Very Bad Archive
Noise of Desire
Calista Tarnauskas
Like a dried root, dropped, forgotten,
in the crack of the radiator that sometimes
hisses a watery cry early in the morning, you
have clung to an invisible amount of something
and shot out one small node of taciturn pain.
Growing in the weary old heat in the winter
of a heart you have made cry over a spoonful
of a memory, a momentary backward glance,
the silent moments that live on after the whey,
the wasteful hatred has been separated from the curd,
the kernel of beauty that lives in love,
lives on like a blind bastard child in love’s absence.
How can I be angry at memory? Is it the silence,
that waning sudden silence of a memory,
as though you had been hearing the noise of desire,
cluttering, sharded, mesmeric, and then
into the oval frosted frame of memory you step and the noise stops
momentarily, unable to speak, say something stupid,
unable to walk away, unless, unless I let you.
Though often it is much like a carousel, your image, the bulk of your body floating dreamily in and out of the frame, then back to the shadows, the dark factory
where the sweaty creator takes a smoke break in the back alley
where false memories are dreamed up from sidewalk litter.
Calista Tarnauskas has published since joining on 30/11/99. Read more of Calista's terrible poetry at the anthology. Here are three of Calista's latest works: