I'm not sure how to talk about this mysterious and beautiful book without sounding like a blurb, because it's one of those books that, like Jean Valentine's work, I love but couldn't explicate even if you had a gun to my head. The thing is, you should just read it. Read with your mind open to transformations--human to animal and animal to animal--and to yearning. Read in readiness to be transported to worlds part dream, part fantasy, part this very strange "real" one. Expect the secrets curled up inside you to be fleshed out in ways you never expected.
Read this poem, my favorite from the book (though "Origin" was a close 2nd) with an amazing ending, and then read my students' centos, poems created using lines from Only Blue Body, in the comments to this post. Also get to know a bit of the quirky, funny, amazing mind of Rosalynde Vas Dias by "liking" her Facebook page.
Only Sweetness
Though I play the white noise
tape of the zebra finches
circling the aviary
often enough, I never dream
of flying, David.
I wonder how
they miked all 27
of those little birds--
catching each wing
beat and braiding
the beats into this sound
of heavy breathing over
a drum circle, but on finch
scale (think 4 oz. each). I did
once sort of hand feed this
oriole of some kind--
they like oranges and I
knew that. Have you ever held
a halved orange out
to a black and orange creature
waiting for him to understand
you mean no harm, you offer
only sweetness? And sometimes
you think that's no oriole,
it's some kind of dog or even
a rail rider too weak to hop
a train out of here and after
you are not too sure what
to believe, he hops or crawls
or drags himself to you, your
hand, the orange-half offering
and plunges his beak into
the fruit, gulping the flesh
into his own flesh, taking
greedy mouthfuls in a way
we associate with desperation,
but this oriole, this creature
is neither desperate nor grateful.
So you wait, almost blank, gazing
at the lay of feathers against
his skull, the pips stuck to his beak.
You step up into the white noise.
He'll fly, you think, if he finishes
the orange. Only half an orange
really. But he never does, just stabs
or sips or laps and you keep holding
it out, your offering, feeling the percussive
strikes of the beak through the peel.
What could I do then, David,
once I saw so clearly there was nothing
else I wanted to do instead?
Transformation Explained – Cento Compiled from Rosalynde Vas Dias’ “Only Blue Body”
ReplyDeleteYou’d never survive out there
with no visible alteration.
Walking through the black trees
holding a spoonful of gold
you mean no harm,
you offer only sweetness.
Yourself, very small,
hands folded, eyes far-off looking
idly gazing out at the crisp
skeletons of living or once-
living material.
You understood by seeing.
Some died. Then many.
The Shadow recalling the Source.
Imagine holding a beautiful object
and see the needles, individual,
on the evergreens, and marks on the rocks,
marks that show where they cleaved
in a panic. Back in the body
by accident in a panic.
Gone Sailing Without Me- A Cento Compiled from Rosalynde Vas Dias’ “Only Blue Body”
ReplyDeleteBen Carter
A book closed upon itself
in the snow woods.
Water, freezing, broke the mountain upward.
Below that, a mile or more, green pastures.
The cold flags under your feet
cold glass against your cold fingers
spool dizzy and loosing substance
the snow piled up to either side of silver paths of frozen boot prints
the blue bug light
was hit by a car
The beetle’s left elystron snapped off cleanly and fit the tip of my tongue like the husk of a popcorn kernel
At the puncture itself, no pain:
juice and veined golden flesh
The oriole pecking the flesh, keeping one eye fastened to you
nodding in recognition
little wren, all anthropomorphic;
a furnace, orange, pulsing like a living carnelian
Goodbye, Goodbye, my voice protesting, the voice mute, thinking
the last wooden cup I made is right now drying on the dish rack
A spring night, already hot
at the center of each nucleus, pollen gold
When I was born, the small spinning everything was gold.
My eyes are huge—liquid and empty of pupils.
step up into the white noise
My disguise is full of holes
The color of an anchor doesn’t matter
The ship is gone sailing on without me
running over water, skidding—there’s an oil skim—purple-green weeps out and it’s down
a barrier.
