Selections from the Collaborative Multimedia Show: Tom & Lisa Dowling -- Reconcilable Differences.
poems to accompany exhibition. All poems copyright 2018 Lisa Dowling. All works property of the artists and may not be reproduced in part or in whole in any form without permission.
Hard to be a Sensualist
“I want to terrify myself with a jar of cherries.” –Bob Pajich
It’s hard to wake up in the morning and tongue air
with every pore because breathing’s not enough.
Hard to obsess over the rough stalk of Neruda’s
cut lily drinking up vasewater on the law clerk’s
desk. I’d much rather be somewhere drinking
beer, eyes open, brain shut, all six senses checked
at the door along with my blue-lined coat.
It sucks not to be able to lounge on the lawn,
to blank out in the pure calm pierced with sun,
grassblade, or sleep. Instead, I note that
this mild afternoon is stitched together by
at least forty-three sounds, among them
jack-hammer, birdsong, pool pump, and pine
needles scratching each other’s backs.
It’s a drag when I can’t just read
a good poem, I have to eat the whole
damn poet, prickly beard or pretty dress,
creator of perfection I crave to hold inside.
Those spiraling falcons Yeats released
still terrify me. One screamed into my tree
yesterday, ripped out clumps of feathers
from the dead sparrow dangling in its beak.
He eyed me through the swirling tufts, sized
me up against his curved claws.
I am riveted by simple things: school lights
timed to come on five minutes earlier each day;
the man across the bar with his wedding ring
chained to his neck; that clerk with horizontal scars
under her ruffled cuffs; that unnamed tree flaunting
ripe fruit; the whole world lit with salt and ether.
Nothing can be done. The second
I dropped upsidedown and screaming
into the world, I noticed how red the view
was, how cold the room, how nice the nipple
that gave the cream.
Oranges for You
Picking golden globes in late, humming Spring,
hands thick with juice, warm, pulpy smear of light --
the afternoon sun is distilled, the bright
gleam sweetens and flows, a goddess offering
nectar to appease. I am lost in this ring
of trees, the heady perfume from white
blooms laces my hair. Drunken bees take flight,
pollen sacs quivering, forsaking stings
that mean suicide. We all want to live.
Fingers stained orange from the tang and split of skin,
tongue tart with juice, a pleasure that's almost sore--
There is nothing that nature and I could not give;
I am your tree, body of succulence in
Spring, heavy, and fruiting from every pore.
A Circus and a Wedding
--Galway, Ireland
I steady my rusty bike and ease the kickstand down.
The grey cobblestones are still wet with rain, clouds
continually erase themselves in the sky. I have stumbled
upon a circus and a wedding butterflied on either side
of the narrow lane. I want to see both, but I’m skin-
soaked and hungry, lacking elaborately wrapped
presents or pocket change for sweets in the stands.
To the left, doors burst open under the steeple,
and a frothy bride descends the stairs, rice exploding
in arcs over her smile. The groom shimmies down
after her, gets in the way by trying to stay out of it,
seeks her waving hand to hold. Ladies in Irish wedding
hats balance their huge tiered cakes of felt, faux pearls,
and veils on their heads, wave handkerchiefs and cheer.
Their men steal glances at O’Malley’s open door,
sniff the wind for the promise of a fresh-pulled
stout waiting on a glazed countertop.
To the right, snapping flags painted with Gaelic runes
snap over the bigtop. A bòdhrán thumps, a fiddle-whistle
tune throbs through billowing fabric. A pair of tired
stiltwalkers clad in velvet pantaloons lope toward the street,
their painted faces white with permanent surprise, their
wooden legs a series of unfolding angles. Red bows flutter
from wrists, yellow scarves peek from pockets, tiny chimes
hang from hems. Two contortionists scurry beside the stilts,
get in their way by trying to stay out of it, and kick
at a pair of dogs circling the troupe.
The scent of candy and candle smoke hangs in the air.
