the quest for jessamine
eileen tabios
stone
The Question is: With what Question do you sculpt the answer:“I write because I cannot paint.”She asks while what she is really considering is: As women lift their veils to reveal kohl-rimmed eyes in Afghanistan, is it the white-petalled jasmine whose sweet, haunting scent you and I now share?
teacher
What moves the moon to sunder itself? Perhaps the long-haired woman with jade eyes perpetually swooning behind a curtain of lace? She was “licked into being” by men whose unshaven faces she wishes to memorize. But can't. Still, are memory's flaws so tragic, I think. She shares a fate with clouds. She sees what is not there: how color bravely dilutes itself: how color paled like a river from a motivation unrelated to compromise.
touch
Or was it that one hot day? When the sun liquefied into a molten light. We were wading through a river. An eagle loosened a feather. I wore a red silk sari in preparation for Kama Sutra. The water was cool against our ankles. Velvet air scarfed around bared napes. Where the river bended, I knew you would take me away from water. You wanted to be the one to teach me how: within fever, dancers hurl their bodies fearlessly courting the fall. Within fever, there exists no compromise.
blue spirit
I admit to many fears, despite the usual impassivity of my face. Lemonade makes me weep—lemonade is a compromise. Once, I sat on a wooden boat watching pilgrims swallow the Ganges. The eyes of the teeming multitudes were all brown, like mine. But it is preferable to recollect their eyes as ebony. Brown maintains no opposite. Unlike black, whose marks always engender consciousness. Say, a story about Idealism that would not exist if it did not unfold through ink mimicking crows feet skimming across a page.
hut
You live somewhere along my spine. I have begun integral yoga to squeeze you more efficiently from my bone marrow. I fail to see why I should always be waiting for you to reply. Something besides light exists beyond the horizon— something waiting to ravish my avid eyes. Foolish girl, she is suddenly reminded by a raven's wing floating past the windowpane. Once, his fingers had forked through her hair before he clenched their jasmine scent with his fist. He hooded his dark eyes as he growled, “Always wear your hair loose. Don't ever compromise.”
poem to delacroix
You don't need to wear saffron robes to believe: gold is consciousness. Not a symbol for. Is the embodiment. Thus, the photographer finds it impossible to capture the alchemical surface of a painting without also portraying his reflection. (Is that the scent of jasmine you and I suddenly share as the storms linger outside?) Had the photographer manipulated the image to delete the shadowy sign of his presence, he would have compromised purity into a false definition of encaustic. While at it, consider the black curve. It can be a perfect circle if you open. If you transgress. If you open. If you
the cathedral of silence
If you become the brushstroke instead of looking at the brushstroke, the photographer thinks as he edges over to the other panel, what would vision reveal? I know the virgin who photographed this painting is in the audience today. So I want to tell you, the circle is the edge of my skirt flaring as I twirl. I sculpted my skirt from velvet stained the color of fertile moonstones. If I ever give birth to a girl, I shall name her Jade. Second name: Angelika, the angel who plummeted towards wet jagged boulders in order to own her vision. In the beginning was the Word, Angelika whispered. She taught me with the sweetest of smiles, Sometimes, Compromise unfolds the enlightened path towards a particular fragrance we can recover from memory.
figure of eight
Is it the scent of jessamine you and I now share? Once, a silver-haired painter whispered across cyberspace, “I could just rise at dawn one morning, and wearing my Philippine robe walk down to Mother Pacific, pick a few pearls from Botticelli's unveiled nymph, blow them across to your throat, into your thorax, you who already wear them as breasts and watch the clouds roll into paintings beyond the painter's brush. Simply licked into being with the morning breeze as our birthless gaze touches the temple of light inside the conch.”
argent
If the answer is “I write because I cannot paint,” this is not the question to which it replied: As women begin to reveal their eyes in Kabul, is it the yellow-petalled jessamine whose haunting you and I now share? Breathe In/Breathe Out. As if Jackson never suffered. As if blasphemy is impossible. As if you lacked cruelty when you sculpted violets above my wrists. As if I have always wanted to be enslaved by the sun. As if I hold the potential for poems keening to irradiate the sky. As if, as if sunlit cobalt, not storms, linger outside.
about the author
Eileen Tabios has written 10 books of poetry, as well as a collection of art essays and a book of short stories. She has edited and co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays. In 2005, she released the multi-genre collection I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved (Marsh Hawk Press, New YorkБ, which features poems, an experimental novel, an art monograph, a play, and poetics prose. In 2006, she releases a new poetry collection, The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. I (xPressed, Espoo.) She writes the poetics blog ,The Chatelaine's Poetics, while steering Meritage Press. She is the Poet Laureate for Dutch Henry Winery in St. Helena, CA where, as a budding vintner, she is arduously and long-sufferingly researching the poetry of wine.
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