Old Jaffa

Moments come that are not a viewing.

They are a listening into tones of light.

When the sun calls, the noise of seeing

faints behind an aural synesthesia.

Light works into substances, vibrating

into shadows of shadows, sounding angles

until the eyes change to different senses.

Bundles of light-sung shapes rise

as cubes of time holding echoes

touching echoes that interfere

and become complex harmonies.

This light pleads into structures, pulling

sentiments deeper than clayey sediments.

Light trembles into a liminal mood.

Ballads of sun in matter can build

staggered tones of momentous world.

Octaves glow as sung vignettes rising

beneath the Old Tragedian's eye.

Architecture dreams under the sun,

its memories refracting into gold.

While just looking at a photograph,

imagination hears unexpected vision.

I have never been to Old Jaffa.

I will never go to Old Jaffa, but...

I went anyway into a photograph of Old Jaffa,

a boat's view of the harbor becoming hillside

and a hundred buildings of staggered mystery

in the light glaring an ecstasy and absence.

I walk stunned through narrow streets,

an old quarter filled with sibilant tongues

that speak of glimmering fish, of heat

and of things I could never imagine.

Many sun-burnt ghosts brush past,

moving through a dream of Jaffa.

I will not leave until the sun goes.

This maze of houses swallows me in shadows

until I make it back to the harbor, to the railing.

I stare toward the far water changing its colors.

The afternoon brings an epigram on the wind:

being lost is better than ever being found.

Sunset now a gong rippling out its gold abysses.

The long waves curl like her tresses...

and I will never walk in Old Jaffa.

~ TB

Lost in a Chinese Night

Yesterday, I had an actual reverie. An official daydream, approved and stamped by a shadowy bureaucracy in charge of dubious precincts of time.

I keep thinking about that reverie. I think it lasted for only a few moments, yet those moments were stretched into a different form or quality of duration. Those few moments seemed to last an incredibly long while.

I was afoot and moving at night through a town or village somewhere in China. This night was dynamic and clangorous with bodies, faces, trumpets, dogs, chimes, flags, leashed monkeys, and neon signs buzzing unknowable ideograms.

But the faces! Everywhere faces. Peculiar, probing, insinuating, alarming faces.

The streets (some paved) were coming and going at odd angles and refuted any possibility of destination. The houses and other buildings were close to the streets and were all built in the old Chinese manner, with curving, sweeping roof lines. Asian trees spread their perfumed branches. Traditional lanterns glowed here and there, like the pale heads of forlorn ghosts.

The sense of utter and bedazzled alienation took my daydreaming breath away.

Those faces! People swerving up to me, close to my nose, wide-eyed, gesticulating, staring with the expression of vaguely threatening hieroglyphs. Faces that were, in contrast to my own, completely at home in this world.

There was no point to this reverie. It was simply a divergent moment stretched out into forbidden space. If Carl Jung was still alive, perhaps I'd drop in on him, to ask about this dark tumbling into a town or village of my subconscious hysteria. To find out the reason why I tumbled there. To discover what form of psychological ruin this episode was a foreboding or what form of spiritual talent this episode was a possible presentiment. 


~ TB (2013)