Poetry
by Tivnan Michael Webb
Tiv’s poems are somehow dense and light at the same time; they embody the deep contradictions of our lives, which can be filled with sadness and yet surrounded by beauty. His poems often remind me of something one of his favorite poets, Octavio Paz, whose work he introduced me to, wrote:
“The world, a double blossom, opens:
Sadness of having come.
Joy of being here.
I walk lost in my own center.”
Tiv’s poems are filled with images that will make you weep at their beauty: the moon, stars, trees, wind, rain, autumn, evening, darkness. He combines words in a way that makes us stop and experience them again, like the first time we ever heard or wrote them. And there is, too, so much sadness and regret and sometimes bitterness in them, and the way he puts so much beauty and so much sorrow in conversation with each other has always been, for me, a picture of the human condition. These poems still surprise me with their clarity and sensory evocation of how it is to be alive. I hope you enjoy them, too.
— Helen Skiba
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The weight falling on my head like dreams in
the darkness and the light intermingle and chaos seems too painful for the revelers.
The mad tragic perceptions that riddle our eyes,
and we can only see distorted reflections of our own faces.
Like hard cement
Which crack underneath the sun
cracking with slow inaudible creaks that cannot be heard.
Small cries for help that were pleasantly ignored.
The perfect angels that surround me,
who glow like
something which…
resembles the moon.
And I pray for the cold winter nights,
when perfection seems so close,
and problems seem to solve themselves.
Praying that I will
Stand still
and leave my palms
unsacred and
unscarred.
When I find myself staring down my soul,
when snows fall thick like ash
and settle on green bushes.
When I find myself,
and settle on living
through the night.
Hour of Palisade Sunsets
A day stretches between two unrealities
A continuation of the cosmos on the lake
& a spindly ant with a gossamer bead
of sun on its back.
We lie spent in the shadows of feet
on the graveyards of today.
(I have walked many nights
in the direction of the moon
only to find
streetlights)
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What if rain fell down slowly like billowing snow flakes,
glistening dew absorbing the light?
Children would dash through the starry drops
capturing these soft balls of moisture in their mouths,
tasting light mixed with water.
Their dwarflike bodies bulldoze
through the silent silver moons,
leaving tunnels there
that slowly fill in.
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The night marshalled the archaic cries of insects
As it stirred receding star tides
In a cobalt kettle.
I passed the tree of my adolescence
That is made from jade & yellow silks,
By day its flowers are the loyal green of summer
By night it yellows under the neon
Flickers of the streetlight.
I saw a desolate road
That knew silence
From which the insects
Undulated towards Orion.
I knew it was a dream
Like the mist, weeping before dawn;
I was a figment, a particle of dust
blown in the cool breeze.
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Your cotton roads stretch towards summer cornfields
As sleeping rivers cut clay gashes into your visage
And carry reveries to meet silken expanses of hay.
Your face is hidden in clouds
Half hidden and dappled in blue maize.
Your bones are bared in reflection of sun
in split rivers
your children do not miss you.
They do not miss the dream of pavement
expiring beneath chrome wheels
or the overflowing smell of planets
that flowers when evening washes over spring.
They do not miss
the telemetry of lovers lost
in watercolor parks
or the torrents of stars
that flood empty horizons.
They do not miss the pyramids of wheat
Piled to snatch the sun god’s fingers
From the heap of summer days
Your cotton roads lie barren
splayed in the golden oblivion of your heart
and your face decays in the skeletons of your forests.
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Sullenly the jasmines
glow, flowering towards
ascendant stones and thick night skies
compounding in the shadows
of dark ravines.
Cruciform
dreams gather at the beck
of Sunday’s blue bells
as you flower, clinging to the lavender night
while trembling a minuet
yet orange and white
as if laughing at the sun’s
cruel
radiance.
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Under the tree in distant dark
Where shadows play their instruments
You stand drenched in sun, passing poems
through the veins of constellations.
In spring’s soft glimmer, you said you loved me.
Oh melancholy ruby, with star-gaze fixed,
Your eyes
Surrendering me to that weight.
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The clouds grew dim on the shoulders of the city as my breath cried for moon-bound stars that
shared the sky with a wounded pearl and pinned the memory of austere September violets
to dusk-drawn billows.
Synchronized in a flurry of passing lights & phantom whistles, I sit in the back of the fluorescent beast, sprawled like Dionysius on cushions of crushed grapes where a dark figure waited, with lips that trembled like dying roses. Our eyes fixed, and we combatted the progression of this meeting; our silences dripping like poppies in spring rain.
I sit in the back, near a figure with skin like coffee beans and the dangling arms of a sapling.
His tongue slid across gleaming teeth like a wet razor, seeking some eternity in the corners of his . mouth. Our eyes met and we resisted this evolution, eyes averting like guilty children,
(His hands shuffled through pockets
searching for some item, advanced
from the murk of memory into
the frontal now, commanding excavation from the darkness.)
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The shifting blue dome in which a hanging crescent
floats above the baseball field,
with bare stars and the aloneness of night.
Near us, the falling leaves
lace memories of spring
through the wind’s dry lights.
Seeking Beauty
I know this girl and she seeks beauty
When I have sought clarity
And her eyes taught mine
(When I sought the iris at her center.)
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please, release me from the fragile machinations
of windblown twilights, dawns, and sunsets
(& dreary nights that questioned the halted
hands of lovers)
return, release me from the fiery width
of memories that stain symphonies
with a copacetic pulse
(effacing the etching
of our dream)
the rainfall is coming
I can hear it dropping
already on the autumn dappled
leaves.