Still Life w/ Cryptids

 

The fox with a layer in its mouth explained:

it is merely a totem,

a representation

or avatar,

but the hen's red throat 

called bullshit

as it died.

The women with stones in their pockets

were made lonely by the waters of the river.

They sang, their heavy diver's helmets ringing

with rare harmonics

hailed by critics

panned by pop fans

and made more difficult to understand

the further from the surface they sank.

Everyone said it would be the moon,

but it was the sun who went mad,

incinerating gardens in an afternoon.

Cosplay Aztecs

held up hearts

in their palms.

Please join us for the afterglow

with refreshments and a swag bag.

Everyone thought that the baby's first word

would be "Mama", but it was "Dada." 

Tristan Tzara's disciple Marcel Duchamp

 presented the child as a readymade

with orange tail

and silver helmet,

an artless objet d'art he named L.H.O.O.Q.

with enigmatic smile + mustache. 

_______

for Word Garden Word List--The Last To Go. 

Music: DJ Dero The Horn (El Tren) Batucada'n Bass Mix

Word Garden Word List--The Last To Go

 

Hello my little Sunday drivers, and welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt! Our source this week is Rand Richard Cooper's collection of interconnected short stories entitled The Last To Go: A Family Chronicle. It came out in 1988. I read it then and have never forgotten it. 

I feel that Rand Richards Cooper is a supremely skilled and marvelously observant writer, but somehow it seems that he did not receive the attention he should have IMO. I am to blame myself, as I never pursued any of his other books, most of which are now out of print. I did find one of them at Thriftbooks.com while preparing this List, though, and ordered it.

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then sit back for a nice family dinner. Or not. (You can always substitute in the family pets instead and stay home with them!)

And now, your List:

always

angles

bump

colored

expected

expression

flashlight

gardens

hiding

inkwell

jealous

layer

lighted

limped

older

pockets

sang

totem

winter

wrong 

 

Mistral

 

In Spring the madding winds arrive

and leave the winter to its dreams

of fools such as my love and I.

In your eyes Provence does lie--

false Spring is never what it seems

when Mistral sings the lullaby. 

The ring is left to rust and die

by drowning pool or icy stream

while scudding clouds above it fly.

Your wind has temper come alive

to kill the bud or turn the cream

and howl unchecked to Italy.

So comes the Mistral, mad with spring

My love, destroying everything.

_______

for Dverse Meeting the Bar "Wild Wind."

The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean. It produces sustained winds averaging 31 miles an hour.

It is said that madness occurs particularly often in the Spring. I believe it.

Clover Flowers

 

I have a memory of a clover field--

white flowers in the warm June green

like spilled sugar on a farm wife's sleeve.

I have a memory of a spring lamb--

carried to the shed as the ewe screams

under a summer sky blank as muslin.

In the farm house, an old couch.

a television, and a sturdy oak table.

There is a savory aroma and mint jelly

set out with the white china plates.

My memories mix like a bowl of vegetables,

gravy on the tablecloth, blood on the ax.

I don't like to remember,

even in summer, on a bright afternoon.

_______

for What's Going On? "Memory"

Music: Cat Stevens Into White

My Despair

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man  --e.e. cummings

I spoke to my despair

in a voice that October

wears around its injured throat

on a chain of dripping water.

Because the nights are too long,

I sew their darkness into a jacket

and on the sleeves are

embroidered golden snakes.

I sit at a table made of the world

with legs of heirloom iron and wind.

Young men run past, shouting

and dragging morning to her grave.

In evening, I speak to the cardinal

who comes to my window like a Gypsy.

I say, the dawn is still in love with you

but a snake strikes the cardinal

from my sleeves

and my despair.

______________

for Dverse Poetics "Reflections" The image by Andrew Ridley and the quote by e.e. cummings are required. 

Don't forget that Word Garden Word List remains active through Saturday. 

Word Garden Word List--Joy School

 

Elizabeth Berg

Hello everyone and welcome to the Word List on its new day, Sunday. Originally, I did not choose Sunday because I didn't want to compete with Carrie's Sunday Muse, but that's not an issue now, so here we go. 

