James C. Baloian

the one white eye
raises its lips
to the darkness
from a dusty corner
looking for the tombs
of dead stars,
looking suspicious,
looking like a broken bowl
in a furnished room

a shadow grows from the hollow
hump of an old life
it walks alone
in the empty space
ashes inherit
before heaven
closes tightly
into a fist

drinking candlelight
it narrows back
from the rim of light
echoing into a single
black eye

before the moon,
afraid to open her door,
is suddenly swallowed by the dark waters
of the sun

This day is no different than yesterday,
that I should make it the beginning.
The world is damp with the odor of winter
and my eyes burn with a blue halo of late news.
Windows have grown higher. I look
for secret edges where doors might appear.
My poems gather behind lips
of women awakening
in the dead hours of bitterness.
Unwilling to speak, the women frighten
into the language of rain.
Upstairs the future takes no shape,
like a wished miracle that forgets to arrive.
In a landscape closing in,
messages go up in smoke,
and something terribly human
wakes my hand.

Words bring no satisfaction
to a kingdom where space
has forgotten its name and season.
My fingers stick on the smoky windows
of a tired sky. The doors to each city
tighten their mouths into a zero.

I speak two languages:
one is the language of the stomach,
a vacant room that laments
in public like a tarnished statue.
The second sings the invisible poetry
of the homeland. Finally, I find
myself like a spider: content
with the darkness of corners.

I dream of wild, sweet fields
where stars twist into the milky dust of the cosmos,
and my poems lift like seeds
from the aprons of Armenian women,
pushing home; their hands red with dark earth.

Listening to premonitions push a green alphabet
over the hardened arms of bare branches,

I went into the field where brown skinned Mexicans
put the stars to sleep with songs of the sun.

I weighed the day shedding my skin
for perfect light, a chameleon

pulsing green in a rainfall of working hands.

To Albert Nalbandian

Morning begins
a bad day for flowers
the sun beats out
brilliant blue flames
lifted by warm winds
across a white sky
onto sidewalks.
Shirtsleeves and shark skinned suits
fragrant whispers of black nylons
cascade Union Square
in a melodic human symphony.
A parade of foreheads
prowl the veins
of Powell and Geary
with abstract, cold eyes
to where the City
is pulled out to sea
by the stilled wings of gulls.

Clusters of red-eyed wildflowers
hum like bees from their golden centers
platonic roses refuse to wilt
craning green necks for recognition
and cellophane
Calla lilies dream of unfurling
tight wide mouths
into alphabets of sound
where purple windowed tulips
trumpet with laughter
drawing shadows
along your lifeline
where everybody rotates towards
Albert
with his open palm of sunlight
extended at the edge of a dark world
like a hummingbird
embracing the face
of a blossom
with artistry and tender eyes.

Unexpectedly,
it’s been raining
all day.

The car is packed and everything
is being said inside;
between fat fingers
pinching cheeks,
Uncle Gourken offers
quick tips
for the first night,
while balancing on
a thin wire of Raki.
Wrinkling cigar-faces
with inside information
anoint America with a garlic atmosphere.
A blur of nervous tongues chant
a liturgy of survival
under breaths of broken English.
The liquid voice of the Oud
tempers each lifted foot in unison.
Hagop and Aram shout politics
over a table of Meza;
Aunt Sarah grunts
from her 4 foot frame: “You’re married now,
believe me, it ain’t
no bed of roses.
Look at me, 40 years
and not a complaint!”

Congratulations tiptoe like the deaf
in a crowded room. Memorizing
words and faces in a swirling weather
of music, fingers rise above heads,
clicking like ball bearings, with sadness and tradition.

But now the hour is midnight,
and when I turn around
the room quiets in a distance of festivity,
a recipe of generations
dancing to ancient tunes in modern times.

This time the mysteries
are worn
by too much magic
while subtle wrinkles
advance like galaxies
over sanguine dreams

Each grain of life
a promise of things to come
now ending
where it began
dancing upside down

This magic
this inertia of air
glitters against a combustible sunset
Its reflection masquerades
swarms of stars
entangled in an amethyst heaven

I lie down to the hush of frogs
My furious life
pretends nothing

My furious life
pretends nothing

Under the burned distraction of night
below my eyes and the uncertainty
of my shoeless steps
I imagine morning
embracing me like an empty bed
the reflection of a cigarette
reminding me I’ve missed the bus again
I pin my fate on the flame of a brief promise
written on the back of an IOU
long since expired

I picture the new suit
In a garden beneath a cloudy sky
the private shadows divorced and returned
among the smoke of turbulent grasses
and the beseeching gestures
of dexterous hands
striking up a match of conversation
between the bad music of applause
a dream fell through me like summer rain

I give the grey hair of my head to a hummingbird
who will use it to find his way
through the dark lonely crying of gulls
Sometimes I’ve held it
like a newborn child
My dreams too large to swallow
and its there waiting to break out
like revenge, revolution
or a memory walking back
from the end of what it has lost
with the bitter ink of prophecy
and the defiant singing of madmen
behind dark glasses reminding me of myself

I return to the grain of my own earth
lift my empty cup and begin humming
the untranslatable recipes
of dead stars and the moon
dancing through a cobweb
like a weightless island

to Baidzar

Your voice passes through me
like the flames of candles.
I look for words to call you back,
knowing I am the one
that is still here.

