Rift-Design

Es eignet sich, es zeigt sich an, es warnt.

                     It owns itself, it shows itself, it warns.

                                                 --Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act V

   
What we missed in the small streams,

declivities by roadways bridged bank to bank

crossing waters with no name, no thought,

easy currents whispered and contained-- 

these harmless passings mere contours,

forgotten veins of watershed patterns

overlaid, what owned the earth first,

carvings we cannot read, evocations of design 

pronounced by rain undefining

sides now lost to passage,

helpless to cross reveals our confinement: 

indefinite closure suggests

damage is irreparable,

a concept we reject, incredulous. 

Protect your children from these waters:

floods that reveal, then vanish,

reclamations of dominance 

more than a single absence

when water withdraws as language

that never spoke: 

the father’s body surfaced later,

fourteen miles down.

Water should never surprise us:

in the language of small streams

floats the rhetoric of floods.

                                                                        Cheryl Emerson
                                                                                          July, 2013

 

                                                                         

 

 

 

Street Art

Ann Arbor, Michigan

July, 2013

 

 

1 .

Painters perch on stools,

ruffled by futile fans

shuffling heat without relief. 

 

Street smells rise like painted faces,

the pleading thirst of sweating leopards

and butterflies that droop. 

 

I should have hung the snow prints,

says an oil painter shunned

for burnt orange and red,

exacerbated desert no one buys today. 

           2.

 

Faces tell me nothing,

narrow blurs on black shoulders,

lean walk, hand in pocket,

open coats loosely flared— 

 

long shadows speak of evening,

city at their back,

heels tap past the wine shop— 

 

separate strangers in the same black suit

tell me I’m no different, scarcely seen

through gestures mirrored by frozen forms

cooled by a gray sky thirty inches wide. 

 

3.

 

I browse the leaf art jewelry,

ask if the earrings change color,

            falling off in November?

 

            because an unnamed face

may ask the wrong questions in peace

when you’ve peeled your name
like summer fruit,

remembering how to slip a bike
               smoothly through traffic. 

   4.

 

Raucous chimes mock the silver street mime,

verdigris comedians clamoring how sound prevails,

how still life cries for movement,

how a living face will not be lost

            in the portrait hall—

 

how patternless chimes

make sounds that still matter— 

 

which is what the silver street mime

            tried to say

                        in silence.

 

5.

 

I wait at the base of the carillon tower

for hundred year bells to sound the hour

when tents will drop a magician’s cloth

on vanishing art.

 

The city will quiet

with the painted people gone,

as if colors had never been there,

 

as if long shadows of the emptying crowd

weren’t painting themselves

to the street.



 

 



Invisible Ink

 

To write until the page is blank again,

when words have ceased to be themselves

and all the stories are told,

like the moth that lifted off a painted tree,

having settled for the night,

assimilated to the scene— 

unless it was a painted moth,

a typical transfiguration,

the way it all begins as art,

how words fly on thin wings.

It's the art of invisible ink,

to write it all down before the letters fade,

then hold the paper to a candle

to find what is drawn to the flame. 

                                                                                    Cheryl Emerson

                                                                                                              7/5/2013

Blowing the Dunes

Las Vegas, 1993

They blew the Dunes to dust,

Flaunting End of Era

with fake cannons and mockery of flames,

pyrotechnics fitting coronation of a pirate king

that set the demolition crew on edge—

colored bombs bursting in air

raining cinders on rocket fuel and dynamite

mathematically placed, waiting

for the real work of rubble,

public fears of asbestos dust allayed,

security stopping scavengers,

memory hunters trying one last raid—
 

From the street we see dead windows,

breathe sulphur smoke thickening

over honeymoon couples and their cheap rings,

names exchanged in the night,

skin upon skin in a city where flesh is uncomplicated,

where all that happens there will stay

until the rooms themselves explode

and what happened there is released

in exhalation of breath long held,

what leaves the body in the end

blinking at the lights, the lift of desert air,

the tang of mesquite and sage. 

All the fanfare humanly possible didn’t mask

The waiting truth of Execution

publically displayed: 200,000 faces on the street

gawking at the windows where I danced,
silk of the songs an illusion of elegance,
anything you wished you could be.

I think of Ozymandias, the colossal wreck.

