Mandi

was curled like a child
in the halcyon midnight
of our apartment

synapses gummed with geometry

embryonic eyes
glazed with little gods
and the perfunctory tears
of meeting an indifferent sublime.

               Your face is full of light,
               she told me.
               You’re raining. 

The room passed through itself
               like a tesseract
               a reincarnation of angles
               all lines equal
               all bodies contained.

Mandi,
  don’t be afraid
       or fooled by our skin—
               we are fractals of each other
               mothers of our mothers
               no body contained. 

Aubrey J. Sanders

 

 I.

My observations seem so much more emphatic
when they occur in mass transit, perhaps because I spend
most of my time in my mind
                                             rather than out of it
and I am reminded of this by the sheer vastness
of telephone pole monotony, the impossible impasse of wires,
the flocks of birds who don’t understand that their movements
are more ingenious than anything I will ever create.

II.

Strangers watching strangers, we are all alike!
I take it as incontestable evidence of a unified human experience
that we insist on fortune-telling via other people’s shoes, that we
recognize the absurdity of dressing ourselves and yet
we spend our savings to do so. There is this:
          a sadness in hiding my body. There is also this:
          a sadness in undressing another’s. I am no mystic,
but I can tell you with utter certainty that our secrets are all the same. 

III.

Greg and I were watching a film in Brooklyn when it happened:
I was struck by a very real and sudden understanding of death. I have
always said that we’ve been here before, that we will be here again,
that life and death are the crests and troughs of one eternal wave.
I know now that it is an issue of quantum mechanics, and that
there is no way to express it in human dimensions.
          On screen someone asked, What’s writing?
          to which someone replied, Words that stay.
And there I went, reeling neon-eyed through my universe
faster than the speed of art.             

IV.

There are times when music is the only thing I understand,
and in those moments it seems quite impossible that there could be
anything in existence more beautiful, momentous, sublime,
than the soul’s inclination to orgasm itself into sound. It comes to this:
I’m afraid we are in danger of transcending ourselves completely,
that there will be nothing left but words that stay.

Aubrey J. Sanders 

after Baudelaire’s “Les Hiboux”
 

Beneath a lattice of blackened yew
the owls wait—solemn, divine—
like alien oracles, onyx eyes
ablaze in hallucination. 

Silent, obscured, they meditate
as dusk descends on the forest
in a plume of ash, a phantom Vesuvius
from which the night erupts. 

The wise learn to be still,
to fear the breaking branch, the creature
chaos of movement; the foolish
lust for shifting shadows
and bear the scars of rapture. 

Aubrey J. Sanders

I know the frightened mare
that gags, white and frenzy-mouthed,
on the hard truth of the bit;
she who pounds savagery beneath the breast
and bleeds herself blind of reason.

I swallow the night, my moon, my world
rubbed raw and hard and smooth.
I swallow myself, as we do,
and the thunder of a tacit word.
I swallow all that is still
and it is a marvelous pulse that gallops on—
a lunacy, a silence, a love beyond itself.

We must send all thought to solace,
an albatross asleep in flight,
our world a spinning stone
rubbed raw and hard and smooth,
the pearl of our pain.

Aubrey J. Sanders

Inspired by Snowmine’s debut album, Laminate Pet Animal

Black ink obelisk
sage brush shade grove
bent back candle wax
creased script calm clove

apple table tablet maple
clever rum slum mine
blue tongue shock drum
loose clef coke line

shallow washing wails
swelling yellow lily hollow
shaman ushers whisper willows
lush thistle thrushes swallow

white winter bristle
broken brittle berry ice
bonnet tip chapped lip
chop copper buckle spice

sparked amp sound stamp
laminate animal rite
snow span hologram
crisp beat beast bite

stiff cuff quick prick
plucked string kitchen drip
soft lick hot hip
chromatokiss chromatotrip

stone clock beetle click
cracked cup wrung wrist
weak lung love strung
warm wine pocket bliss.

Aubrey J. Sanders

Did I not say
that when I think of you
I think of white-crested mountains
and vast pillars of stars,
the life of the forests
and gray silken shores—
did I not say that we are eternal already?
     that the stuff of our souls had mingled
     long before we met?
Come back,
come back to me.