The melodeon slowly jigs off to silence under the bigtop
as the bride and groom circumvent their carriage to greet
the towering stilts. Circus flags spiral to the ground as their
fingertips meet. I miss the words exchanged, but see
the painted pair miming a nuptial kiss. The newlyweds
oblige, and suddenly, church bells begin to ring.
Tiny bells laugh inside the dark pockets of the
stiltwalkers as they turn and hobble home.
Poem in the Name of Love
Touch me when your fingers cannot stand to be
other than everywhere on my body.
Morning should all begin with the golden
dawn breaking over the geometry
of your face. When we open our
windows out onto the
liquid skin of the sea we
invite small sparkling waves of
nebulous peace to break,
glittering over our bodies.
salty dog
i watched your hot tongue
smoothing salt from the
oval lip of your glass --
feeling a twinge of desire
to be so delicate and cool.
against your thirst
something inside me knew
you would accept my life
(glass sphere of loosening
ice) and tongue the bitter shards
Nap
Near sleep, my mouth
pressed so hard against
your shoulder that my teeth
impress your shirt,
I slide my hand into
its home between your ribs
and waist. The afternoon
is warm and smells of cut
grass; beyond our door
the breeze lifts and lifts
the red tree’s limbs.
In this light your hair
is so translucently gold
I want to weave it into
a bracelet I could wear
after you are gone.
I want to always have
you that close, tied
to me; perhaps this sleep
might be the last
dream between us.
House, Vessel, Hive
That was the summer of wings
and milk, of the music of bees and cries
of hunger, golden honey between
walls hot with furious work.
Hundreds of small mouths
murmured as a single body
emerged from a pregnant twilight:
nine full months of crystals
arranging their molecules
to sugar the dark.
My body was a hive warming
the queen – a house of one heart on
doubletime turning sweet to blood, blood
into body, her body danced slowly
at the end of the red rope, luminescent
in the watery comb.
Both vessels were full to splitting.
The corpus of the house, the shelter
of the womb, the whole matrix cracked
open at once as her wings unfolded
in the perfumed afternoon
humming with purpose.
this is eden
we garden in autumn. the luscious dirt crusts
my palms, sifts into ridges on smooth fingertips,
while yours, clearly etched with time, catch flakes
of gold rising from the earth. we plant and kiss
and taste the time on each other’s lips.
there is puregold in our garden, shared peace seeps
slowly in, rich words promised in the patter of rain.
Side-by-side we coax life from dappledshade
and silence, mending wounds with a balm
of sap and solitude. you leave a golden print
on the curve of my back, smiling as you walk away.
i watch you go, twine my fingers through flower
necks, split them to their waists, divide the fragrant
earth to find the truth. i am floating, dreaming, rising
entering and splitting thoughts, bee-legs parting
petals, humming freely from image to image.
glittering body crusted in pollen: dirt, books, water,
root, paint, leaf, sorrow, gold, sex, age, fear;
i falter on these few.
in a week you will be fifty. the tiny seeds i scattered
last summer never took root. fear of future loneliness
chokes like wildvine smothering a wooden trellis.
i grip the spade, lean back to look at you, golden man,
standing with eyes closed, face tipped toward the sun.
turning, you smile and wave, ring-finger glinting back
that lovely promise, but in years ahead you will be gone
and i will work this soil with hands that wished never to
know anything other than your freckled skin;
your body finest, fullest, when flowering against mine.
i started this garden knowing the cost, knowing
that nearly thirty years between us means winter
silences too soon. so i plant slowly, with purpose,
tenderly stroking the arching lily stalks,
succulent tips, tulips with their red and yellow
anthers waving in a joyful mocking of my youth.
the trowel turns and turns the earth.
the sun lances through the dancing leaves, dividing
light into purpleflash, yellowfire, the autumn wind
laughing at the riddle i will come to understand --
i have been growing towards this
my whole life
Undone
A white plane stares back at you.
No matter how your body is angled
away or against the surface, it refuses
to rise and meet your brush. The canvas
withdraws demurely from yesterday’s
thumbnail sketch, and light lines
gradually layer themselves obscure
under plush gesso sheets.
