James C. Baloian

Streetlights lean through clouds of starry faces
dissolving under a steady drum of rain.
Life goes on between scattered papers and fixed clocks.
Forgotten messages are wrapped in the cold room of her heart
She looks for a secret edge where she imagines a door might appear,
or a word, behind her unwilling lips
curls into ashes where thin fingers of smoke squeeze
a delicate pain through her ceramic nerves.
From a distance, the first star flairs above glassed roof tops
and moonlight wrinkles the steps of sleepwalkers
their waxy shadows of lost moments
slowly falling apart
through a forest of curtained windows.
Here life separates a kingdom of memories, patiently waiting
Here the future sheds its skin in public,
when each heart beat least expects it, you can almost hear each life
sound an alarm after years of waiting
while the universe of a day, short-termed and long forgotten
waits down avenues of dawn for the simple grace of human touch.

The tongue tiptoes with sober breaths
drawing ghosts from the weathers
of worn furniture and always alone
the fallen conversations of inquiring hands
the approaching dawn on the quietness
of remembering past moments
possessed with accusing shapes
erupts into iridescent migraines
leaving blank spaces across a frontier
that winks out a nervous summons
and waits to be fulfilled
where the lips reclaim the edge of delicate hours
life closes in and waits
to be fulfilled

Windows take a deep breath,
Reflecting the moon
From their dark eyes
Like dice held captive
Inside a fist of soundless space.

I live in a cosmetic land.
I feed on the insomnia
Prowling the air
I sink between the sheets.
Nights go underwater
And the lights of the city
Limp as cotton hurl
From the heavens
Just under my skin.

Ambition haunts the air
For signs of dawn. I hold
My breath and wait
For the rooster’s crow.
I climb shadows of dream with invisible fingers.
My face clocks seconds of silence
On each numb wall. And one by one
My eyelids open
Like store front windows
Where I will try
To pawn all I have
For another day’s breath.

Published in: THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

The factories on Van Ness and 55th streets
bend their crumbling walls like old men
who sit all day thinking they have somewhere to go
On the inside, frames of pictures hold only dust
and the dark shadows of their once lean bodies melt down the once virile concrete
that shouldered barreled frames of working men sucking on cigarettes
and whispering their dreams for Saturday nite when payday weighted their pockets
and the hipped girls on East Fresno Street called to them like sirens
and made them smile for the week….
In those days the hours seemed never to end
and for one day in the week each man was a King
as he spread the dollars for each hand and bill that reached out…
Horrified faces of all kinds speak to me forever like children who never grow old
My hand stretches, like the end of a rope, to pull each shadow out of the darkness
and into my memory, my voice vapors into fog,
as each word stumbles, like drunks on a Saturday nite, one over the other.
The children lose patience waiting at the dinner table…
their glass slippers break against the factory walls and windows,
their voices grow silent with each passing year,
they feed on their own depressions remembering days past,
and inherit what is only make-believe.

Uncertain of an ending he scatters ashes of another life before our eyes
Handfuls of rain press the silence of the afternoon into water proof dreams
Umbrella shadows crown their regret into dark breaths
at the door way to his forehead
His vocabulary indulges frightened discoveries
looking for ways out of this heaven
where a vacancy sleeps unclouded with each embrace
and waits on a dream to unfold
Perhaps it’s a turning point, where betrayal arrives late
demonstrating each moment controlled with unsaid words
where he grows darker “as if he were nothing more
than this man or that man”
Where the power of poverty concealed in the wilderness
of his own shadow passes from one hand to another
and words are no long necessary

After all is said and done
the eyes find it harder to look up
as they bow shyly to discover silence
behind a curtain of boredom
or how after hours of refusing reflection
they harden into dark planets
and pretend orbit

After all, we all end up
crawling deep into corners
of the surgeon’s bed
our wrinkling flesh numb and red
fussed over with plastic gloves
explored with sterilized instruments
We invent a space from beneath the ashes
of fragmented omens
with nothing asked
and nothing said

