Her Eyes

Words & music copyright -- Tim Buck
All parts on this demo -- also me









Her Eyes

Breath arrested, my heart skipped a beat.
She was standing in a restaurant.
Could not take my eyes off that scene,
and I don't even know where it was.

I had to pinch myself to see if I were dreaming.
How could this happen right here, right now?
Why did she have to be so beautiful,
for crying out loud?

And those eyes, those eyes, those eyes.

Her picture is burned into my brain,
an image seared into my heart.
I'm wounded, but I welcome the pain.
It feels like a great work of art.

I want to hear her talk, hear her laugh, but
she's just standing in a mute photograph.

Her eyes are infinite, I think she even sees me.
Her eyes are beacons for secret harboring.
Her eyes are serious but also smiling.

I know she is far beyond me.
I would have melted right on the spot.
Had I been there, I'd have been spluttering
my wine in that restaurant.

But you can't take that picture from me.
I will hide it in my heart's treasure trove.
I'll pretend that shadow cross her brow means
she's sad that I love

those eyes, those eyes, those eyes.

That photo speaks of melancholy,
of something like tears behind her eyes,
of something deep, not to be
disturbed by a prying mind.

Nevertheless, I want to know how she thinks,
but she's just standing where that shutter blinked.

Her eyes are exquisite, they shine with dark mystery.
Her eyes are knowing, is she lookin' back at me?
Her eyes are not hurtful but I'm still hurting.

the question

She likes to walk in the old cemetery
on weekdays when others are living.
If a sudden rain breaks through sunshine,
the summer elm and oak leaves make music.
If sudden rain does not break through sunshine,
the silence is a muffled voice of great irony.

Others in the city carry too much gravity.
They weigh down moments with talking,
and they look too hard through eye colors.
They are living and it is a horrible thing
to carry one's bones around so naturally!
The colors of their eyes are almost painted.
Do they blink? Eyes can be so alarming, noisy.
They make her small notebook tremble blankly.

But here the bones are very still.
And flowers left in remembrance
are simply dreaming in sunshine,
left by creatures who quickly fall
back into grimaces and laughter.

Here among those with better manners,
she will stop to sketch an imagined poem
of dragon winds perplexing the Gobi night.

Sonja of the golden rooms

Where she is slides off any earthly map.
Sonja of the far place is almost smiling,
her aura tinted in shades of rare element.

Sonja sighs with music and blinks with irony.
Silks of golden hue hang like whispers of time --
are draped around her chamber of unusual being.
She lives in a room of passing-through phantoms.
Translucent drawings of impossible contraptions
drift through the quiet space of Tesla-tingling air.
A smile will bloom then fade then bloom again,
a curvature of amused lips from her thinking.

Behind her eyes is a world of oceans.
And she wrings dooms from moisture
of nightfall -- she blows it into a bubble,
a secret golden bubble inside which to fly.

I have seen her standing quietly for hours
in a corner of shadows, there without reason,
just there in dark-bouillon shadows, uncannily.

Sonja of the golden rooms is beyond my words,
no narrative will bring or halt her poised arrival.

I think I have seen her standing in aloofness --
but an ambiance of sharing blooms in shadows.
I think she passed through me to convey a riddle
without words – “You are not cured, thank god.”

Souls are beyond all science and metaphysics.
They come through vents of the molten elemental.

in lieu of opium

Some moments appear longer than moments,
and they are taller than any scaffolding of time.
To slip into the creases of such vertical durations
is to move past the present, toward a dark mystic.
In lieu of opium, succor of some kind must be had.

In lieu of opium, music opens the spaces between wondering and hurting.

There is a space of objects, colored in sounding shades
that will open like a liquid door, that will open darkly.
A space of hypnotic tones climbing, swaying, falling.
A moment of objects can open made of a few notes,
a moment drunken on curious rhythm, piquant harmony,
a moment of objects forming an abstract picture of hope...
and in lieu of opium, one can fall into the sighs of music.

Because music is invisible it is bountiful.
Paradise teems and beckons in a measure.
When there is something that can't be spoken,
the sense of it shimmers implicitly in timbres.

