Final Take

 

Take me in your arms, though they and I both tremble.

Take my ticket, in the shape of a falling fruit tree leaf,

light and red and now yours, after all this time.

Take me to the harvested fields, cleared of crow and ear.

Take me as I am, with my empty emblems in a cherrywood box.

Take time to be silent, and in being so become my healer.

Take all that I have loved or shattered, planted or trampled.

Take me to my wedding, that melody in a dead bedroom.

Take me to my grave, where I will subside at last.

Take a photograph and give it to the waters beneath the bridge.

Take down everything the river rocks say--that is my epitaph.

This is the take to keep at last--it is all there is or should be. 

__________

For What's Going On Take This Poem.

Top image created by Bing A.I.

Music: J P Jones Prophet In His Prime

On The Subject of Enduring Love

I have sent my driver, with the map in his head.

He'd be better off blindfold.

Better off dead.

Banter with him as events unfold.

Pretend you've not gone mephitic and old.

Forever is the thing, forever is the word.

Forever the mounted, desiccated bird.

I have sent my car with the soft leather seats.

All the ash trays nailed,

sick with sweets.

I wait for you breathless, gloved and veiled

tubercular, powdered, primped and paled.

Here love's cricket who last night chirred

lies dead in the mouth of that god-damned bird.

____________

for The Sunday Muse #165, where I am hosting. 

Interview

It is not new

this interviewing of myself.

In a dark or dull hour

ghosts rent my tongue,

black flocks rend my mind's sky.

I called a nightmare by name

to break its back.

Making a paste from fury and innocence,

I conjured a papier mache landlord,

all purpose, no heart.

The renters scattered.

The birds flew into a vortex, blind and damned.

Moving into my own skin,

I learned new oxygen

with my keys held tight between my fingers

just in case.

______

for Sunday Muse.

Canaan

I keep a lock on the fallboard 
to keep silence on the keys.
It's not there for kitty, but for the Destroyer, 
the Hell-spawned vaccuum-souled Imp
who leans in the doorway and pipes up
that the adagio is "nice."

Follow me to my playing place,
and I will knock you down the stairs with a spiked club. 
I do this for the sake of my instrument, 
blind and trusting in every way that I am not.

If we have just made love,
our breath as close and sweet as roosting doves,
do not think that now you may ask me to "play something."
The window is glass--you will fall two floors with the shards.

I have preserved this spare garret
through hundred-year storms and momentary bullshit
using every avenue of preservation a girl can summon.
Now, in even solitude, I free the fallboard,
set fingertips to white strikers, 
and look to kitty, in his terrible authority.

As before? I ask.
His eyes are unblinking, 
and His instrument fills like a ewer in Canaan.
________

for Sunday Muse #97.