My last

...post. And you'll be surprised to see it really has nothing to do with Yves, although I was trying--the poem just didn't conform. It's been a pleasure writing/working with everyone again in MayDay--I've found the experience fantastic. I hope people share the good news on any excitement involving the poetry. Thank you for your feedback/thoughts on my poems and good luck to everyone in everything.




SPEAKING ILL OF THE DEAD

1.

It’s a misread, an accident
that should have read “will”

the mistake of an aging single
aunt, a spinster they wrongly used

to say, as she speaks her living
into the tape recorder found

at a flea market for a dollar.
She will eventually hire someone

to revive her wishes, a friend’s
daughter’s boyfriend, the wanna-be

director, to film what she is unable
to figure out, her testament

to the process knowing full well
this isn’t the academy awards

nor is it high art (perhaps
in some French foreign

abstract way), but she wears
her store-bought blue

while posing on satin sheets
the bed a staleness

of occasion tightly bound
by the bone-bumped wrist

that grazes the pillow
of what she wills—

which is nothing
to the unseen, always ungrateful

family, and everything
to her neighbour.




2.

The neighbour knows
nothing about the aunt

except the laundry aired
daily on the rusted metal tree

the inside out hanging in long
underwear, the black gartered

slip, finely patterned cotton
dresses tracking days beside

pale silk stockings unsnagged
by any rough-palmed hand—

and rows of bras hold
only each other, silently sway

whipped by wind’s weekly
worry and high-waisted

hopes pinned in the past’s
determination to endure.



3.

Sometimes we all get the wrong
idea. A cloud that curls

in front of our eyes, the sold sign
hammered in before the sale. The white

wake widening before we notice
what we leave behind. And mis-

understanding the aunt asks, what will
save us?

Last Friday in May

A Leap into the Void

It’s only that our lives
are busy, our hands
plunged in painted

portraits, portions
portioned by
sky’s middle, parallel

pasts, our fingers full
in fact so much so
that we forget

to be thankful for
such finely
featured faces.

Yves Eyes

Yesterday night, Wednesday, we went into an abstract café… the abstractionists were there. They are easy to recognize because they give off an atmosphere of abstract painting, plus you see their paintings in their eyes. Maybe I’m delirious, but I have the impression I see things like that. In any event, we sat down with them. Then we began speaking of the book Yves Peintures. Later, I went to get it from the car and I laid it down on the table. At the very first few pages the abstractionists’ eyes began to change. Their eyes lit up and in the depths, pure, beautiful single colors appeared.

Paris newspaper, dated January 13, 1955






What did I know? At the time
I was certain that Yves eyes

were brown, not earth’s honeyed hue
exposed by wind, or the chocolate

of cocoa, or blurred like weakened
coffee, but a tender doubled tint—

morning’s shady past slowly
edged in dew’s damp linens,

the shyness of water’s soft fall,
light’s luminal glance

as day’s electricity turned first
on then off. Isn’t absence

what is most real? Someone
dreams a beginning, the impossible

burst of orange— one framed
wooden window. The sky

beyond is not simply scarred by birds,
or cumbersome clouds

seam-ripped by motorized machines
but faked by fingers that study

the blue. And blue,
someone says, is the great trick—

a kind of universal masturbation,
where the hand is always eager

to grasp what it sees.

The Fundamentalist

Decides today he doesn’t want to be
a painter, raises his salon-blackened brows

to the ceiling’s lumbered frame,
thickens his canvas with water,

while judo-trained knees muscle-
crunch complaints about the foot’s

certain speed when he rushes to draw
a torch from the closet

filled with tobacco tucked in tins—
(in 365 days he smokes

so much that the lip-
dropped ash is enough

to build an Eiffel Tower,
or two). He understands fire

makes the body suffer. The flame
aimed at the morning’s

passing attempt of work,
seared hours singed simply

by the tense tilting
hand. And the sun’s surface

is not nearly as warm as a painter’s
forehead when he’s thinking.

