{"id":7362,"date":"2014-09-29T13:00:21","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T17:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=7362"},"modified":"2015-06-16T13:20:07","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T17:20:07","slug":"heraclitus-reaches-another-sea-growing-magic-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/heraclitus-reaches-another-sea-growing-magic-rocks\/","title":{"rendered":"Heraclitus Reaches Another Sea & Growing Magic Rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"musicplanet\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Heraclitus Reaches Another Sea<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond the poetics of these spaces, I pine to a rolling sky.<\/p>\n

Let your long flashes tear the roof off this grass hut.<\/p>\n

We leap over the last sign; only our tracks: our mandala<\/p>\n

to the middle of nowhere.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I toss away former selves like Ritalin bottles out portholes.<\/p>\n

Wanderers eventually smear paint toward a new home.<\/p>\n

I was once bundles of bruised nerves, but after 30 years<\/p>\n

I finally left my mother’s ocean oil paintings alone to dry.<\/p>\n

When the levee broke, the harbor crumbled, but now<\/p>\n

I keep climbing toward new headlands.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All my life I’ve been trampled under Stormbringer,<\/p>\n

that mare’s tail bolting, clouds striking my head,<\/p>\n

until my flamenco stepped in with her hand’s<\/p>\n

descarga<\/em> electrica,<\/em> shorting out the chair<\/p>\n

I was made to sit in before knowing what it was.<\/p>\n

A tortured prisoner gets his last request, then escapes<\/p>\n

with the Roma dancer to tell his stories of cruelty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now we dance to the surprises that feed the right brain<\/p>\n

creating axons. We’ll wake to our gypsy nicknames,<\/p>\n

sing away our stories of oppression and wandering,<\/p>\n

and splash our feet in new currents.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All our pain and rescuing each other made deep colors<\/p>\n

and blazing light against our shadowy blue lament.<\/p>\n

But I’ve looked at chromatophores; the goal is galaxies,\u00ad\u00ad<\/p>\n

stretching our gills in the International Station.<\/p>\n

We’ll float over the wreckage of ancestral metal and glass.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If only more moments would flash scenes for us:<\/p>\n

sailing down routes for new views of you;<\/p>\n

not with the old weeping willows or bitter quinces<\/p>\n

(the old world pussywillow branches did their work),<\/p>\n

not oaks and laurels, but palms welcoming us,<\/p>\n

lotus flowers showing us home,<\/p>\n

and fresh poppy blooms to help me forget<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If each little vacation brought new colors (to you),<\/p>\n

flavor-textures of shuffled music (for me),<\/p>\n

If I could keep tasting the fusion of those waves<\/p>\n

without breaks in that song-scene,<\/p>\n

then I would not have to be so human anymore,<\/p>\n

and you would be my all-becoming loves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Growing Magic Rocks<\/strong><\/p>\n

—\u201cDon\u2019t worry about poets.\u201d \u2013 Anthony Piccione in a 1998 phone conversation with me—<\/em><\/p>\n

Harvested stacks of print articles grow, weighing the gap between poets and readers.<\/p>\n

I pondered this one night as I was sweating into my pinesap-stained hammock.<\/p>\n

I had spent the day on a ladder sawing eight-foot hedges and digging out stumps.<\/p>\n

My jaw loosened; shapes and symbols teased my oxygen-starved brain.<\/p>\n

As I pulled them around me to close off the waking world, I saw<\/p>\n

poets as stumps growing stalagmites out of their heads, like pastel coral.<\/p>\n

Some of the coral budded into globes, then opened to release<\/p>\n

smoky spores, rising, turning into an Escher-like sky.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The pattern felt as important as music, my synaesthetic taste for music.<\/p>\n

Yet it felt so easily missed, like fluorescent coral without blacklights,<\/p>\n

waiting to glow colors. The sky kept feeding around its other side,<\/p>\n

but that scene just felt too big to view right then.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I awoke on the hammock in the dark to a neighbor\u2019s radio playing opera,<\/p>\n

that vibrato singing that can swallow half a scale. Radio waves<\/p>\n

bounced off the ionosphere, past Sagittarius, its string resounding.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And I wondered about undiscovered types of coral growing in the ocean,<\/p>\n

and poets growing those cauliflowery images no one eats, distracted by<\/p>\n

the glut of news\/glorified gossip of crime\u2019s scars, or celebrity worship<\/p>\n

that eclipses our view of auroras, and our own way to reach upward.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But then I recalled the sky pattern, and somehow knew<\/p>\n

the inverted rain could emerge anytime, and that<\/p>\n

we may never know what happens to poems<\/p>\n

any more than notes played into the air,<\/p>\n

or these words you may read into the air<\/p>\n

graveside, finally backed against the fig tree<\/p>\n

pointing to Lyra, listening.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Lloyd Milburn teaches creative writing, literature, and composition in colleges in upstate New York where he earned a creative writing MA. His poetry has been published in Permafrost, Talking River, Willow Review, Ithaca Lit, and Sandy River Review. His poem “Unschooled” won a poetry award from Willow Review in 2012. A lifelong interest in synesthesia influences his poetry and his music recordings. His first CD released in 2013 includes two of his original poems and lyrics.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Face in a pillow to block out the roaring.
\nThen a small radio became a womb;
\nMy tight stomach needing songs
\nto cover up all echoes of words.<\/p>\n

Music, a push on a sled into a quiet barn,
\nfinally, the feeling of being covered in
\nhaybales: a thick scent-sound I could inhale<\/p>\n

READ MORE.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":218,"featured_media":8050,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,219,199,217],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7362"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/218"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7362"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9403,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7362\/revisions\/9403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}