Tag: writing

By Mark Katrinak

Vacancies

The years have passed and yet particulars
remain on premises: her footsteps on the stairs,
the shape of questions marks her cigarettes’
thin smoke configured in the haunting air—,
her purple purse with creases and the sheets’
perfumery impede my memory.
I’d wish it’d rain already, bloated clouds
overcompensating gray, rooming past
their stay, behind on rent and hanging on
to hail and other overcast detail…
not why she left but why she came and signed
her name upon the register. I think
it was herself she so wanted to know.

It idled like a latent earthquake, deep
beneath her crust, without a notice strike,
take hold of title, take her life, the sun
going about its business, diffident,
as casual as Icarus the day
he fled from Crete. And something fired one
can’t possibly explain, the woman now
a stranger, not his wife, her presence otherwise
that honored one’s attention like a rose
in faultless light, an Albuquerque dusk.
Now something’s not quite right. Dogs bark all night.
Uncertainties of screaming in the sky;
alarms we cannot silence in this tenement.

Complexion of the roses reminiscent
of just-ripened peaches, sunsets in Santa Fe:
softened orange with yellows less intense.
This is the day that red is uninvited,
that navy kindly asked to stay away.
Let farmers bring their apricots and ask
twilight to leave a scene of nectarines.
We tire of the bright intensity,
the midnight flights assigned to indigo,
the politicians siding with insanity.
As pretty as the peachy roses are
we will not get away with peachiness;
we cannot drink the emperor’s rosé.

She isn’t who she thought she was. The light
investigates the glower on her face;
her hours leave her passion paralyzed.
She’s like a candle wanting exit from its flame,
a mountain cursing wind and stones, a sea
refusing breaks along a sandy shore.
Where she resides she cannot find a butterfly
probing flowers, fluttering here and there
in nectarous adventures.
What occurred?
What happened by the afternoon she changed?
Who bent the metal discs of tambourines
to bring discordant rhythm to her streets?
The evening’s coming to a close. Her light,
that light she had, can’t find a place to land.

The desert’s true to snakes, left alone stones,
its aridness, executor of rules,
snakes never slithering across the sand
without a consequence a mile ahead,
an aftermath suspended in the barrenness,
the fineness of the cacti needles. Moon
light’s everywhere out here. The shade
is trickier amongst the wind-blown brush,
a darker navigation for Stygian
adventurers. Jack rabbits burst from scene
to hidden scene, no mortal point of view’s
completely clean. The eyes of midnight’s mice
momentarily mirror sudden light.

Mind breaks under the pressured weight of it—
the problems seem to auto-populate
like water running through a zig-zagged crack,
that when the levee breaks the water finds
and floods the first locus that it can go
as heartbreak spread to other broken hearts
and vacancies. The realization then
the empty creeks one has, the stony beds
with all the purplish weeds, interstices
the deviled darkness wishes to invade.
But mind can lighten load like kites let go,
surrendered to the wind, the length of harmless string
following it mile after endless mile.

A feline’s piercing hot, persistent screams
drown out pronouncements of the morning birds;
the trucking highway traffic—weight of it,
as is the world’s been rigged and can’t be rid
of it, ambient architecture for the ear—
is hauling noisily to termini;
and someone’s foul play on a dead-end street,
instigated while you were miles away,
a victim straining for the missing keys,
draws doubt, half-circles where you work and live.
All these and still there’s possibility
of peace outside the quietness of trees,
the infant’s welcoming of mother’s breast.

The flapping shadow passing laterally
across the patio as sleek or sleeker as
the bird itself, the shadow quickly lost
amongst the oleanders, cypresses,
a bird without obstructions so intent
on destinations postured in the vanishing.
Significant are speechless incidents,
any random afternoon stripped of sound,
the shadows dumb although they overhear
intentions governed by the wrong and pass
the knowledge on, though each recipient
is often unaware and goes about the day
soaked thoroughly in thought, an errand to be run.

Your shepherd stares attentively at you
going about the room, a look that’s more
of consequence than bark, as understanding’s annexed
between us two when nothing’s said, a wordlessness
moving relationship further ahead
than what was thought possible, flying birds
uncoupled from their shadows, shadows not
as minimized at noon with objects off
the ground, the darkness not as paralyzed.
So if we’re close enough our shadows merge,
and shepherds fall asleep to enter dreams,
cats gazing through the windows settling
to calm as calm as a Santa Féan dusk.

This silence then a matrimony, mix
of birds and turtles, rituals of light
and dark and absences of April wind,
pine needles falling to the forest floor,
togetherness of trees a common law.
The quietness is non-denominational,
unadvertised, itself its own secured
persuasion where the spirit gets things done
and little disagreements make amends
between each spurt of needles, aspen leaves,
in light that falls through unattended openings.
No invitations have been sent. Too much
of noise, too much of life will get you here.

Perhaps a haiku’s apropos, but no
more, quietness alone says more with less.
The serpent’s proven uninvited speech
is reason for concern, a new religion
and Cain’s dismissal. Broken brooms, waste words,
give wordlessness a chance so desperate
the situation has become. With just a rib
lovelier loveliness was formed. With just
a sentence or a phrase we’d have enough
to live on. That six days necessitated rest,
a punctuation and a question mark,
is all the evidence one needs. Adam,
though, alone, was caught talking to himself.

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