Jellyfish Dreams

The street this morning glows, cool gray and wet.
Wispy blobs of winter fog roll in
like cotton balls pulled from a cabinet.
Windows drip with drops of paraffin;
steel poles run with streaks of iodine
blotching the flaking eggshell outer skin
of paint where a crack grows, a russet vine.
I look through the thick mist that obscures Marin’s
blue hills and the still green strait
as, on floors of needles and dripping ivy,
ravens under the white sheet imitate
a beeping monitor. Where is this? I see
a street and a sterile room. Each image lies
beneath the sheet of fog behind my eyes.

Plop!
Startled birds —
rustle of a snake.



Clear sky
flows across stones —
ripples in the heat.



Rain in the window
drums in the street.
No parade in sight.



Meltwater.
Ice runs,
sets skin on fire.



Seagull dives,
escapes a wave —
a thrash of silver.



Lightning from towers –
cracks
in a glass city.

I could have guessed,
and haven't guessed wrong yet,
that out in West
the sun would set.
 
Stupid as that may seem
to some of you,
the ones who'd dream
it wasn't true
are few.
 
But even for all the certainty
that guess would seem
to have for me
I must confess —
it's still just a guess.
 

You have made impressions;
imprints in the stone,
shells in limestone cliffs
and weathered shale.
 
As you walked beside Devonian seas
ammonites and trilobites
and bivalves, cast into the mud,
resolved into the land:
 
these are the impressions
broken from the hills,
washed again in water,
made to weather time.
 
Wind moves the sand,
water carves the world,
leaving only those impressions,
waiting deep within the Earth.
 

 
Empedocles once thought the eye
emitted beams that lit the world;
the cosmos was a starless sky
of elements these rays unfurled.
His vision can’t account for those
bright specters Isaac Newton saw,
projected on a wall, where rainbows
bounced to hit his retina.

But even ancient theories, long
disproven, sometimes shine a light
on something true. The Greeks were wrong
about the eye, but strangely right
if by to see we mean perceive —
we cast out streams of thought to light
those visions we believe.
 

 
You — you in the coat of gray,
      the dappled gray, the threaded gray,
            whose figure stops, who stops to sway
      in the lavender haze of a winter day;
 
you — you in that threaded coat,
      the coat now dappled a lavender-gray,
            your head arched back to look and see
      the branches of a spreading tree;
 
the crooked branches of a tree,
      a spreading tree, the silhouette branches
            crazed across a field of gray on a winter day,
      across the clouds, the clouds a cool white-silver gray,
            the silhouette branches swaying in strokes of a deep warm gray,
 
the strings of the tree and the clouds and the evening
      pull your head to dance and sway
            with the breeze that dances dappled branches
      in a round, hypnotic way —
 
and you, and I, and the winter sky
      dance in a trance-like reverie,
            as who are you and who am I
      and where is the end of the winter sky
            all blend with the gray and the gray in the gray,
      in a deepening field of gray.
 

 
Recirculating like the winter fog,
currents in the room — cold angels —
kissed our skin with notes of trampled mint.
We were the warmth, the vibrant touch
of radiation in the dark. The scent
of you was every shadow, curve, and angle.
 
As I drew my index finger in a figure
eight across your thigh (infinity —
that figure feels so intimate) you arched
into my hand, and with that pressure let your
eyes close tight — mine, like gimbals, fixed
on your horizon. And we turned to glide
 
through clouds of lavender-black and shale.
Your eyes appeared, naked slits of starlit
specular gleam, the living seconds tensed
and breathing like the spawning fish inhale
the currents of the moon. We pulled against
the rushing linen sheets. Your skin let out
 
aquatic notes, your hair the black Pacific
kelp swept up in heavy tides. You caught
me with your fingers and your legs, and slipped
my heat inside your heat, until ecstatic
waves crashed along our backs, collapsed,
and left us in the thoughtless folds of night.
 

 
 
The jay cocks its eye in the live oak scrub,
a glint of thunderheads
in its tumbled jasper stare,
bounces on the branch,
dives up and plunges
through the gloss-dark leaves,
twists its paint-tipped ailerons
     to stroke the air —
 
 
          I hold my breath and hit the bite
          of Barton Springs, a shivering plunge
          into the amber echo-world
                         beneath —
 
 
Feathers catch the heat-
ripples, trilling
cicada scales
crescendo into double-tongued
               fermatas —
 
 
          My arms pull back the amniotic
          currents, elodea ropes
          of sunk jade feathers
          wave where salamander feather-
          gills move ghostly
                    in the deep —
 
 
The hammered bronze
               water beats —
 
 
          I breach,
          dripping crystal in my hair,
          the underwater bass-thumps
          transmuted into high-harmonic
          syllables as sun-shards
                    glance the surface —
 
 
The jay glides
as the summer breathes
               on new wet skin —
 
 
          and I
 
                         breathe in.
 
 
 
 

 
We use such simple words to weave
   the tapestry of light
into our language. Red. Yellow.
   Green. Blue. Black. White.
 