Tubes of color shift their weight
on your cart, tessellate into fixed patterns
on the splattered table, and it only
takes a moment to realize that a canvas
is painted before it’s started.
Much as an uncarved marble block
reveals a figure pushing out,
the stretcher bars already show
a palimpsest of strokes.
It is given that the brush
will lift away from your desire:
the pigment chooses its own hue as you
paint, assigns value, considers shade
and tint; the light divides and falls
away like a lover slipping
languorously out of her sequined dress.
While you are asleep, the colors
rise in waves against your ideas;
the sketchbooks erase their pages
in the dark. In the morning you will mount
the stairs to find the piece done, but never
done as the image shifts and shifts again,
hints at what the muse requests: grace,
beauty, deliberate lines and painted
curves that stroke the face of truth.
Sea Story
My hand is hooked under the nape of your neck,
and your palm supports the base of my skull. Toes from one
of each of our feet touch. Our bodies become a starfish seen
from above. The ocean has washed over us; the morning light
pulls down the sheets of sand into an ebbing tide. The sun
lights us evenly, our almost symmetrical shape split down
the middle by a space bridged by love. Looking closely,
though, a gull overhead sees perfection
broken by heat. A mirage shakes
our image into waves of distortion: our bodies don’t match, our
outlines are smeared by light. By not speaking after the heavy
crash of lovemaking, we have become a child’s attempt
at understanding equal parts, half a page painted, then folded,
pigment fanning out and duplicating itself. My side, a life lived
under a little more pressure, is smudged, blurred in the innocent
crush. Dawn grows brighter and I see that we are not a painting,
but a book broken open down its spine
to a beloved passage, two pages
that, if read from left to right tell a story of finding lighthouses
sometimes silent and unlit on the point. Though we
are not perfect: our male and female forms curve differently,
our skin is freckled or not, our lives up to this point colored
with different characters, we match. Our symmetry is broken
only by the rise and fall of our ribs for breath, our eyelashes
fluttering at the intense sky, the pages riffled and turned
by the breeze, our story moving ever toward the end.
What City is This?
What city is this that rises and falls with the moon and loud cries
from foghorns at odd hours? I look down to the stone streets
sleeping beneath three feet of Adriatic, where rats float,
bellies bloated with seawater through canals as cats mewl
from windows. A heavy table floats by, its dark top still set
with linen napkins, chipped china and stained silverware,
followed closely by an armada of sullied chairs. Long, black boats
search the water. Men poling the brackish surge peer up at me
with dark eyes and dip into the sea solemnly, in silence,
with long, black oars. Someone has been lost.
I search the velvet beds of their boats for your shock of blond
hair, your hat, your traveling parka, your notebook with sketches
of buildings, of simple circles, of sky. Minutes drip by as I wait,
hoping you haven't given up, hoping you will return and tattoo me
with names of exotic streets, with your lemonrind scent, the ocean
always infusing through, and perfuming, everything we touch.
We came to see the sinking mosaics of San Marco, to learn
the quality of light that plumes through the frescoed sky, to fill
and be filled, to swirl in air, water, spice, age, innocence and lust.
And yet I fight the urgent rising, the imminent tide.
What city is this that haunts me, that pries open my sleeping lids
with its silence, with its odd floods and colored-glass beauty, with its
people whirling in masks and silks, with its memory of being entered
nightly by rough, pungent seawater? Soaked to the bone in brine and fear,
I toss the map aside, with its blue-veined canals and inscrutable signs;
I have come to know by heart these unreadable streets.
You have waded out into the wreck to force me to choose between
the tower and the flood, our life together and the prospect of death,
between celibacy and ruin. I have come to ruin you and you accept
my gift like something you have expected all your life.
The water buoys me out to the bridge, the white arch where yesterday
we stood and watched the textbook clouds etch the sky, where you took
my hand and told me to decide, left me on the glaring curve with clouds
and silence building, the threat of storms loud on foreign tongues.
What city is this? What have I done? I have come and come
to these strange, silent streets with damp stones and broken shutters
and swelling tides to find you.