This week our source is Elizabeth Berg's 1997 novel Joy School. I have read seven of her novels and liked them all, but this one is my special favorite. Some novelists are all over the map, one stunning read, one awful one, and one in between, rinse, repeat. (Anne Tyler, I'm looking at you.) Elizabeth Berg, though, is money. She always delivers a wise, entertaining, heart-tugging story. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others, and then go skating or something! This List remains active through Saturday. 

And now, your List:

automatic

book

brains

cookbook

dismal

evaporated

exact

fix

iceberg

luxury

museum

narrow

newspaper

punch

skate

spray

unfolding

vase

whole

witch

Pomegranate & Oleander

 

I traveled through an arid land

where pomegranate trees bent like new widows

to find myself in a room with white stucco walls,

an almond in batter, with oleanders in a vase. 

Scarlet oleanders, delicate and bright, fragile

pages of dawn in a book of finite days.

The windows are narrow and look out on the bay

blue with white edges, sewn for a tide that never stays.

White boats like a spray of Nerium oleander

on a blue-edged plate set in a shifting hutch,

or whites of eyes from evaporated dreams

of a lover on an iceberg, things slowly lost and such.

I traveled through an arid land

a museum of what not to become,

born from a pomegranate seed,

fed on oleander, a gull duty-married to a setting sun.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Joy School.

The Dark Bird

 

Behold the dark bird,

new as a fresh injury

old as antiquity

spreading its wings 

bespangled with collected eyes.

Millions cheer the dark bird.

empty sockets over their grins

like twin red suns

over a planted scythe.

Behold the dark bird

in all its majesty and power,

its feathers tipped with blades

and blades are most of what it is,

wounding all, even itself.

All hail the dark bird

whose spread tail obscures

the east, its head devouring the rest.

Kneel to the dark bird

and behold in its bones

your own grave.

_______________

Music: Cream Deserted Cities of the Heart by Jack Bruce and poet Peter Brown

Poet

 The futility of being a poet in a country that loves hate. 

Slough O' Despond

 

Welcome to the Slough O' Despond Shopper!

Oh, the warmhearted clerk you liked won't be back--

we chained her to a stove and dumped the stove down the 

roiling 

          oilspill

                     of our ravenous bellies.

Don't be bitter, we still offer a wide selection

of watery logic and dubious ingredients.

Our highly satisfactory laundry products get everything

whiter than white like a terrified horse's eyes

when we ride him into our slaughterdreams

which are

                 members-only

                                           and fully automatic. 

Check out today's special! BOGO on genders

of which there are two but only one matters.

Recite with us our shopper's guarantee! We

pledge allegiance to our public, but only

those who happened to be born in our parking lot. 

Come on,

                 crawl in, 

                                leap in, but don't look 

at the price tags cleverly hidden in plain sight and doubled every day.

_________________

for Word Garden Word List and WGO? open link. 

"Slough O' Despond Shopper" taken from a line in Grover Lewis's poem You Know Where. 

I am in a state of utter despair today about my country and the apparently innumerable people in it who just voted in a doddering Christo-fascist dictator.

Music: Celine Dion Think Twice. It's a break-up song. It reminds me of my country.

Word Garden Word List--Absent in the Spring

 

Hello my roving rhymesters! Here I am with your weekly Word List, a day early this time! I have been mulling changing the day to post because the first few days have been a ghost town; most people seem to show up at the end of the week. Thoughts?

Anyway, our source this week is a novel by "Mary Westmacott", a pseudonym used by the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie for her non mystery novels. This one was kindly recommended to me by my friend Queen Cool Dora and is called "Absent in the Spring." I'll include now my review from Goodreads.com:

My Goodreads review of "Absent In The Spring" by Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie writing under a pseudonym). 5/5 stars.

