You are a tragically distilled moment

you are a tragically distilled moment.  one that cannot be repeated, except in the still picture of memory but memory has no duration.   i wear a suit monogrammed with declarations, i have!, i will!, i can! i am!     And you?   you are a score  and when played the rain turns into birds that never hit the earth.  everything is so dry.  the ground like a parched mouth calls your name, as wild fires continue to burn in the hills above los angeles  and answered prayers mislead children down wrong way streets.

A dark voodoo rises like steam from an old sewer grate,  It plays a snare drum to your steps.   You are overtaken by the late running elevated train, all the passengers faces pressed against the windows looking at you.  Not one of them waves and this makes you want to write to forgotten friends and tell them about the time that “we did this or that.”  You soon forget, you have a knack of closing doors without any sound. 

2010
01/19
CATEGORY
poem
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She rises from the ashes…

She rises from the ashes and feels more like a chimney than a phoenix.  The flight was late from the other side of night but this doesn’t deter her.  She rises from the bottom of the escalator and he is not there to meet her.  She walks like a man who has just killed his brother, like gravity has increased exponentially.  Atlas takes pity on her and tilts the world just so.   Propulsion.  She moves in calculated ways to keep the sun rising each morning, her daughter being grateful puts petals over her eyes as she sleeps, to give her dreams of solutions to algebraic equations in the shapes of a houses.  Here we are.    Times like this can bring you to a point of stillness,  a moment of distilled stillness.  The earth stops moving under our feet and the volcanoes are also still and filled with sleeping. What are they dreaming of?   It isn’t easy to find this moment in the tumult of so much noise. Motorcars, jet aircraft, so many voices, the drunkenness that surrounds us. Shhh  can you hear the moon laugh a little giggle as we walk in the desert night.  The stars are also whispering to us, telling us to let go.  All this grasping.  I once he met a man who had no hands, I felt pity for him, and didn’t realize how happy he was.  I wish this desert sand was a sea and I could lay down in a boat with my dreams and float.  I would lay back and stare at the clouds and dream that I was flying.  There would be no falling.

2010
01/07
CATEGORY
american poet
chris leibow
found poem
love
poem
poetry
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You are looking into a room…

You are looking into a room.  This is a room you have never been in.  It is an empty room as far as you can tell.  There are walls, windows, doors, floor, and ceiling.  Some might call it a box.  The light from out side floods the room with warm ivory milky light and closer to the window the light reflects from inside the heart of ivy, the light tints the lintel a gentle content green, the green from a secretive glance of a spring tree.  You walk into the room and you find yourself day dreaming of a different room.  Where was it?  The caress, that floods you with a waterfall, a rushing of tides, a warmth under your skin.   There are words, and the words almost come to you but they are talking among themselves just far enough away that it reminds you of prayer.  Then it is gone.  A bird flies outside the window and you name it nostalgia.  You open the window and the bird flies into the room and she names you a name that cannot be named.  An excitement of wind runs into the room. A door closes.  Together you talk about the rush of lovers and the long songs of touch.  The wind lags and falls asleep on the wood floor.  Wind’s breath twirling dust in the corner as it dreams of solid things.  Now you sit on the floor and draw constellation in the dust, draw her face in the midst of stars.  A black cat and a white cat come into the room.   You name the black cat Fate and the white cat Faith. They climb on your shoulders, one left the other right.  They curl up into small cities, which you walk at night, debating with naked statues the need for memory and the place where desire builds desire.  This room is a room you have never been before.  Space disintegrates, like lace next to a fire.  Desire next to reason.  Every room is a dream.   

2010
01/06
CATEGORY
american poet
chris leibow
experimental poetry
love
poem
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Our gestures speak unspeakable things

 Our gestures speak unspeakable things (with even the slightest of movements) they speak of love, of death, of fate’s sudden turns.  Our  otherness translated briefly, like the last flash of a dying star. A gesture; word made flesh, a hand between legs, a  cheek on heart, lips on neck, that speak without words, inmuted tones, telling stories that mouths could never utter. Or breath and  tongues stopping time, exorcising ghosts, a tearing down and building up again, like the rough hungered touch received that makes all  other attempts at song futile. Our burning lives held in one gesture, translating desire, or longing, or a long dreamt dream, into a  flaming bird – by an unexpected kiss.

