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Sentinel
Poetry (Online) #36 – November 2005 Online Magazine Monthly…since
December 2002. ISSN 1479-425X
Malgorzata Kitowski
Answering Wallpaper
“Poetically man dwells”
- Hölderlin
I
It takes cool faith to cultivate oblivion.
Aware of warmth, thoughtless flowers rotate
and unfold to face up into a sun they cannot see.
I had a telepathic dream. I told you about
it once.
It is the butter and the fire and the melting.
It is the inspiration and the breath and the word.
It is the sawdust and the sieve and the air.
I haven’t even opened my presence yet.
II
It takes air to cultivate telepathy.
A dream they have not, and cannot see, unfolds my presence.
It is the sun butter-faced. Faithless thought is melted sawdust.
Inspiration rotates and is the breath of
awareness.
Oblivious too, once I even opened up the fire.
It had a cool warmth about it,
and into it I sieved the flowers.
And and and and and I told you the the the the the word.
Timers Run On
If A=1, B=2, C=3…
“timers run on”
= 166
word base: 166
number of
words: 3
re-arrangements: 3
I
Forgetting something does not imply that that something forgot you, just
as closing a door does not eliminate the possibility that something interesting
goes on in the open room on the other side. For, we were in this false room,
close, thread-thought scattered, looking: something happened. Open footsteps, a
threaded time maybe, returning. Nothing mine. Semi-memories and light lucid
dreams brought me no closer. Remember, you stayed, yes, led a strange thread
out, white shadows, love, caves in sack, no dice, carrying them, carrying on
past the closed door into strange out-times, picking up hints, shaping my name,
another mirror room of an unfinished meaning, on past the sentence and door
closing, into another moment like a room – here, is now happening. It is
made only always believe it. Know the cup of words. See space face everywhere,
future petals before us. Thread me. The message is in a number. Were something
to happen to "we" then, like thread fed through caves?
II
Closing. Into another room just as something interesting goes, picking
up my scattered thought in a sack, and carrying past the door. Then, forgetting
to close it, returning, carrying on into another room of past possibility. The
closed door does not imply something strange: always a lucid now. See, no light
is everywhere. A looking thread maybe does not eliminate caves. That thread led
through a number of white petals, that mirror thread, fed on false footsteps.
The strange times made them something threaded out like love-caves. Semi-words
brought me no closer. The message is here, in dreams and cup-space, closing
shadows before us. In the room threadshaping on the other side, know time
forgot you: face the open moment, remember only nothing. Believe dice
future-memories. We mine meaning for hints. "We were in this room",
is it happening? Yes. You happened. Open me out. Were a something to happen,
that something stayed an unfinished sentence, like closing a door on a name.
III
Something “unfinished” happened: scattered thread, we were a
possibility happening. Time does not eliminate space in this mirror, shaping
the past and carrying my love into the caves. Looking closed the door onto
false thought. In that dice-cup, a name threaded footsteps that fed you to
them, into a strange lucid forgetting led me, just an interesting
sentence-thread, closing something: a number. Happen on a closing room-door,
open the door - another room does not imply meaning, only another thread like a
returning moment carrying on, closer now. Like a strange sack of something as
nothing, caves. Something light, past and future goes in it, you see. The
petals of dreams brought me here. Always out-believe before memories. Know the
shadows face us everywhere. Mine for something: time’s thread, close it.
Remember we stayed, forgot. White is in words. No yes no. Maybe, then, through
picking up hints (the semi-message), an out-room is made on the other side.
Were that room open…
Qualia
Sometimes reality is too complex for oral
communication –
Godard
Frozen in a salty equinox of loam and sea,
together with land’s consciousness I counter:
if instead of our memories,
we were made of our forgettings,
if instead of seeing what we did,
we reconstructed what we missed in our blinks,
if instead of secreting what we thought,
we drew a circle and stepped inside?
Teeth lightning weeps bleeding branches.
A dead bird has fallen from the goblet.
I collect phonemes from the dream,
assemble them into a coloured graph.
Cinefilm tram-rattles industrial scapes.
A diagonal hat; red walls; machines.
Eye
The ice is melting and so are the words.
The water is evaporating and so am I.
The air is solidifying and so are the words.
When I cracklesinged my eyelashes with a match,
I broke a bone and wished them to grow.
Hairs grew: shiny, thick and curved,
arcing backwards like a touched body.
The stems extended still, long and longing,
pushing through themselves into a sweeping curtain
I pinned behind my ear with a dried rose,
so in my field of vision I could see the past clearly.
My lashes are sprouting shoots and strange buds:
little welts upon their unblinking branches.
I wear a patch and weave young boughs
into my head, plaiting new leaf with tangled hair.
Eating bread and Stilton,
I tightroped along a vein of mould.
It led me to a dream.
I found
a box of engraved fossils and toffee.
The moonpail needed emptying
in sky clotted with purple marbles and
fur,
and nothing remained of those who live in
monotony.
I rippled when I moved, like a soundwave.
I pluck the round weights and stay indoors
to make good things with my fruit.
I baked an apple charlotte with pastry
I cut myself. You would come to the house of eyes
and I fed you because I wanted you
to eat my apples, eat the gifts of my eyes, eat me.
Only then would you see the truth.
Nobody comes to the house anymore.
Nobody eats my apples, apples
that come from no season, from no planted tree.
I cannot move for the burden of the fruit:
nobody unloads the truths anymore.
Whispers of ripening, decaying apples
frighten me: their low song is too much to contain
for one being. My eyelid has stretched far now,
reaching my knee in a skirt of skin membrane.
Weeping sand, I climb inside the thin cloak of my eyeskin
like a pip, waiting in the eye-hammock darkness
for the apples to stop murmuring semaphore truths,
waiting for the twigs and trunks to entomb me with apple arms.
Apostrophe
Two dolphins were trapped in the harbour this week,
and the gherkinplants in our back garden have grown –
phenomenally. He used miracle-gro compost in their pots.
He measures them twice a day and we all go in the garden
to marvel at nature, or chemicals, I’m not sure which.
We will salt-pickle them in glass jars with a herb
called koper – I think this is dill or fennel. We have carpets
of “dennel” plants, and no gherkinfruit as yet.
I pick blackberries in muscled lanes when I walk home
from the windy corner, arriving with purple fingers.
This amuses me for the rest of the day. It’s a good walk,
over a little bridge under which the steam train coughs,
a prime spot for jumping, round the edge of the golf course,
and past a lavender hedge. I rub buds into my wrists, hard.
There’s a wood nearby with trails leading to the sea.
I want to take you to the cove. We will swim underwater,
skim pebbles, dive off ruins. The rest of the time I’m here,
writing with purple or plain unadulterated fingers. I seek time
‘s doppelganger and the lost alphabets of light, I eat dates
and dried plums, constructing a poetics of the apostrophe.
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