 |
 |
J. Michael Martinez
THE LADY OF GUADALUPE'S DREAM AND JADE RUIN
After Araki Yasusada’s “Dream and Charcoal”
And she said: does darkness list our erasures and become beautiful?And she said: those I love, I translate into advent and wild foxgrape,
the blind staggers of water.And then she said: the dead will return, narrow gates unlatched.
To which she replied: his body is air written between my hands.
Which is when she carved an arrow upon linden, leaf & chaff.
Which is when the butterflies hatched from her footprint.
Which was how she cut her fingers with seaweed and bitter jewel.
Which was when our martyr became the hour of unsung reeds.
MARRIAGE UNEARTHS THE GARDEN:
Adam's Confession to Eve
Always day. Begin in negative grace. Copper light humming. Corn husked. The outlines Of a broader childhood. Beyond mortality what seeds flowers. Turns opalescent.Towers. In our black habit. To breed memory with understanding. In my love fields rush.
To leaf. Ruins of stamen. Coalesce confession. Our lips glass. In fire. Unsounded threshing.*
Child I am. Say now. The mother’s hair. Say silt. Say locks unlocked. Say the hair black. Air broadening. Say the air. Apprentice the rooster. Herald ashlight.Child you are. Listen fluency & name it. God counting lots. Til winter’s field builds its strange white. Altar inside you. & The day seals you. Childhood bore. Through ransoms of blood.
*
Unspoken waters. Spill the fountain. Lilac’s tendril roots. Pulled by the vestal.
Of their vow. Broken names line. Like supplicants. The virgin’s watermark. Before before.There are distances. Love. I must cross the linings. In other’s dreams the black boundary. Erupts unwilled.
Child the dust. Stains my listening. A dove coos in the stomach. You finish every echo. Praising.
BROKEN CINQUAINS
Rodin to the Danaid
*
Sweet daughter,
bloom
raw the marrow-rose:
your marble
piles gored like quail:
mouth your erosion,
jaws retain in claw
a prince of water—scorn spent,
your torn organs
grown rich in his vast will.
*
Rags flood breath—
all gold less
than her hand—a verdin
building temples, passed as fable.
Come here, act:
thrive
my pet, grace torn pale,
perish my lungs: so wingless from leaves
graved in tumors
of her arrival.
*
Tensed, treason speak broken acts:
myths silencing the tongue,
birth’s
strength grasping shade
with hands unwound
Unsay water,
silt of my breathing; mold
through cadence;
law braids dew,
algae, guilt.
WEDDING DRESS WITHOUT BRIDE
after Peter Callesen’sWedding Dress Without Bride, 2005
Acid free A4 80 paper and gluearmless and hollow
love is this into whitestitched in her own I do, I do
a woman vowless
**over promise
feral branches lope
a calf dressed in buskins
is slaughtered the safekeeping
of the any who
enter her
**
is this most bodyless longing
struggling for mend & bloom
to string
itself into
that please of wait
**
but a dress
whose rupture
is proper essence
not the world—
that unspoken if
**
and would she, if she were,
translate her skin to know
this wild
yetness of sky
and would she,
if not the world,
but a dress
translate if
to I do, I do
in hollow bloom?
- - - - - -
J. Michael Martinez´s writings have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, New American Writing, on NPR, and in The Denver Post. He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize and his collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, and will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2010.
Top