 

or yellow flowers left on a windshield

2009
12/30
CATEGORY
Life
chris leibow
love
poem
poetry
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Oh four o clock mechanical bird

Oh she says as she looks at me naked and at the ocean in the center of my palm. A simulacrum of some archetype. Don’t mind that I say and finally she doesn’t and she flows to the ground like a waterfall, a final release of longing and of the exhaustion of holding back; the wet soil of her eyes making me think of the coins I left on the window ledge of the shower glistening in the morning sun.

figuring out this strange economy where my land is desired but undervalued by the speculator because their return would be greater than what they can conceive.

I am a quarterhorse tied to a merry-go-round. Round and round we go. All horses
but not. Biting – biting at the ropes.

It’s a recession of imagination, hiding in the shadows of stones fallen from a once cared for stone wall. Those walls that are not meant to keep anything out — but mark distance and definition by the care taken to build and maintain, their responsibility,

the ability to respond to stone, to history that sings forward from the path behind us.

So I wind up my four in the afternoon mechanical bird. send it to God as an offering for more kindness and grace.

2009
12/13
CATEGORY
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american poet
chris leibow
experimental poetry
love
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poetry
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Here comes the moment you have been waiting for

Apples fall to the ground of their own accord
And a lone balloon floats aimlessly on the wind.

You are tired and you lean against a dark cloud
That slowly moves across your mind. Here is the
Place where everything else is irrelevant, this place
Where you build a house of “Enough” A new home

Where everyone will live in peace and even
The night can sleep a long awaited dreamless sleep.

2009
01/05
CATEGORY
Life
poem
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2008
06/09
CATEGORY
1
Life
american poet
chris leibow
experimental poetry
love
poem
poetry
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A black horse’s flanks tremble…

A black horse’s flanks tremble in the reaching reflection of the moon from a still ocean. A cool breeze writes sudden stories on its coat about lost children floating out to sea. The horse’s neck streches up to a bruised night sky and its neck muscles flex intentions of the thought of running, then it passes. The frog, like a wet emerald sits next to a long blade of grass like the jade blade of a samara stopping to take a drink from the brakish water of his desire. Both singing long songs of intrigues, and contradictions.

2008
03/25
CATEGORY
american poet
chris leibow
experimental poetry
poem
poetry
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Talking in words in the shape….

Talking in words the shape of so many shores, a constant in and out. I feel like the wind parsing the words from a letter sent a long time ago to a fictional lover, the longing so great that they are meant to be in different shapes then they are, the one paragraph tumbling over itself in an insistence to meaning.

At the same time, there are small machines in the water that tell secrets to everyone who drink it. The drinkers are unaware but they invade the corners of dreams with booksellers hocking the latest theology and hot plates of steaming fish. It is true a golden death waits everyone once the receipts of a different life are audited.

This reveals a need for specific events, and the need to be brave. Like falling overboard, watching the lights from the aft getting smaller. It is at this moment that we realize that we should have demanded more of our objects; Doors, A boot, The shirt on the floor, Street lamps, automobiles, hinges, beds, a vase, a sideways glance, tombstones, a single cloud, a overlooked note written in a margin, a pebble in a shoe, a sudden smile – Our objects; the letters, alphabets of a celestial language, signs of greater things – blurred by our constant motion our fear of stillness and the daily skirmishes between urgency and expectation. In our efforts to simply sleep, we have become illiterate.

2008
03/22
CATEGORY
chris leibow
experimental poetry
poem
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I am tired of living with cowards…

I am tired of living with cowards.  

I want to live in the mouth of a volcano or among the shifting plates of continents.This drone of a garrulous night is getting on my nerves.   

Could it be that my eyelashes have turned to teeth and they bite at her with each kind glance. *    Come closer, do you not understand that I want to eat this night, and possess those nocturnal panthers stalking the shadows of your dreams; you know too well the hungry birds of logic that stand pecking at their reflection in stagnant water and the black swan tracing

the paths of her trajectories.   It is the heft of errors and false hypotheses that weighs down all your limbs.  Your want of altitude: takes on the form of a mystery novel or a film noir scene; absent actors, the contracting room not the only suspect; the click of my heels down the dark narrow hallway. 

  Inevitably getting farther away. 

2007
11/12
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