Lightning Tree

When heat meets high,
hail is what you get.
Cold comes down to earth
Like a hard kiss.

Any woman who loves a Gypsy
sets her heart out in the wind.
Your girl's got the sunset eyes, doesn't she,
and the widow's peak you like.

I wouldn't want to tell you your business, girl--
keep dancing like the lightning tree in a gale;
call the sky closer and see what you get.

Turn the tables, sister--
read the five rings on her right hand.
Gold, for when she feels fine and satisfied.
Silver (moonlight) for when she's dreamy.
Turquoise (water) for when she moves in the mystery.
Brass, for when she's bold and her words burn fast.

The fifth is made of bone, with a ruby stone
for when she feels passionate and broody,
a bryndle spirit wrapped in Old Country colors,
a moment's flame between low ash and high smoke.

But you know, don't you,
it is her left hand, held behind her,
that will snap or sate you,
and stir the storm through the ice-white jasmine either way.

_________

for Monday Melting #22. I used the word "slap". Wait. No I didn't. At the last moment I changed it to "snap". The voices told me to do it.

If some of this poem sounds familiar, it is because I was working on it in my previous post. 
 

Jaguar Black

Jaguar black
Is the rain-beat pulse
At my wrist,
At my throat,
The animating ghost my body is cage for;
A cat's whisker
Searching in the dark for your hand.

If I had golden eyes,
If I were sandalwood incense burning
Beside you,
Rising,
I would move through the stars like silver grasses;
I would borrow moonlight for my coat,
To make myself beautiful
So that you would love the very skies
I fall from.

Jaguar black
Is the trees at night
Whose hard embrace holds me,
Whose canopy carries my almost-human cry,
In darkness
In hopelessness
That my desire would ever be haven for
A touch returned
That can never be mine.

_____

Using two of Shawna's Monday Melting words, "jaguar" and "incense."

The House of No

Here is the House of No.
Has your trip been long?
Please remain standing.

Examine our literature,
Our list of the one hundred most beautiful words.
Wear this mask. Keep silent.

We've seen your type before, a thousand times;
We know how your arms ache for her smooth skin.
Hold them up--
We will teach them tolerance, wrapped in heavy casts.

We're wise to the way she falls from your mind in sections...
Sweet, as if her ribs had called your fingers from a dream,
To lay tender stripes from their tips to her heart.
No more of that.

We give no sympathy, even in extremity,
For the memory of her breath, warm and close on your face,
Or the turning up of her shoulders when she kissed you the way she did.
Empty your bag.
Give us those.

In time, you will no longer feel riven in two with impossible desire.
One day, her name will cease to seem holy, or even noteworthy.
Until then,

Come to breakfast,
Accept the cup of dust we offer;
Trust our healing methods.
Stop moaning.
Eat your rind.
______

for Real Toads Open Link Monday and Shawna's Monday Melting.

Crusade

It was during the blackout,
In the time of the plague.
I came back to our apartment, leading my exhausted horse,
The cross on my chest dotted with sprays of blood
Like funeral flowers.

You never understood,
When I spoke of slaughter.
Yes, you let me tremble, bare-skinned, in your arms, in the dark,
My heart the very last thing unsheathed;
But I think you still pictured the dead, if you pictured them at all,
Laid straight and pretty in fragrant new rosewood coffins
Unmarred, like asparagus stalks upon a plate.
In your version, they do not lurch,
Cradling their guts in their hands,
Grown men, dying, calling for their mothers.

It was during the scaly week,
The interminable seven days without you,
That hopelessness seeped into me, like poison through a corrupted membrane.
I am your prickly girl, laying my dented helmet
On the counter at the 7-11, embarrassing you.
Haunting the kitchen, I touched my fingers to your copper pots,
So emblematic of the order, the care, the warmth that is you, baby.
I wept. I did.
Then, I lit smudge sticks to banish myself
From this good place where I no longer belong.

