Through a Two-Way Mirror

You, walking away

have never more my love,

be gone, say,

for a while.

Many birds

hinge on

self-sacrifice

and stray,

exile – would it be

and superficially

to love another?

I, with my void

am not,

carrying this weight

more than it is

and wonder, if this is.

    Eliot Cardinaux, January 17th, '11

"The Dust," "The Worry" (Eliot Cardinaux)

  The Dust

The dust stirs

as it stirs,

simple and quiet,

all around me.

The voice

of the speaker,

many miles

away,

I feel that emptiness

surround me,

like a nothingness

I just can’t

ignore, but I don’t want to ask,

are you feeling that way too?

And I like this fear,

this moment held above the earth,

hovering like a note on a violin

before all hell breaks loose.




                        January 13^th, ’11

  The Worry

In this room, like pictures

in a foggy way

it gets too dark to stay

and all the travelers part and ask

which way? 

Did you follow

them so crooked-

ly I ask and watch

the seasons wither voluntarily

the skin of a picture, not a picture

no, but a way that always seems

to go, vulnerable

ability, and ask,

these parting ways

it seems are more than laughing

where the meaning strays?




                        January 16^th, ’11

A Swarm of Bees (Eliot Cardinaux)

  A swarm of bees

It becomes an anomaly
like Hanny's Voorwerp,
this twisting rope of gas
or tidal tail,

the theorist, or other-
wise, who becomes
and twists its tale
is now the light behind.

The quasar too
has much its part
in this greater mouth
universe

which swallows
it or simply hums,
like that tune that ears
make up, from parts of  
   what is whole.

And God, how small am I
to be smaller still
encapsulated
by an ear

who's often heard
the parts of this anatomy
that trail as words
still lit by light

but older
having traveled
and stood still
like honey in a clouded
   glass.


                        January 15^th, ’11

A Vision (Eliot Cardinaux)

  A Vision

That the world is cold,
simply put, I can endure,
but that is not so simple;
fortune, fortune, away,
fate, fate –

melancholy fire,
disentangle these veins
grown thin with time,
disperse these aching limbs in motion –

I am not a foul man,
reaching for the wicked parts of men,
dust that shudders,
settle to the floor;

this ship flying flagrant into night’s eye,
the midnight sun, grows bright, too bright for me to gaze upon.
And none of this will cave
into the sea as ice which dulls

and were it not
what spectacle would haunt this night?
(O galleon of treasures rotten, sunk
amongst the weirdest creatures of the sea.)

                         
                             January 14^th, ’11

For Tuscon

  For Tuscon

Beyond opposites they called it
and he knew,
right away the bluebirds flew.

And in that man he saw a man,
a man! Nothing he would ever do
come crawling up and round
a stick he carried in his hand.

And I looked in his eyes
and felt that evil in my bones.
And I looked at him just rubbing his chin
like a man just contemplating

alligator skin.
And I've seen him walk,
there on the T.V.,
maybe in Zimbabwe, or in any other place

they do that to
one another,
he just walk away and wonder,
"how's it in a man to do

what I seen was in that man to do?
In a man,
in a man,"
He clench his teeth and gone.


                         











Eliot Cardinaux, January 10th, '10

Two old poems (Eliot Cardinaux)

  I will leave my life by the heart of the sea

I will leave my life by the heart of the sea

for the shoulders of thieves,

for an extinguishing star,

for my soul’s loose skin.

I will find it again in the soul of wine

for America’s sleep,

for a soldier’s happiness,

for a fugitive justice.

We were scattered here

like magnolia petals,

from a garden of movement

to a prison of stars.

Our rivers have been poisoned

with usury’s kiss.

A discarded rose

lays in the road

like a dead dove,

like an apple in a broken wrist.

We may abandon this place

where chains hang loose

from the mouths of gutted cars,

abandon it to a dream of brown and blue,

but rust will fall

from a butterfly’s wings

and another wasteland

will open in our lives,

for our rivers have been poisoned

with usury’s kiss.

We were scattered here

like abandoned children

on empty trains.

A discarded greeting

lays in the road

like a dead animal,

like a rusted face

from another wasteland,

for our rivers have been poisoned

with usury’s kiss.

And I will leave my life by the heart of the sea

            for a wolfhound’s feast

            for a soul’s madness

            for a lonely woman

on abandoned train tracks

like a memory that haunts the echo of today.

Amherst, October 26^th, 2009

  I will open the orange trees of my blood

I will open the orange trees of my blood

to the sea, to the rocks, and forget.

I will find a cave by the sea to remember,

to awaken my longing again

in the rocks and in the spume.

Here, at the confluence of two rivers,

I will view my desolation,

my desolation that reaches to the stars,

and asks me to remain.

              Amherst, October 24^th, 2009

"Fast" (Eliot Cardinaux)

  Fast

An impression of pleasing

curved mother’s glasses' rim

to weight soon indelectable,

while impressions unfold

from a moving eye,

in a such great wait

never were there

more presence of opulation,

fantastic beyond all centered out

from in, is passion’s light

weightless formless birth.

                        December 27^th, ’10


Reading with Jeremy Starpoli (trombone)
http://bsa-music.blogspot.com/2011/01/fast-eliot-cardinaux-jeremy-starpoli.html