Sneakers

 

I dreamed I was young again

which seemed natural

(and woke up old again

which did not.) 

I had on kicks that looked as if

they'd been left out in the rain,

buried in a mud slide

and chewed up by wild dogs.

Does a life get old, too?

When is the last day of school?

When do all these teachers

lose their love of lessons?

I dreamed I was looking

for new blindingly white shoes

to make my feet like new brides

puppies fresh as fabled loves.

I woke up gimpy, slow, sore.

A shining soul misplaced

in this beat-up box of a body.

It must be keen for a new ride.

I dreamed I was young again

but woke up old

without possibility of parole

except by the sleep that cures and mends.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Game Six. 

Music: Grace Potter, I Shall Be Released

Process notes: I did dream last night that I was young again and wearing completely worn-out sneakers from long travels. I had it in mind to buy new, spiffy, blindingly white ones that day as I had another journey ahead.

   Some years back, I had a dream in which I was vividly, pointedly, and emphatically told that April 17th would be my day to step across into the light. However, there was nothing about what year. And so, every spring I get a little nervous. In fat, I was seriously scared the first time around, but the day has come and gone several times now and like Elton John, I'm still standing. For the first time, I'm sanguine about the day approaching. If this is the year, I'm okay with that.

Poem About a Dream, With Shifting Tense

 

I dreamed you were there again

like a delayed letter in the mailbox

twined with thorns, slick with lipstick.

There you were, at my doorway

on my farm where I have never laid eyes

or set foot, nor sat cross-legged in the wild-grown meadow.

You were with someone new.

I was with someone new.

They were both starting to see how things are. 

Your hair, you know, it's like a pillow on a bed

where I long to be. And me, I have the key that you can't find,

as clunky as a cow's bell, as broken as an old washer. 

The guy you were with had begun to see the 

sunset behind your October eyes; I've known your full dark.

I'm here but obscured from the wildflower partner beside me.

I'm getting a vibe, like pixelated messages from space,

that your man would like to be mine instead, and drop his

heavy bags on my rag rug. I think my partner has checked out silently.

So there we stand, in a now that never was,

in a place we never were, playing out a scene like breezy clouds.

I see blackbirds on the split-rail fence, dipping, calling,

and feel my heart break apart inside my chest like a broken door handle.

___________

for Word Garden Word List--The Jesus Cow

Music: Coldplay The Scientist

Your Angel

 In a curio shop you bought a small angel.

The first thing the two of you did was to eat each other's hearts,

Hospital or cemetery? I asked, wiping spatter off my sleeve.

We have a nest inside Danielle Steele's blastoma, you said.

Take us there. 

Little soft-spoken angel, my partner's darling

breaks playmate's noses when things don't go right. 

There is the law, and there is what is clearly sick and wrong.

The two of you swing on a blade between the two.

Brilliant Ideas, you get them by the bushelful.

Marriage, madness, ill-advised rambles, and your angel

smashing the crucifixes.

Yes, I tried setting her on fire but your tears put her out.

It is her nature to be unnatural. It is mine to try to survive.

Dawn breaks. The neighbor's rooster kills itself. The sun lists.

What about our family, you ask? I scream, I want a divorce!

You smile and it shatters the Hummels like a cheekbone.

_______________

Episodes of Sea and Sky

 

Often,

I sleep on a tightwire

with a balancing pole

rising

falling

like a pair of oars.

Often,

I am busy organizing,

counting, ordering

items

that only

exist in my dreams.

High,

wearing shoes with grooved soles

making my way to a 15th floor window

all  I 

so want

is to get it all down 

on paper and set in boxes.

Awake,

it all reduces in an instant

to pointless nonsense.

Ah me.

Impossible

and silly besides. Sometimes,

someone loved me--they're gone too.

Often,

this splitting of my mind

is like an updraft out of my everyday skin.

My useless

looping tasks

give me purpose, and comfort

and favored faces alongside.

Often,

morning makes off

with these impossible pufferies

and I

rise

but it feels like falling

very fast, from height.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Let the Right One In. 

 

Music: Bronson Know Me

Nyx

 

Here is the Moon, with its baton,

puppetmaster of waters and women

low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

My head is a bowl whose edges ring.

I have buried the years in flowerboxes

under every window. They bud into regrets.

Here is my marriage to a wildflower grave.

Here is the Moon, with its baton.

I want to run amok like an islander,

and may already have done, bobbing 

in my cradle like an avid nun before Nyx,

puppetmaster of waters and women.

Listen, I need a month in the countryside

to knock these Perspex-eyed monsters

out of my dreams, to lighten me and render me

a low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

Baby, I'm freezing, I can't take delivery

of myself anymore. The Sun has reversed

herself, gone down the well, and my head oh

my head is a bowl whose edges ring

with unbearable Moon-song I don't know how to stop.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Music: Kim Carnes Breakin' Away From Sanity

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"

 

As I Said

As I said

in confidence

as i said 

from a holy book

as i said

at the emegence

as I said 

but could not look

These are the days of the Autumn's fall

These are the days of lead.