This flood fills me. I cannot go home.
copyright 2018 Lisa Dowling. All works property of the artists and may not be reproduced in part or in whole in any form without permission.
Hard to be a Sensualist
“I want to terrify myself with a jar of cherries.” –Bob Pajich
It’s hard to wake up in the morning and tongue air
with every pore because breathing’s not enough.
Hard to obsess over the rough stalk of Neruda’s
cut lily drinking up vasewater on the law clerk’s
desk. I’d much rather be somewhere drinking
beer, eyes open, brain shut, all six senses checked
at the door along with my blue-lined coat.
It sucks not to be able to lounge on the lawn,
to blank out in the pure calm pierced with sun,
grassblade, or sleep. Instead, I note that
this mild afternoon is stitched together by
at least forty-three sounds, among them
jack-hammer, birdsong, pool pump, and pine
needles scratching each other’s backs.
It’s a drag when I can’t just read
a good poem, I have to eat the whole
damn poet, prickly beard or pretty dress,
creator of perfection I crave to hold inside.
Those spiraling falcons Yeats released
still terrify me. One screamed into my tree
yesterday, ripped out clumps of feathers
from the dead sparrow dangling in its beak.
He eyed me through the swirling tufts, sized
me up against his curved claws.
I am riveted by simple things: school lights
timed to come on five minutes earlier each day;
the man across the bar with his wedding ring
chained to his neck; that clerk with horizontal scars
under her ruffled cuffs; that unnamed tree flaunting
ripe fruit; the whole world lit with salt and ether.
Nothing can be done. The second
I dropped upsidedown and screaming
into the world, I noticed how red the view
was, how cold the room, how nice the nipple
that gave the cream.
Oranges for You
Picking golden globes in late, humming Spring,
hands thick with juice, warm, pulpy smear of light --
the afternoon sun is distilled, the bright
gleam sweetens and flows, a goddess offering
nectar to appease. I am lost in this ring
of trees, the heady perfume from white
blooms laces my hair. Drunken bees take flight,
pollen sacs quivering, forsaking stings
that mean suicide. We all want to live.
Fingers stained orange from the tang and split of skin,
tongue tart with juice, a pleasure that's almost sore--
There is nothing that nature and I could not give;
I am your tree, body of succulence in
Spring, heavy, and fruiting from every pore.
A Circus and a Wedding
--Galway, Ireland
I steady my rusty bike and ease the kickstand down.
The grey cobblestones are still wet with rain, clouds
continually erase themselves in the sky. I have stumbled
upon a circus and a wedding butterflied on either side
of the narrow lane. I want to see both, but I’m skin-
soaked and hungry, lacking elaborately wrapped
presents or pocket change for sweets in the stands.
To the left, doors burst open under the steeple,
and a frothy bride descends the stairs, rice exploding
in arcs over her smile. The groom shimmies down
after her, gets in the way by trying to stay out of it,
seeks her waving hand to hold. Ladies in Irish wedding
hats balance their huge tiered cakes of felt, faux pearls,
and veils on their heads, wave handkerchiefs and cheer.
Their men steal glances at O’Malley’s open door,
sniff the wind for the promise of a fresh-pulled
stout waiting on a glazed countertop.
To the right, snapping flags painted with Gaelic runes
snap over the bigtop. A bòdhrán thumps, a fiddle-whistle
tune throbs through billowing fabric. A pair of tired
stiltwalkers clad in velvet pantaloons lope toward the street,
their painted faces white with permanent surprise, their
wooden legs a series of unfolding angles. Red bows flutter
from wrists, yellow scarves peek from pockets, tiny chimes
hang from hems. Two contortionists scurry beside the stilts,
get in their way by trying to stay out of it, and kick
at a pair of dogs circling the troupe.
The scent of candy and candle smoke hangs in the air.
The melodeon slowly jigs off to silence under the bigtop
as the bride and groom circumvent their carriage to greet
the towering stilts. Circus flags spiral to the ground as their
fingertips meet. I miss the words exchanged, but see
the painted pair miming a nuptial kiss. The newlyweds
oblige, and suddenly, church bells begin to ring.
