No Third Thing

Only so much room in a lifeboat,

half-capacity sixareen.  Bushel basket.

Butcher.  Baker.  Maybe

a candlestick-maker;

the notables cross over

in threesomes.

Synchronicities flutter in threes,

casually.  Historically informed,

hinting at world harmony;

a table of elements

that dissolves on the tongue

like rice paper, moths.

This time it's fresh;

just the northeast wind.  

Ball of string.  Buttermilk sky.

A buoyant list scrawled

on a paper kite:

1.  I am loved

2.  There is solace

There is no third thing.

tk/September 2014

Beautiful read by R.A.D. Stainforth...and a bit of music as well...

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Metronomic

Each of your days

is composed in equal measures.

You breathe, eat, sleep, a musical score;

bars of hours, notations of moments.

Everything clicked and clacked

in reductionist order;

a natural metronome

I've never seen in anyone else.

You modulate discord,

anything that qualifies as static,

with the harmony of seconds

continually playing in your head.

Clocks tick in every room

a steady andante of sixty tocks per minute;

a perfect tempo for the slow movement

of Beethoven Seven.

tk/October 2013

R.A.D. Stainforth reads between the ticking of clocks... 

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arabesque of the spine

 A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body. 


― John Updike, Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories