Such Murmurs

Murmur of wind.
Murmur of war and life
beating like calf-skin drums
in my veins.

My blood, so resembling blood,
flows around the icebergs
left to steadily melt
like poison, like love.

Murmur of promise
and future solitude.  
Am I here or there,
the two-headed train
careening forward, hurling back,
back to lessons insubstantial as vapor,
vulgar footprints followed
without thought or expression,
fruits ripened in the mind, murmurs:

man is not a creature of dust
from mouths dusted in loss
nor one of suffering
from those whose faces have absorbed
enough tears to now wear but sandpaper
nor one of love
from the inexperienced
and those who talk circles
around their hidden truth.







Danube

I.

From here you run,
a fistful of dirt to a dying tree,
tasting of washed socks
left too long on the line.
The sun below opening its hidden door.
The sand raining down from empty skies.

In that the swans avoid you, I hear
your innate stillness, the silence
of a thousand bodies, your eyes
blackened by history.  None were your
conquests.  None your blood.
But you smell of both,
allowing me to swim
your ample inheritance.

Each stroke, my arms strike stone,
cold thousand-eyed alabaster.
My once-powerful legs churn
your sorrow.  I live the moment
between your poetries
and am liberated by the dawns
that have passed you over.

Perhaps the next sun will dry you
to grain or wheat, so exultantly
you can extinguish
this vast world light.

II.

You carry the city I call upon
to replant my roots.  I am grateful
for the way you hush violins
and squeeze between the shadows,
unnoticed.  The green song of air
tooted from the hundred green hills.
The blue song of penitence
beaten into the streets.  The red and gold
banners of daybreak.  The sly vermilion grin
of twilight.  

In your deftness and blindness I huddle,
saturated, a mangy alley cat
or any small animal
wounded by ego, shuddering
at my hands of water.

Touching but my flesh, you cannot crack me.
My master’s hands are stars
I name for the dead and clouds
painting the faces I have been blessed to erase.

But you wash me like a bird’s wings until almost
I am alone.  Like you.  Bypassing
yesterdays, celebrating silence,
testifying to nothing.

O haggard, hallowed river, my greenest envy.
The many names history crowns you
are broken bells.  They will not ring
tomorrow.  Their voice is already crackling.





Reflections

Horrified, I discover my face
rippling like vain algae, the river
always moving and casting new mirrors.
Dense is the space between them,
all those familiar glassy eyes
judging what they too see as reflections
of the real.  Am I a stranger to myself
or a member of this changing family?  
Changing in complexion and age, lines
carved then wiped clean from mouth’s
dark corners, shadows revolving around the eyes
like riderless carousels, each face so close
to my own but imperceptibly warped

as if approaching a large canvass
hanging at gallery’s end.  All works you pass
before the end are years, all years
strokes on white, all whiteness a series
of changes.

What frightens this series of eyes,
afloat in the murky waters of clarity,
is that all are valid, as real as blood
and stone, all canvasses are the one, and finally
between there is no discerning.




Blank Canvass

In the thin attic air infused by the failing
light of day, the carefully arraigned
brushes and pallets and plastic vats boiling with
colors
semi-circle the empty white space
with enough room for the creator to create
her vibrant, splattered world.

Will she nudge a new sea into existence
or whisper the novel concept of mountain
(as novel as all mountains and paintings of
mountains)
upon an unborn flatland
or perhaps will she birth her mother
shrouded in head scarf and distant twilight,
perched beneath sagging bedroom window, face tilted
into the long-awaited concerto of night?

The vacuous rectangle, colorless by nature, waits too
but knows the soon-to-be will find
wings and movement, feet and life, infant joy and the
deepest
solitude, whatever its tone, structure, composition.
All colors are shades of the same.  All existence
(even dreamed existence)
began blank and white.  All things painted
once breathed air or, at least, do now.
A communal air, an embryonic spark, words
like the first ever uttered, tears
like the last notes of the last song.

Dust gathers.  Light dims by the moment.
Eyes open and close and hopefully open again,
if the heart learns to embrace weight and dark
as easy as joy and summer sun.  
The talisman emerges high in the sky
above the unspoiled white, as she dips the first brush,
perhaps red, perhaps blue, knowing both will be used
to capture even a shadow
of the eternally new, lidless moon.





This Me

I.

Which one will I be today
at this very moment?
Writer or miscreant,
deceiver or deceived,
her salvation or usurper?

Each moment I find myself
not where I left me,
my own touch
from a stranger’s hands.
Gone on a sudden voyage
and no longer able
to tell when I have returned.

Even the ever-present double
dissolves in my mirror.

II.

How I covet the single souls
painted by history, with solitary
voices and but two steady hands,
all thin as a page
turned to reveal
the self-same hero.
Deeds harmonized.  Poems homogenous.
Reactions violently predictable.

Even the villains
taste the freedom of one face.
The sinister and the tragic,
both the spirited and crushed
bridled horse.  How I would gladly
deal my constant surprise
for melancholy or instinct.

III.

But now in times of longing,
cold concrete paves my heart.
And when the sun catches
her eye just right
I flavor but cynicism and fear
of future shadow.  One John
carries bottomless water buckets
to the flaming bridge.  Another
hauls gasoline and a comfortable chair.

As John writes out his tenderest heart,
he suffers each word
like physical anguish.  I watch
as he embraces friends
with clenched fists and kisses
his enemy’s cheek.

And, just as often,
it happens quite differently.  
I savor love as a child
dreaming of stars
and lick words from my eyes
and relish those I have let
behind my walls.

Some me is always
in a surreal state of shock.

IV.

I do not understand
this endless series of understudies,
all so far from perfect,
all so far from me.  

Do they circle some core
that I can grip
like a rollicking ocean liner’s railing?
Are they the core,
malleable and ever-changing?
Would that I be one,
not many, and feel my feet
relating to earth.

But I cannot tell which John
writes these strange, inconsistent lines.
Each one vanishes
between my fingers
like a lover’s packed suitcase
leaving me to wonder
if they all know each other
as I know none.
John Williams
Recently receiving his Master of Arts
in Writing, John presently calls both
Boston and Vienna home, and he is
compiling a book of poetry and art,
as well as beginning his first novel.  
John has won the Best Fiction Story
in Voices and 2nd place in the
California State Poetry Society’s
haiku contest.  Other previous
publications include:  
Phantasmagoria, The Alembic, Black
Rock and Sage, Language and
Culture, Red Hawk Review, Blue Fog
Journal, Wild Goose Poetry Review,  
Samizdada, Raving Dove, Collected
Stories, Poetry Motel, Typically
Unusual, The Leaflet, Main Channel
Voices, The Lowell Sun, The Campus
Report, and The International Library
of Poetry.