The sheet laid down over wreckage.
Rebellion by Evan Goetz
ReplyDelete(Cento created from poems in Rosalynde Vas Dias’ Only Blue Body)
The moon tonight is so white,
holding a spoonful
of gold he never gave
to me, the fire small
in his pupils.
I’ve always wanted
dark eyes without light.
I would die
for that.
In that church
my disguise is full
of holes.
Wait ‘til it breaks.
Drunken noises
of approval follow.
Artificial becomes artful.
Longing By Yelena Sanchez
ReplyDeleteA Cento After Rosalynde Vas Dias’ Only Blue Body
In the mirror, I am merely a woman, with breasts, the too-large nose, mouth, eyes. There seemed little choice.
I used to be captain of my own ship. I stared at it forever. Long ago, he fell into the brown rot of the forest.
In my dreams, a man asking, Don’t you ever get lonely? Maybe I am.
Alone and lonely in my attic room, a light on all night will draw him. But standing in the dark, he is a plum.
His good aroma, his growing softness. His skin barely contains him. Maybe I am a woman in love,
or maybe I am delirious. Inside, I would die for that, if I touched him, where sun touched
lines that curved. He was silence, a book closed upon itself. Illusion.
Can I say it is a memory? We got along because it was fiction. He is mine because I hide him,
folded like a paper fan largely in my dreams, sad when one is longing.
*Line breaks were altered by publication, sorry :(
Rán Gone Fishing
ReplyDeleteChlöe Sweetman
The sky turns soapy, the air bends
down, inert in that desert
under the dark water. Silence,
as if he lived
within a mirror, temporal
silver bubbles caught here and there.
He is so still, dark
purple, black purple,
a parcel of flesh, porous
and also organic. His cracked
ribs are just visible, his knuckles
mercury white.
Gold, his gift of penance.
At his growing softness
she lifts him from his place. Soon
he will split. She holds him
up to her lips – a face. Human.
Her blue eyes turn
blue, the blue that dead
bones should be.
Don't You Ever Get Lonely? By Donna Walker
ReplyDeleteA Cento After Rosalynde Vas Dias’ Only Blue Body
Oh!
You used to be
a small, unbearable itching.
White and purple as a frozen puddle.
What is this
in the photograph?
Silver paths of frozen boot prints,
mercury white?
The light is a kind of phosphorescent milk…
yourself, very small,
dreaming of being
a reflection.
At night I’d try to feel
saffron. A gentle hand.
Goodbye, Goodbye.
The gold changed, becoming white and distant.
Can I say it is a memory?
Is he eating silver? Is he marching?
Speeding away from the source—
combing the earth.
No wonder his silence.
As if he lived within a mirror,
his back to me
for the first time.
Everything Gold
ReplyDeleteCoral Nardandrea
He lay down in a hollow.
His skin was pale under clothes.
Is he eating silver?
Is he gold and white?
Inside the shade, he is
not hollow, but swollen,
holding a spoonful of gold.
The gold changed, becoming white and distant.
Don’t you ever get lonely?
She looked for him there,
unmade from herself, swoop of inked line.
His listener nods the slow and long motion,
though his eyes suddenly seem erased.
How is it she’s never noticed before?
Does he feel he is always being born?
Someone to remember him:
her face, half intent, human.
But like her,
this was a divisionary lie.
No wonder his silence
barely contains him.
It sometimes seems
she’s just briefly resting, reeled out
to nap as one reels out laundry.
You shouldn’t stare at her, not while he’s standing there.
He lifts her, shoulders straining back,
wielding a paint brush.
Artificial becomes artful.
But that’s not a memory.
These aren’t that kind.
A cold morning.
There was paper stuffed
in the window frames.
It takes all afternoon
to see it clearly--the dark back,
the blue that dead bones should be.
The mirror reflects the small spinning,
everything gold. The part
that seemed real--
Is it not visible?
Gold, throated bodies
playing airplane.
They hung from the rafters
by ribbon.