The rain marches outside the door
unfurling shadows from dawn
as the wind turns a shoulder
and weighs what is said
among crafty wolves
eyeing the motions of hungry children
whose words hang on hollow branches
and fall each day like blackened fruit
the wolves with no hesitation arrive
bared teeth drum the ground
as they circle in a macabre dance
The children, sleepless, push out of sleep
looking at silhouettes of hunger
in an ecstasy of suspicions
Their arms suspended like a clouds
while inheriting blank faces of fear
through the moon’s shadowed
and quartered eye

Her mythology sings
to a lifeless world
a symphony of the sea
from her rock-tiled balcony

Leaving traces of sunlight
through candles of narcissus
her hands flower morning glories
and nasturtiums
over the concrete environment
where birds slide
along the shadowy arms
of telephone wires lost in fog
where twilight filters through
like sand that rises under white-hooded waves
she trembles with curiosity
and unshed tears

A halo of salt reflects the
veils of mist
in her watery hair
as she rises
in a clear voice
from the chalice of the Pacific
awakening the ears of a silent planet

If you look long enough
her breath lifts and falls
like the wings of birds

You are frozen at the doorway
by the quiet movement
of earth each year
in shaping bones
or filling in the illegible
wrinkles on the palms
of her hands
or the sky
of her voice

Her voice tickles the leaves
like a summer wind
crossing and recrossing
the delicate paper of sea
on which the maps
of her life are spread

In other lives despair is less simple
dampening the earth
with the wisdom of uncertainty
hunger sits at an empty table
waiting for the doors to open
into a great room where each secret life
turns into a galaxy of grass
and a child waits, learning to open her hand

Littered and loitering, other lives
hide among abandoned things
wearing wintery eyes
and the coats of scarecrows
their fierce intolerance
grinds handfuls of dust
into landscapes
that are not theirs

I believe we leave behind
what is inherited
touching each moment of life
before it’s forgotten
like a dream at the moment
of waking

I said
here are the hands
you wanted
the rest are coming

There is
a boy who plays
the violin in a field
no one has been
able to stop him

when we had come as far as the road would go
a fence stretched from side to side
pine chutes growing between
broken tar,
upturned roots elbowed into fists

the closing passage more and more
in darkness
a wild stream
blooming down over rocks
loosening itself from snow

for the edge of the sea

appearing at the tops
of towers
over the scrape of shoes
at five in the morning
the drifting moon like an eye

I walk the neon coast
and greet the last angels of night
the ovens like the cheeks
of fat men
and eggs spilling an orbit
of grease and frying meat

light shivers a needle
of cold grinding in the tube
of the lungs
food or air
what matters
is keeping it down
loving it
and in the dark
squat among tallcans
and shit like a river

once at sea
I saw your face
blinded with light
across the sky

in the night
the king of night
commands his desert
with a lizard eye

a child came suddenly
like a hawk
living from the dead
living from the dead
he said
flexing his wings
in a tangle of wire

I go out
barefoot
to quiet the dogs
they sense my nervous control
and go into corners like lions
and wait for me to leave

yesterday I counted fifty
lifting into the sky
and drifting
they were like travelers
and did not stop

It’s Christmas. The sky
is thick with snow, and houses
along the streets begin to darken
quickly against the landscape.

The glassed windows are packed
with snow, and only a few shadows
escape from the inside. There
are these moments of silence

which lock people to one
another; and I, alone
with a friend, speak of things
which my father said yesterday.

