Clear Night by Charles Wright

Last year's lunar eclipse moon...the magical clouds parted...

CLEAR NIGHT

By Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. 

Moon-fingers lay down their same routine 

On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. 

Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls. 

I want to be bruised by God. 

I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. 

I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.   

I want to be entered and picked clean. 

And the wind says “What?” to me. 

And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me. 

And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.   

And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

Charles Wright, “Clear Night” from Country Music: Selected Early Poems. 

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

I've always had a nose for scents---quite like a bloodhound I've been told.  I could smell beer on my mother's breath the second she walked in the door...from the time I was born until I was 15...She quit drinking (and smoking, temporarily) when she got pregnant with my little brother when I was 15 years old. (To this day I wonder why she could get herself sober for him, but not for me and my sisters...) I was horrified to have a pregnant mother at that age.  Ah, those teen years.

I also grew up in a chronic fog/cloud of Pall Mall filterless and Virginia Slim cigarettes.  I guess there is no such thing as a perfect childhood, right?  For sure.  We all do the best we can... But I'm way off track now...  

Back to scents:  this amazingly fragrant poem always delights my senses supremely.  Can't you just smell the cinnamon?  Enjoy!

The Cinnamon Peeler

By Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in an act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller

                     Monet's "Houses of Parliament" from his series of this painting.

Monet Refuses The Operation by Lisa Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, 
to soften and blur and finally banish 
the edges you regret I don't see, 
to learn that the line I called the horizon 
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see 
Rouen cathedral is built 
of parallel shafts of sun, 
and now you want to restore 
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe 
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world 
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight 
so quickly to one another 
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals, 
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands 
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.