Jody's Notes
What an author emotionally responds to isn't always what readers are going to respond to. The hope is that there is enough overlap that there will be readers who will understand where the poems are coming from. But there are certainly authors who are moved by images that almost no one else reacts to. It's not always a matter of bad taste. Sometimes it's just that the author is wired differently. "Like wings in a box." That image came first, as it were, and means a lot to me. Perhaps it means entrapment (when a claustrophobic has an abstract expressionist nightmare, he dreams about wings in a box). Anyway, I wanted to title my first collection of poems, "Like Wings in a Box." A friend of mine insisted that would be an awful title too. (He'd already killed off a number of titles.) So he went through the poems and pushed me to instead use "The Lust for Blueprints." The irony, of course, is that no one really knows what blueprints are anymore, except old architects. But plenty of people still know what it's like to be a pair of wings in a box.
The lightbulb holds off
the creep of shadows. I doze
in the splendor of its warm thought
knowing full well that sleeping alone poses risks.
This time it is your hungry memory
pretending to be the stuff dreams are made of.
Your face reminds me how, even on sunny days,
shadows played over my sleeping hands
like suntanned ghosts. You remove your sunglasses,
twin pools of twilight,
and show me you have no eyes. I awaken
my sweat cold, the lamp dead
the flutter of the air-conditioner
like wings in a box.
© 2004 Jody Azzouni