I hunt allnite lots
of stolen cars
swung in a cosmic swoop
along the great hiway
into the fillmore and tenderloin
the gloved hand of the city
black click of heel
and smack

the needle points
a pattern of blackstars
rain echoes a scream
the doors of my veins
open
and
refuse

to bury you

the alley
grows thin
in the face of the moon
my eyes close
so I can look
backward

the road
pressed between clouds
opens its palm
of flashing rabbits
and deer

my body comes down
hurling like a star

for Garabed

The last number is the first
and the curve in the straight line
is only a river that runs from a desert

I would name that river
but by nature it leads to the sea
I would enter from the backside of the mountain
and look at the city of Palu
to watch it operate

Multicolored scarves and vegetable markets
where the dee/eyed Armenians close
over a day’s work
Streets with dancing to invisible music

Below the shadow of the mountain
stone arches crown the river Euphrates
It is the beginning of time

I have not yet been born
2/

I am 90 and die
on a hospital bed in America
My teeth gone/bones for skin

I cannot see
I speak with my organs
They know me well
Many shadows come to my bed
I smell each with my fingers

Have I come so far
that silence is my fate?
Have I encouraged history so much
I listen only with instinct?

The quiet feet of questions
tend the growing and the young
The anxious eyes and dreams
prepare the tradition
Whatever buried returns
and comes again

Knee deep in the river
the words are read
and revealed
I become the future

The wrinkled shirt over the shoulders of the chair
Rests in a blue heaven of blankness
The crumpled pants in the corner
Unworn now over a week
Are stained at the knees

The child wanders with a silence for words
In the tall forest of houses
And 5 o’clock traffic
Tears seem useless, and only the woodpecker,
Wings tucked around a golden red body
Strokes and digs with vigor against the tree

Grandfather the wind stings my eyes
The child in my body ages toward you
I size my shirt to my own shoulders
My frame tightens and the pocket
Beats hard with blood

What dream is in your coma?
Do you speak with God
That your voice is so still
That your fingers twitch with nightmare

During the early morning
Before dawn colors the darkness
And barefoot monks kneel on stone for prayer

I walk the dirt avenue
The universe of the field stiffens

Out of the cold
Your face in the circle of sun

I appear poised
like a pelican
scattering my spirit
into voices of sand.

The Pacific chooses to go on,
bringing messages that taste of salt.
At the edge of this slender sweep,
I translate the syllables of mermaids
nervously lamenting in a tantrum of seaweed.

From the Pacific I hear
my own departure trumpet
into a separate moment,
a bridge I can cross over,
a beginning for my life
to drink from.

From the Pacific the middle of life
holds a candle in a wind of echoes.
Into my life whales pass
after years of captivity
knowing the way homeward.

In the distance the celestial bear
Lights the way to the moon,
and I can never go back
from the way I came.

Photo by Dean Drumheller, Rio Mulatos, Bolivia, 1994

Along the road
dawn pushes
through the orchard
barns fade red
through crooks of oak
An old man dawdles
in turnips forgetting his age
A cauldron sun nets the far hills
where vineyards roll down
into the machinery of earth
and night endures tireless faces
heated under the dead lake
of an enameled moon

Spiders weave webs
among the small fortunes of flowers
thinning the unsettled hills of suburbia
eating the dust of heaven
in corners that go nowhere
Under the city’s cinematic skies
rackets of labor drum
in a sandstone dusk
cold washes of beer
harbor the air of swamp coolers
Men line boulevards
lowering their hats and hands
like secret agents
Trees talk to air
and children wave ragged coats
to ships that go by
pulling the horizon behind them

Without hesitation something visible
shatters to the floor like a truth
waiting to be picked up and eaten
I imagine a wife
small farm
a cow full of milk
all day in the field
in the hive where a queen
in triumph directs the wind
pouring in overhead

Clouds edge the world
Birds on imaginary winds
with some vague urgency
of direction press forward
into rhythms of boredom
Their wings refuse to move
and the clock’s silence
is a white tablet hidden
beneath punctual tongues
Leaving this wonderland
is so hard
I lose everything
to dark bags of crows
trailing behind me
and their dreams are not
strong enough to endure
the distance between
breath and departure

Every passage is fossilized
Squalls of light perch like small packages
on a winter clothesline with bitter tongues
The shape of things to come
twists in the wind like a hanged man
Wearing through what I can not wee
each day dissolves
into fragments upon a butcher’s block
dragging me into its trance

I begin work
my terrors knotted
around my neck
like conquests
The road that has dragged me
this far still has my grin
on the bottom of its shoe
I collapse
like a puzzle
to fitted anyway
I choose.