Within me is a stone,
a geography of sadness
that clings to each breath
I see in everything
you’ve touched
an inherent spirit,
life sized and wakened.

How will I learn to understand
the language of clouds?
I anchor messages
to the wings of birds,
and wait for an answer.
I scatter objects,
and wait for your hands
to join them back again.
Too quick was the life between us.

Outside, winter’s face blackens
the cosmos with sleep.
Each day closes
between our shadows,
as if we were in a dream
where your voice echoes
into the sound of a gate opening.

I stand before another kingdom,
separating us for only a moment.

To Harry and Vera

Last night’s rain
pushes into snow
and north to New Hampshire
at the door
of the Armenian Church
children circle
in cold breaths of laughter

Vera’s soft steps
ballet through the kitchen
since 6
with the sun’s eye
Vera is earth
creating fruits and blooms
wisdoms for the family
her heart ia an open fire
in a desert of snow

I listen to Harry,
called Boz, her husband
click the needle of the phono
with the music of America
the voice of the oud
is the color of Harry’s eyes
his soul is the spirit
that wakes dream from nightmare
with a smile
and a will to make
each day
the 1st day
of your life

Waking on Spring Street
In Whitinsville
I rise
In a tango

Of Harry and Vera

To Louise Mantashigian

Into the boiled cabbage leaf
she feeds rice, onions,
garlic, lamb,
humming a folk song
her father sang
to her on the banks
of the Euphrates
a century ago

When she pounds
the wet dough for bread
her mother’s dark eyes
appear in the shadows
her fists make
the wings of doves
lift and disappear

60 years
she bites her tongue with no tears
and quiets her heart
from that moment
when the Turk split
her mother in two pieces
Der Voghormia
watching the doves
lift her heart
toward heaven
Der Voghormia
Der Voghormia

Louise listens for the shoes
of her grandchildren, who climb
her stairs in America,
growing with each step,
she recognizes each foot
with clarity and name
and knows that each
will sit freely beside her
and listen to songs and stories
of a far away land

There is a quiet growing
In that lowland
the dark shadow of the Sierras
purple in summer
and the coast violet in winter

That growing root
would anchor to
nothing rich on top
the hardpan of language
to break the surface
and continue
a door of misspelled words
and no punctuation
a child of revolution

A child of plants
the hands of working people
the eyes that sit with no one

Across an ocean of white sheets
night moves in
with its kitchen of neon
The city settles
with a hum of moth wings
and curtains drawn
against a wind of schedules
a table of unopened letters
Fear is an empty chair
that has lost its voice
Mice hold their breaths and listen
for the wilderness to speak

I study all the exits
within me leaving no memory
but to bare my teeth
Night moves into dawn
from the moans of bedsprings
scattering omens like confetti
from rooftops

until there is nothing visible to see

This vacant house
is too public
its community of mice,
after dark,
dance on the cellar door
for the moon,
or bite new passages
into the earth;
at dawn they return
with pockets full

Exhausted from frost,
the cornfields frail
with harvest, roots
go out like hungry snakes
with swollen tongues;
shudders of rain
mark the road

like heavy boots.

Up past
the first fields
of dead grass
the slow rise of hills
opening green,
shifting winds, crossing animals
risking blank turns

Up past
the closed houses
blinking whites and blues
Up past the flatness
of late summer
we meet—
his short arms
opened into flight

He whispers
and in that moment
grabs my hand and leads
me back
back from the first front of trees
back

into everything growing

In repose they bend like grass
to teach in blurred voices,
how to summons the stars
from the dark rings of my eyes,
or quilt the earth with seeds
and feet of clay.

I smell the fragrance
of Ararat
on their breaths, composed
of words
that would make paper burn.

I live under a spell.
catching flies
with a charmed tongue
at the bottom of a water well.
Living below a water lily is heavenly,
but I choose this pond’s earthy surface
to grow weary in my green leper’s skin,
dreaming of a gentler flesh.