And now for something completely different

...or not. This is a day late, not that I'm losing momentum, but that I haven't felt much like a writer. Like the other long one, I'm sure this isn't ready for other eyes yet, but I'm ready for comments. For those with no Klein experience, it's based on the series of paintings called "Anthropometries". I will hopefully get to some comments on everyone's poetry tomorrow.



Anthropoemetry

1.

He said the routine
is simple as swimming
asked if I knew how
told me I could
breast-stroke in International Klein
Blue’s shallow ocean
where the wave’s edge drifts
in audience-eyed shores
and the moon is usually full
of the sky.


2.

He said touch creates a sense—
a vision. Last night I dreamed
he was coarse-canvas, palms
flattened to my hips, thighs lined
with yes.


3.

He said there is comfort
in performance. Yves Klein—
the ringmaster at a circus
dressed in a dark suit
waves white gloves while he conducts
three women’s bodies and limbs. I stretch
myself onto a painted portion of the floor
skim skin in wetness, the thick
oily crawl, bristles bruising
nipples. And then I think
maybe someone notices
the slight belly-bulge
under my own hands
the smoothness
as they slide up and over
a thick-caged heart’s
impatient sound, the thumping
dull then drowned
by the Monotone Symphony’s
muffled score.

4.

He said the body always
comes clean. Later I am
alone to a steady drip
the empty bathtub
tinged blue. I lean
my chest over the sink,
press my hand to the steam-
fogged mirror and wipe.

Yves and Andy

Perhaps you’ve heard the story
before. Yves says

he’s not fond of canned soup
prefers bistro to beast, sips red

wine at room temperature, thinks
car crashes are best

avoided, stages words that worm
past Andy’s rose-coloured glasses

until he snaps like a blue roller-blind
in a square window—

casts a can from his intricately
inched demonstration,

flattens the cigarette, strategically
sloped for an entire year,

from Yves lip. And once
the pissing match starts,

without wind’s wetting help,
they two-step closer to an artist’s

angry duel: rock, paper, scissors.
The parable being

not how fair you fight
but never leaning in to the hot air

of heart-heavy hands
when they both pick scissors.

Yves Klein’s Trash

is clichéd—treasures I salvage
early one morning, flea marketed
fantasies I find in green
monochromatic plastic,

once famous blue
pitched in polychromatic
fashion. What is leftover

wasted like underwear, another
pair of Klein’s found tucked
under the bed at a new apartment
then properly chucked.

But you were always unique—
your roll-your-own roughness
a Frenchman’s foreign maleness,

those butts unfiltered in ash-trays
littering the rough-smoked museum
of facts, the undeniably erotic
images my fingers reach for

in automation, the desire
to own something of the past,
like the bird that builds a nest

from garbage on the metal ledge
of a don’t walk light,
the red blinking sign half blocked
by twigs and what’s left

of life’s little bits balled in to strings.
And after I’m done my raid
the air reeks of refuse,

bag-slapped by wind’s palm
my own words turn colour-
blind, the most abstract
junk of all.

I think

...that this isn't quite ready to share, so I'm sharing it. Perhaps another's brain will work better than mine today. I had some trouble with formatting--it took awhile to figure out the line break stuff and I think I've ended up with a different font.

The Blue Revolution

“blue recalls, if anything, the sea and the sky,
the most abstract elements of touchable
and visible nature” Yves Klein


1

Klein knew it was not just staged
squares of IKB so much as the white
      walls behind that sets the mind’s
      placement of scene, and how it is not
presence that orchestrates an endless heart,
one single note continually performed

but absence that eternally holds us in place
and time. Maybe the wind
     works the same, presses in to ample
     open spaces, yet hides some nights behind
horizon’s co-ordinated curtain, softly snags
us in frames half filled with prairie then sky.




2.

