Dear Emma,
you raised every man
your child in touch
I was once of them,
A flower’s dye, alive
on the endless palm
of your kanga,
In twilight I still see
the slow draw
of your long fingers
loving like water
over
what it holds
Poetas, Ustedes no se meuren- Poetry by Carlo Saio
The more I lose my words the more I uncover my soul
Dear Emma,
you raised every man
your child in touch
I was once of them,
A flower’s dye, alive
on the endless palm
of your kanga,
In twilight I still see
the slow draw
of your long fingers
loving like water
over
what it holds
An Islander’s Pocket of Time
∞
The canals lining the mind of what I hear
dowse in the gushing voice of the cowry
An ocean becoming,
whirls in the mouth of a hermit’s lost shell,
where sound coombes and constellates
only to break
and wisp itself, thin amid
the fingerlings of driftwood
water became.
∞
Thoughts lag behind, whip-
whispers of blind sand contour-
over the lone casuarina,
tracing listless,
the history of the wind
in leaves
tickling-
empty tipped rivers
into the ceramic ash of shore
∞
Distant limbs sweep over their brittle markings
continuously retouching could never be finished-
The meanders left languid by a toe, drag in the sand
a boy’s journey and endless loop back home
There
stands my body
The feet
are both below
and thirteen worlds
beside me, whole.
They walk in tow,
One is young,
One is old,
and too slow
For the four steps
it holds
∞
Slur, perception, slur. Detach limbless
pendular tentacles of one imagination
to all,
the dark mute dissolution of chaos, solaces
in the rhythmical will of the universe,
white moths snow from the inkwell eye
unfathomed by the ocean’s wandering murmur
A path to a part apart of the past,
and the catalyst of eternal evanescence
splays from the waves as they peel and spray,
slip and spill the self, lost adrift
the continual spume of elemental law,
to draw from outward rupture, the calming clatter
of beingless breath, met
within the obscure, clammed core of matter.
I. Seem me among the moonsun minutes of dawn,
along the waneless, half-day crest
of tropospheric froth,
a dugong,
unglassed on the undulate surface of the past
Half the equal, reflected upon
the sea you no longer see, met in imagery;
a vicarious leaf, springs under laminal skin-
the palimpsest of experience.
A fisherman with no line but the bow-
broken horizon. No rheumatic tan
of turquoise death
from the dolphin fish bled of water,
but the hue of its imagination
in the greenest grain of aging color
I became.
∞
Sit with me awhile,
graze upon the shallows of time, lull
in the giant gaze of her endless motion
wait-a-minute, amidst this feeling felt as the tide
rocking us in and out of coral swept vision
You are as lawless
as the shift ing pigment
of what you create,
watching as stars swim winged beneath
the night of a waking sea.
You do not speak for the nakedness of being
nor pin pierce the wilderness of innocence,
the ever masked symbol
patching the collage of your ontology,
but in yourself lay you long enough to exist
rich in the iridescent essence of things
yet too small to be seen
by the science of daylight.
For I have sailed somewhere unseen
in-between the oneness behind two paths,
ahead of the future birthing the past
in the lunacy of one season, blown
toneless
in the soulless shade of the kuzi,
thunder, oscillating and outstretched
to mind beached men, and yet
no more than the trade of wind
flapping skin like a breathless sail,
a nomad seen balancing freedom
on the sinking teak of a dhow,
or a mangrove’s distant drifting finger,
already-born seedling of its imagining.
∞
In the circular swallow of reason
the mind becomes what it undoes
and the body is no longer
a bridge
crossed, when one cannot swim.