Weight & Lightness

 

In morning, a thousand plans;

afternoon finds me recumbent

Hours become like contraband

and my plans undone but done with.

I feel unchanged, sitting by the window

but tire at the slightest exertion.

I watch as the evening bends low

and wonder at vitality's desertion.

But my mind! Imagination grown brighter!

While a simple chore leaves me breathless.

So I poeticize or read another chapter

and for the moment feel light, lifted, deathless. 

____________

for What's Going On? -- March of Time.

I have been a sad child and a wild addict and a recovering person, a long-time employee, been married and raised a son, been divorced and started over, called myself straight and LGBTQ, and I end as I began, with a love of dogs and poetry. What a long, strange trip it's been, but I am happy where I have landed. 

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

Music: Fleetwood Mac Landslide

Crackerjack For Lancelot

 

I set out Crackerjack for Lancelot,

candy apples for his mount--

licorice for dancing devils

too numerous to count.

I bake pie for the Lorelei

and salt water taffy for the sailors--

honey for all my winning ways

and bitter ale for my failures.

_______

for Dverse quadrille "candy"

Music: Lindi Ortega Fall Down Or Fly

Self Portrait

 

There's someone in here,

inside my

skin,

someone Frankensteined

up from a girl

I used to be or

never was

or

someone on a greased slide

to the boneyard

(yep, that was

me)

but she got

off at

El Paso

sweet little woman get along.

See, I'm living for two 

now,

preggers with myself

and way

overdue

but we're cute af

in certain light

or in 

my imagination

or 

in the sight of God

with a 

heave

and a

ho

I just couldn't let her go.

_______

Nursery Rhyme

 There were devils

present at my birth

and veiled angels

in smoky violet shirts

with handbells

they'd stolen out of Hell.

Who is the coward

that devils teach to curse

holding Hope out in a teacup

but overturn it first?

A fool's sun

wanes fast, warms none.

See the rose stem

my assassin's throat was vase for

so that every imprecation

that's spoken only makes more

melodies

across my garden's leaves.

Angels kept my heart

in a box with golden hinges

carried by a devil

on its back with burning cinches

in tandem served--

my hidden heart preserved. 

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Crane

Music: Beth Hart & Joe Bonamassa "I'll Take Care of You"

Castaway

 I have searched for my twin in prismed multiplicity,

called in secret language for my double in duality,

milled in crowds,

wandered the countryside,

hurried after a vanishing face I thought I recognized,

and waited as night fell, dawn came, and still I lingered

searching for my twin

but always as a castaway, a solitary stranger.

______

for The Sunday Muse #211.

Arabesque

I am the spine of a book, pages open on either side.

I am steel rails down a valley that two greening hills divide.

I am the corpus callosum, of two minds in every thought.

Am I sleeping or here wakeful, one eye open, one eye not?

I am the nest with two birds calling, both the same but different still,

I disperse myself in potions, both the doctor and the ill.

I am the worm who grew two wings, one of blue and one of gold,

Meeting in the middle when in flight and when in fold.

_______

for Sunday Muse #161. This had three stanzas but I liked it better with just the two.

While The Devil Sleeps

 

Even the devil has to sleep some time,

dozing by the inferno, daring a red-lipped smile.

Let's dance, though the downstairs neighbors bang the broomstick.

Let's wear sequins and furs, hats as big as platters,

and take the train with our big brown bags.

Put an air on, try an accent, we're beautiful don't you see?

We will land like birds on a fountain in a square

to sing ourselves as Whitman would, while the devil sleeps. 

--------------

for Sunday Muse #143, where I am hosting. Join us!

Equinox

I'm as plain and brown as mud in March.
I'm a stone in a river; I don't move much. 
I'm the dull-bound book with the faded cover,
But my pages will call you to next and another.

See the yard all strewn with last year's leaves--
See the unassuming chair, the sparrow, and...me
Dreaming at mid-day-- as roots are, too,
Seeming still-- but restless and drawn to do

Our turning and rising as the season commands
with sure sense of continuance--like ampersands.
_____

For Fireblossom Friday : Poetic imagery. I'm hosting at Toads. Come by and join us!

2 Reasons

There are two reasons why I love you,
one why I don't.

1. The things you say. You're a silver-tongued devil, such a testament talker.

2. The sight of you spills me, inside of myself. I overbalance, warmly.

And the other?

1. Someone killed us both, but we got up again, hipsway walkers--

One proud, one guilty.
_______ 

A flash 55 for the cauldron of the fearsome and powerfully magical Hedgewitch at Real Toads.

Landscapers

The neighbor's lawn crew arrives, and I realize--
I am here by mistake.

I must certainly be a shadow of a more substantial me--
wearing ten pounds of clothing in the summer time,
out walking where these houses will be.

All you noisy fuckers on your riding mowers,
you are not yet here;
you are not yet born.

Other Me watches her language,
buries her babies,
scorches the muffins, drops a stitch.

For her it is not so long ago that locusts crawled these stalks of grass.
Out on the fields where this burb will rise,
the wildflowers, the pumpkin vines, the snows will pass.

