Carolyn Srygley-Moore (USA) | Real Stories Gallery

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is an 1984 award-winning graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's writing seminars, a Pushcart nominee, & author of the digital chapbook Enough Light on the Dogwood. Her desire to participate in Real Stories is motivated in part by a furious yet elegiac sense of friends living with or lost to AIDS, by the need to write something relative to the real world, & by the need to be a guide to her daughter through means of language.

(**all copyright remains with the author)

NOTE: Carolyn Srygley-Moore (poet, USA) and Ferama Wöbken (artist, Germany) collaborated for Real Stories Gallery to raise awareness about HIV

"This page is dedicated to Ray & Quinn, & to Brigit. & to those others, unnamed, fallen or fighting along the way"

Kennedy Center Honors, reflections

- for Tim Barrus (visual poet, USA) -

The neon barbershop sign outside the window flickers

like the sun behind the blinds

as we make love coiled upon the rough hewn carpets

We whistle on eachother's tongues

as on blades of fireant grasses

When Walt was waking the world with his poem about the double flute of the sex

the poem was at war with itself

the world was at Civil war

all a question of economy of language

I saw a dance today to that fact

a man delivered dance unto a new level of precision

& his co inventor perished of AIDS

which is what happened then. The bones did not slowly break

but at once, in a giant collapse, the ribs pelvis spine

dove in at eachother, eating. hungry. there had never before been

such hunger.

I saw a song today to the effect

that love is all. That should all broken hearts

yield up unto eachother's zigzags

the world would mend. & these people being honored

had at one point had lack

of a dollar for a cheeseburger // lack

of a place to sleep. The neon flickers like the snake's charmed tongue

& I am wondering, can I keep you safe

in your new hat & gloves, can I keep you safe.

& not in San Quentin, no,

but in a circlet of suture thread that glows.

Sun Ray, by Ferama Wöbken (Germany)

Wind through the ribs

The candle is not able to be snuffed, we try & we try

the wind sighs through the ribs of your sister

I found five glass angels arranged in a circle at a consignement shop

stained red a bit round the clavicles

& asked if you want me to buy them for your mother

next day I return, they had been taken

& buried like glass is buried once it is broken & swept in a dustpan

buried like cat litter & shit

That's not what I wanted to say

the wick falters in the wind, but the heart is unbroken

our sweat as it merges sculpts a shape

convex as a mirror in which myriads of faces appear

joined at the rib the pelvis the elbow

skipping across the river like light

Unbelievable the noises that fill us

when we touch & the child is nowhere to be found

we are atlas shrugged we are a landslide in Los Angeles

the noises that fill us

followed by an unbelievable stillness

an underground tunnel brought into the light

This is what I am trying to tell you

We have tried to snuff the candle

we have tried, we have tried

Le Torse, by Ferama Wöbken (Germany)

For those who believe in a future // off The Golden Belly, sculpture by Ferama

Within the woman's belly is a covenant

the sun glints from as from a stained glass window

behind which gleams not God but snow

falling. Snow where science declares

there is no snow. The memory of which lies in the falling

lies in the breasts wrecked from children's teeth

gnawing, milk, more milk

when there's no milk to be had.

She stands in a meadow, prairie, snowfield, savannah //

stands on a dam in Holland

on a nuclear waste site in Pennsylvania, her belly golden

an ark in the sun, bring them by pairs,

one on one. There is a parade in the aorta

of fire ants of elephants of butterflies

crossing womb like long distance runners

crossing spaces, race, gene, what is written

by that first chromosomal dance

by the anthropologist's flare. I dare you, ask this woman

what she has seen, is she made

of flesh or wood or iron, some of each,

ask this woman what she has seen.

I have been an outcast from birth, she says, it is not only

the AIDS that has done it, not only

being taken to the dark corner to bleed & bleed //

she is an Other, we are each of us Others,

I know what it is, to be an outcast,

to be a dog amongst men,

even as the sun glinted from my belly of raptures

of futures to come. Here's to those

who believe there is a future

even for the dying // something behind the window gleaming

like broken ambulances,

like ambulances dismantled,

like ambulances no longer needed: what are you going to do

she says, wait here to be taken,

wait here to die? We must get bread for the children

& show them, the snow

they have never seen before, show them the falling

blades of pirouette snow, learn them

to love the falling.