I succumb to what is hidden,
inventing darkness in the blink of an eye.
My humped appearance
remains unbroken, bewitched
with a cold blooded passion for love.
I bask alone,
while sunlight shuffles
patterns of light,
hushing the gossip of mosquitoes.

Where flowers shed their fragrance,
I purse a smile
from eye to eye
and rise early in the morning
without moving the shape of water.
but I am hard,
examine my edges,
the beast kicking within me,
that would turn these veins
of darkness
with a woman’s kiss

into the flesh of a man.

His mother beats stone
Over raw corn,
Pounds and shapes with water
A carpet of maize for Sunday’s visit. I’ve seen
Her careful hair and perfect hands
Turn prehistoric behind those bones
The way a butterfly steps out of the shell
Sand falls from her palm
And passes one day into another.
Her voice sings in a with a gentle madness
The stories that fall down around her;
Inside, Eddy throbs, looking for a way out.
Dark eyes point his fortune North
Beyond the river where smoky cities frail
Under an afternoon sun,
High on slushier to a place
Where she must learn to keep,
What everyone leaves behind

At the border she sadness with silence,
Gathering last straws of memory
From the pockets of her eyes.
She waits in the shadows like a question mark.
When she answers, two teeth bite down
On a clothesline of dead children
Strung through a backyard of fences
From Guadalajara to east L. A.
—a jungle of concrete and glass.
Luck finds its own fortunes,
She knows this, expecting to miracle to arrive n the wings of angels.
Dawn sparkles from the East; the Sierra’s would rather sleep.
Eddy waterfalls into America
On the table of a flat bed truck, in front of a “Flying A”
On promises written in sand on a pathway of empty eyes
To “Hall’s Diner and Gas Stop”–
Eddy whispers among the heads of cabbage:

“Nightmares, Man.
Nightmares.”

Conversation slams a door,
listening to the afternoon
decompose into a shadow
under the glass faced table.
All vital signs thin
into a red thread
pulled between our teeth.
We breathe silence into weather,
making it impossible to hang on.

And without a cry, our skins
emerge from an undergrowth
of syllables, fleeing with the moon
toward the Great Highway
to the heart with no hesitation.

Our love is no longer secret,
sinking into a wilderness
of darkened windows.
Morning enters
and I find you suspended
like an echo
between the fingertips
of the wind

followed by no one.

The moment slows, I see the butterfly
Clasp wings in a faint orange black flight
Hands still
Fingers point and settle
On the dust of two wings

After the catch, unbuckling
Watching the intelligence
Turn and budge from right to left
I let the butterfly go

The conversation went hours
Finally at last the hand
Met the nods and eyes
The veins grabbed
Again at flight

I caught the Ace of Hearts
The Jack of Diamonds
And lesser cards

I fasted and met each gamble
The stone got colder
Toward morning
I let the butterfly go

Yettem , California

Further up the passage small fires
Blink with the distance of stars
The horses wide-eyed and still
Make no conversation

The old men with stories of animals
Nod with children in their laps
Young men spin wheels of fortune
And come to bed last with eyes open

The women temper over the river
The heat of an absent bed
And packing for early rise
Undressing lengths of hair
Speak under lips
With curled tongues

Half and half the moon rises yellow
Over the milky haze of many lights
And streets of the market
Seven pockets of gold
Wait like the sun to rise

After midnight the only watchmen are the old
Who keep silent stories among themselves
With the motion of sleep, never sleep
Eyes with the gestures of an owl
Branch the oak
So calmly webbed their shadows seem invisible
The quick journey below

“Come,” said the Reaper,
“My hands are cold
And the world is still.”

The hands are full the tables empty
Laughter is less all that is secret
The stairs must slumber into heaven
Blue doze of eyes
light the lanterns once more
for gypsy settles the night

And dawn squints over the sea
like a mermaid beached
looking out
over the great desert

before her

For Lisa

it is the stain
of blood in her eye

her missing hands
robbed in the night
by wolves

at the castle’s entrance
her sheep are sold
the butcher’s knife
beckons them
as grass does
in the high plains

as the stomach’s
of the rich
pounding like hearts
in dark rooms

To my father

I enter the mouth of dream
between the ticking of the clock
Something invisible falls to the floor
without hesitation like a star
while the world sleeps

He has left the warm body of his wife
to rise for work with closed eyes
through rooms of empty furniture
The fragments of his face
sit before a bowl of cold cereal
with obedience few would understand
while his childhood wanders
barefoot and unreachable
into the music of another world

A dim candle at the window
watches the wind dig into him
like a dull knife
head tucked deep in a jacket
and cold curling him into a leaf

as dark blurs into dawn

Before I
and then he let down his head
like he’d seen the future
and wouldn’t turn around
for anybody

