I don't know if I can remember all my previous lives...they had names like "The Underground," "The Science of the Indie Romance," and, most recently, "In Case of Success." I had intended to keep ICoS until I actually was successful, but as it turns out, I'm not yet. And eventually I just began to use that blog for the poetry I was working on, and to post excerpts of things I had written, have written, over the years. Lately, I've been posting my poetry on Facebook, and it has been drawn to my attention that that's a less-than-ideal arrangement. Thus, here we are. Harmonia.
The poem in question is below. I wrote it last night at a band practice in Echo Park, and it's rare that I'm as pleased with a poem as I am with this. I think I often write about the same things, with the same ideas, the same images, the same words: light, space, stars, time, houses, mountains, and animals. Some of those images are here, too, of course, but there's something else here, too -- finally, a name for the elusive girl I'm always chasing, the luminous, magical child I remember myself being. I'm sure we all remember ourselves in a certain way. If you knew me then, I don't know how you remember me.
Harmonia
I discovered sex was nothing but making music
and making music nothing but swimming
and swimming nothing but breathing
and breathing nothing but the hard taste of desire.
Harmonia, I called my childhood, her sharp
quivering lashes, her eyes open so wide. We put things
in boxes, as though pain is not a light
animal, landing on our shoulders at unexpected moments, or like
love is not sometimes just a tree and sometimes
a strangler's hands.
We are never not touching
each other, never not stretched across the keys
of life, the taut strings of longing.
You can stand still all you want to.
Your humming goes on. I am tied up in Harmonia,
not dead,
not dead,
aching,
and not dead.
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