L' Amour, by Ferama Wöbken (Germany)

A Love Letter

Of course I will stay

like contrails of steam after the jet passes

although I went into exile sometime ago

I will stay. It is a love letter

between two who shall never touch hands or mouths or eyelashes.

Snow falls upon the branches, upon the broad backs, of those working the fields.

They stay, working. There is no choice.

I speak for nobody but myself.

I cannot speak for the dead.

I inhabit a parachute of red cloth, stitched by the great tailor.

He sews buttons on my nipples.

He weaves our eyelashes together over the globe

an irridenscent tapestry

sheltering the lost children, the disappeared, the woman

arms blown off in Iraq

for whom her children make a sandwich.

It is a love letter

for the exiled, the exiling

The crows rise in the Vincent painting. They are sweating.

Of course I will stay.

Shamane, by Ferama Wöbken (Germany)

Sun Ray, by Ferama Wöbken (Germany)

The Shaman & The Ray of Sun

Convoluted as a circus actor

convoluted as a yogi performing the lotus

for his cats

amidst the yellow winds

The sun is the white of an eye

the eyewhite of a child in Darfur

the eyewhite of a child in Africa

both parents dead of AIDS

I have twisted of my own accord

& have been twisted

like licorice tasted & tongued against my endeavor

Brown brown white has envy of color

we lie in the sun day after day & blister to burn

any color but white

we blister

I have seen the whites of his eyes up close

when he was mad

he had not even been drinking

& I know I am guilty of a butterfly's blasphemy

at times

stroking the air like the penile shaft

of first discovery

of first language

what is more important, the picture

the written word or the spoken word

Convoluted as a circus actor

stripped of my prison orange jumpsuit

yet lamed that I might conjure

image by clay or speech

I come to you

I come

Comparative studies // the teacher

She said you pray often don't you I said I never pray, embarrassed

though sometimes at night I would talk to trees & I just-then was

looking out the classroom window at the evidence of the trees

looking away from the spectral omniscience,wanting

to see each distinct leaf on the oaks blooming outside.

She knew she could read our minds, this woman, she said as much.

I would chalk a fortressed outline around my brain

duck my head into my book carriage, blocking.

She would announce to all Carolyn is blocking me out.

Once she said she had a vision:

Jane had bandaged hands, there was a loss there, she said

& Jane ran from the classroom weeping.

Jane told me later she could no longer play piano.

Comparative studies it was, religion, we never opened anything

like the Torah the Bible the Koran, opened nothing

beyond our hands for her to fortuneteller-trace them

our dreams for her to rain-dancer call down the rains.

She wore bright orange lipstick

that's all I remember // & dyed hair carried over from the McCarthy era

an era that imbued her: she thought

she could read our dreams our minds like common playthings //

& worse still, speak them aloud //

touch a strand of hair like a string on a guitar like a DNA sample in the laboratory

& morph it, shape-shift it, into something incomprehensible

to those on the verge of leaving the unknown

into the unknown.

The poem is for them

I avoid his name, lately, the name of the one who intervenes.

He is so many.

The face that comes to me in spiral

like the wish for patricide, like the whorling of the conch

shell. When I tended bar, I would come home

with all these faces, all these stories, & bear them in my insomniac

nights. My eyelids were sturdy

as a colt's legs. So tired, sleepless, I would watch

the faces pass through each nightmare, the axis of

each film. B movies on the black & white tv, the alley

cats mewing out the window, for some

milked heroin of nodding-off

to peace. This poem may be for them.

Facing down

the hallway & insipid darknesses

they too are divine intervention, these shiney gestures

of women in hospital rooms

or no, I am in a bar. This poem may be for you.

I am the girl with long blond hair & no ass pouring drinks

then drinking when my shift had ended, scotch on ice

after scotch. The light would enter, I would duck.

Trucks would pass through rigorous alleys, I would

feel the glint, the glide, the avarice

of being nobody going nowhere,

dancing soft shoe on the sidewalk for anyone who would

give me a kiss. Or no, that poem's for you.

