Boy
Chris Al-Aswad
From the vantage point of a sandwich shop,
across a busy street,
on the inland road leading to
a shady grove of smaller homes,
you see him go off to war.In the past, the hum of households
kept the winters warm, children
in dove-grey down comforters
slept the whole night through.Now, the Army platform truck,
brown and green canvas tent,
stationed intrusively
under ribs of bare trees
on a suburban street.Then you see him running out,
a dot of movement
boy to man
gone before –
the wind lassoes
the remaining
leaves.
Icon
Chris Al-Aswad
I trace the origin of my search
Back to the Romanian artist named Iarcas
Because it was his painting that initiated
My iconographic amazement:
The Virgin’s large round eyes,
Her tilted head and serious face,
Her tall forehead bent forward
Into the light of heaven.
She appeared in my dreams and then
I returned to the gallery to stand before her in awe.
Her face spoke to me in no ordinary way,
I was captive to some potent image beyond the painting itself,
Some magical alchemy worked behind that Madonna,
And I returned week after week to gaze
At the perfect picture with my imperfect eyes
Yearning and yearning in the cool shaft
Of God’s gimmick, man’s obsession over image,
Which is only half real, the other half –
Lie.
Vulturous Men
Chris Al-Aswad
As four
fat black crows
feasted in the snow
on a discarded pizza box
and some crust,
I thought of your vulturous men
and how they peck you apart
when you’re laid out
on a bed of snow.Yesterday, in the library,
when I approached the desk,
you strained your face,
trying not to cry,
but melted away
in hot black tears.It seems we like
to mutilate ourselves
with the hard beak
of the opposite sex.
We starve ourselves
like birds of prey,
for months we refuse
love,
companionship,
even friends we turn away
then all of a sudden,
we feed on hearts
as crows on litter and waste.They peck at me too,
the vultures you speak of –
insidiously.
I recognize them in myself.
After long periods of hunger,
I go out scavenging too.All of us,
crows, scavengers, vulturous men,
our hearts refuse to eat,
then want to gorge on plates of
human lives.We vomit up our lovers
after extravagant feasts.
My Image
Chris Al-Aswad
The child narcissism in my father’s eyes,
the voice listened to by Jesuit priests,
his infant body swaddled in a terry cloth towel,
cradled lovingly in the arms of an ageless nurse,
the spectacle of my father’s overcoat,
his enthusiastic pose (the pose I am holding now),
the heart that is everywhere, before I arrive and
after I depart. Through the world I wear his five-petalled suit,
integrity, self-love, dignity, resolve, courage,
our Ideas share the same source of divinity as
great men. But something lacking in us both,
we each have lost our mothers, and having lost them,
we walk through the city on wintry nights, blissfully cold
we walk through the surface of the snow
in glittering darkness, in absences –
among centipedes of people carrying shopping bags for relatives;
we walk under canopies of Christmas lights.www.escapeintolife.com