the dark-vowelled birds

new blog.

relke — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 07:04:02 +0000

relke — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 05:19:34 +0000

She imagines a greater love, one in which we glide through and into each other, sourceless and without boundary.

Near the flashing tower the cool city amasses for another day. The fog strokes the furry water, and hums athwart the glittery trusses. It flows down and down. And the coldness flows up and up. She imagines the body stretching beyond miles, ending finally at some other self. Here, she says. Here is where I should be going. There are no more mouths of me, no more half-moons of finger nails.

Her hand opens and there is already nothing there. There are no more fears on her wings. Her residents are all spilling out, stone by stone.

In the morning, under the tarnished sky she has to find everything. She finds her toes first, then her kneecaps. Her weighty shoulderblades sunk near the watercress. Each thing she finds she puts back and each thing is unheld and falls apart again.

Every morning the egret sinks into her body and fishes out the wordy organs. Every organ is crowded with rain. She imagines that to have a body is to make a gesture and then make it again and again. And so she does.

the book is aching for the tree/ return return return to me

relke — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 05:28:39 +0000

When they were very much in love, even then, there was one day or maybe it was two days when in the aching night she lingered at the corner of the street underneath his window. The light cracked overhead. At the chest of the foothills two russet and darling deer ambled darkly, lit now and then by the yellow yield sign. She was peering into the part of the future where they were falling asleep already, sick of each other’s heat, in separate privations. She was thinking that even when they had clung to each other with the force and desperation they did in every other memory, what she made was as much love as it was desolation. Had they been, and of this she is not sure, much more like two halves of a clam shell, held closed by the extraordinary force of a creature trying to remain alive? She was thinking about loss, in the brave sense that they both knew there was no winning, that someone was left and someone was leaving. She knocked on the door but her thoughts stuttered, and she looked at the accidents of the body, and quoted from the privilege of being.

day one.

relke — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:18:16 +0000

and therefore everything. immediately the sun. thick oakland fog, dock lights lighting up like windows on a massy forgotten train. the brightly colored and pointy fleshed vegetable sitting above the alcove where the warmth of the night kept out the howling morning wind. the tingle tingle of the after drug.

music flowing luxuriantly, contemplatively, multiple scarves and kites in russet damask. trails where thought wandered outward and then came back and then wavered in the threshold of the self.

a little narcotic warm on me / what will i do without the weight of you

relke — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:41:13 +0000

At the cafe, amber leaves fall into the table
sunlight fractures on a book.
Coldness tingles in the edges.

If darkness leers underneath the veranda,
then there is no sustained grace.

Two literati in bright keffiyeh complaining of
the particularly insular German grammar.

In between sunset and the yellow sodium
streets.

Tessellations

relke — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:09:00 +0000

My father, looking over the soccer-field
at the semicircle of Korean drums,
in dusk, in Shanghai, is thinking about
old and new minds. The way winter
thinks about summer. The way people want other people,
with boughs of juniper. Stags of ice.
The way everything collapses eventually one pale morning,
almost untroubled by the weight.
We look at each other,
baffled, silent.

But you didn’t know,
like those deer we found meandering
the night streets: not only time is ephemeral,
striding and leaping out of sight.

Last night, waking in the middle,
obsessed with object constancy,
I looked through the pantry for salt to eat,
spinning on in our human wishes:
to be correct but also sympathetic,
to admit that there is pain, and there is pain,
but at least the bafflement
is sometimes followed by the droning
world, turning into another morning.

Morning peaches

relke — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 09:29:51 +0000

Chill summer. When it is bluish morning
and you are still awake.

Cutting peaches to replace sleep,
with sticky fresh hands
and the soft and hungry skin still holding on.
Slightly damp hair.

Warblers are opening in the high trees,
above the house,
above the theory of measures.

II.

I am a beggar of sound.
If only there was a glimpse
where desire was idle

and idleness the bold red accent
in the window frame where the sill
met the other color that had no name

and name the food
that we ate while talking to each other,
probing for history, dancing with language,
then drowsily waking, each foot dropping
to the ground

and ground the hurt of age
the terror or unterror of each moment
bending against a shore of unknowns.

personal ethical crisis, pt. 1

relke — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:14:00 +0000

following brought on by a week of watching fora.tv:

there are always periods where i am deludedly, ecstatically content with life — in the most general meaning, as if my particular happiness is the uncelebrated instantiation of all human joy; that discussions are the abstract but crystalline probing into some sacred concreteness where these discussions of terms like “the nature of [x]” and “future” happens and therefore stays. over drinks or in the park.

if history were a mirror, and if i peer into it sometimes in the unabating night, i can’t help thinking that my thoughts are encased in obfuscated language that does nothing but shield myself from where their realities are actuated. that words encase the horror that every item and action of mine inevitably connects to the suffering of someone else: that each small pleasure will be multiplied to be pain, in a system of inconsolable equations, coupled and nonlinear, as pleasure always is against suffering. so then it is a lie of sorts, to live the half-aristocratic half-acetic academic life, in moral indifference and at the same time to be the advancement of human kind. what does that mean? what do you do? i think i just blackout the mirror.

clipped.

relke — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:15:04 +0000

so it is
the winglet plane of your back
trembling near-movement
fielding
your effort

incandescent in my dream

like the wet lights of a new city
faraway
licking the nightfall panes

and it is warm to put my hand there,
and the dream grows enormous and heavy

and stutters into waking.

there is no helvetica in shanghai

relke — Mon, 24 May 2010 10:08:57 +0000

there was a scene in the first ghost in the shell movie — reconaissance, the music simmers and mounts, and the leviathan cityscape of hong kong flows into the foreground.

walking through shanghai in the rain it was the same acrid & vivid sight– half-lit catacomic tenaments above the old neon covered alleys; unceasingly dense & moving; a highway above and the river of people below. galleries of shadow & light. no impulse. no sense of purpose or production besides the countless exchanges of things. in the languid rain-eaten air the city is dreaming of itself. its dreams are overlaid in mired lettering.