But what is blue? Did Homer know
   when sailing on a wine-dark sea?
Why did he paint the sky with bronze
   and layer green with honey?
 
The ancient brain is not the new;
   when, with modern eyes, I view
the ocean and the midday sky
   they look, unquestionably, blue.
 
With other simple words, we paint
   the colors that we feel.
Sadness, joy, fear, hate,
   love: all these signs reveal
 
some inner state. But what is love?
   How can we call that one emotion
longing, ecstasy, respect,
   infatuation, and devotion?
 
I grasp with these imperfect pigments,
   try to catch the palette of
experience — and fail. What tint
   can be, unquestionably, love?
 
My blue is not a simple sine,
   nor is my love Euclidean:
no matter how I flatten it,
   my love’s oblique meridian
 
will not lie on a paper map,
   nor nanometers ever be
Pacific waves, a robin’s egg,
   or what a person meant to me.
 
Just as the different shades of blue
   have secondary colors there,
so love can be tinged green with lust
   or dyed in indigo despair
 
and still be love. Love’s many things,
   and though its boundaries aren’t defined
its subtle thread is intricately
   laced throughout the tender mind,
 
intertwining feelings that,
   at first, might seem quite different
within a tapestry of sense
   that weaves around love’s referent.
 
In that tapestry, love cries
   while flying on blue swallow’s wings;
it flowers pink in fruiting trees
   and runs with umber wild things.
 
You’re in it, too, in faded fields
   of tangled thread, a knotted part
(the untrained work of younger hands)
   whose weft still binds my heart.
 
Our love may not have been for years,
   been made, at best, imperfectly,
even at our hyperbolic
   orbits' heated perigee,
 
and cast us both on fast and far
   trajectories to where we are:
you married to the gravity
   of some bright northern star,
 
and me to where I settled, bound
   with two firm feet on loving ground.
But, sometimes — when I look on high —
   I see your color in the sky.
 

 
                Flickering, humming
fluorescent lights are years and years
from violent stars. Palms against
    plastic chambers press
            the monologue
                into awful moments
    of listening, fingers tensed
bent abstractions, forgetting
            that I have eyes.

    Radio static evolves into cells, pulses.
I can faintly tune in to the sea-rush of capillaries.
    I seek for the minutes to Jupiter
        and hear whale songs there.

                What's the difference,
        astronomer? Astrologer?
    Modern depths and distances,
hell and heaven of ancient understanding
    both, far and near emptinesses crawl
uncomprehending chasms that hear
            minds, see echoes ―

Cut the audio.

                Monitors pulse
in sterile clarity, flay sinusoids from vital
        static by soundless analysis.

        Feel cracked lips.
    Touch the keys.
This isn’t that abyss.
 

 
Stars fall
skin bright
with fire
and endless sky

     Such was sung —
     and so I sing
 

 
Your problem’s unconventional,
and seems multidimensional,
but closely viewed, it is, in fact,
a tempest in a tesseract.
A substitution should be tried;
it’s just a cube, once simplified.
Once it's a cube you’re halfway there:
project your problem to a square,
and then your problem, rendered flat,
can probably be left at that.
Not satisfied? You could consign
your problem to a finite line,
reduce it to a single point,
then prove its membership disjoint
from all the sets belonging to
the set of things that trouble you.
Therefore, as you can plainly see,
there is no problem. Q.E.D.

My husband, as he often does,
finds fault in all these algebras.
“Don’t confuse,” he says to me,
“the model with reality.”
But problems, being what they are —
of science, or of some crossed star —
just never seem to be designed
to fit a mathematician's mind.
 

Like a boy from an old storybook
I get lost, and find myself
In solitude along a river shore.
The distant bank is steady,
straight, not a place I can go.
On my shore grows an apple tree.
I rough my way up top
And pluck an apple from its branch.
I feel sorry for the apple, yet
My belly makes strong protests
At this weird morality.
Below, solitude spins with shadows,
Wind-dancing apple branches
Tap at the old orchard trellis.
A far off farmhouse raises up west.
I jump down, trudge the way
Uphill to ask to phone back home.
The apple core lies in the orchard
Alone now, or with lingering shadows.

In the air, there is so much air -
A chasm, hollow, deep.
In the window is a window
Opened just a gap.

Tap a little, tap to feel
Disassociated
From my body, from my finger -
But I'm not better.

If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
Then you'd better go to sleep.
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
Then you'd better go to sleep.

Walking through the seamless void -
The void is filled with leaves -
Experience, a hollow ember,
Fully interpreted.

The spirit moves upon the face -
Rustle in the wind -
The deep is parted, the uncolored sky
Replying, "I am blue, unwound."

If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
Then you'd better go to sleep.
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
Then you'd better go to sleep.

Each step, a tremble, not in fear,
But awe encompasing
My own strange tumbling, to know
What I can't even doubt.

In the air, there is so much air,
A chasm, hollow, deep.
In the window is a window,
Opened just a gap.

If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
Then you'd better go to sleep.

If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -
If you want to wake up - tomorrow -