Deborah Poe

Heroine

there is a house with many rooms

            and you are a window

                        there is a coat of many colors

                                    and you are blue

cry sister

cry sister

for the ones you couldn’t keep

vertical infallibility:

the walking out and looking up

an inability to second guess

what Chinese poetry reveals

is between us and the sky

as far back as the Han.

what is tucked between the chest hair

and the moment somewhat marvelous

is the truth that there is nothing

between us except for us

say happy birthday

say you will

not own my odyssey of silence

the Chinese poet
says all genius

is melancholic

Einstein, Rilke

the old testament

to today

I remember the girls that we talked about

how they threw up, didn’t eat,

gave it up and gave up.

and what was my subject

position?

not missionary

up the ass up the river

fuck who defined the confessional

the anger engrossed in the past

the dharma gates a broad entryway

daring a future to enter them.

 

 

 

Untitled, September 2004

 

 

perhaps we have decided

                       

                        to have our own feast

            of fools. will the village

idiot please rise?

                                               

                                                nothing is exempt

                                                            from reversal

it is this time

                                    most of all

to speak.

 

 

 

 

Deconstruction

 

Zen through the pores

                                    the heart

to explain how things get to words,

a mangling

                                    (a pile of white bones)

                                   

 

It can't be obtained with words; it can't be obtained without words

            or

Without words, without silence

 

                        Empty of -isness[1]

                                                emptiness

                                                origin beyond understanding

a lectern made of clouds

vibrating electrons on the edge of wood

                                   

we

of the impermanence

Oh emptiness,

                                    and suffering

                                               

the transparence of body language

                                   

           

empty and connected

                                    or empty because connected

The sense organs dispossessed

           

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[1] Empty of –isness was referred to by my teacher Tim Burnett during a Heart Sutra class.

 

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Deborah Poe was born a military brat in Del Rio, Texas in 1969 and has continued the wandering. She considers Texas a place to search for rattlesnakes and to fish with her father and the Pacific Northwest as home. Battling many years for more time with words, she was last seen in business America working in the software industry as an international program manager. She left that position in the summer of 2002 and has since been studying Chinese language, contemporary global literature, global modernist and post-modernist poetics, and literary theory. She completed her Master of Arts in English in June of 2004 and moved to upstate New York to continue her graduate studies. Deborah Poe's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Solo Magazine (review), Jeopardy, Poetry Midwest, Triplopia, Snow Monkey, Bellingham Zen Newsletter, Poetry Bay, and Hamilton Stone Review. Her chapbooks ,,clitoris,, ,,vulva,, ,,penis,, and (W(e)a(St) Solo were published in April and October 2004 by www.furniturepress.net. She is working on finding a home for her first book of poetry.