Tiny bells laugh inside the dark pockets of the
stiltwalkers as they turn and hobble home.
Poem in the Name of Love
Touch me when your fingers cannot stand to be
other than everywhere on my body.
Morning should all begin with the golden
dawn breaking over the geometry
of your face. When we open our
windows out onto the
liquid skin of the sea we
invite small sparkling waves of
nebulous peace to break,
glittering over our bodies.
salty dog
i watched your hot tongue
smoothing salt from the
oval lip of your glass --
feeling a twinge of desire
to be so delicate and cool.
against your thirst
something inside me knew
you would accept my life
(glass sphere of loosening
ice) and tongue the bitter shards
Nap
Near sleep, my mouth
pressed so hard against
your shoulder that my teeth
impress your shirt,
I slide my hand into
its home between your ribs
and waist. The afternoon
is warm and smells of cut
grass; beyond our door
the breeze lifts and lifts
the red tree’s limbs.
In this light your hair
is so translucently gold
I want to weave it into
a bracelet I could wear
after you are gone.
I want to always have
you that close, tied
to me; perhaps this sleep
might be the last
dream between us.
House, Vessel, Hive
That was the summer of wings
and milk, of the music of bees and cries
of hunger, golden honey between
walls hot with furious work.
Hundreds of small mouths
murmured as a single body
emerged from a pregnant twilight:
nine full months of crystals
arranging their molecules
to sugar the dark.
My body was a hive warming
the queen – a house of one heart on
doubletime turning sweet to blood, blood
into body, her body danced slowly
at the end of the red rope, luminescent
in the watery comb.
Both vessels were full to splitting.
The corpus of the house, the shelter
of the womb, the whole matrix cracked
open at once as her wings unfolded
in the perfumed afternoon
humming with purpose.
this is eden
we garden in autumn. the luscious dirt crusts
my palms, sifts into ridges on smooth fingertips,
while yours, clearly etched with time, catch flakes
of gold rising from the earth. we plant and kiss
and taste the time on each other’s lips.
there is puregold in our garden, shared peace seeps
slowly in, rich words promised in the patter of rain.
Side-by-side we coax life from dappledshade
and silence, mending wounds with a balm
of sap and solitude. you leave a golden print
on the curve of my back, smiling as you walk away.
i watch you go, twine my fingers through flower
necks, split them to their waists, divide the fragrant
earth to find the truth. i am floating, dreaming, rising
entering and splitting thoughts, bee-legs parting
petals, humming freely from image to image.
glittering body crusted in pollen: dirt, books, water,
root, paint, leaf, sorrow, gold, sex, age, fear;
i falter on these few.
in a week you will be fifty. the tiny seeds i scattered
last summer never took root. fear of future loneliness
chokes like wildvine smothering a wooden trellis.
i grip the spade, lean back to look at you, golden man,
standing with eyes closed, face tipped toward the sun.
turning, you smile and wave, ring-finger glinting back
that lovely promise, but in years ahead you will be gone
and i will work this soil with hands that wished never to
know anything other than your freckled skin;
your body finest, fullest, when flowering against mine.
i started this garden knowing the cost, knowing
that nearly thirty years between us means winter
silences too soon. so i plant slowly, with purpose,
tenderly stroking the arching lily stalks,
succulent tips, tulips with their red and yellow
anthers waving in a joyful mocking of my youth.
the trowel turns and turns the earth.
the sun lances through the dancing leaves, dividing
light into purpleflash, yellowfire, the autumn wind
laughing at the riddle i will come to understand --
i have been growing towards this
my whole life
Undone
A white plane stares back at you.
No matter how your body is angled
away or against the surface, it refuses
to rise and meet your brush. The canvas
withdraws demurely from yesterday’s
thumbnail sketch, and light lines
gradually layer themselves obscure
under plush gesso sheets.
Tubes of color shift their weight
on your cart, tessellate into fixed patterns
on the splattered table, and it only
takes a moment to realize that a canvas
is painted before it’s started.
