Lilacs And Ashes

 

1. ‘The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.’- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dent Dutton, 1955

I brought you lilacs and ashes

wrapped in paper milled from early mornings and blind starlings.

On the paper were written a million words

that when translated sickened and when spoken disappeared.

I touched you and grew old but was reborn in the lilacs.

You gave me caramels and sickrooms,

wide verandas where ghosts sang madrigals with sisters of the moon.

You gave me the world's most beautiful door but kept the key.

Your skin was sweet on my tongue, but my tongue became a road to nowhere.

In the ditches there were lilacs, on the hillsides, marigolds.

I wrote you a million poems and grew leaner with each stanza.

You said, "Come in! Come in!" from a dark hall that narrowed into nothing. 

Such was our love. Such was the starling with its injuries,

hiding in the lilac ditch. Such was the silent book,

the radiant rose, the bright marigolds on the coffin of time.

The moon makes me remember and I cannot forgive

its ruined face

so pale

so luminous

so sorrowful

like a Japanese lantern at the canceled wedding of joy and misery.

_________

for Dverse Poetics, hosted by Linda Lyberg. 

Word List Is Moving

 Hi friends. Word Garden Word List is on the move. It will now appear on the third weekend of each month over at The Sunday Muse. See you there!

Refraction

 does light lie?

do these leaves deceive? 

what is green 

but a word for a thing 

we see a certain way

inside our skulls where no green thing grows?

here is my yellow dress.

my yellow hair.

and yellow fields stretching flat and far.

inside, my reasons.

outside, the sheltering trees, 

our house in their lee.

also, your face, the flickering planets, and stars.

i want you, but i want the wind.

you say i deceive,

but what is wanting

but a word for a thing

for which there is really no word at all?

does light lie?

here is the yellow sunflower

and the yellow night-window

but they never

called themselves those things.

here is my silver ring and my yellow ticket--

i love your face, even though you don't believe

and wish me damned and dead because i go.

____________

for Sunday Muse #204

Waiting For April

 When I was seventeen, I set out oranges 

for turkey vultures on the glass top of a table 

with pastel yellow legs, in summer.

I said I did it because death is sweet.

Don't ever lie. Mutism is one way

to stay honest, but turning one's tongue

to a violin is another. Many early saints

were buskers, though they died stoic, silent.

What I'm trying to say is, it might snow in Falstaff

while it's 90 in Phoenix.  You might look for robins

and find peacocks, with their weird piercing call

that makes you feel suddenly faint and homesick.

I've grown slow and stiff, my hair is white

from a blizzard of mistakes and sorrows.

Surviving from March to May seems as sweet

to me as your kiss once did, but I'm cautious now,

Not like I was when you knew me, not such a fool.

I keep a .45 laid on the leather of my bible 

to test for truth, so think before you speak

because my ears are dull and dead, but I read lips.

_________

for Word Garden Word List #18 (Leonard Cohen).

Word Garden Word List #18 (Leonard Cohen songs)

 

Hello everyone, this time our list comes from a man who requires no introduction, Leonard Cohen. Specifically, this list is taken from his songs. At some point I plan to make a list taken from his poetry as well. 

Please use at least 3 of the 20 words in an original poem of any length or style except haiku or haibun. There are other venues for those. Then link, visit others, and enjoy. This prompt stays "live" through Friday. 

.45

angels

avalanche

blizzard

choir

curious

heroine

kitchen

meter

Motown

oranges

peacock

Phoenix

reviews

revolution

robin

sorrows

strategies

tempted

violin

Glass Acrobat

I stood on my head for years

and grew glass skin

to keep myself contained. 

I stood on the sky

and wept on the ground.

All my birds died of thirst.

 I let go and fell up,

became an ocean in all directions

carrying a second sky on my back.

"It's dangerous!" someone screamed

from the shore, but I could hardly hear them 

over the wild rush, and shattering roar.

______

for Sunday Muse #203.

A Brief Instruction On Style

 Many hands make light work

and many hats make the Hydra happy,

thus, the night shift at the haberdashers.

Dig the butterscotch factory windows,

the glittery silver mercury pulse of industry!

Have you ever felt the urge to relocate to France,

reinvent yourself as a nun in a nation where faith is an artifact?

You and Saint Joan and a renegade postman

delivering visions, swordplay, and cafe au lait around the clock?

I have spoken to the Hydra with its ruby eye and hissing susurrations

hidden in a yellow profusion of forsythia.

It keeps a Wurlitzer and baseball cards and the Cretan Bull in there with it

and the beauty of their hats makes statues weep and flagstones dance.

Whether fez or porkpie, bowler or kepi,

one cannot think without a lure for angels atop one's golden dome.

Whether wide-brimmed or ostrich-feathered,

loveliness must begin nearest the seat of the Divine

And the Hydra with a set of nine, waves like sea grass

by the coastal shores of Nice

with the haberdashery humming behind it, all lit at night

like a cause,

a very banner 

or a blue streamer above the brim of the shining world.

____________ 

for Word Garden Word List #17 (Joni Mitchell).

and

Dverse Poetics: Leave Your Hat On.

 

 

 

 

 

Word Garden Word List #17 (Joni Mitchell)

In the course of everyday life, we all have those days that stand out, and stay with us. One of those, for me, was a Sunday spent at a friend's house when I was in my early 20's. I was nosing through their record collection and ended up borrowing two--It's A Beautiful Day by the west coast band of the same name, and For The Roses by Joni Mitchell. I already had Miles Of Aisles and loved it, but it was this new one (to me) that really made me a fan for life.

She's gone through many iterations, from folkie to jazz, but always her music is original, catchy, and intelligent. From That Song About The Midway to Two Gray Rooms, her music moves me and becomes part of my life. 