The hollow blue bench rained upon

The hollow blue bench in the pyramidal sarcophagus

where memory sits // leaning into

a quickening of music

quickening of despair

those instances when one looks off the precipice

& finds no indigo butterflies

nor the resemblance of love

drunk on first embalming

methods, wrapped

in trails of gods. The results

are not evident

one cannot tell what part of the food chain

consumes more than the other

in imaginings O how the dog dreams

& how I flinch at your touch's

silly

zero I call you silly Zero

mammoth creature lowering upon me

like light upon flower

neither human nor monster

nothing I know by name

except I recognize your lips

how they sleep with the wind

how they nest with the wind

brine of plankton

mixed with lion

& metal of airplane soaring above like a timid suggestion

shiny as sequins on wet bark of trees.

g with kitchen knives I & II

When he tried to discuss it his hands trembled

visibly, he tucked his fear like a papoose

within his shirt, & went onward. One cannot describe the wound

itself, one must not make mention of the wound

as in the Sun Also Rises, one never knows exactly what

debilitates. Yes, he tried to discuss it.

I am a violent man he said.

I am a violent man. But why was never

made mention of // yes, shrapnel moons traced along the chest

yes, bullets that were never removed

but not the wound, not the actual wound.

Apples cored by knives littered the hammock where he rested

hands calm again, coring with kitchen knives.

Eyelids are frail things, they tear like paper.

Then what encourages our separation from the light?

Tie over your vision the fortuneteller scarves, red, you can still see.

Tie the pirate's patch, you can still see

the ocean stretching out like future breaths before you.

What can you deny? They will go on & on until the last breath, rattling.

As the rattler's tail rattles before the strike.

Kinnel lights a fire in the rain

to counter absence, what occurs when you let go of what is

cradled in the arms // night, an instance, light.

Your daughter's face, round, & not yet wound

the breath of her, not yet wound, laughing.

I would not have it, youth, again

Prevention, that is what I am considering

as I catapult the stones toward the fence, see if they will overarch

the metal lattice work. The snowflake stays on the tongue's rind for a time

before melting // & I watch my daughter struggle through

the youth I would not have again, should it be mounded in a bowl

with flowers. I would not have my youth again,

holding onto the doorjamb in a faint,

thinking love, love, love's lack. The moon appeases the landscape

but does not appease that memory. The streetlight

glows neon as a barber shop sign, as something wicked this way comes,

so the story goes // & what of that sense in the stomach's pit

of dread, foreboding, on going to

school, church, whatever institution deems itself

revolutionary? Prevention is what I consider

for messages evolve in darkness

as the loon call floats

& darkness is the room in which youth sleeps.

The wind tonight bears the cargo of all the cries

The wind tonight bears the cargo of all the cries

of lovemaking in this village. Men with puppets on their hands

traverse the streets with diligence to reach the children.

The children are suspicious of puppets. I too never cared for marionettes,

hanging from the doorjamb, their porcelain faces painted like clowns. No.

Positions of passivity frighten me. Rather one foot on the floor always prepared

to run, run, always prepared to run. I will not leave my face

in the mirror like a rundown memory. I will carry its thinning skin,

its tearing skin with me like a flag // of what, of the ability to recreate, to be

recreated. I mold it on the patio into different forms,

the sun hot on my shoulders. As too I mold my voice into different

unknown geometries. The wind bears the cargo & we do not thank it.

Yet in the wind, the cry is changed // the shattered violin hollow

pieces itself together again, is pieced, rather, despite the element of wood

which warps, is warped, by time.

My brother & bridges

My brother builds bridges & has crossed many bridges

& had flown many planes

& has been the architect of many a dream.

When I was a child he would bring me books of anatomy drawing

from school art class, so I could learn to draw the structure of the human eye.

There was always a wedge of distance between us, that was good.

When I got sick, he wept openly, he wept & clutched at my hospital gown

& all distances dissolved. Salt stirred in water.

The space between us is different now.

We are two moored ships, bows touching. His wife is beautiful &

dear to me. She builds bridges too.

& the book of childhood fell away like a hat taken to wind.

& I no longer draw the human eye.

& I am no longer sick enough to be wept over

as one might weep when scattering ashes. I am well enough.

I could not catch up, I have caught up, I am catching up

running out of breath, running, I am catching up

to the mercurial amalgam of what was.

The imagination sleeps in a drawer

In darkness, I descend the staircase on hands & kneecaps

seeking the footsteps of someone/ something I cannot see. I am a fool

for echoes of the imagination, I can take it too far.

A bird is slamming against the window, I see the blurred scallop of wings

against the night // it falls stunned, crow or dove, to the slabbed concrete broken

sidewalk below. What were our last words to each other this

morning? Something about who took out the garbage, or failed to do so;

nothing about which of us loves the night more....