In war, in the smoky mornings,
We would sift through the dead and maimed, taking their coins, their shoes,
Anything we could use and carry.
In the dawn, riding slowly along the freeway ramp east of town, with the rising sun behind us,
Our horses' hooves made a jarring racket,
And we shocked the early commuters with our taken scalps
And the heads of our enemies on skewers.

Over time, I know, Love,
That I have become foreign and hard.
Your friends hate me, they say I smell like a stable;
They exchange looks and discuss the white scar
That runs jagged through my short-shorn hair.
So, bless you for coming back,
Like undeserved, untenable salvation.
You hold my head as the television drones, now that the power is back
And the plague has gone.
You kiss my scar as if you were a mother
And I were good, and worthy, and beautiful.

_____

for Monday Melting #14. I had to use these words: tremble, prickly, lurch, asparagus, blackout, copper, scaly, smudge, skewer, sift, membrane and slaughter. Also linked to dverse open link #41.

Things I Said

Set a lemon on the window sill--
I will come with the April freeze.

I loved a man like you, once.
He was a hack, like you.
He was carob when I wanted chocolate.
Did I say I loved him?
I tend to lie.

Never mind me, I am just a shadow-girl,
Like the violet growing in the green pot your mother gave you.
Your mother and I, we wear the same root
Crushed, in vials, around our necks.
When we speak,
We disturb you, I can tell;
And yet, we never run out of chatter.

Here is an almond--
Ask it anything.

Every specter was beautiful once;
And every beauty will writhe with worms, given time.
It isn't what you wanted to hear, I know.
Forgive me--
I can be soft.
I can be yielding.
I can be kind...

Just not tonight,
And not for you.
_____
for Monday Melting #10, which required me to use the following words: almond, root, fire, carob, hack, lemon, specter, violet, writhe, and disturb. (And I just noticed that I edited out the line that had "fire" in it Oh well, I'm not sticking it back in now.)

The Sunflower Road

There is a wound deep in the helix--
a hard grief down in the dark family blood--
and I can't turn monkshood to maple sugar by denying it.

Still,
There is the Sunflower Road
and this warm-going afternoon--
the bug on his back doesn't talk rot or doubt my hollow-stalked soul
when I flip him in my palm
and watch his simple ascent.

Yes, baby,
one day I'll line the lily casket with my wicked bones
sweet as cane in the marrow;
black-dress ladies'll allow as to how I had my uses,
and later they'll slice peach pie and fan themselves with prayer cards
like pretty caged birds.

All of this is why--
plain-root simple-face bloom that I am--
I tell you honest,
same as you have always been with me,
that I could not have found my way
without you.
______
photo by Shanyn Silinski

posted for Real Toads Open Link Monday #19 and Monday Melting #9  

Chamber Duet

See how I love you, darling,
Risking my favorite gray ankle boots to go skittering down the rotten-leaf path to the marsh,
Wearing my delicate little gloves and an old-lady cardigan against the chill damp?

Don't try to hand me any shit about how you love sailors now,
And how they float their bones up from salt water to this place,
To sing shanteys to you--
Here, where you percolate in the shallows like a Quadroon turned to wax.

My frail sweetheart,
Look at you, what's become of you.
There was a time when you could char the moon's pale edges simply by looking up;
Don't I know it better than anyone?
There was an age--was it sixteen?--
When a lack of you was a dearth I couldn't endure.
Now, if I move you at all,
It is with the edge of a cypress branch,
To roll you like a dismal log in a fire of rot.

We really cared once, you know it's true;
But these days we are sophisticated--
Everything must be de rigueur and scripted to within an inch of its life.
Go ahead, I release you for all time--
Be the anima for your little sailors as they dance out from sharks' mouths and surround you,
As stultifying as ease.

I will use tiny silver clippers to trim the soulful timbre from the cello,
Rendering it a balsa fiddle;
A repository of false notes and refined choking,
A waterside abomination,
Our love song evermore.
_____

for Monday Melting Week 2. I had to use the following words: timbre, derigueur, percolate, marsh, char, damp, frail, dearth, wax and anima.