 Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist ( Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroine Chic, The New Ulster, The Dawn Treader, The Bangalore Review Wild lifeIn the crisp starlit night beasts run salivating. A triumph of peril howls a mile or two from the toy fences, the blue timber walls of isbas that imagine through coiffed windows as children do, with clarity: drawing and erasing on the slate of space. Cats huff and moan among deciduous trees. To huge soundless rivers bare birch raise their bayonets. When the wind blows the stars are hard as bullets. A silent might brands the air with tremors: Idolatry rises to the stars, cruelty runs among the trees. The visitA sandstorm bears down on the city a gritty vomit from Inner Mongolia dunes borne by a Northwestern wind. The Sino-Russian border bays like a hound. An hour ago Spring was swaddled in blue. Helter-skelter imperial, Maoist, modern the urban syncretism made itself clear. Now streets wear camouflage traffic packs in soiled headlights and roars like a fog horn. Neon in tarnished stripes and medals suggests the old martial mood while gray tile roofs still gestate dynastic grime. Red strongholds arrayed in legislation numbed by the haze walk their hallways timbered dark muffled deep in velvet. Through the window’s smile an elusive facade across the way replicates the grim beauty of your face that once challenged inflexible order. This raging gale opaque to logic is far better for us than limbo to dig into and curl together with the pretense of a samovar and muslin curtains consenting to the scrutiny of your Husky eyes. Here comes your spacecraft: phantom concrete spying over sidewalks vaguely lined like damp notepads. When roundabouts spin off into the wild ire vanish in the murk of a place no longer here to please I cannot tell by your type broad and slim in the best parts whether you dance or soldier with me. The PuzzleThe way to Darjeeling tells
A chaplet of burgs hung Between reams of greenery Piled high on both sides As offering to bodhi’s altar. Darjeeling, what is your meaning? Bold terracing Singled out trees Domed out of sight By birds’ treble Discipline the monsoon’s Diarrheal mudslides. Card castle built on air and faith Darjeeling juts a stubborn chin Of embellished pediments Over a world below Not forgotten though Looked down upon. People tight rope and abseil Between steam train and the unseen From irreverence to sublimity. Fog creeps and nestles Against cottage window sills Colonized by potted Gentians. Near-sighted streets Darted with roses Bundle up, infused with the brown Of coal fires, brewing tea, Pashmina shawls, stray dogs, Roof prowling macaques, Faces square and tarred By manliness and The uniformed bustle Of fluted lapels Among a hoard of cars. Ribboned braids, blood red lips In the haze recall A Hogarthian England. There in vaulted gangways A compound is bottled Both cozy and sly Of this urban puzzle In which magic claims Its golden due Of menace and charm.
0 Comments
|
RSS Feed