In lieu of opium, one can listen to wounds opening and smile with pleasure.


But when music begins to hurt instead of halo,
one may blend words into the narcosis of a poem.

Nafplion (for Regina Bou)

Nafplion, Greece

Today she will drive to the old town,
the beautiful town beside the sea.
Light will fall gracefully into her eyes.
Pomegranate air will breathe into her,
as gods whisper to Pre-Socratic spirits.
And colors will tumble down hillsides.

Today will not be ordinary.

The weight of stone a reassurance.
The feel of fitted stones underfoot
and the slant of orange roof tiles
bright in the afternoon sunshine
will soothe wild forms of mind.

And she comes because this old town
juts like a big thought into the blue bay.
She comes because this town falls back
and onto slopes, in the grammar of a poem.
She has arrived to see Nafplion dreaming
so far above the blue timeless water.

It is far from an ordinary day
when a large-eyed seer stands
amid the alabaster sighs of time,
within an old town beside the sea.

It is a solemn mystery to ponder her
pondering impressions of the Aegean.

She comes because she is living
and the dead will write her a poem.

an evening in Appalachia

This quaint town does not exist.
How perfect is that? So let's walk
and talk of how it is to be Southern.
 
I'm a stranger 'round these parts,
so I'm glad you are here with me.
Let's stroll these nightfallen streets,
outside of time and just within reach.
 
Mountains lean back and bring dark to dark.
The town is lit with eerie lanterns of fireflies.
Hawkers of trinkets and fablers of folk songs
laugh in the rough-sawn Shenandoah bazaar.
 
I have plenty of crumpled Confederate dollars,
so I'll buy you a piece of West Virginia coal –
consider it a diamond in the purity of potentia.
 
We speak the same language, a slurred gothic potion,
a twang of piney syllables, drawled out like dog yawns.
I could speak some fine gibberish as half-chortled words.
You would understand the subtext and flavors of wounding.
 
Let's drink some moonshine made of secrecy and dewfall.
We'll touch our mad fruit jars then walk in drunken circles.
 
We could dance a slow twist
on the train station platform,
while waiting for the smoke
of a lost gypsy locomotive.
They're smuggling Tom Waits
for a midnight music séance.
We'll present Libra tarot cards
as tickets to the magic table.
 
Later on, let's not say anything to frighten the owls.
Let's marvel at age gaps and the mystery of kinship
 
or simply burn time under great aching mountains.

letter to Nabina Das

How could I know the shapes of souls
who peer out from northeastern eyes?
Or touch the fabric of days unfurling
along Brahmaputra River, beyond me?

It is all mysterious and puzzling.

Verandah roses and Palash trees blooming
send essences, oils as keepsakes into houses.
And many-thousand years breathe in dialects.

The rich silken colors that have played
amid your years of singing and dancing
through symbols hiding in folk legends --
even my reveries lack the conjuring,
and I drift on winds of my pale words.

So I have no way of knowing how it is
that you emerged from ancient depths.
Was it the gleam in your father's eyes
that spoke wryly to you of imbalances?

Beyond architecture and sea breezes lie mudflats and the salt of tears.

In some slow communion with the people,
you took them into the temple of language --
a fathomless touching of their hard tales.

Used tools hanging in peasant sheds
teem with energies of earth and rice,
their worn handles elegies of poverty.
Fields and the mists that haunt them
give up their dead tillers, a dawn sigh.

You work them into lines of hard beauty.

You speak them into tribute and apotheosis,
clothe them in the living linens of free verse.

The forgotten people of India move in slow rhythm
against the counterpoint of greed and social injury.
When old ones and wide-eyed children of hot days
are broken under callous yokes, forfeiture, seizure,
young men and women seek communal elevations
to shelter amid red scarves and crossed bullet belts,
may stake blood on a mountain under Hegelian suns.

How could I know the shape of India?
But I have felt poems of human lives.


On the bank of Brahmaputra River at sunset,
your songs hang on the weary and godly air.



Nabina's blog