7 Portraits

2013 by Timothy Tiernan. All rights reserved. Uploaded in Altadena, CA, on March 18, 2013. Copy Editor was first published in Blue Collar Review, August 2010 issue. Cover photo and design by the author. No part of this e-chapbook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, per fair use copyright law (heres a crash course). For information or requests to purchase the complete version of this chapbook, contact the author at tiernanpoet@gmail.com.

Peripheral
We ignore most our beauty, like today I was rambling on about my ex to myself and forgot to watch my colleague laughing. She was beautiful in whatever sunlight I missed across her face as she chuckled three notes of a triad I couldnt trace. Last night I dreamt a music of mist gathered round the garden of the home I rent in my separation. It was like a tender tryst of milk and moonlight. Tomorrow a sincere quartet will play in the background of my 8 to 5. If Im lucky I will hear the bowing of the third, the fifth, the heart, and likely I will skip the root while plucking about my daily jazz wondering if the show will ever start.

Eggplant, an Open Letter

Going down the steep steps to water, I learned finally how they grew like heavy, purple bells, on stalks as hearty and hairy as grampa was. How the next day they were gone with the radish tops. Nature gorging itself, or telling me its just-enough self-interest (in a garden, lets admit, whose form was like a candy store of sprouts). Hoof marks like some childlike cuneiform in the mud that wasnt mine, in a valley where stealing spells out thank you. And the evidence of imprintsthe card the rodents and the bucks have left. For once I was comforted by an industry indifferent to me.

The Carpal Tunnel

The electrochemical couriers of the night's tunnel delay. Traffic tightens, mountains shift in, shipments of sensation are lost. The quota fails to pass through, and the index, middle, and thumb lock up on the other side of Mont Blanc, numb as three men whose bread will not come. They stand in the cold and wait for morning, when the commerce of the body can begin again. With dawn they're reminded the pinsand-needles wheels to grip, the hands (warts and all) to hold, the music they must pluck from cellos and breasts alike, the simple jars (their women need them) to turn open.

Copy Editor
Sometimes I'm the goalie on a silent team whose opponents dash pucks of fragments as easily as their skates cut flecks of ice. I'm the guy you never see who paints the lines on roads, the hushed grammar of the highway, the unwitnessed necessity. I'm the textual janitor mopping the sloppy hallway sentence structures. Sometimes I'm a feng shui expert suggesting a shift of column to help the flow of qi. I fluff pillows, or I rip the sink apart. All you have to do is show up, use the facility, enjoy the meal. I'm the butler's presence, more absent than absence.

first published in Blue Collar Review, August 2010

Memoria for Two Cats

Nearly two-dimensional, her matted leftover is unfeline, contorted like a three-toed sloth. She hangs on to loose gravel. And all I do to mourn is swerve around the unburial ground that we call road. I've a reading to get to, a party, an office. If I stopped, I'd slide toward the horizon of moral minutia: pray for the squashed squirrels, the crushed magpie eggs, the unearthed earthworm frozen to a crisp, into a mini shepherd's staff along the step to my house, which sits amid the unseen wild with which we are at war. I'm tired of us winning. That month, along the Cougar Crest, its just our prints in ashen, knee-high snow, and loggers hauling home below us. Then we see the paws that named the trail, and tell us our place, and sharpen our sight. So we scurry back to Motel 6, where crystals gather on the sill like that years hopes. We drive to town for yak and tea. Im still thinking of the dead cat back home, how its head was pressed to listen to the ground floor of being.

Attempting Love
You cant pair a word with love, and besides, you cant pose a preposition beside it. Im not for it, Im not with it, Im not by it. Certainly not in it. You cant hook it up with another verb. You cant send it on a date or dub it with a date range. You cant tell it not to go to the movies where its going to be misrepresented again and again. You cant tell it to put its coat on before it runs into the rain and into the cars and into the buildings and into the lives youll never see, though you can leave the light on for it. You cant tell it to stay warm. You cant say itll get sick. You cant say that its terminally ill with itself. It refuses any diagnosis, any diagnostics. You cant tell it that it cannot see: It wont listen, and it cant. You cant tell it to grow a certain way. It cannot get its head around a nationstate. Cant get its heart around a map. It lives liminal, thrush at the threshold, hummingbird that cant bother with boundary. You cant convince it of anything it does or doesnt know. You cant hand it another noun. You cant prep it for what its always been. You dont even know where its come from, how long its lived like a flippant teenager, like a patient volcanic thing. Every morning it prays at the altars of your ancestors. Every morning it casts colors into your genes. Every morning its resculpting a future in your blood. Every morning it finishes some care package for a loved one you havent yet met or once you knew. You dont know its beginning, and youve no clue about its end. Stop trying to give it language. Keep trying.

Cave of the Shaman, West Hills, CA

We werent supposed to step inside that chimney cave, so difficult for your small boys to grip granite. But we climbed it, and we listened to some wounded dove or were we prey?we called the Chumash shaman. Deep in the belly above us, the apian fairies ferried their work across their quiet vector. And I wondered, neck craned, camera outstretched, do they feel pride, doing their thing, dreaming up a better, floating world? And here we were risking unthinkable slips of a foot, trying to honor a treacherous path. View this fleeting world as a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning, a flickering lamp so some sutra would have it. But Ive seen salvation by snow cone, by exhausted, half-open eyes, unstoppable grins, a star at dawn, fried moons by 9 a.m.

So you should view all the fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.Diamond Sutra