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Best Poems Written by Rachel Temkin

Below are the all-time best Rachel Temkin poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

I woke up one morning in a world full of lost things,
with no recollection of how i got there.
They curled around me and taunted me, examined me carefully with their hands so that they could better see me.
And when they found my ears they whispered in voices so soft I could scarcely discern if they spoke at all,
and told me of epic lovers until we bled together.
They shared with me what it would be like to be a lost thing too.
So full of inaccessible power, of sinful yearning, wanton longing, so full of empty space.
And then they presented me with a second hand clock,
small and brass and on a chain for my pocket so that I may never lose it.
They showed me and told me "fill it."
Then they felt behind my eyes and turned my senses higher,
Made everything so bright and lovely that it caused me terrible pain.
But with it I made life. I made such wonderful oceans,
I fostered worlds and tried to use them to follow out what I had been commanded.
And when the hands on my watch no longer ticked beneath the weight,
I forgot there was ever anything before my silent command "fill it."
Their voices ring out like angels,
they still sing to me of lovers. I want to sing too.
But the next thing they touched was my mouth,
and from it removed all its memories
yet left and burned in it the faintest ghost of what it would be like to ever have felt.
So that in its efforts to resurface,
it forgot how to speak.
At night, though less over time, (and I had long since lost track of that),
the other lost things will weave themselves around me like slippery shades,
and nuzzle into my neck as a purring kitten until I let them into my arms for the evening.
They'd hold me down and keep me awake as they sang to me foreign folk songs.
Occasionally they would break their song, and wait for me to pick up their melody,
and when I would it sounded too conspicuously like wailing.
They'd be gone.
I am not ready and I am not even sure for what.
I think about deliverance,
but less so with every passing phantom tick.
It is beautiful here, or so I think. I have no comparison.
There are so many oceans.
It's a wondrous case of Stockholm I'm sure,
but nonetheless a purposeful one.
One of vivacious heartache, of my own design,
When the lost things, my strange companions, come for me again and find me,
and we find other lost things -like me,
And we make worlds together.

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

Shooting Star

There was a meteor shower.
And I did not expect it,
but in the quietest of moments,
I saw a star rush down to meet me in my cold walled city of light.
And though my life has been comprised of wishes and the desire for cliche,
in that moment, I forgot my wish.
I forgot my first chance at the magic of a real wish, 
as custom dictates beyond birthday candles and eyelashes and dandelion tufts.
And when the childlike wonder coursing thickly and wildly through my veins finally settled back into a steady rhythm,
I felt the child in me smack myself upside the head and berate me that we missed our chance,
-to find real love 
-real magic
-to fly
-to wake up in the morning with some extraordinary supernatural power wrapped up in a neat little sack beneath my pillow,
Because "Starlight star bright,
first star I see tonight"
will never work if I continue to see the millions before the single.
And I know they are all there where I am looking,
even though the light drowns them out,
but when the quick white trail of spirit dust and wonder is set in motion before my eyes,
I regress into the wistful yearning of an optimistic fool.
But if I am space dust,
and a body made of particles from earth and time,
then surely this echo, this passing mound of metallic fire is also me,
and I must grant my own wishes.

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

A Dream of Uruguay

I still have that dream of us
on what would be my last day in Uruguay
sitting on a low stone wall
overlooking the vast sea
while the sun is chased away behind us
and the wind gently brushes the hair from your shoulder
to tease at my arm.

Between us is a slice of cake; Chajá, like promised
picked up while strolling Montevideo 
the real tour being your form in three dimensions
a whisper of peach still on both of our tongues
still secretly wondering if it would taste any differently
if stolen off of lips instead.

Conversation scarce and unneeded
lulled in favor of kicking legs and staring out at birds
as they glide from blue and into orange and magenta blooms
all the while hyper aware
of how charged your long, lithe fingers seem
and how mine, coarse and calloused, are busy supporting my weight
as I lean back with my shoulders
and itch to crawl them closer.

Just the wind carrying unspoken wishes
in a moment so serene and encapsulated
in the lives of youths coming together in ebbs and flows
light crashes of waves 
against a smooth stone wall.

"Can I kiss you?"
not knowing how but moving forward
brushing brows and cheeks with the pads of a thumb
and landing on a chin to hold
so that a featherlight brush might be delivered 
with the proper mix of shy yet the most bold they've ever been.

And peach does taste especially sweet
when bitten off juicy lips.
As how salty air becomes a balm
when breathed fresh between two pairs of lungs

Though time is short and shy and chaste
this moment lingers like a false memory in a bottle
thrown from the wall to be lost at sea
a message to the future when this may be realized
and held precious like a gem and not fragile glass.

I don't want to taint this beautiful delusion
with the reality that is far too unkind
But now if I visit I fear we would both be ghosts
me, an intrusion 
a foreigner retracing the steps of a familiar stranger
mourning the echoes of memories
resenting the setting sun behind the low stone wall

and the parting gift of an overdue first kiss
stolen not by the warm summer wind
nor even the strains of money nor pains of distance
nor "best laid plans"
but by something as simple and foolish
as wanting too much
the wrong kind of slip of the tongue.

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

Phosphenes

I close my eyes and the world dissolves into little stars.
Windows and shadows taper off into unknown distances of space in sickly, bruised, yellow-greens and poisonous magenta. 
With whisps like ghosts that arrive in clouds and vibrate in the center of this not vision. 
When they are sliced by imposing rings of pale blue and green from the left, 
washing away like a beachy horizon. 
Until it fades away once more into a grotesquely stained carpet pattern crawling with ants
That moves as if on a conveyer belt.
There is a fine black point in the distance that radiates with a distinctive sting.
It begins, with instances of light that stretch and vibrate like sinew under beacons when the squinting makes the vision ripple
And flattens floating amber orbs until they burst. 
The prickling landscape advances.

