrors
dark pupils shrink in the glare.
And I see, plainly,
it is too early to tell...



Painting by Johan Jongkind c. 1872 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Spasm

Silence sucks me through this narrow tunnel and only

in my knitted spiral, soundness burrows behind flat walls,

I am pulled down or out, never to get all the way

through to where

it is all white

there. 

Painting By Jean-Guillaume Carlier (1638-1675) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Naked soles

Tick-tac with each step taken down

the tile floor hallway-

crept moving was the only way

to get here to meet there,

though the narrowing drywalls close in

facing the wall she wonders-

Whose purpose memory serves now-

As if climbing these textured cream walls

would help us all adapt to sharp

right angles, as accustomed,

and if given a sideways glance,

one may admire the frames for their brevity,

developed into more than the moment

of moving placeholders.

Time froze at her feet

the ceiling cast white over her. 

The slate she found was just cleaned.

Photo credit by Milko Matičetov [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

This image or media is available on the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum's website. 

Talking myself out of any and all steadfast beliefs

And the shadows became emboldened

tossing themselves, whole bodies

against the stuccoed wall of the house

like a lunatic whose waxing drips onto

the serenade night.

Appendages out of lines, 
sinew slung haphazardly, 
do not move, it will heal.

A straightjacket all white and tight

would pacify this wicked waving,

haunting in its accidental tempo.

It was stirring.

The stale air, intent on suffocating this

common moment, tries to circulate.

Still, under such serious moonlight,

all stars let out a slit of light and with
pity.

Keep going.
Solidified, all recast and quartered

for symbiotic division of belief by
schisms and seizures.
See there,

old ways of seeing arthritic or systemic.

Unrelated to shrinking white matter,
this time indivisible from the prism
have been here again
breaking light from black wholes
made it all night once any again. 



Painting by Frits Thaulow [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Weightlifting words

There is not enough silence
or white in the world.

There seems to be enough water,
when you look around
the circumference of the globe-
                 have you noticed
how long
we have been wrong
about power and drainage-

As magnets naturally defy resistance
or make magic with retrograde,
nothing else matters
but shine...

                   And distraction, interruption, and
compulsion
become utilized and oxidized
to fill in the surrounding blanks
with loud, explosive air
we refer to this as
                  white noise
and we are sinking in.




Sketch by Lorenz Frølich [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Scanned by Haukur from a reprint in the illustrated 2002 Prose Edda edition by Gudrun. Originally published in Gjøgleriet i Utgard (1872).