Once he’d seen the darkness
and sun in the same moment
now it was just the window
the clouds and grey light

this far swept his hand

a little more time in space

all those alive
the open hands
offer all journeys

fields of animals
digging the graves
of other animals
stretched from
kelso, Washington

all those alive
gums and jaws
black-eyed
they close
the rooms
for morning
for the sleepy eyed driver
for the waking children
for the wet gleam of chrome

they leave no mark
or name

to John Stewart

I hear him clicking
in the open spaces of windows and doors

White-capped rivers push
canoes into the darkness

of his fingers
His black body
a sky of shouting stars–
a village of nations
in an endless sentence
that leave no mark or name

John John
My
Brother John

Fastened to our seats
like fish on land

Snow gathering on windows
like shattered stars
Denver a jewel
glittering tears
watching the moon dive
into cold eastern sky

I’ve never been that big
the old man said
with each footstep
a morsel of faith
the crossfire of moon and trees
having driven his shadow

deeper into the heartland

Between the ticking of the clock
a small body realizing it has grown
tries to close into a fist

He has left the warm body of his wife
to rise for work with closed eyes
through rooms of empty furniture
The fragments of his face
sit before a bowl of cold cereal
with obedience few would understand
while his childhood wanders
barefoot and unreachable
into the music of another world

At the window
I watch the wind like a dull knife
curl him into a leaf

as dark blurs into dawn

there is a difference
of flesh

of how far
to step
after the wind passes

of whose words
you should

listen to next,
and always
the edge
of your own hands…

two stumps
growing eyes
blind as your own

The old men use their bones
in ceremonies
lasting all night

What uselessness
fastening the bones
to the young
to make fit
their dying

For Panzo

even the table will surely break
or find its fat legs
swimming in quicksand
garbling for a loose rope
drives down

the red dressing over green leaves
the red pouch
of rib glistening
its blood
tempting teeth
hearts
and a hard prick

dance zuchinni
I kiss the tempting bulb
of green onion
tiptoe in the valleys
of casaba

and now before the king
rest
this table like a wet maiden
hair full and open

Look at the whitehead buffalo
said Teddy
the bear in the wood
the city in the tax
face my stick at sunup
or get out of town

The last summer
and in Ohio and Indiana
the green coming autumn
and McKinley dead stone
this progress that is
the short hand of the clock

There is a time
Teddy would tell
when he woke
and thundering the sky

The “electric theatre”
with all the fury
of the stars
in one shocking
bolt of explosion

is the night blue moon
and if the moon
cools the sun
in a long breath
will gulls come
and raise the sails

the dark girl
sings without voice
four strings
and naked
invites memory to dance
water chips ice
and winds
into the lower lands

the horse brings no message
I come soon

fuck
and it was done
so fast the story

runs into a laugh

Autumn flush and cool winds
no snow
the lake slides like a snail
grits teeth to the very bottom
and looks for the lost eyes
it drinks with

Tango of streetlights
morning breath circles
the bottle
its green kingdom
waves in the heat
the jailor washes
he’s got two teeth
half a beard
and good notions
about life and making money
all day he salutes with
loud jerks of his tongue
the petitions
the laws
of nature

and to the moon
his dreams
of being
king

1/

At Harper’s Bend
the sky breathes
hunger’s scent like the bear.

Moose nose the ice for water plant
only to find their shadows.

Caribou, hair thick with snow,
move in twos their tongues
tied together like a compass/

There are no seasons, here,
only ice holding the landscape captive.

2/

Foot beats on the path
from the forest the mad river’s laugh
His shadow climbs
from the throats of gullies
to consider the end of day.
Hooking seal meat to twine
he lowers it into to the lake and waits.

Below, eyes wait
gulping their breaths
like the flames of a lantern.

Polly

along the night
the fiery red bush
simmers like stew
in the reefer head

in July
we trail to watch
the moon first appear
in a yellow coat
and with faint flow
a girl at her mirror
rose to the black curtain
and undressed her full body

to the sea

Tavern

the door is drifting
the first glow
is Miguel
hunched over thin paper
capturing pinches of dust
he is a cocoon maker

and fingers thumping
over Polly’s white keys
clear guitar
and sweet smell

I am a lost sailor
shivering in the yellow moon
of Polly’s dress
Peppermint Patty smile and cross-legged
above the cold window
the howling whale
drunk
and on his way
to Mexico

the new moon
brims over the road
and waits invisible
for night to grin
and light out

earlier shaken from sleep
I came out to speak
nightmares and wake my body
in the bold
stars and blue wilderness

Sometimes I wish myself
small and running in
from the road
or wind

and at your feet
ask to climb up
into the basket of arms