Dias-Porter, Joel

English

Syracuse University Research Facility and Collaborative Environment

7776Joel Dias-Porter7978Joel Dias-PorterSEVENTEEN QUESTIONS(And a dervish wish)Beloved, say our souls are lostin what we seek to salve or solve in ourselves, plus the wafting magentaof scented candles or Cassandra Wilson calmly humming from two cornersYou Don’t Know What Love Is.Say one has kissed and paid a cyan cost,yet still wishes to smell your hairor cradle you close as what speckles their chest?Suppose this wish includes more kiss, not squashed lips, teeth clinking or a desperate wrestling of tongues, but melding irises pistoning our pulse?Say magenta, say cyan, say canary.Mean these colors of kisses could be key,kisses perceived as almost melody,as key notes or uncertain notationof certain chords,kisses flitting like sycamore leaveson a broken branch in a key breeze.We know we may never taste a lobe of your ear or peep our peppermint breath steam across the compact, yet magnifying mirror of your body. But suppose these hands were muscled horses roaming the sequoia hills of those hips, or these fingers Canary pups under your ruffled blouse.Say a body breaks all bravadoand stacks that hardened armor at your feet;then nears you almost naked as a peeled potato. If said kiss laidyou across a bed’s soft greed and sipped beads of Chablis from your belly or cupped your breasts like plums-would a river flow over the cedar banks of its hands?Which prayer might peel back clothes like leaves sheathing an ear of Jersey corn and finger what fine hair is found there? Say cedar, say sycamore, say sequoia.Yet, please don’t mean these branchesfear noon’s rising heat nor thinkthis supplicant wouldn’t seek to enter your chapel now boarded up for years. What if every molecule of ourswas also yours and more entangled in twists of the plot than vested in how it unknots, if stars couldparse each beat of our heartstill shivers start to shine paradox past the spartan logic of spines?Yet given the silence that scissors usour nose may not nest in the knowledge of your neck or collect scents from deep in the pockets of your sheets.But say hand, say hum, say heart.Not as part of any apt quotation marked by a curving like lashes, such as if a tongue whipped twice could both spark or demark desire,but simply so that one might somehowtrack the syntax of your sighs,as they silently watch the hands of timecaress the backlit body of a clock.8180Photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths8382SOMETIMES IT SNOWS IN APRILfor LaSon C. White (1961-2007) April sprouts around us,is the sky as sullen there? Wasn’t The hour after we talkedcruelest, most raw? In less than amonth, your oncologist says a blizzard ofbreeding cells may overwhelm you.Lilacs still bloom here as there, justout screened doors. Hintsof all the Prince songs we share.The purple petals are nearlydead certain to flurry down,land and bury your walkway.  April’s sibilant drizzleis a ride cymbal which seems to mockthe insistent rhythm of memories,cruelest at dusk. What othermonth would dream ofbreeding, then watering theselilacs purple as a recent bruise?Out of the incessant patterof the rain’s thin fingers,the Alto vibrato of a voicedead on key, humming “Adore”, somehowlands near these ears. April winds wane,is that my phone’s ringtone amidthe backscatter of the evening news?Cruelest is the quiet past the call.Month after month might sprout,breeding a peace fragrant as thoselilacs you adored. But right now,out on the horizon, the purple dirgeof a setting sun isthe last hope I may have of beingdead silent and hearing your voice in theland of the living.Joel Dias-PorterTHE IDEA OF IMPROVISATION IN DUPONT CIRCLEThe whir of a “Blackbird” stirs from a battered saxat the center of the circle.Its marbled hues ringlike a fountain’s waves,rippling flag-likein the April windblowing a dark Blues,a rhythm not solely ours,though perhaps only wecould spy what’s sigilin its rites. Suppose the white fountain isn’t merely a metaphor,the soaring “Blackbird”not simply a symbol.Could this blue wail and that widening water(raving evermore)be tied by dark chordsif what spouts from the gray-locked manwas just what he’d heard, since these chords were likely voiced by Birdwhose tarnished hornwasn’t spurredby splashing water or rippling wind, but a sea sharply diminished within.If simply a blue soundof the fountainstirred or stilledthe green bills in his caseor merely a deep silence of overhead clouds8584floated darkly,no matter how light,wouldn’t it still bethe yang of dark waterringing deep?Why then did he seemto play somethingdarker even than the yenof a black bird’sundulating wings on the wind?Might this sculpture ringedwith listening pigeonsmean more than just a spouting place where he (God with a minor G)came to create?What changes are these? Which Key? We ask to unravel its ontological roots,(though finding mostly a few chordswe cannot).A minor Seventh“singing” said darknesslies to framethe admiral light.As he blows, what he quillswith this epistle of Paul’saugments and diminishes our quandary,so how could“these broken wings”be the sole controlsof our sapphire soul?Meaning listen, who could see what the “sunken eyes”of our enslaved ancestorsmight’ve dreamedthinking overboardof some minor C?O play black Bird, hint whySi’l vous plait,these riddle passagesare the changes you chose, and by choosing, changed.Reed why we may have wanted(as the conductor of dusk donnedhis onyx tuxedo)to bop our headsto the traffic’srumbling motors,or gyre like civil serpentsto police sirens ringing the circle,but perhaps heard “learn to fly” above that alabaster basinwhile the Lyric framed the arc& spume of its sprayor dovetailed in a chordwith a bird-black eye’s charcoal fire orwe deign now to sing-sky dark,have you anythingto say?Joel Dias-Porter

Joel Dias-Porter folio

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1132&amp;context=correspondingvoices

Joel Dias-Porter folio

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