Here are 20 words taken from a selection of her songs from different eras. Please use at least three of them in an original poem, then link up, visit, and enjoy. Last week's fun aside, please refrain from haiku or haibun; there are other venues for those. Thanks! Prompt stays "live" through Friday. (Word list is located after the linky.)

And now, your list:

butterscotch

castle

centerpiece

devils

France

glitter

hissing

indistinct

postman

radio

river

robbery

ruby

silver

stardust

stockings

taxi

urge

wolf

Wurlitzer

Linguist

 It's like a telephone call from the gut,

a mirror garlanded with white dahlias where the moon lives

behind the glass, shifting,

swinging a railroad lantern,

calling you by an unsuspected name.

Now you are a brick and must throw yourself.

Now you are a throat and must sing yourself

until you fall to the flagstones empty, an overturned ewer.

Desert the war, go home to your bed with its hand-sewn quilt.

There is a woman there

or a man

or no one--it doesn't matter. Go. 

Now you are a blooming vine, and the earth moves 

with you each time you step.

Beware the imbecile with his scythe.

Carry the fragrance of God in your laced boot.

Use playing cards to confound thieves.

Find Venus on the night horizon during a crescent moon.

Keep an oriole, a falcon, and a buzzard.

Live alone, 

but with the door open

so that April can call you with her rain-voice

like a petal volcano

birthing bees from your tongue in new language,

the thing you longed for

now--in astonishment--named.

_________

for Sunday Muse 202. 

For S.

you

my heart

my teacher

fool and angel

whose mighty heart beat itself out too soon

if there are words for how much i miss you

they elude me

but longing

and love

stay. 

_______

for Dverse "numbering ten"

hosted by Laura Bloomsbury

A Hollywood Haibun TLDR

 

On the set of the submarine movie, famous actress Natasha Krinkova is having an argument with the director. He says the other actors have complained about her three pet porcupines, Fremont, Lodi, and Malibu, who accompany Ms. Krinkova everywhere, including the cramped quarters of this undersea adventure epic.

"The fucking things stink," gripes one of the other actors, a man known for playing kindly uncles and benevolent bosses, but who could curdle milk with his off-camera personality. 

"They're wonderful, gentle creatures," protests the famous actress, tilting her chin as she did in Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire, a meandering detective yarn in which she played an extraterrestrial hooker. 

"They should be shot," says the kindly uncle actor. 

Yesterday was Fremont's birthday, though it's unclear how she knew. She set up streamers and had a concert pianist pop out of a giant birthday cake to play the Beatles ' Birthday for the rodent as it sat there twitching its nose like a palsied bunny with very sharp fur.

"Go play in traffic," sneered the kindly uncle. Fremont raised his quills. Lodi had an accident in the radar room of the submarine set. Malibu wouldn't come out from under a pile of Natasha's kimonos. The concert pianist segued into Octopuses'  Garden. 

Ms. Krinkova demands that the porcupines be written into the submarine movie. The kindly uncle shoves Lodi into a storage hatch and turns the latch. A fire breaks out in the torpedo bay, which is actually made of painted cardboard. There is panic and the sound of fire extinguishers. Somehow, the actress playing Lieutenant Mitford gets quills in her ass. There are tears and accusations. 

Watery Grave is never completed, and sinks the production company. The director's drinking gets worse. The kindly uncle actor wins an Oscar for his work in a subsequent film entitled Lassie In Space. Natasha Krinkova sells her gowns from the musical Chiffon Switchblade and uses the money to set up a trust for Fremont, Lodi, and Malibu, but unfortunately, Lodi wanders off somewhere and Ms. Krinkova sees to it that the nanny never works again. This series of events is hotly debated on line at Am I The Asshole?

quill is sharp but pliant

porcupine enjoys cherry blossom

but stinks like dumpster

(Excerpted from Hollywood Haibun: An Anthology of Japanesque Poetry From The Shelves of The Screen's Biggest Stars by Babs St. Argent, Pompano Publications, 2021)

___________

I have broken my own rule for Word Garden Word List #16 (Donald Barthelme). 

Word Garden Word List #16 (Donald Barthelme)

 

This week's word list is taken from the volume Forty Stories by post-modernist story writer Donald Barthelme. He was an odd duck, and so I naturally love him. When I was just a teenager and eager to get away from my relatives on a family trip to Denver, I went bowling and then to the book store, showing, I think, an admirable knack for prioritizing. 

In that book store, I found a paperback collection entitled Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts written by guess-who. The stories were all set in the present, with normal characters like husbands and wives, employees, and so on, but the situations they found themselves in, and/or their reactions to same were skewed, impossible, and often howlingly funny.  My eldest brother, whose taste runs to thrillers and Harry Potter, declared that I had wasted my money, further endearing Barthelme and his odd characters to me. (On a subsequent visit to Denver I bought my first Grateful Dead recording. That time, no one was there to pan my selection. Whee!)

The story I remember best from that first (for me) Barthelme collection was one about a man who felt he wasn't climbing the corporate ladder very expeditiously, and so to show his will and determination he became a Human Fly and began climbing a skyscraper using bathroom plungers to stick him to the glass sides of the building as friends and acquaintances shouted encouragement along the lines of "asshole!" Gosh knows why all that resonated for me.  As the years have gone by, I have continued to love both Barthelme and the Dead. A friend of the devil is a friend of mine, or something like that. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem--no haiku or haibun please--and then simply link, visit others, and enjoy. The prompt stays "live" through Friday.  

Spellcheck suggests I replace "haibun" with "halibut." Okay, no halibut either. 

And now, your word list:

actors

avoids

blackbirds

bodyguard

cops

fire

gaped

gowns

heroic

interview

Natasha

necessarily

peculiar

porcupines

saddened

shockingly

streamers

submarine

welter

wonderful