#chard de niord

[poem-today]

A poem by Chard deNiord

This Ecstasy

It’s not paradise I’m looking for but the naming I hardly gave a thought to. Call it the gift I carried in my loneliness among the animals before I started listening to the news. Call it the hint I had about the knowledge that would explode. In the meantime, which is real time plus the past, you’re swishing your skirt and speaking French, which is more than I can take, which I marvel at like a boy from the most distant seat in the Kronos Dome, where I am one of so many now I see the point of falling off. There’s not enough seats for us all to attend the eschaton. This ecstasy that plants beauty on my tongue, so that if it were a wing, I’d be flying with the quickness of a hummingbird and grace of a heron, is so much mercy in light of the darkness that comes. Who would say consolation? Who would say dross? Not that anyone would blame them. All night I hear so many echoes in the forest I’m tempted to look back, to save myself in hindsight, where all I see is the absence of me. Where all I hear is your voice, which couldn’t be more strange. How to go on walking hand in hand without our bodies on the path we made for our feet, talking, talking?

Chard deNiord

More poems by Chard deNiord are available through his website.

[florriescreamlagoon]

The days are my consolation. I take one home each night and put it in the case beside my bed and watch it fade in the dark, no matter how shiny it seems at first, no matter how high it stands behind the glass. I keep a few polished for memory’s sake, but even they grow tarnished and lost among the others.

Chard de Niord

[venuscomb]

What the Animals Teach Us (Chard de Niord)

that love is dependent on memory,that life is eternal and therefore criminal, that thought is an invisible veil that covers our eyes, that death is only another animal, that beauty is formed by desperation, that sex is solely a human problem, that pets are wild in heaven, that sounds and smells escape us, that there are bones in the earth without any marker, that language refers to too many things, that music hints at what we heard before we sang, that the circle is loaded, that nothing we know by forgetting is sacred, that humor charges the smallest things, that the gods are animals without their masks, that stones tell secrets to the wildest creatures, that nature is an idea and not a place, that our bodies have diminished in size and strength, that our faces are terrible, that our eyes are double when gazed upon, that snakes do talk, as well as asses, that we compose our only audience, that we are geniuses when we wish to kill,  that we are naked despite our clothes, that our minds are bodies in another world.