Maybe its age
Maybe the years
I sit under the orchard

Counting the tears
At the bottom of the glass
Reconstructing,

Is it the Armenian in me?

{}

In dream, In paradise
In the blood
In the rolling thunder
between us
I remove the scarf
The air beneath your feet
The swords crossed in gripped hands

The blind wind of desolation
That pretends all mountains
Will crumble before
Its raging

In lemon-colored photographs
the wind blows whispers of wheat
through my ancestor’s hair
Before the rain
shoes untie themselves
and run from the children
that inhabited them

All is windless and sky
There is a roaring in the air
that chases our lives
into backyard shelters
while Eisenhower calms
the static air waves from a hospital bed

In the streets scarecrows
have lost their shadows
I see them make their way
to the next day
folding into Dali images
or the shadows of unread letters
trembling in the hands of winter trees

1920. His words stalk the silhouettes of Wall Street
a dark encumbering sea of desolate meanings
in shoes that refused to move the tumbling hopes
of the Republic

He looked for something
he forgot to remember
remembering only what to forget
A hypnotist’s oracular tongue
in a house ceasing to dream
A grift in a silk suit he held
the country’s heart with his “hollywood looks”

He counted words
daily in a different voices
memorized their bitter virtues
in the hours drunks lament
a childhood of broken mirrors
He charted maps across

a park of fallen trees
where premonitions poked
up from a gray earth
where the echoes of wrong
became right
His white hair a silk flag
his public saluted with reverence
blackened into a Tea Pot
assaulting the abstract democracy
his worshipers could no longer
drink from…He procured a girl
to bolster his innocence with faithful emotions…

His days began to winter
like his hair
into a snowfall of pigeons
on a park bench
in the dawn of 1922—San Francisco
his luck fell to its knees
in a plate of King Crabs and mistaken identities
still pawning America
little by little
into an empty room
of promises
for the price
of a lifetime

Armenia, Armenia!
Far from your red earth
my heart explodes scattering
white stones along the banks
of the Euphrates
to cover the eyes of the dead
I breathe
the fragrance of Ararat
through shoes of endless roads
and cities petrified into bitter stars
I hear my ancestors deafen
into snow
into a sudden breeze
across a desert of no return
I follow
their footsteps where blood
softens the ground
into a sea of wild flowers
I embrace
all strangers as I am a stranger
in a new land
and wings are within me

I find her absence mapped in lines on my hand.
The mirror never lets go.
I mistake my reflection for her shadow
and the trees move towards winter.

I keep her name beneath my tongue,
pace the avenues of the room
where her heartbeat echoes in the teeth
of the clock.

At the window I watch her face freeze
to the landscape, refusing to move
into the white glove of the moon.

Weeds stand erect
on the roadside
Through the squinting heat
of motel curtains
three-day stubble
of dreams close behind me
My shadow outruns me
only when I pass under a light
All these days
snapshots of the dead
in the lining of my coat
and what to show for it
My face contorts without command
My tendons like old gears grind
dry and flake away

A spider hides in my heart
sleepless working night & day
on the shelves of my spine
tending a menagerie of petrified wings
I try to name the unforeseen shadow
between words
but everything around
me grows smaller…
an empty boat on a silken sea
My memory is a cloud
through which the rain falls
on the edges of insomnia
Everything I consume
makes me thinner
During morning hours
he comes across the desert of my bed
his smile drips with tiny bones
his whispers offer everything but love

Standing in winter’s doorway
the Magician
does the same trick
over and over—-
he shakes an empty hand. . .