I think of Death Valley and the rare chance of visiting

at the moment when its futile flowers bloom.  

 

                                                                                       8/2012

Tethered

Curled spine tethered, stiff--
she thinks of Browning's poem of the poor painter
whose reach exceeds his grasp.

She thinks of crystal serving plates,

glass cruets, good knives stored

on the high shelves, pushed to the back,

as she folds like a morning towel

hanging heavy on the shower pole,

the room still swirling in steam
scented clean by the good shampoo. 

 

                                                                                                Cheryl Emerson

                                                                                                7/9/2013

Apocrypha

What I meant to write,

what I promised to remember--
crumpled papers in trash cans
 

hotel maids might read,

learning English by discard, 

aftertaste of evenings I didn’t spill. 

A man writes poems for the dead,

then burns the words when they're done, 

in perfection of which life?

Rain always falls in these mountains,

this compilation of refusals,

this unpublished life,

Apocryphal work.

 

                                                                                                Cheryl Emerson

                                                                                                                  7/4/2013

Blackberry Tunnel

The dirt was clean,

cool in the summer.

if anyone came

they’d think my eyes

were two little blackberries

tucked inside. 

I dreamed up troops of soldiers

marching down the street,

taking families whole,

all but me,

I would hide and survive

eating blackberries. 

                                                                        Cheryl Emerson

                                                                        7/3/2013

Pheasant Chase

The ring necked pheasant waits to show

'til nearly stepped upon,

then explodes, squawking indignation

in low flight over morning fields. 

They never fly far, like skipping stones

sinking at a distance you can follow,

keeping your eyes where they vanish 

under mist on grass,

gliding farther from each chase,

adding space, royal dignity of emerald heads

an accusation of your desecration, 

as if I knew what to do when I caught one:

a surrendering of feathers, perhaps,

imparting wisdom or granting a wish
stopped at the river 

I needed a raft to cross. 

 

                                                                                    Cheryl Emerson

                                                                                    7/4/2013

Dehiscence of Trees

“This work is real when it is destroyed.”

                                                                                                                             --shop sign in São Paulo

I wasn’t there to hear them fall,

to prove their movements end in sound,

but the broken trees still scream,

one snapped at the neck

posed in recitative,

an operatic cry against

a flat and unfamiliar sky. 

What are these trees to me,

beyond our trust in root systems

and thickness of trunks made real

by the red earth rudely torn,

articulating mute surprise

drying wordless in the sun? 

The neighbor boy’s kite died by hanging

and dangled out of reach,

kite colors turning, entangling

until their brightness weathered away,

leaving a gray kite skeleton

now easily exhumed,

picking bones off the downed limbs,

fingering the remains.

I am dismembered by the oldest apple tree,

burst at the core, apples lost to eating

where infrastructure of the years marks
here the children learned to climb,

hanging like fruit from its branches.

What were these children to me,

always bursting outward,

and why does the naked interior

of this exposed tree

seem like a forced delivery

from the midwife storm? 

The wood smells sweet in the fire,

or maybe just knowing there were apples once,

pies for the baking, eating them hot

before the crust had time to cool.

 

                                                                        7/2//2013

                                                                        for Duane Davis,

                                                                        scholar and tree cutter.

---

[i] title and theme adapted from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining---the Chiasm,” The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort, Trans. Alphonso Lingis. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) p.130-155

[ii] ibid, p.144

 

 

Monument

What we trace on cobbled streets

like ink patterns, reproduced,

blankets of remembrance muffling shapes, 

these fossil formations, imprints of absence

like museum lives
we tour in whispers:

 

only postcards in a dusty box

gathered by names that are lost

because nothing was written, no stamp, 

only yellowed Niagara still falling

in antique shops we sift like shell pickers

in old buildings carefully kept 

or warehouse ruins and faded signs,

their dim light at night

resembling music, 

sounds lifting like air

when the moon shapes a mountain

cresting clouds blue from the dark. 

We sat in a corner window

with a view of the river

where birds tossed like leaves 

landing in tatters on a monument

done in marble and brick,

scarcely touching before gusting in circles again, 

black in the sky,

flashing silver when they turned.

 

                                                                             Cheryl Emerson

                                                                                                7/1/2013