It is not competition. & seems the bird is not a bird

at all, but a green dinosaur incarnate, proof of the regeneration

theory // that all is change. That everything human, all of life, is

change, down to the single animal cell, regenerating

each seventh year;

down to the desire to morph, shapeshift, be a creature

of filmed outer space. In darkness, I feel scales forming, scales disappearing,

III

in the same arm's breadth. The daughter of imagining sleeps in a drawer.

I am not asking for more than this // that you stop saying you cannot

change; that we stop saying there is no change.

Down to molecular biology, that is a lie

like this animal crow thing, stunned to the sidewalk, this dinosaur

Thing, stunned by history, by extinction & rebirth, by the hot pink

semen of time.

How we come to know, or Charlie, the perfume

Remind me about Charlie, the perfume

I had on my dresser when I was fifteen. How does one come to know

the distinctions between scents, mother, father, brother,

the dead hawk on the sidewalk. How does one come to know.

We drive by a house you call your monopoly house, it is enormous, how

does one come to know the distinction between such weatlh

& poverty, past going to bed with cramps in your stomach

from hunger. Or the distinctions between families, two fathers, no father //

the girl locked out of the house in winter.

The sky dresses us in glorious skins, skins of light, fading.

Skins of light, brightening in the dawn.

At the edge of the water, I will push you in

to the depths of fear & brilliance, I will push you into the tundral cold

then pull you to warmth, wrapped in a blanket forking a can of mustard sardines //

& you will know.

Ways to avenge onself on interpretation

Prove the human is not

essentially evil. Prove there is not only one way to the Spirit. Prove, rather

the Father embraces

I am not a scientist of any sort.

I remember biology & its arrogant teacher, slicing the fat frog open

& the Amazonian song filled the classroom with small bells.

The liquid smell.

The dissecting slice was thin as a fingernail clipping

a small boy leaves on the floor. It glowed like orange moons.

Ways to get back: love, the verb. Look out the garret window as Anne pondered

& say I know people are basically good

even as war looms, the red gash of bombs, of rotting flesh, looms

two feet away. Bearing red trumpets stuffed with lotus

in full bloom, stand on the footbridge, & salute the orange sickle moon.

Jim & I curl on the unmade bed & touch eachother's navels like

war wounds, scars. I guess they are.

Like miniature coils of gospel blues, one is avenging oneself on

an interpretation of an interpretation of the Holy Ghost.

Almost kidnapped

Growing up, having grown up to believe more is there

than can be seen // more than newsprint headlines

more than tv screen blues, I glimpsed magic everywhere.

It was not a Jesus thing, really, but a sense

that the stripmall was multidimensional,

that when the clouds opened above the Colorado hillside

it mattered. The missing child on the milk carton or paper flier

stared blankly at me across the kitchen table

all my life. She is me, is not me, does it matter....

I skirt all faces for resemblance, I am eight, she is the girl inhabiting the massed

trees behind our house, the house there placed. The girl in the movie they show

at school, with the floating white sneaker & depths of strangers,

looks like her too. Me, not me, does it matter. More is there

than can be seen // I pray nightly for a father miles on miles away.

There is a rainbow oil slick in the driveway.

There is a mutter of love. There is an incidental almost-kidnapping

rather, kidnapping, certainly

much later, without love.

The woman in black at the warship's bow

didn't sleep well last night, I dreamt about falling

endlessly through a window that was not even open.

When my brother returned from the war

he spoke of nothing but oranges, he spoke of oranges openly

how to dissect them like violins, like biology class frogs.

He did not speak of what he had seen. and

When my father returned from the Pacific, he yelled he screamed

He flailed in bed in the night, my mother said later,

he spoke of a woman in black at the warship's bow, without a face.

Times are uncertain, always uncertain. Nostalgia

is but a searchlight in the prison yard, blinding to what is, what

is not. We pretend in this area that we are safe

from hurricane, tornado,

certainly we have our blackouts, our days

without heat & fire. This is a haven, a woman with Alzheimers

used to say. O, the possibilities of forgetting! I didn't sleep well

last night, dissecting guitars & the eyes of bulls

in my dreams, I awoke my hands all bloody, as if possessed

by acts unknown, stage sets of cardboard.

and I fall and fall, without force of gravity or grace, through a window not even

God forgot, & left open.