Asian Pear

Standing at the kitchen window leaving a message for my married lover, I admire the Asian pear just outside.

Its limbs stretch across the walk,

gifting soft white blossoms from itself every spring.

People tell me to cut it back,

it is where it is not supposed to be, but

it is so beautiful and I am so lonely.

______

Day 3 of 30 for the Wednesday Muse.

I doubled up today. You can find my other, unlinked, poem HERE, at Mamba.

No More Of Jerry

At some point, there was no more of Jerry
and yet, I kept walking him around anyway
no matter how he billowed and sagged,
no matter the film-melt at his hands, his feet, his face.

I kept thinking, this is Jerry, MY Jerry,
and he will rally, he will laugh it off and start dancing
even though we would both know it hadn't been a joke;
love can be that way, can't it?--illogical, like improv, chancy.

Okay, I lied.
We had got to that point of inattention where things get missed,
or recast, or denied,
and so when I walked down the street with Jerry I wore no black,
but the night lent me its share
and I wrapped it over my shoulders
and knotted it in my hair.

Look, Jer, I'm 3 a.m.--
your girl full of stars, still circling, ever faithful.
There's no more of you, but life is crammed with leftover me;
I don't know what to do, and it's lonelycold, unbearable, rainful.

'Bye, Jerry.
When dawn comes, I'll have to pretend there's a tomorrow,
and there it will be no matter what--
without me caring, without you there.
_______

For Karin's "No More" challenge at Real Toads 

 

 

Cheshire Cat

To kiss the winter is to kiss bone-lips--
to hold her is to make roots of one's fingers as one rolls in one's grave.

In my dreams, a succubus,
singing to me in crowsong;
an edge to open the blood borders behind my eyes.

Does all of this seem grim?
Let's do it on the hard wood pew,
and in the after-talk, soft and easy,
I will pull a bloom from the hymnal of my mouth, a song that has slept
and now stirs just to describe itself to you in octaves.

Once, dressed in scales of shell-pink and green,
I roamed the years like an exhaled breath,
searching for the dark-haired Queen of my dreams.

Summer found me gloomy, draped in leaf and binding,
and so she made a gift to me of her indifference;
In my hidey-hole I wove it into a flag, then burned it.

I kissed winter on her bone-lips then,
and breathed jet-colored smoke into her body--
from then on I saw her as Nubian, and beautiful as an animate jewel.

Cheshire Cat, she said,
behold now, nothing is left of you but your smile,
enchanted by me, the nothing of me, the waste.

Deep in my root-tangle, I imagined hanging gardens nodding with abundance.
Shocked with cold, I resolved to become a furnace, and fed my own flames.
As for winter, she knew a sucker when she saw one,
and laid down with me in our somnolent abatoir of illusion.
_______

for Kerry's FANTASY mini-challenge at Real Toads.