I know all too well the type of person that the unreliable--even, or especially, to herself--narrator of this novel is. Joan is unwilling to face reality even as it goes on relentlessly right in front of her face. She's shallow, judgy, materialistic, surface, and possesses an iron conviction that everyone else is confused, shabby, pitiable, and most of all, absolutely in need of her expert guidance. She's a prig, a meddler, a busybody, and a snob, still blundering through life as the perfect student from St. Anne's, her girlhood school. She doesn't set out to be cruel--in fact she thinks herself the soul of kindness--but somehow she leaves a trail of injured, damaged loved ones in her wake all the same. It's all a mystery to her until she finds herself stranded at a lonely desert "Rest House" waiting for a train that's been delayed by several days. There, she quickly runs out of distractions and diversions, and with no busy tasks to attend to or people to interact with (except for the three foreign workers there, and that fails utterly), she has time to do nothing but think and comes face to face with her true self, and she doesn't much like it. The scales finally fall from her eyes, as it were, but will her new and unwonted self-knowledge stay with her when she finally gets back home in familiar, comfortable surroundings? Read it and find out.

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and don't get lost in the desert afterward like Joan in the novel. This prompt remains active through Sunday.

And now, your List:

alarm

amusement

bitter

capricious

competent

dubious

far

impossible

lazy

nerves

quietly

recite

roving

satisfactory

stuffy

suffered

symbol

vision

warmhearted

watery

 

On the Occasion of my 39th Sobriety Anniversary

 

You ask nothing of me that you do not share in every detail.

In a desert place, on the edge of a precipice, you found me

and took every wound upon yourself.

You bled where I bled, and that is as real as it gets.

You offered your hand but left it to me whether to take it. 

I did, and knew that I would never fall, then or ever,

and here I stand, Never Alone, sober and strong

Not because of any book or pulpit, but because

a workman found me in a desert place and gave me His hand. 

______

My 39th sobriety anniversary was last month. One day at a time. 

Wishbone

 

When I was young, I learned the art of

decisions made with wishbones. 

A living heart had informed them

with a love of yellow corn and a fear of silver hatchets. 

I came out of my shell one night during 

a traffic accident like waking during surgery.

Wrecked Chevies turn shy as little girls

but their drivers find illumination in oil and blood and pavement. 

Jail and church are cousins and I found

in one what had eluded me in the other. 

That morning they returned my effects.

A crow had nested inside my leather satchel like swag from limbo.

Why bring all of this up? Why now, when

October is just a penny on the railroad track

shiny and done with, like an old flame?

I guess I'm just telling how I got here, the whole swerve of my life.

Living alone takes nerve, more than I ever had young.

Magic never gets the laundry done, or the

chicken fried, but I have it in spades these

rainy days, when my hawk-heart feels the wishbone

and I wonder what it will tell about me, how it will split

between sweetheart and shrew, drunk and duena,

all the spilled tiles and tears that depicted my face,

the one I wore while here, doing the best I could, grandmother and memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--She Had Some Horses

Music: Katey Sagal Bird On The Wire. 

Word Garden Word List--She Had Some Horses

 

Hello, my very marvelous versifiers! It is time once again for a new Word List! This time, I have liberated She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo from its 40-year snooze on a shelf of the bookcase where I like to keep all of my poetry books. 

The blurb on the back reads as follows: This is not a book. It is an opening onto woman light, into hatching, into awakening. The ruined & dismembered, imprisoned, dispossessed, ride out on a bright thundering of horses in a light of illumination & love. Who touches this book touches a woman. If you want to remember what you never listened to & what you didn't know you knew, or wanted to know, open this sound & forget to fear. A woman is appearing in the horizon light. --Meridel Le Sueur.

Well all righty then. A tad overwritten & overblown & it has the weird "&'s" instead of "ands" but hey. The book itself does none of that, and yet, I have owned my copy since the 80's and have never read it through because it just does not grab me. It isn't bad, I just don't think it is all that and a strawberry milkshake. Honestly, it stopped one step short of sending me off to sleep. She somehow writes of difficult, worthy subjects without making me feel. However, I did like the ending of the title poem:

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses. 

