Pareidolia, image by Irene Koronas
Pareidolia
On the moon’s
craggy canvas,
our brains
brushstroke a face
with droopy
lids and fleshy smile
from craters
and ancient lava flows.
We spot
Demeter on a russet,
the Virgin
Mary in a quesadilla,
Our Lady of
Lourdes on an oak bark,
woman in repose
as a mountainside,
amazons
battling cumulus nimbus,
a smiley face
emoji on Venus.
We cannot help
but to make things up,
turn Rorschach
projections
into angels
and clowns,
even the fin
of a fish left on a plate
is devoured by
a Michelin star
in the squint
of an eye
as we
interpret and redefine
the world
through imagination,
finding
meaning where we make it,
making meaning
where we find it.
Dancing with Neruda's Bones
...bury me at Isla Negra
in front of the sea I know...Neruda
Neruda, only
known to me in the poet’s words -
I
love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in
secret, between the shadow and the soul -
Neruda bones have been exhumed for
examination.
I did not
want his decomposed body uprooted
from its
plot, transmogrified into murder mystery.
Poet of
eternal present, I cradle his imagined bones
and pull them
to me, his tango body’s phalanges
jangling as I
cross and giro their tibia and fibula
pinned
by the sun between solstice
and
equinox, drowsy and tangled together
clanking
across tiles of a kitchen floor.
Let Neruda
be, I plea, still dancing, his bones tethered
to my body
tripping and swaying in tango rhythm,
talking head
on the radio droning on
in conspiracy
theories of the Pinochet regime
poisoning of
Neruda, life split in poetry and politics
as the night wind whirls in
the sky and sings.
Forecast of
ill fortune - to lift bones from the grave -
much like
this wave of melancholia. In inevitable
surrender, I
concede: what does it matter
to have dug
them up as his love lyrics resonate
in his
monotoned moan, Gardel crooning
behind our
bumpy boleo: el
dia que me quieras.
Neruda’s
unearthed skeleton clings to my arms,
scent of
honeysuckle climbing limbs like vines,
as I sweep
and dip inside his metaphoric sigh of sea
and our final
soltada, voice
of the rain crying:
no
carnations or barcaroles for me,
only
a wound that love had opened.
Neruda, now
so mystical and magical,
cloaks his
bones in flesh and play, conjures
a dusty
fiddle, leaps and lands on the walkway below,
the
violin with its ragged companion...
learning
how to befriend lost souls
and
sing songs to wandering strangers.
Nocturnal
Haibun
I will think it a pity that you
have no way
to remember tonight’s play of light.--Kawabata
Caravaggio
powdered his paints with their iridescence.
In Frost’s
garden, they were real stars to fill the skies.
Children
contain their flickering dance in Mason jars,
smear the
emerald brilliance around fingers and wrists.
sparks of
fireflies
ignite
summer’s shimmering
nocturnal
courtship
They
are Cherokee torches turning dark into starry nights,
Japanese hotaru of passionate love, Chinese hing hoy
souls of
the dead.
dancing on
night air
luminaries
in shadows
make
concerts of light
When,
a
lament
When
the
dead grew too heavy
for
the heart to bear,
when
memory
could
not console
nor
priest nor god
nor
soaring bird,
when
you reached
for
me & I was not there,
when
what was
almost
said
is
what endures.
—Andrena
Zawinski
Andrena Zawinski, an award
winning educator and poet, is the author of three full collections of poetry
and four chapbooks. Her first collection, Traveling in Reflected Light
from Pig Iron Press in Youngstown Ohio, was a Kenneth Patchen competition
winner in Poetry. Her second, Something About from Blue Light Press in
San Francisco, CA, received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Her third
collection, Landings, is forthcoming from Aldrich Press. Zawinski was
born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA but has made the San Francisco Bay Area her
home where she founded and runs a Women's Poetry Salon. Her work appears widely
online and in print. She is also Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com
