Four Poems
by Tantra Bensko
Flung Blindness
Kiss a black fish
With no eyes, in a dance hall,
Kiss a gold fish
In the middle of sound,
In the center of a circle of sound
Of drums, of dance, of spun
Thoughts flung into elements,
Animals, colors, your selves.
Kiss your own blindness
To all but your own sight.
Kiss your own eyes
With another one’s mouth.
Fling out your selves
To the dance of the drummers.
Weave all your colors through
Animals, fire, and
The music of numbers.
You
More memory
Than dancing,
More dreaming than memory,
More awake than asleep:
You, weaving like smoke,
Smoke in a tendril,
Tendril of smoke twisting up
In rhythmic gusts of air,
Silver
From a mouth of fire devouring a mirror:
More hypnosis
Than seduction,
More rhythm than hypnosis,
More transfixing than action:
You, slithering like smoke,
Smoke being reflection,
Smoke killing reflection,
In gusts of silence.
Memory
From a future looking in the past
Again—and I say no, be separate,
And you say
Nothing, being the rhythm of my silence.
I’d Say So
Let’s go where we don’t know,
Where we don’t need our language
With us all the time.
We’ve dreamed it, seemed it,
Gotten close, fallen in, almost,
So let’s go closer and almoster.
Can we be the things we see,
Dream not in words, but what
Words never, ever let us say?
Where is that Other Language
Where I Want to Drink
Where is that other language
Inside the flowers’ center
Or the sea’s range of crests
That sound can ride
In and out of playing
Til the meaning pounces
And you never see what hits you,
Scratches, pulls, and looks
Into your eyes with colors
Fully there and fully here
Inside you. Where
Is then that other language,
Does it yowl and dare descend
Into the beat and die inside itself
For other words to be you?
Call upon bees inside the flowers?
Is it higher, higher, tighter, more intense,
As it looks into the fire and burns
Its colors brighter, readier
And readier for sound, yet
Always sound, just readier?