Felino Soriano
Poetry
Painters’ Exhalations 287
—after Ivan Aivazovsky’s Stormy Sea
When the sea begins to brawl,
a showing of altered character appears,
we see a duo of siblings
arranged by the manipulated parent
visualizing self-known abuse, the allegorical
need to showcase natural dissipation,
a leaving of violence, unneeded visitor
not unlike the selling solicitor of already-captured
possessions. This arrives too late in the text
of dusk’s unwinding scroll.
Can a wave of violence, a singular glisten
on the tongue shouting expletives
cause blur of the empirically known?
These waves show a struggling pair of bodies
bound by definitional parallels of sailing
capabilities, leaning into the laughing strength
of wind’s decapitating fury.
To sing and dance, to spin into silly bouts of
humanistic pleasure, now not known if again
these will spell themselves into relation. As
the blackened walls of dangerous situations
become the moving monster of insulated feeling,
these vessels may become an afterward, an
afterlife devotion of memories pasted against
the currently alive, showing patterns of adjectives
causing downward appearance of isolated
tears.
Painters’ Exhalations 288
—after Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 94 Degrees in the Shade
In the open mouth
of Summer, the whirling hot breath
demonstrates a wilting tone of
executed coolness. The coolness
has arrived inside an elsewhere
farther in distance, unreachable
to the child needing light
in the ironic sense to become fully asleep.
Here, a man horizontal on a natural bed
of flattened blonde soil. He with motive
to enlighten self with stabilized prose,
fixed by the author’s unwavering dispense.
There, a statue to the watching birds,
forming circles of sameness
because wings in mechanical
language, duplicate in the mirroring
motion of identical duration. He, though
without wings, without flight, without
the need to become tranquil, the traditional
tranquil in the environment of overlapping
heat. He only aware that in uncomfortable
environments, comfort can be built
when the mind curls into a placid
motivation, finding the appropriate
subjective definition of need is
wrongly wrought by the experiencing
of ignorant definitions.
Painters’ Exhalations 289
—after Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Winter
Leaves left cold in diluted light. Warmth
on leave, military AWOL
though defines an absent of this
specified reality. Existence in this winter shadow
becoming difficult, different
than the prior months of abundant tone,
whispering warmth visiting from multilayered
angles. The bark, much drier, a peeling dry
from alabaster skin not familiar with
the browning aspect of sun’s hemming
hands. We are sad today. The covering
of ambulation’s ability, that of the evening
stroll uncovered within the moon’s draping
conversation; thus, we wait, for in the coming
time of allowable movement, we will stroll where
man has not yet set fire, near the bank of
cultivated stream, housing the marble blue
fins of multiplying fish.