Daniel Barber

Selected Poems by Daniel Barber

Opera

Shattering blackbird chorus
synchronized swimmers
peppering oaks and sky.

Coalblack molobros
Agelaius – with crimson epaulets
crow-faced grackles
full-spectral iridescence
in the right light. 

Millionflock
world-devouring
systematic in their gluttonous threshing
of sparse woods
and fields.

What is heard and what is remembered

A father
a boy
Stars still-burning
cold against the black 

this is you
there is nothing else
go
gently

World-Night

Ash-forward the sky broken by its river
The night-sound slips with a prick under my skin
Washing, washing, washing
A tumulus, a darkening of autumn into grit and re-growth
A path cleared but for here-and-there brambles, thawed root, burnt stone 

Clarity is something earned, not bought
Dependent on the little tides of event and thought and nothing
A café coretto in the Piazza di San Marco
With pigeons tumble jostling in musk-canal air and everywhere crowded with no one
A damp kiss in the old stone shadow-hulls of monks and stillness and hope 

The dead linger, old wallpapers and paint,
Residue and flight-sought whisper-songs
foot grooves directing my steps on old wood and stone
Ice-split and glistening as the lurking dawn

 ~

It’s been several months since I dreamed of flying
Dream-flying is a cuttlefish pushing outward, a swimming
Through liquid air and will
Yoga-stroking the ephemerality of sight 

Each gain a loss, or losses, gains again
Each age and earth-growth change irredeemable and beyond reduction
All beginnings are merely use-mind and forgotten tugs
Not-quite arbitrary conventions and little recoveries clinging
As lichen on the dying oak

What is this, blued butcher and eater of lettuce?
World negator – necessary in the shadows
This now a clung-consummation on blood-washed lilies and pauses
a hope-veined flesh altered and released

 ~

The visual cortex is a mass of propositions
burning and burning
endlessly reaching, groping
Ash-swept mirror of mind and nothing

Paper Boats

Drinking wine and reading Li Po
Words stream-float
with penciled images
and the night.

This Place

 …to manifest what was in my own mind
— Hui-neng, Platform Scripture, 8

 
Observing the wind is crucial
to understanding the trees

Today all day the blustering
screed cut cold
into the Georgia spring
its chanted cacophony
rearranging countless molecules

The Easter nightfrost surprised the tender buds
Air currents now sail the little corpses aloft

Each interaction with my two little sons
invokes visions of budding neurons
maps drawn
fogged
redrawn and again 

the plasticity of mind
the wind-embedded forms of the oaks

Breathswell

The word respires in the fullness
Being lingers
as you pause
between weeping and exhaustion 

The same questions
The same tired fears
lurk as wisps and twilight
in each night-talk
in each unknowing 

An open crevasse of truth
night-bleeds from ears
trickling into dream-glimpses
day-shadows
and informs whatever sustenance is 

The owl, unseen, sounds the void-dark night
Our love, embedded, stokes embers
of remembered and rewritten pasts
enabling the going-on 

While the word
is hope 
Not Word                  that old fiction
but words born of mind engaged
of rigor of reason of compassion and silence
Our hope
What meaning is and was

Nonfinito

It is in the unseen
the unsaid
the white fibered paper before the mark
So say painters and poets. 

Sometimes, though
language is necessary
like inventing a calculus
to clarify
to verify
what we know.

Still,
seeming still unsaid
language darts and scratches
at the plate
its dry point burr
holding the fogged echoes
of matter
of meaning

Chaconne

Swift-swim acrobatics
suck insects from dusk air into dark
bat-spirals etch bubble-chamber trails
criss-crossing star fields
moon
and rod-visioned sight 

These nights I am close to what is
enfolded into thread-loomed tapestries
evolve-nestled and distant
one and apart 

Craving no-mind barred by craving
these sky loops plunge-thrust into
blood riddled being
too fragile
too framed
too drifted to kin-apart
to sea-fields of culture and sprawl 

String-thrummed dance
Ache-thrust beauty
and this dear night 

Insomnia

Not Athena’s wise birds,
burst from the head of god,
but Goya’s owls
Haunting and screaming
in the twilight of mind
in the flight of reason 

These sounds muffled and creeping
between heartbeats
and a longing for winter
keep mind this side of sleep
Body naked and adrift,
poised like a clichéd Etruscan coffin-lid
staring glazed and wanting at my sleeping wife

The animistic walls shim between
nocturne and silence
insulating fatigue against a world unknown
and too beautiful
sheltering memories actively writ
from the too-large and endless emptiness
of space 

The retinal flash of tight squeezed lids stokes
awareness even in the shimmer of the dark
Oneiric compost of a life-constructed brain without center
begs for a turning,
for the lovely aeration of active worm-burrows
under white sheets of rapid dreams

