|
Rainflowers.org/home.html Home
News / Events!
Featured Poetry
Yahoo Events Calendar
How To Contact Us
Leave Us Feedback
About Us
Arts Resources / Links
Delta College Writers' Guild
Sun Shadow Mountain Anthology
Poet’s Espresso Newsletter
Visionaries Do The imPossible
Mable “Jimi” Choice
David Humphreys
Camille Norton
Marie J. Ross
Paula Sheil
Melanie Sievers
Sotere Torregian
About The Aertherial Movement
Critique Ideas
Audio Playlist
Donald’s Bio
Donald’s Resume
Darwin’s Children Anthology
Naked Poetry Anthology
Midnight Dance / Pathos Anthology
|
|
Paula Sheil
GAP
By Paula Sheil (previously unpublished)
She wears leather. Drives Trixie hot. We pool through the city. North Beach bookstores and Chinese double parking for sandalwood soap. The police call out, hey ‑ jaywalk against face/blind tourists. Boxes of bitter melon. Sizzling duck. Tar. A brass band funeral and black limo hearses.
Her roses unfold in sunrise. Post boy pictures, puttanesca sauce and cabernet. Her spiced nails, wine lips and white cotton T-shirt slipped over a black bra. The gray cat. Easy. My brain is pulp. How could my brain function orderly under these great demands? Huddled on the pounding shore. Beat down, turning and rolling its fragile mass over and over. Laughing.
Because no thought can find its way into the context that will make it important to any other thought. And so they are. Flashes of impulse. The time for this double action of electric love between sky & earth is less than 1/10th of a second, but the jolt packs 30 million volts. Impassive afterthought.
Captured and filed, one per cell, I suppose in some horrific viscosity. A mad operator wheels a stool back and forth endlessly plugging jacks into open channels, struggling to make a connection. It is hopeless. She buys two wooden chairs with red vinyl seats. She buys silver boxes. One of the many bodies of the solar system that apparently consists of loosely aggregated meteoritic material.
Many calls come in, one after another. No one can talk. Words stream through the wires. There are no conversations. Speech, but no answers. Endless calls, but no echo. The other is lost. Side-by-side irretrievably lost, one thought cannot connect to its other. And the other remains likewise. Idle.
This process could be building a wall, one stone at a time, if this were a functional doing. Something useful. But I cannot remember why I wanted a wall ‑ to protect myself? Separate. Keep her out? It matters not. One side of the wall has definition. Stay inside.
But this wall, stone by stone (like a thought becoming a shared signifier...we agreed...) would have a purpose. Would have a foundation. Utterance. Echoing other. There would have been grounds. A starting point and a line either of us would have had to cross. Making a point. To calculate the distance between.
I have clay feet. Yet, comfortable in this beginning place. A Great Wall could reach the sun. Berlin, but between us. Only at the point of contact and disclosure of distance would it matter. One brick.
Don't dig, or kiss or say my name. Thoughts have entered by moody pores, at the base of each rooted hair, making it difficult to breathe. It is if she entered, opening me when I had not known the opening existed and filled the gap, even as I recognized the gap to exist.
Recognizing the space I had within me that exists to be filled. And as she swallowed space, pushing through my body, opening space and filling it at the same time, it seemed charged with a magnetic energy that caused St. Vitus dance, my nerves like iron filings, frantic to align to true north, or any direction that would lead to comfort and certainty. So how can it be that being filled with thoughts can be so unsettling? Not at all like the weight of dirt in an open grave, not like water rushing through a gold sluice, not like vanilla.
There is no comfort in transformation, no joy in movement, no identity in the mathematical precision of my engineered accumulations. Thoughts race through me, leaving traces of expectation. I had waited. I wanted patiently. And arrived like a BART train, but did not stop. The thoughts no. They did not. Sped by. And yet included me in the rushing past / my presence allowing the train to pass, to say it had passed. Otherwise, the journey, too, futile as my stationary hope.
There is no remedy for deluded abscission. These thoughts express desire and dread of occultation. Binary opposition. Within which I am. Without which, the other struggles to possess. Vibrating in all directions perpendicular to the direction of travel.
Twelve Free Peaches
Or Eat This Poem
By Paula Sheil (previously unpublished)
Each is potential pie. A wedge soft,
Pliable. Like mind. Made from scratch.
My hands harvest
A tree, searching deep
Within. Each stone fruit opens
Wider expectations.
Meal in a globe. The round
Fullness of satiation. Almost.
More. Peaches. Summer. Heat.
Encased in fuzz and sticky –
Neither obstacles to desire.
The Woman Warrior, by Paula Sheil, was reworked and performed in 2006 with Lisa Rie and Tamara Little at the Artists Embassy International Poetry and Dance Festival at Legion Park in San Francisco.
The woman warrior is a welder. You are waiting. The bus has passed you. You didn’t have the correct change. You failed the test. There were no blanks to fill in and you missed the dead-
line. PAUSE. The woman warrior is no one you know. She
is a dream ghost. An unhappy accident. There are traffic jams
just beyond the rooftops, on streets you cannot see.
The bus you should have taken is overturned.
There are bodies in the street, piling up like
question marks. Your test scores prevent
you from entering college. The college
burns to the ground. The woman
warrior is your sister sneaking
your underwear.
© COPYRIGHT 2007 ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
|
|
