Kashmir
Abstract - Distant - Philosophical
Pet Information
Pet Name: Kashmir
Owner: Metaphor
Theme / Type: Frost Eledon
Born: August 24, 2015
Gender: Male
Collection: 4
Mood: Excited
Battle Portal Stats
Hit Points: 12 / 12
Strength: 20
Defense: 0
Speed: 10
Intellect: 18
Misticpower: 1
Battles Won: 0
Battles Lost: 0
| Attached Weapons | |
Books Read
Books Read: None
Exotic Foods Eaten
Foods Eaten: None
1. - Eat Me Cookie
Pet Profile
Winter of Elephants
1. To recall the pachyderm and his memory
His eyes tear up, softer than a stallion’s
fighting dust for dry vision.
Across his gaze, savannas fit in concave mirages.
Behind it, memory sprawled like
a crumpled then uncrumpled map of Kenya.
He forgets what brought us here,
thinks with his trunk extended,
tusks bronzed with grime.
He remembers with his ears, lily-wilted
as we join him, intertwining, ponderous with thought
music is white, wax-winged
sonata of the house fly
a half-note rising
on each amber eye
radio on the kitchen counter
indecisive with static
music is intermittent monochrome
the memories it invokes worn
pockmarked land masses
that grind, groan, gasp into place,
somber, migratory.
He recalls in his traveler’s dream:
the sepia plate tectonics planned
onto a giraffe’s grazing neck,
the place on his back where age lines converge,
Euphrates and Tigris deep with drought—
He does not carry them. They navigate him.
They swell when he staggers. When he thunders,
they retreat into beginnings,
a mild storm of dust at his hoofs.
2. Portrait of a Waxen Fruit Bowl
Every day, she set out a bowl of fresh fruit, whatever was in season--
Pairs of strawberries siamesed at the coarse napes,
Green grapes with the girth and glow of opaque Christmas lights,
Black-red cherries staring up in a pulpy haze, stoic and glaucomic,
melons without seeds suspended in flesh, the beginnings of birds.
I’d satisfy a hunger I didn’t know was there,
one more like a thirst that begets mirages,
silverfish in the sleek kitchen tile,
starstuff staggering hazy from every source of light.
Cried into a cup of chocolate milk,
withheld from her all they told me that day
while my skin preserved me, airless,
saran wrap over weeping citrus.
She teaches me
that pea pods smell
more like baby’s breath
than baby’s breath,
a nostalgic garden
knee-deep in its own asymmetry,
tomato vines, gangly prayer beds
a harvest moon
man’s legs akimbo
beside his splayed almanac,
that they conceal smiles
still verdant, clutching baby teeth
askew, too meager for joy.
Cried into the snow
the pit of my pulse exposed
like a stirring from hibernation,
a meek growl, a tepid fanfare of claws
that catharsis
retracts
misses
retracts again
forgets what
it wished to bloody.
3. Roses, Tulips, Carns
Nothing fits
Skin over bone
peeking into pried-open cells.
Penumbra and cloud
can’t keep phasing moon
from spilling
a perfumed purse--
blue pearls cratered
into seeing,
tissues saved for a day
when no one will cry.
She is a gardener’s spade set down on the earth.
Nothing fits
cold sheets over cold couches
stolid carnations
frostless vase
the bouquet that’s not a unity
still huddled close to
shiver under the breath
of a deaf dim-lighted fugue.
Only I cradle the dirt
into which her panda-faced violets are born
where we pull our skin
our names tighter around the neck
write them in penmanship
every o a tentative moth hole,
a t tied to an e,
trip over our words.
4. House under the airplanes
Stars. Our galaxy a dishwater baptism.
Metallic warblings of
morning take-offs. Jaundiced moon
and its identity in calluses,
a clock of tilted heads
all poorly made up.
In the back bedroom,
I face the door,
the dark bathroom
whose light bulbs stare
like shoddy taxidermy.
I force somnambulant toy soldiers from the woodwork.
I sip warm milk, then orange juice, through a straw,
not expecting pulp.
I call for you. I struggle to admit that I call for you.
I struggle to admit that
I mourn by sweating on my own words.
I join a herd, an elephantine march
melt into my thirst for tears
entertain mirage after mirage of red-eyed muses.
5. The Elephantine March
I've had my crippling moments,
all starting in fragments, glassless
joints fresh off the potter’s wheel
hands with the kiln’s fever.
I wouldn't know how it feels
to hurt to walk—maybe like a pilgrimage
through a sandstorm to satisfy a piety toward dust,
maybe like a nostalgia for ocean
whose sirens have fallen laryngitic, choked to tears.
I’ve strained to listen.
I reach to speak
silent and assertive as a smoke signal.
Pet Collections
Revelry
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