Still, you creep about in my mind’s dark
And in these walls poems
lie like inadequate insulation
holding in heat enough to shelter from the requisite freeze
exhaling drafts of ice
breathed in from the outside air 

This air then exhumes the night corpse, stepping
booted, well beyond midnight
clouds and heat-risen haze drift
clear moments and Leonid fireflies
illuminate fragments of looking
diamond-scratched lines on a soot-darkened plate

A drawing-out of mind into the cluttered debris-field
A lying prone of a body too-taut
a self too-riddled with the residue
of replayed and edited rehearsals
for a life not yet seen
or lived

Drawn

Drawing is a visual breathing
an interchange,
inhaling and exhaling
the naked stuff of the visible world

Line is breath
quickened at a strange touch
Value, the chiaroscuro
of life and death
Gesture is the quick fog of the soul

All of this is mind embodied,
briefly noted and more briefly ennobled

Drawing, thus,
is the evidence of a life of fragments –
of meditation
and record

Trace

I watch my hand drift above the page—
line trailing shadow
abraded black carbon
ground into off-white pores

Your face appears
—not your face—
a fingertrace of memories
of touching your mouth—your skin
known within

without but apart
a drawn residue of an
interwoven becoming—suspended and thick—
emergent from the graywaste that seems

Self-Portrait

Strange. To be aware that my image, reflected
is always on the surface one half the measure of my callipered self

Still—I paint as if I could see more
and nearer
Still, yes, but always in responsive flux
impermanent
dustless but riddled

Pentimenti
residue of failed attempts
over-painted with corrections failing again
to embody

This moment lingers as it must if seen
A suspension
An elevation
A dissolution of this here-now
A perspective fleeting, evolved, and traced
by a hesitant hand, fatigued

Nurture

Strange
to watch the slim oaks
breathing in a blued-pink
evening sky
inhaling the vaporous residue
of day’s end, dancing
slowly in a dying breeze

Trees are shaped
by such swaying—
lives by the little motions
of accommodation
resilience
and time

Narragansett

Alive in the sea, immersed, buoyant,
rock-cut flesh healed by salt

Lazy late-day cormorants
sunning, eyeing the few hungry ones still diving

The tide tugs, insistent,
drawing me into depth
into dark
windmill pounding skim-dipping across and through the waves
the open ocean
a lure

Sea Lions

…flipping the body in the stream of words 
-Eihei Dōgen

Swimming deep and spitting salt
rhythmic exertion and a buoyant oneness with the waves
brown blubbered flesh heaves near
massive with surprising grace
surfaced peek then quick-plunge again

Seaweed clinging to a noble back
the beast then floated close
a daunting beauty, another mind
hung suspended in familiar sea

More elegant in water than this practiced swimmer
evolved for land
in the sea a foreigner
reveling
in the weightless tug

In Loving You

In a world undone, at times,
your smile cuts through
to self and place—
your lips sing kisses
breathing tempered flames
into the cave
into the night.

In loving you
I love the world again
and lose myself
enough

Koi, Displaced

For Bob

Was it the blue?
the saturated shallow with depths revealed
that drew your eyes,
and drifting thoughts in
to this little world of resolution?

 ~

You are nothing now,
and so much to those still here
Your eye lingers on these Chicago walls,
oddly curved,
and still your mind still stamped, tentatively,
a dialogue, still, in silence.

Santa Monica

The broken patterns of a relentless sea
waves lifting bodies to
fold them into dark
and foam

Bikinis tugged by rough caress—
breasts and buttocks bared
shown briefly naked
to a gazing sun

And so the waves

I rarely drop the blinds until
after sunset
after the blackness muffles the last bleeding trace of day

It’s one thing closing out the dark
shutting out the light is something else

These beach days stand defiant, lucid in a landlocked home
on bodies water-drenched and longing
still-jerked aloft and whiplashed deep
toying with a mindless strength

We walk on window glass floors—
long and taut and just
above the yawning reassuring
emptiness beneath 

Glimpsed

Hypnagogic slips of self into oblivion
of iced water sipped into immersive seas
wherein mind grays, settles, and condenses into
new blocks of here, new spheres of now.