The Jack of Hearts recites
a sonnet without moving his lips

The deaf hang upside down
and ring like bells

A butterfly turns
darkness into a rainbow

Colored scarves dance
in a halo around the moon

A woman’s belly swells
with the song of a child. . .

and
he shakes the empty hand
he shakes the empty hand

Absence points me like a compass
through streets
where memory prowls the air
to keep the dark from dream
night seeks each muscle
a constant companion
between the sheets

I’m awakened at dawn
surprised to find my poems
roosting in the window
calling the wind to inhale their sail

My voice retreats into echoes
only stones understand
At noon I twist like a weather vane
over a blue dance floor
a man growing older
refolding the shape of his life
into the glass of the sea

The sun slows
and the boat begins
to drift as I take form
I guess no one
ever let’s anything go
without a fight

The warm tropical winds have finally
pushed a high pressure system
over the valley and suddenly
the idleness of February and March
shatter into telegraph rain

Weeding, spraying, planting, tying and suckering,
irrigating, tractoring under the ghost of the Great Bear
awakening
bumping his head
in the dark cave of stars
And each moring
through his transcendental cave
pokes the eyes of the Sun
woken earlier
on the gossip of birds
sitting in the black/blue
notes or a morning prayer

North coming
the sweetness of orange blossoms
cool evenings and summer mornings

Machines of war
shed their parts
and the world goes dark.

Threadbare on the outskirts,
a child bites knuckles,
finds no blood,
fills his stomach with cold fire,
hardens lips,
knots his throat into a truth–
a revelation.

Women on street corners
gather themselves
into bouquets of seedless sunflowers.

Someone is walking ahead of himself
waving his ragged coat to ships that go by
on the sea of his loneliness
Darkness unfolds an apricot sun
chilling edges into the color of brass
My expectations simmer
into tongues of dust
arranging themselves
into last night’s ashes
The sun erupts
with bleeding hands
I shrink from a day’s work
like a match that won’t light

The roads all came back
bringing with them
the gray weather of old coats
A flammable moon
wrinkles the landscape
into blacks and whites
Winter wanders in
on the breath of an empty page

From an old photograph
I listen to a black man
play clarinet to crows
silhouetted into musical notes
between telephone wires
My feet turn the earth
as I try to keep my head
from the wind’s inevitable noose

Between the ticking of the clock
as dark blurs into dawn
I enter the mouth of a dream.

I count my failures
like loose change
or prayer beads,
reciting the liturgy
of empty spoons
and methods of sin
that are unexplained seeds
I would rather feed
to pigeons on a cold day,
listening to the wind
scissors through a cathedral
of dry leaves and over dark tables
of freshly plowed earth.

We cling so fiercely,
sacked in our flesh,
shapes who do not
own our shapes.
Black night.
I leave a foot in the door.

Dawn.
Children hold out their arms
to the slow return of light,
the wind, and whatever is coming
whatever is at hand.

I step outside
and inhale the earth
with its blue echoes.
I lift an orphan
from a crowd of crows
and carry her like an urn
of sweet water.
In the distance
the brown rhythms
of farm workers hunch
in a field of flowers
gather the last light
into the basket
of their arms.

I am worn from the inside
like a pocket. Wandering
in circles, I make dancers
of the birds,
weaving the wind
with wings and words
that refuse to shake
the earth from their skins.

Foot beats on the street
where memory hums to itself
on wet tires and in the dark rooms
of empty pockets where voices
slow through a sea of fogged windows
and into the next world.

Awakened, I crouch in a city of dry leaves,
hunched and hungry, unhurried, and drinking air.
An electrical fever of streetlights yellows
the weather; hours run like ink
into a hole beneath my feet.

The sun bullies up like a battered fighter, balancing
on the dull patience of a razor. This is how it goes
day to day; shadows sink into pavement, and the sky,
stiff as iron, is a knotted sheet each hand grapples for.

One day lends itself to the next. Workmen line boulevards
like prayer beads, awaiting the final justice
their lives have struggled to become. Above them the city rises
and the word is made flesh before the dust of day
settles like a prophet into the pit of my throat.

I bicycle winds whose echoes
mock silence with sawdust smiles. This is how it goes
in a life where love wakes behind doors it does not recognize,
tapping out random rhythms of loneliness
that sweep one hour into another. All around us
the landscape holds up straw arms and sings,

believing hands that once held stars
always lead to heaven.