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

The Damascus Room

The room is an object in its entirety.
Singular in form and mind,
and multiple in purpose and pleasure.
It is a secret capsule.
Though it was once adorned with bright reds and greens and plated golds
that climbed up the walls like vines of calligraphy clambering towards colored swatches of sunlight,
they have aged into a state of refined and quiet dignity.
It’s not so much nostalgic as it is displaced,
eternally collapsing and rebuilding itself in city after city
and still patiently holding in the last breath it took from Damascus,
unable to answer the whispering calls of the fountain’s upturned ghosts,
as it desperately tries to remain in context with its lost world.
Crushed by the insurmountable weight of being the focal point of its own outlying universe,
the room asserts itself and its occupants as direct descendants of Muhammad himself.
Now barred and sick with musty browns it waits
for the call to be whatever is required of it
and its ability to expand itself as far as the heavens may reach or condense to hide itself and its occupant away,
so the festivities and conversation may linger a hint longer
and hang suspended in the ether that surrounds its now empty plot and new resting space.
Exuding its familiar warmth in the midst of eternal Middle Eastern winter,
comforted by southern exposure and vibrating,
beckoning the senses to become hyper aware
of the plush velvet cushion, red to the touch,
the incense burning, mingled with the smells of succulent meats and mystical fruits,
and the sensation of water dripping,
dripping as it sounds throughout the room
filling it up to the brim of the ceiling and overflowing over outstretched hands,
pouring over bared feet, and running dry as it slips over tile.
A dream of laughter wafts through the ebbing music,
obliterating winter.
Words feed the fountain and circle up into the walls,
and embed themselves there to rest in the cabinets and books that adorn them.
A facilitator of echoes, even in its own time,
a reflection on the lineage of light and thunder.
And as it streams in from the courtyard I remember it there,
warm and radiant behind the panels.
The summer courtyard waits,
and we can only peek in through an invisible barricade.
I am the ghost, looking in from what was once a wall
and trying to meet the space half way.
But I cannot be entertained and it cannot hold me.
Although it yearns to forget its promise,
and it longs to remember the delights of conversation,
I admit I know nothing of these lives,
these stories and doctrines shared and laughed over while pressing back against towering script, claiming its place in the heavens.
Who am I to assume.
And yet, its old bones have been propped in place by tourniquets and carefully bandaged by modern prosthetic wood and tile,
masked so casually and yet they lay in their places like lovely debris.
The flashes of memory don’t quite reach inside the way they want to,
Can’t quite be made whole and comforted by crawling inside and curling up.
Looking up at the decorated patterns of flowers and fruit and invisible stars,
we are both reduced to what is at the base of all desire.
It wants to go home.

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

Artist Statement 1

These small instances of unabashed humanity
That grow grand when isolated and transfix the senses
Become loud and brash while still remaining a small, subdued world within the world.
With stories that flicker in an out of my existence as they proceed on within their own
And I will never know except for how I choose to know them.
And myself, alike a stranger, will flicker in and out of my perception 
And briefly will engage on its terms alone
To find that the tragedies of life are quelled by unnoticed and quiet reformations 
Having shared them, at the core, the passions and pitfalls of people you will never know including yourself drive you to fall in love twenty times a day with the mere ghosts of subway riders,
The lines in the face, the strange depression felt from the broken bottle in the sidewalk crack, overheard conversations  
the pure ecstatic joy of light through the curtain of leaves, the man playing a nostalgic melody on a park bench 
These small wonders that exist as compositions in real time.
The act of synthesizing that purity into a form that can be accepted as true for one and true for all
-Albeit unique truths
Provoke and challenge to become more than what they are and invite sweet commiseration.
to tell a story confident in the idea that one truth is the truth for all and they will find  their own way to theirs. 
Succumbing to tradition is no more valuable than obsession.
Why suppress trivial passions?
Push and twist and distort the exoskeleton 
Because through the material, the working, the molding, these emotional turmoils, the spirit of humor, the charisma forces its way to the surface and is hopefully unmasked.
Strip the context and copy. 
Be gloriously and inexorably redundant.

Details | Rachel Temkin Poem

Anachronistic Eulogy

Look out into the darkness and hear the remnants of cities.
The faint, ghostly echo of music wafting through the air, carried by the smell of cigarette smoke before it grows stale,
that diffuses the light so exquisitely to make you believe, just for a moment, that you are under the blanket of another era of time.
Secure in the notion that this memory has always been so romantic.
That the singers and musicians will always play in perfect syncopation and the ladies will dance with their pearls clacking together and the men cheer and drink to the night.
Drink to the ideals of the Great Gatsby himself. That to be young is never to die and it will not all grow twisted and sour and disappear as suddenly as it was remembered.
Fading back into the pristine dark, the heavy silence that still almost rings with the cacophony of the reckless.
This is not to say that these things are no longer attainable, that nobody clinks drinks any longer or laughs or sings with abandon.
But the hauntings of a time that has already placed its bets and faced its dues plagues those of us who scrutinize too closely the new composition.
Beckoned instead by the tarnished golden hue of smoke diffused haze.
Quick to barter the glint of one grand age for another.
And though one day you may come to lie awake in the ethos of glass and dripping in your absinthe stained velveteen tailcoat,
remember who you are. Remember fondly the absent moments as they flicker like marque bulbs and twisted carnie sounds.
But do not pray to the dead,
the old gods can give you no comfort here.
For you are not where you were before,
and can never truly be again.

Best Poems Written by Rachel Temkin

To a Friend

Bystanders

Astrolabe

Lost Things

Shooting Star

A Dream of Uruguay

Phosphenes

The Damascus Room

Artist Statement 1

Anachronistic Eulogy