Here I will wait a weeping tree,
feather flayed and weather withered
until salt and brine have swallowed me:
     the moth-eaten maiden
     stands day after day
     on the windy bluff,
     heart cast across
     the cold canto of the sea
     the floating foam
     the green strands of waterweed,
     imagining the distant shore,
     dreaming up the lover’s faded cheek.
Come back to me.

We will gather youth like petals in a basket,
feel music like a feather touching our love,
see the world in stained-glass vision— 
but here I will wait a weeping tree,
feather flayed and weather withered—

Did I not say
that you are closest to the being in me?

Aubrey J. Sanders

I want to be the lady in the red dress
sipping on sultry songs like liquid alabaster
and lace draped across a harlot’s thigh:
porcelain, spotlight, perfect.

I want to raise chills with lipstick rouge in B minor
trickle down the walls in a champagne dew
set their top hats spinning 
from where they shuffle in the corners— 
voyeurs in the most visceral sense,
brooding from the privacy of a crooked bench,
shadow-eyed like red-blinded bulls
or one of Penelope’s fated suitors.

I want to be the tension in the room,
and the music, and the quiet danger,
the double-edged doll and the nightingale smile
or the smoking cigarillo lit under embered eyes,
silver microphone fingers wrapped 
in wartime and white gloves, 
sepia stills and lamented love.

Aubrey J. Sanders

I.
I have tattooed my body and danced for destruction
dark-eyed and barefoot before the king
and from wild fingertips I let fall
a trail of seven veils, strewn like soldiers at my heels,
while my hips wove a poison
into the palace shadows
    (I am a wretched thing)
and at last, that royal tongue,
whetted and dipped in delirium,
licked royal lips and promised
sacred heads on silver plates.


II.
I have kissed the freckled faces of my children,
stirred their slumber on my lips
and promised lemon summers
that billow through open windows,
bedtime stories and prolific crickets,
cider-ripened autumns
spiced with caramel and wood smoke,
plucked loyalty from the eaves of my home
and sewn it into the pocket of my apron
    (alongside an acorn and a thimble).


III.
I have carried the water you drink
in a vase atop my head
    (an infant slung against my back)
singing paradise into the jungle
with my sisters and their skirts
and the jangling anklets that jumped
as we walked the path
all the way home
where you and your brothers worked.


IV.
I have spilt my blood like rosary beads
on the altar of your god
draped in amethyst robes and tied
tenderly to stone
    (a chain of finest gold snaking round my wrist)
had my mother wished for a son?
And the crops grew tall.


V.
I have betrayed the one who loved me
and absconded in the night
wreaked a handsome havoc
with a lovely, untamed song;
I have dragged his ships asunder
to the bed of the abyss
so he may know
    (and may he never forget)
that the fear in his heart is female
and she and I are one.


VI.
I have been defiled by heathen blades
and pinned by aching, armored brutes
     on the temple steps
     on the forest floor
     in the crooked, cobbled alley
my deathsong a lullaby of bloody breath
and many times over,
I have been thoughtlessly slain.


VII.
I have cradled the world in my navel
lifted the poets from their knees
bled with the moon by the Nile
endured the virile beast
shaken my fists in fury
bound my breasts for war
wept in the pain of my brother
wasted away on the moors;

I have slept in the arms of my mother
taught the children to pray
dripped with vital nectar
married for duty’s crusade
wailed at the fall of Damascus
laced blossoms in my hair
devoted my heart to fidelity
succumbed to jealous despair;

I have washed my hands of men
and ringed my finger with ink
raised my eyes to Zion
declared my freedom to think
martyred the damned scholar
enlisted myself thereof
written the paean of women
and sung for the valor to love.

Aubrey J. Sanders

I was born a body of worlds
a carnal web of cosmic pearl
billions of stars that hold me to my bones,
and when one day their cores collapse
I will shed my skin in ash
and sleep among the mosses and the stone.

I’ll grow into the vine that licks the ruin
writhe beneath the savage moon 
my scattered cinders eaten at the roots,
and when the ravaged willow moans again
she will take me in her veins
and shake me from her hair an astral fruit.

For we forgot a fact that we once knew,
the only ancient truth,
the knowledge of our primal origin:
That from the feral night we came as dust
born from stellar wanderlust
and unto the stars we will return again.

Aubrey J. Sanders