Tonight I stroll the farmyard lane —
frogs and tadpoles long crooning,
     coyotes echoed bass
     in a nearby field. The unwavering
sound deafens a nephew’s
grinding truck as he follows me

in the dirt, his easy growl
assuming the role of motor
    as he screeches to a halt beside me.
    We stop in windless dusk
toss rocks at willows woven in water,
listen to another creature whoop

more vocals from reedy roots.
The dog dives at the muddied surface
     shatters an evening choir cloaked by stems
     and suddenly I wish I could sink
up to my knees, catch and hold frogs
and toads and tadpoles, keep

a year’s past uncertainties in glass
mason jars, confine disappointment as creatures
    rescued from a stationary pond
    hours siphoned in to the clear
jar, each tiny second examined
under secured scrutiny then quietly set free.




3.

Wind’s cease-fire stages each scene.
My own performance, the year’s shawl
    wrapped lightly around my shoulders, corners
    loosened by rehearsals. In the wind’s absence
I measure and re-measure the fit—
each day’s rough fabric against white shoulders.

Without the wind—what are we? Smooth
aluminium siding sidled next to each other.
    Neighbours nudged by blind fingers.
    The wind moves us, draws us in
dark ink, pushes us forward. Without it
we are silent, uninhabited blue.

More about the wind

Like Yves Klein I'm becoming obsessed with one element: the wind. Of course, it's hard not to these days. I wrote this one yesterday, but because of laptop woes, I was unable to retrieve it until today.



The world’s most challenging puzzle


recoils from winter
urinates umbilical
strings of the nothing
we are in its wake.
And who’s to say
what’s on its mind
other than procreation.
Impersonation.
Impregnation.
More hot air
than fresh breath
it balloons the belly—
punctures imagination’s
sponge, dimples
the mind’s continuous
banding. The wind
reattaches us
annually to a land
sand-banked by dirt-
devils, our own
memory’s hills
mounded each May.

Who has patented the wind

The wind isn’t something
to hang around lightly.
Last night’s fury hair-raised—

a paper-eater chewing a mouthful,
the garbage picker rustled by an alley bin,
one lid’s nervous quake—

some ordinary organism yelling
“Don’t let it in!” But my bedroom
window thinks better, moans

with delight as finger’s scurry
the full-breeze flapped, cotton’s
fringed fling, the home’s homely bones

squared in an eye-glassed gape.
Yet there’s something
artful in the wind’s stuttering

determination, the day’s lip
buckled irregular-blue, every tree
bristled by the weathered

vane’s attempt to paint and sell
each of its trademarked frames
the same.

It's a-MAY-thing!

Hello--

here's my start to the May Day explosion of verse. My brief intro: I'm a Regina writer that leans too far in to the centre, laments the loss of sleep, lisps in the wind while walking, lingers in grocery stores, lounges on freshly mowed lawns, and is lucky enough to take part in writing a poem, probably every other day, for the month of May.

I like the notion of themes so as not to confuse anyone, my theme this year is "After Yves Klein" .


Dear Y

This is the letter I start
late one night after drinking
too much gin.

The unopened voice
splashed and splattered
within paint-can tin.


Dear Y

This is the letter that starts
again to speak all things

to say I need
late one night
after drinking. This—

letter brushes the red coat’s
pocketed past.


Dear Y

This is the letter that undresses
what it would, addresses
what it should—

bristles thin plumes, mottles
motivation’s scent
but remains unsent

word’s wetness, the paper’s
piece not yet dry.


Dear Y

This is the letter that starts
again and again.



Dear Y

This is the letter
that says not square

burglarizes sky with tri-
angular arms

one mass pillar-pushed—
resemblance stolen
from a post.


Dear Y

This letter says things I sought
to speak late one night,
but never said—

a lick in memory’s inserted
fold, the enveloped eye
enclosed.


Dear Y

This letter is a letter’s
pretense receding.

Past and distance. Some far
away inkblot dispatched.


Dear Y

This letter is our present
acting out—
pretense we’re passing by.


Dear Y

This letter I write
late one night after drinking
too much gin—

why’s sun-roofed
performance uprooted.