A devil with a leaf blower crosses himself near the property line.
He has heard about the spirit next door--
that misplaced ghost haunting a restless future--mine.
________

A Spiny Demon

A spiny demon fell out of the chandelier and into my decolletage,
just as the aperitifs were being served.
There is only one thing for a lady to do when this happens,
and so I went to the kitchen and boiled him in a pot
like an artichoke.

The chef in his toque
and his staff in their amazement
gaped at me for crossing an unspoken boundary line,
but I was raised by wolves
and educated at Smith--
I can snarl with accent or without.

By this time I could see the spiny demon's breath,
though it may have been steam,
or just hot air.
Concerned for my manicure,
I plucked him from his impromptu bath with tongs,
and demanded to know if he had come
to try to collect my soul.

He clammed up, so I went next door,
holding him gingerly by the tail,
into the neighbor's house,
the Land That Time Forgot,
and played stoopball with him against the inside stairs.
I used a Babolat racket
and a wicked serve to make him talk.

Borrowing the jack from someone's Audi,
I opened his gob and got the truth out of him.
He had been spitting night into my stellar disposition,
while I slept,
innocent as a kitten.
I stashed his loathsome spiny self in the dishwasher
and, departing the neighbor's house,
I kicked off my Jimmy Choos, letting my bare feet sink into the wet grass.

The sun was coming up,
as yellow as a taxi cab,
so I started all over, despite my age, and despite convention.
What the hell, Bo Peep, I said to myself,
live a little, bring down a moose,
win a Pulitzer,
get a girlfriend.
Why not?
________

for mag 228

wolves

The wolves who ate the sun
had all night to find my soft white sleeping-place,
my foolish face,
and then to circle me like a wild garland.

With the moon in their eyes,
and the stars caught between the pads of their paws,
they ran and left the sky behind them
trailing blue and silver
down into my skin as I slept.

Come to me, as you always do,
in your time, and as you can;
but understand
that all night, now, I am awake and watchful,
a different and darker girl than the one you could lull and tease,
keep and command.
_________

Amherst

"I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf"

There are more ways than one--
that books can burn.
We sat in high school English class,
blank as babies--
as disinterested as the wrong lover--
being spoon fed the prescribed pablum
our curriculum required.

Our teacher was a young guy with a mustache--
nothing sinister about him.
He told us,
"This poem of longing expresses Emily Dickinson's desire
for a Philadelphia minister
whom she heard preach only once."
or Judge Otis Lord.
or Kermit the fucking frog.

Still,
I felt the fire.
I felt the funnel begin to turn--
the Rotation and the Dip--
and everything I had known or thought before was just blown to sticks and dust.

I got the infection,
felt the calling--
to put words to the weather of my heart.

In 2007, I visited the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst.
I saw the room--
the unassuming small space
where Emily wrote her soul out on paper,
then carefully stored it in a trunk under the bed.

Out the window,
the trees and garden, those double spirits,
vessels for both their own beauty and the beauty she gave them--
with each word, leaving the flesh and divinity of herself
caught on every thorn and stone.

Across the way, The Evergreens--
home to her brother and his wife Susan.

Susan knows
she is a Siren--
and that at a
word from her,
Emily would
forfeit Righteousness--

To a woman who felt everything,
this must have been the most exquisite torment--
a gorgeous bird contained in the cage of her time and mores,
and able to be holy enough,
and profane enough,
and human enough,
to make such torture so beautiful that it saturates Sight.

To own a
Susan of
my own
Is of itself
a Bliss--
Whatever
Realm I
forfeit, Lord,
Continue me
in this!

The most particular and intimate feathers
held in those wings beneath her bed,
were fed to the fire
upon her death.

In that room, and in the garden later on,
She was there,
and she blessed me. 
In the simple passion of every word,
she told me, sister, sing it.
Over so many seasons, one bird can't last,
but another of its kind can lift her head
and there are the notes, still sung, from a Twin Heart.

But Susan is
a Stranger yet--
The Ones who
cite her most
Have never scaled
her Haunted House
Nor compromised
her Ghost--

To pity those who
know her not
Is helped by the
regret
That those who
know her know
her less
The nearer her
they get--

My friend had given me a choice, the last day of my visit--
to meet her new musician girlfriend,
or go to Amherst to see the Homestead.
All the way from Plymouth, she played the girlfriend's only cd--
great the first time, then good, then...
well, she's in love, and she's making this trip for me.

She couldn't stand it, though, by the end of the tour.
"Why isn't there anything about Emily Dickinson's lesbianism?"
Our guide answered smooth as Teflon,
the non-answer she had been trained to give,
and quickly switched to a short course on the furniture.

Love.
Longing.
I felt it, in waves, coming off my friend as she drove.
I felt it from Emily,
with the Evergreens as near as truth ever gets,
and as far, in its way, as places foreign on my Homesick eye.

And were You lost, I would be –
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame –
And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –

So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
_______________________

"I Cannot Live With You" and the three quoted pieces written by Emily Dickinson. I hope that I have done her justice with the rest.

For Corey's "Destinations and Dialogue" challenge at Real Toads.