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Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
Let me tell you a love story. Starts with eyeliner & burnt coffee under a sunstone moon. Cracked lips on your chest, one eye under a frozen torrent of hair and the other held beneath a blade-thin bed of sky dancing the horizon. You're built like six-o-clock and it's way past midnight. You're the sweet taste of song: sets off a snowfall in my organs: a heatless walk that's a prelude to real heat: a cryogenic cold that burns. The tympanic heart flees the fresh vision of cymbals and orbits a smoky bass bruising the air. She's caught in the smoke: the weaving of smoke: the smoke. Whispers of a lost current fill my empty chest and I promised I'd never leave the scent of thunder ringing between my eyes without her. Saw her face in every woman I've ever known before or since & never tilt-touched the steel-brushed belly of sky the same way again. This life takes things. In the night. When you're alone. Prayed my back would finally shudder into wings. Prayed to the moon hung up by the nape of its neck. God doesn't speak here. He certainly didn't hear me. From there the scene slides into a fracture. Your face slipped from my hands and fell from the sky, atomized into the infinite cycling dynamo. Every blink tattoos your face in red on the undersides of my eyelids. One line of talc and you dance my spine clean as a cool spring buried a mile deep in the chest. Erases everything
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May/12/2014, 6:04 pm
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Re: Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
Hi JR,
For me this describes a memory of first love,
primal passion/longing and a sense of transience or futility. I hope my take is not too literal--trying to hard to make sense rather than simply experience the sense of it. I'm impressed by how it avoids sentimentality.
"Prayed to the moon hung by the nape of its
neck." No, not sentimental.
best,
Chris
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May/14/2014, 11:04 am
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Re: Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
Thanks Chris for the read! Yeah, it's part of a longer work and I should've posted that first. But you've zoned in on the salient parts of this.
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May/14/2014, 11:14 am
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Re: Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
I think what makes the prose poem work for me is its lyrical voice, its I/Thou voice.
Tere
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Oct/18/2014, 2:24 pm
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Re: Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
JR, In the past I had trouble reading, grasping, absorbing some of your poetry, but here it seemed to work very well. There was some really excellent writing here -- as there probably always has been. Particularly like the waiting for my back to shudder wings, and how her face slipped from his hands. Very good, very powerful lines. Could use a bit more consistency, but still very good. Zak
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Feb/27/2015, 1:45 pm
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Re: Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
J---way too much poem type stuff, too little feeling.
clunky to the max:
...sets off a snowfall in my organs:
...a cryogenic cold that burns. The tympanic heart flees...
...the fresh vision of cymbals and orbits a smoky bass bruising the air.
yipes.
love or a weather report, maybe a vocabulary test.
by contrast, here's gold:
"Prayed to the moon hung by the nape of its
neck."
here is DONALD HALL:
I pace beside weeds
and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge
where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots.
"Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down."
Your peonies lean their vast heads westward
as if they might topple. Some topple.
and when his wife dies:
...A sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rise from her open mouth.
He watched her chest go still.
With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.
there is love, no drama. strive for that honesty with your language which you now barely discipline.
bernie
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Mar/16/2015, 5:03 pm
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Re: Catalina Mountains Under a Blood Moon
This life takes things. In the night.
JR, this is very nice. Someone on the forums called a poem a mood piece once. If so, then this is it. I think the idea, and here i mean the Idea with the I in it, the closest approximation here the title and the first welcoming line (and I would like to throw in the line I quoted somewhere there), can only be actualized in a set of symbols that operate on the timescale of msytery and love. The imagery here contracts rather than expands. Everything is symbolic, but most importantly the body itself is a symbol holding up a mirror to the worlding world. The mirror is concave, hollowed out, shaped by touch as well as light. What the poem does is extract movement out of familiar situations (snorting a line) and delivers them over to timescales and spaces where we can breathe easier. There is love and there is death feeding off each other.
A strange place.
Last edited by arkava, Mar/24/2015, 6:36 am
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Mar/24/2015, 5:18 am
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