You

"Maybe tomorrow honey

Some place down the line, I'll wake up older

So much older mama,

I'll wake up older and I'll just stop all my trying." --Jackson C. Frank

You, wearing your father's coat

and a ribbon in your hair,

you're the one I spoke to in a blackbird dream.

You, like a pocket sun,

burning down and rising up in continual blaze

all while reading a book, riding the bus, counting raindrops on the pane.

At home you wear a long shirt

made from calendar pages and paste.

Both are white as summer light, or a fallen blue jay's breast.

You, in love with Michigan in the fall, Morrocco in hazel eyes.

In your boot, a trove of travel tickets,

bad paper, and the echo of smoke-gone nights.

You lay your heart in the curve of the sickle moon

and claim to have no desires,

but they leave your skin and howl in the hills all night. 

You, with a sense of home in your chest like a tumor,

wounding and soothing you like the gin you used to love

until you can hardly stand it anymore.

There is a house from 1925, with a Packard in the drive.

Someone is washing it as if it were a memory

there on the tarmac arc beneath the pear tree.

You held your dolls up against the leaded windows

before you were born, after you died, 

before any of this thorned tapestry you're stitched into now.

The leaves are turning red, the nights are cool.

There is no kiss that holds a hospital for souls,

no soft-bound convent that knows the right prayer.

You can just listen to the yarn-ball clock and when you're ready

let it fall, think of nothing, and find yourself home

where we're waiting for you, those whose names you knew, and now recall.

______

shared with Desperate Poets open link. 

Music: Janis Joplin Little Girl Blue

Me, Looking At You, Looking Back

 

Here we are -- me,

looking at you

looking back.

You dip your head, do a little shuffle dance.

I get the question but you know the answer 

before my lips so much as flutter.

You are an odd blue-black, luminous by moonlight

but a cipher at noon, or so you pretend--

our story begun at the bitter end.

You lit and left, lit and left the hollow place in me,

inspecting, appraising, always returning.

You gave me baubles and trifles as rent.

I gave you blood where your sharp parts went.

Here is my dead-womb where you rode

and taught me to mark faces that hold no light.

Screaming helps too. I thought it might.

I am the house of glass, you the burnt wick.

You are the mother of every line I write,

your call the ink I use, fragrant and thick.

We are yin and yang at each other's back.

Me, looking at you

looking back.

______

for Desperate Poets "In The Footsteps Of Our Feathers"

Music: Beth Hart "Your Heart Is As Black As Night"

The Hawk

 By a fence line in the damp green of the morning

a hawk by gifted vision caught a wren.

There underneath his claws she learned the sense behind the laws

and she'll never by the fence line sing again.

In the evening by the fence line lay her feathers

which I gathered up to weave a tiny dress.

Stars said, "No, it cannot fit," but I whispered love to it

and by daylight I stood head to toe in yes. 

By the fence line in the damp green of the morning

I made from apple wood a mandolin

to play the hawk a tune, oh aren't you pretty as the moon

and at his touch I felt the answer sinking in. 

______

shared with Desperate Poets Open Link. 

A Taste of Honey

 

I'd like to say I understand

and forgive as in the carpenter's command.

The once-lovely loaf has gone green in my hand;

the crows will have it now.

It's such a feeling to be living at the dawn

with new love in some contented Avalon,

but these things cannot go on and on.

They shy and die away. 

Around your arm, a snake arrives

and I see your face reflected in its eyes.

It speaks one word--the word is "compromise."

It turns your heart to smoke.

I'd like to say it's all all right

and I can't remember anything I dream at night

but my bedside vase holds blooms gone dead and white.

They wave like conquered kings.

And so I'll say--no word at all.

Both the dawning and the dimming hold a sudden fall.

The gods we placed our faith in don't return our call.

"A taste of honey" is their lazy joke. 

____________________

for Desperate Poets "Lonelytown"