Much as an uncarved marble block
reveals a figure pushing out,
the stretcher bars already show
a palimpsest of strokes.
It is given that the brush
will lift away from your desire:
the pigment chooses its own hue as you
paint, assigns value, considers shade
and tint; the light divides and falls
away like a lover slipping
languorously out of her sequined dress.
While you are asleep, the colors
rise in waves against your ideas;
the sketchbooks erase their pages
in the dark. In the morning you will mount
the stairs to find the piece done, but never
done as the image shifts and shifts again,
hints at what the muse requests: grace,
beauty, deliberate lines and painted
curves that stroke the face of truth.
Sea Story
My hand is hooked under the nape of your neck,
and your palm supports the base of my skull. Toes from one
of each of our feet touch. Our bodies become a starfish seen
from above. The ocean has washed over us; the morning light
pulls down the sheets of sand into an ebbing tide. The sun
lights us evenly, our almost symmetrical shape split down
the middle by a space bridged by love. Looking closely,
though, a gull overhead sees perfection
broken by heat. A mirage shakes
our image into waves of distortion: our bodies don’t match, our
outlines are smeared by light. By not speaking after the heavy
crash of lovemaking, we have become a child’s attempt
at understanding equal parts, half a page painted, then folded,
pigment fanning out and duplicating itself. My side, a life lived
under a little more pressure, is smudged, blurred in the innocent
crush. Dawn grows brighter and I see that we are not a painting,
but a book broken open down its spine
to a beloved passage, two pages
that, if read from left to right tell a story of finding lighthouses
sometimes silent and unlit on the point. Though we
are not perfect: our male and female forms curve differently,
our skin is freckled or not, our lives up to this point colored
with different characters, we match. Our symmetry is broken
only by the rise and fall of our ribs for breath, our eyelashes
fluttering at the intense sky, the pages riffled and turned
by the breeze, our story moving ever toward the end.
What City is This?
What city is this that rises and falls with the moon and loud cries
from foghorns at odd hours? I look down to the stone streets
sleeping beneath three feet of Adriatic, where rats float,
bellies bloated with seawater through canals as cats mewl
from windows. A heavy table floats by, its dark top still set
with linen napkins, chipped china and stained silverware,
followed closely by an armada of sullied chairs. Long, black boats
search the water. Men poling the brackish surge peer up at me
with dark eyes and dip into the sea solemnly, in silence,
with long, black oars. Someone has been lost.
I search the velvet beds of their boats for your shock of blond
hair, your hat, your traveling parka, your notebook with sketches
of buildings, of simple circles, of sky. Minutes drip by as I wait,
hoping you haven't given up, hoping you will return and tattoo me
with names of exotic streets, with your lemonrind scent, the ocean
always infusing through, and perfuming, everything we touch.
We came to see the sinking mosaics of San Marco, to learn
the quality of light that plumes through the frescoed sky, to fill
and be filled, to swirl in air, water, spice, age, innocence and lust.
And yet I fight the urgent rising, the imminent tide.
What city is this that haunts me, that pries open my sleeping lids
with its silence, with its odd floods and colored-glass beauty, with its
people whirling in masks and silks, with its memory of being entered
nightly by rough, pungent seawater? Soaked to the bone in brine and fear,
I toss the map aside, with its blue-veined canals and inscrutable signs;
I have come to know by heart these unreadable streets.
You have waded out into the wreck to force me to choose between
the tower and the flood, our life together and the prospect of death,
between celibacy and ruin. I have come to ruin you and you accept
my gift like something you have expected all your life.
The water buoys me out to the bridge, the white arch where yesterday
we stood and watched the textbook clouds etch the sky, where you took
my hand and told me to decide, left me on the glaring curve with clouds
and silence building, the threat of storms loud on foreign tongues.
What city is this? What have I done? I have come and come
to these strange, silent streets with damp stones and broken shutters
and swelling tides to find you.
This flood fills me. I cannot go home.
copyright 2018 Lisa Dowling. All works property of the artists and may not be reproduced in part or in whole in any form without permission.