Thus do I see you
across the room
across a world fissured and throbbing with difference
a well of being unshared and inaccessible
familiar but glazed with an impenetrably refracted glance

Mind is a shadow blued by evening sun
cooled in autumn’s wait,
evaporating under clouds, haze, or the
still-lingering light of evening

Kelp Adrift

I am wary of the Warhol scholar much the same
as the priest, the preacher, the theologian, or the so-called exegete.
Infatuated critic, imitative acolyte, or hermeneutic thinker all kiss the same god
at whichever end

 
Adherence to a doctrine,
—an authority lofted by a consuming thirst for mirrors—
however reverent or erosive is cause for pause or flight

Yes and yes and yes dear Andy saw the shallow surface in all its glittering
and fabricated depth
Yes and yes the Sartrerean command haunts the making of I without birthright or destiny—
a noble stand against the fascists, conformist thugs, and academic worms
though Heidegger seems to have escaped his due
Yes and still and still
give instead uncertainty, the thrusts of half erased lines and dread-smeared compositions

Peeks all at self unveiled yet still not naked floating buoyantly upon
Pacific waves
aloft and beached in a day, tripping the curious underfoot then tossed back
into the confiding breach

Appropriation

For Jack

Was it the art or the world that knotted your rope?
That cut-slipped the images from urgent will
to cliché, to flaked paint deterioration
a bulb-lit leash torn loose and flailing
alone amidst the pressing studio buzz
and business of production

The heroin helped.
You lay proudly trackless
from fear of needles and evidence of need
stillcalmed into the night
into drifting pictures of astronauts, lightning, and walls
of aphoristic shedding
to lie, again, each night on dog shat sheets
a whitenoise fuzz of television, vodka, fuck-soaked money
and quickslammed back doors

The words, the mind – paper scraps
thumbtacked dense on tree-shaded walls…
poetry unseen in a White Plains wood

I miss drawing, you said

Then draw.

Sometimes, when we dream, perhaps, we sit outside of time

The hawk, in my dreams last night,
carried off a slain squirrel.
The body limp and dead as dead things are.

Later, in the dream, the hawk was wounded—
in conflict
with a crow

In the Greek way the world tipped back as the wounded hawk
paused for rest under a winter-stripped tree near the creek.
It limped—and another squirrel ran bullet-shot along the bank
and killed the hawk with a quick bite to its leaning feathered neck.

The packaged body carried off the stage into the woods
a glance as if to say,
this is not your concern

Later—away from sleep
away from dreams and entering the car
my wife called out to look
as a hawk carried a dead limp squirrel
from beneath the old oak, across the creek,
and into the dry-dark wood

Tide

Thumping fast over salt-flung waves
we kept our kayak falteringly true
skimming madly to the sandbar
surf licking sweat and sun

skiff-thrust into what is needed
to the fleetingly firm stuff of tidal actions
a play of moon, sun, sea
of climate and of wind

a boy and a father, a nearly synchronized dance
of paddles of current of need of cleaved blood
yielding to the bonding majesty of the sea

Purge

To write
what is this?
to cough thoughtfully-forth words—not to draw—to
still-freeze thought, abstract the self,
reflection as artifice or truth
a lucid vocabulary of articulate silence

drawing is more honest.
and fumbling

The weighted contour of words leans back into itself
a drawn line without meaning carries much
like a well-inflected bow crossing the strings
tearing space and self raw
blood-let and emptied
clustered into little phrases, memorizable and fleeting
drifting as such things do

In this quiet fog we dwell
our images of other
our indulgent fabrications of self
drifting endlessly soft and weary into what remains of awareness
into flesh, into touch, and the focused sounds
of a child’s piano or a little drum beat out-of-step
and clenched tightly
between eager knees 

Rondoni

In the short still hours hovering about
the rising and setting sun
the swifts come,
loosed but mindful arrows

dart and turn and grab
and dart and turn again
pruning the explosive growth of insects in spring

The bells ring too,
roped as they are to the light,
a trailing diminuendo,
lubricating, somehow, the dawn

The air, in these hours of hunting,
is a charcoal sketch,
gesture quick and quickly erased,
leaving echoed pentimenti
on retina and mind

Geminids

Lying, deep in the night, on a synthetic yoga mat,
covered—to insulate against the damp—by a quilted blue moving blanket,
between spent gardens under a moonless chill-crisped sky,
waiting, like bait on on earthly hook, for an occasional
meteor to light the moonless black.

Dogs quarrel with distant coyotes
Freight trains moan in that melancholy way that
things of the night do,
a wood rat scuffles in the compost bin,
and, curiously, a gunshot (or boards quick-slapped together) fuel
wary prejudiced thoughts

In earnest, the spectacle accelerates as fragments of an unknown body
burn in collision with the damp fog that allows us to live,
that thin gravity-cleaved atmosphere softening, for a while,
the inevitable burning

Salt-tailed streaks litter the night
radiant lights briefly lit,
each second of ten,
silent evaporating deaths

Burning now, phosphorescent green trail cutting slow
one two three four seconds past Orion's head and shining Jupiter just left of the Pleiades
and tearing finally, its fireworks spent, through the bull's spine and gasping out then
a few degrees above the western horizon,
leaving memories burned
here and now and always
of humility, knowing, and awe