As i said

when we heard the trumpet sound

as i said

as i held your hand

as i said

as we knelt to kiss the ground

of this long-abandoned land

These are the days of the flying bird

These are the days of gold.

As i said

in bent and rusty words

as i said

with fingers crossed

as i said

to saints and conjurers

as i said

when  all was lost

These are the days of the swollen bud

and the bloom of scarlet red. 

_______

I dreamed this poem last night, or the main part of it anyway. 

Shared with The Sunday Muse #242. 

Bareback Rider

 

When I was a girl, I often dreamed

that I rode a haunted horse whose head was ether

and its steady breath was my own pulse

sounding through my ear pressed hard upon the pillow.

We rode in slow procession through 

the house gone unfamiliar in weird shadows

pulling a death-carriage behind us

and it seemed that I labored while the horse hovered

With lantern lights for eyes

on each side in concert with the slant moon

dim-blind through silver windows

but watching as the horse's flanks rose and fell.

A bareback rider, I hooked fingers

through streamers of jet mane like widow's weeds in a breeze,

hoping to hang on, to wake up

only to see Thanatos the ostler smiling and standing

At the stable door holding a gleaming dark apple for his charge.

_________

For Sunday Muse #236.

Music: Snakefarm "All The Pretty Little Horses"

For Su Griffin

 There was a woman in love with fog

and the harbor knew her name.

Su of the basket heart,

Su of the darning needle nights.

Su out of breath, or holding it, just the same.

When you're a woman at odds with time,

every second slows the heartbeat.

Woman of the breakwater bones.

Woman in the crowd, alone.

Woman who folds her heart, folds the dough, folds the sheet.

There was a woman in love with fog

and the harbor knew her name.

_______

for The Sunday Muse #198. 

Part of the following song says (In Spanish):

Because after this life 

There is no other opportunity

How much love arrives like this, it arrives like this

Impossible Riddles

 " After last night's storm, the tulip petals are strewn across the patio where they mortally fluttered" --Church, Jim Harrison

I woke around 3am again this morning. 

Someone had been talking to me

pushing pebble words through cotton teeth, 

posing impossible riddles,

or,

I was in love with someone already vanishing,

or

something important was expected of me that I could not do.

At 7am I set out seed and peanuts

for the birds and whomever may appear,

maybe even myself, in a new body

not made of seed and feathers.

Everything hurts and I am always tired.

I am as soft and ridiculous as snow, 

holding winter's hand by instinct, leery of warmth, gray as January.

Here come the jays and starlings,

crows and cardinals,

like clockwork.

I watch them from the window and remember a day years ago.

I am both there and not,

here and not.

Dear eager raucous birds, 

will you be here again tomorrow?

Will I?

_______

for Dverse Poetics: "Songs of Unreason"

Watercolor

 Last night I remembered you into being

like rose-colored paint swirling in a water glass 

from brushes dipped in street scenes and night windows.

Remember, black-eyed susans sleeping by the step,

remember, rain caught on the upturned leaves of silver maples,

recall, to no point really, the dusty lanterns on the lawn.

Last night my fingertips wandered along the lines of this poem,

looking for the place where your body moved like a brushstroke

looking for me, the way I was, the way I loved how you were.

Last night, I remembered you into being

and the moonlight on the wall made me afraid, of time 

and of memory, and of these lines where they meet, like mourners.

___________

 for Sunday Muse #174.

Whistling Past The Graveyard

 I had hired him for an hour in the afternoon

though gigolos aren't my usual thing.

I'm an Egyptian tomb of a woman.

Scarabs whisper to me about daylight.

He was intense, dark, beautiful, 

with a nemes crown and a heqa scetpre.

I turned to dust in his Cyprinum-scented arms,

and wobbled, satisfied, into Duat.

________

for Flash 55 at my BFF's place. 

nemes crown

heqa sceptre

Duat--the Egyptian realm of the dead

On The Thin Edge Of November

 On the thin edge of November

smoky air flirts with freezing and the stunned birds

seem to lean forward on the precipice of a warning cry.

Last night I dreamed of you,

my chest a redding leaf poised at a point of immobility.

A wind came up.

Windows grayed.

I rose, denying ghosts.

(Even yours.)

----------

for my BFF's Flash 55 bash.

Air Strip

They are building an air strip in my back yard. 

An older guy who used to do bit parts in the movies showed up while I was reading a pulp novel in my Adirondack chair.

He said he needed a place to land his plane so could he build an air strip on the back part of the double lot?

