poetry.

MUST WE FORGET

Our skulls—magic
A love letter we must compose before the
Great white waft of snow- overtakes us
It’s made of visions—

Fancy-flashed dancers at midnight with wine painted lips and
An imagination to drive, even a saint to sin, a fatal word
It says love while I hear a million songs tonight for you.
Dedicate them until we ride out the darkness, our madness
Singing for supper and waiting out as the dog gets his day—

Which is to say
Not ours
The one time inflicts upon us
Sun up to
Sun down
And again and again we pray
From out of our houses a shinier ship beckons
Us to sail out into the swarmy seas
Without a nickel to our names.

Imagine we are in a boat with a wind
Intercepting our love-filled glances, I
Finger the buttonhole on your jacket asking

Your name?
Tell me the city from which you came?
Here are a dozen dandelions and two bits of ocean glass-smooth
I put them in palm
I say
Tell me your name
Before
Before forget—
But forget we must, our names, my own to know yours
Then forget again.

We live so many times until it’s all
Earth above and
Earth below

Until we make to air our bones.

LOVE IN SEVEN PARTS

i.
we went to the sea last week, middle of winter, sand feeling the way snow would if we had any. everything crisp. shells, bits of paper blowing, broken bottles, rocks that shone through the pitch of night with glass trapped in between sediments. we went out here with a paper bag full of forgetting and waited until low tide, when we could walk halfway out with our flashlights, the ones that made our faces blue (or was that the cold?) and tried turning our memories into fish food.

ii.
you tried to ground yourself in me but it didn't work.

iii.
too many pockets full of hot air, a vivid dream of a train wreck with no survivors, only a shoe high heeled and pointy toed black patent, a conductors cap, and a record player lying on the tracks.

iv.
nina simone's "my funny valentine"

v.
was it you or she?

vi.
and when the ice melts, and it always does doesn't it? we are still standing stark still on a sandbar out at piney point, baby yet to be born and tanks all around us like some mystery solved miraculously by technological disasters.

vii.
disaster. noun. a sudden event, such as an accident or catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life. a failure. the unfortunate consequence.

FANCY DANCING AT THE TEA PARTIES OF MY BIRTH

The lines we rehearse + re-do
in bedroom lights with all the world around us
really right outside blinds,
makes for an interesting way to discover yourself,
a stranger to yr own body.
Color changed + a voice sustain-ing
the true blue confidence of
50,000 years degeneration.

A summer’s end comes in, and we can barely recognize
the repercussions of change into autumn.
Lines of sleep awake from under our eyes again.
And we are never fully alive or dead in this season.

Leaves peel off the trees with distain.
And I realize I am not in love quite yet.
Only an idea that becomes manifest
when I see out of the corner of my third eye.

The vision is the vision of a dream.
We fly or bide time, spinning plates
and you say to me some mad-hatter madness in between chagrin.
About how we will never be able to fully regain understanding
of our place in the world as our mothers’ told it to us,
half groan, half whisper or half sigh of relief when we were being born.

About how we can never fully comprehend,
the place of the place of where we once were,
which was also the place where everything began.

© 2009 James Shultis. All Rights Reserved.