Joy Harjo is a Poet Laureate of the United States of America. (So is Billy Collins, but while he's cute and readable, I don't find him to be earth-shattering either.) But what do I know? Harjo is famous, celebrated, and enjoyed by many. To paraphrase the B52's, before I talk, I should read her book! (But I know, after compiling this week's List, that I never will.  Little lending library, here we come.) Pay no attention to me, this long-haired, overfed, leaping gnome and her crackpot opinions!

My views aside, Harjo's book was just fine for compiling a word list! What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then spout rot about the famous poet of your choice! 

And now, your List:

alive

animals

belly

bones

corn

crow

hawk

heart

horses

jail

magic

nerve

never

railroad

rained

shell

shy

silver

sweetheart

yellow

In Honor Of

They name things after people.

It's done all the time,

like

the George Washington Bridge

or

Kennedy Space Center.

Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee

but then,

Sara Lee never did anything to me.

There are others.

O'Hare airport,

Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility

or

Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane.

I'm adding one

and calling it

The Pat R. Harvey Desert.

Its grand scale reflects your self-importance,

its shifting sands your endless bogus tap dance,

and its

vast, uninhabitable wastes

your vacant heart.

I placed a plaque

smack dab in the middle

where the sun is harshest.

It tells the tale

of which curb I kicked your bullshit to.

If you want it,

it's out there where nothing can survive

with your golf clubs

and your

side piece.

_______

for What's Going On? "desert"

.

Word Garden Word List--Hapax

 

Hello my poetic posse, it is time again for a new Word List! Way back in July, when the sun was high and the sidewalk hot, our source was a volume by poet A. E. Stallings called Like. This week we return to Ms. Stallings but switch to another volume called Hapax (Hapax: once, once only, once and for all.) 

I love how she expresses both prosaic and weighty ideas in a most appealing and usually rhyming style. Rhyme seems to have somehow become the red-headed stepchild of modern poetry. Free verse, blank verse, prose poetry, and the dreaded imposter that calls itself poetry but is actually just journaling have taken over, it seems to me. Do I write free verse, blank verse, and prose poetry? You bet I do, but I also love rhyme and form, all the more as I grow older. And so, A.E. Stallings delights me, much as A. E. Housman always has. All these A.E.'s! 

Last time, I didn't give you any examples of Stallings' work, but this time i am going to provide two. The first is one called "Apotropaic." The title means "power to ward off evil." 

Pity Evil his quaintness and old-fangled

Manners, his age, his nerves so raw that bells

And firecrackers leave him spooked and jangled.

Shy of onion, garlic, pungent smells,

His stomach thrown off by a pinch of salt,

He hankers for blandness like an invalid.

He stands on ceremony. He will halt

When not invited in. You can be rid

Of his presence by vulgarity--eschew

His curious eye by spitting, and offend

His queer aesthetics with the color blue. 

Beauty attracts him. He's quick to befriend

The lucky, the talented, the heaven-sent--

At your service if not your command--

Courtly, brought close by compliment,

Bowing, with his black hat in his hand. 

___

And, "Another Lullaby For Insomniacs"

Sleep, she will not linger:

She turns her moon-cold shoulder.

With no ring on her finger,

You cannot hope to hold her.

She turns her moon-cold shoulder

And tosses off the cover.

You cannot hope to hold her:

She has another lover.

She tosses off the cover

And lays the darkness bare.

She has another lover,

Her heart is otherwhere.

She lays the darkness bare.

You slowly realize

Her heart is otherwhere.

There's distance in her eyes.

You slowly realize

That she will never linger,

With distance in her eyes

And no ring on her finger.

I have tried to suss out what form the latter example is, but failed. It is similar to, but not a Kyrielle or a villanelle. In any event, I love both its depth and its workmanship. You too? 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. It need not rhyme or use form, that is merely what I personally like about the work of A.E.Stallings. Then just link up, visit others, and then try to get some sleep, despite the Black Hat Man! This prompt remains active through Sunday. 

And now, your List:

ambulance

butterfly

cradle

chrysanthemums

ferric

flags

fogging

funeral

groggy

guess

idiocy

kinder

kites

mint

phantom

scatter

torch

tunes

wise

zero