Sure. Why the hell not?

He pays me six dollars a day in rent, cash money.
My dogs watch the work unfold,
or play with the guy's Boxer.
There is just him, his wife, his adult son, the Boxer (whose name is"Buddy"),  and an old truck.

Work progresses slowly. 
I collect my six bucks at 5 o'clock.

One afternoon about a week in, the guy stops by my chair, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief.
"I'm up in the air in my prop job, and I'm almost out of fuel," he tells me.
"But...you're here," I point out as gently as I can.
"Yes," he agrees, "I'm here, but I'm also up in the air in my prop job and really need a place to land."

The dogs play.
His wife and son lean on their shovels.
Inside, I have a refrigerator, a table and chairs, a tv.
I think I've seen the guy in something.

Right now, though, he's up in the air in his prop job,
looking down at himself building an air strip in my back yard.
"Good luck," I say, the way one does.
He nods, sweating and looking beat, then goes back to building his air strip.

I watch the dogs chase each other and try to think what can I buy with six bucks?
_________

for day 9 of my 39 poems in 39 days.

First, There's A Dead Guy

First, there's a dead guy.
(There always is.)
Who cares? 
They'll figure it out in an hour.

The actress has red hair. She's quiet, but
simmering, like Emily Dickinson stirring chili in the afternoon
with wavy-glass windows steaming up
and a clock ticking in the hall behind her.

It's her hair, you know.
And her face.
I can feel it, that shift inside, sliding me into a time-fall.

I had forgotten the sensation on the sides of my fingers
as they curled around your green Henley at your hips.
They had never been born before that.
I had never been hungry before that.
My desire for you created me entire, on the spot. 

You had red hair. It was quiet in your dorm room,
like the air before a rare fall funnel.
I lifted your shirt up over your head,
lifted out of any life I ever lazed through up until then.
I never knew I could kiss someone
and carry that kiss like true north under my skin.

All day, I'll be thinking about
your scent,
your easy smile,
a time, place, and two girls
who stopped existing years ago, 
but who drop by unannounced and find me out.
_______

For Bjorn's flashback prompt at Toads. Last night I had the most intense dream about someone I knew when I was at college the first time (I went back later). But though I knew who it was, she had morphed into actress Julianne Nicholson, who played Detective Wheeler on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. I probably need years of therapy.

Rumors Of Wars

image by Rebecca Sygnus

We were foreigners bloomed in exotic soil,
a kind of invasive pet.

Wherever we went, we had nothing,
and so performed and begged and stole,
spreading our arms in sheepish apology as our bellies growled.

We wore the emblems and baubles of our homeland,
as meaningless as gum wrappers here.
We were restless,
resentful,
thrilled to be free of all that constrained us at home.

None of us were ever going to wear
those conical hats
or our men grow those little goatees threaded gray with eastern wisdom.

Someone called my name, in accusation or greeting
and I looked up to see only my familiar ceiling.
There was no "we", no scraping sharp-edged survival,
and so I rose, fetched the morning paper from the step,

And searched through every page, as if for crumbs
to feed the thing I had felt
in the life I never lived at all
with the imagined companions upon whom there was no reporting

Though I missed them with a ferocity that held on for hours
like a dying foxhole brother.
_________

For Sunday Muse #77, from a wild and intense dream I had before waking this morning. Why I should dream of being part of a lost military expedition in Indochina is beyond me, but there it is. 

Swans & Roses

Eleven swans with one
voice brought a warning,
delivered in a dream.

"Your love is sick,
dying. Her bones are 
stems. Her hair, thorns."

Each swan carried a
bloom. I followed, eleven
miles. Behold, my love:

In the earth, stems.
On the earth, roses.
_______

A quadrille for Wednesday Muse.

Remember

Remember the Alamo.

Remember the Maine.

Remember yourself, in my dream last night,

tilting your head the way that's done

when the next word is "no."

In our bed, Santa Anna's Mexican army.

At the breakfast table, saboteurs asking for the Tabasco.  

Sunken steel and mud missions know

how it was and

how I remember you.

______ 

a 55 for my BFF.

 

Moonset of A Working Girl

"Gathering Wood" by Edward Emerson Simmons

"I said this can't be me
Must be my double
And I can't forget, I can't forget
I can't forget but I don't remember what"--Leonard Cohen

 

Gathering kindling, wearing wooden shoes

is work that makes the sun slip

and the dust rise

in stupid excitement under the wheels of that chariot.

I pull bones like branches slowly

from body to berm

until there sits the new me, blinking,

carefully arranged, expendable, ready to burn.

I am a moonset, walking, blathering,

obscured in a bonnet of overcast and dry leaves.

My effigy with her soft hands rises,

ascends, lights brightly my obligatory entropy.

_______

for my own Fireblossom Friday