Mariana In The Morning

 Mariana in the morning

by Morning's light possessed

all afternoon she walks the cliff's edge

trying to forget.

Mariana by the window

in a yellow aster smock

She knows November brings the end

of all your foolish talk.

And the mermaids come to die

on her lonely rocky shore

they ask her for her anodyne

then ask for nothing more.

Mariana, bride of Sorrow

in Sorrow's cottage kept

She counts the coins the stars deliver

and medicates the debt.

Mariana, in her silence

braids the horses' tails

She knows November brings the ostler

with his shoes and nails.

And the mermaids come to die

on her lonely rocky shore

asking for her anodyne

then asking nothing more.

_______

Mermaids

Mermaids sing but do not stay

and I have always been partial to them,

perhaps because they do not stay.

I take to sea in a skin of metal and wood

to look for mermaids diving, vanishing.

I throw my heart over like an anchor,

heavy odd thing, inflexible,

not the sort that mermaids love at all.

-----------

written during the Wordcrafters on line meeting.

From A Shell

From a shell came Divine instruction
insistent as a drowning man's hand,
his ear a barrel of seven-year whiskey.

As his bones grew longer, firmer,
the ground gave way so that he was always at sea,
a perpetual castaway in the solid world.

A woman, his mother,
said his head was in the clouds;
another woman, undressed and unhappy,
said he never heard a word she said.

He hears, but his heart is a barrel of seven-year whisky
a sea within a sea within a man
at the mercy of the Selkies who shed 
their seal-coats at his feet and sing.
______

for Sunday Muse #68.

Sand & Water

"Solid stone is just sand and water, baby; sand and water, and a million years gone by." --Beth Nielsen Chapman

They say that if you love a Selkie,
she will leave with the tide, and not return for seven years.
Lovers of Selkies walk the beach collecting shells
and other empty things, here...and here...and here.

They say that if you love a Selkie,
to keep her, you burn the seal-coat she's shed.
Then you'll have a Selkie wife
silently crying in your bed. 

Here I've been, since who knows when,
Drawing pictures in the dust on the sill while you slept.
Don't say you believe, in me, in us
anymore; what's been burned can't still be kept.

Down through the town, past the fields, to the water
with my seal-coat stitched from paper and leather,
I slip back home, on my back I'm carried
by the change in the waves, in your heart, and the weather.
_______

for Margaret's Artistic Impressions at Real Toads.



 

Francisco

He kept Plath in his beard--
Pound in his pocket.

He was a big, round, officially endorsed cargo ship
carrying Crane, Yeats and Cummings
to and above all our upturned mermaid faces.

How we adored him as he
orbited above us,
tossing us enjambments and sandwich crumbs.

Everyone I knew that winter
was on some sort of diet, slowly
starving themselves to get more
love
looks
and saints' medals for self-denial.

He alone moved through our world consuming it
even as he fattened it with all he stuffed us full of.

He said, "I have the reputation of being unapproachable,
but come to my office any time."
He had The Bard on the wall, Ferlinghetti on the book shelf.

He saw that I was famished and gave me loaves and fishes,
bound with glue and published by the University Press.

I let him down, you know, in the end.
My depression settled in and I gacked the final paper.
His appearance that last time, shocked me.
He said, "You're smart, but you don't try."

Gods kill themselves,
and when they do, nobody can believe it.
I thought it was my fault.
It wasn't, but

I grew all that spring and summer, even after he was gone.
My parents' lips hard-dried in a thin line.
Friends put their palms on me.

I never told anyone, and they all assumed it was some college boy.
Now I have one of my own, but when he was little
I would bitch at him to go sledding,
make a snowman,
play hockey,
anything, but just get your nose out of that book.

Then I'd feel bad and apologize to the air, and to Francisco
for all of my shortcomings
and the poems--the poems unwritten. 
______

For Magaly's "Carpe Jugulum" challenge at the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads. Some of this poem is true, the rest is my imagination.

Lullaby Of A Beautiful Girl

I'm a beautiful girl, made of ice.
I am water when it stops moving.
If you want me, it is either because you're crazy,
or because you see summer, still, inside me--
a season preserved that you can't touch.

Invite me in anyway, murderer.
Make love to me with a hammer;
don't kiss me unless you want us to stay that way forever,
not eating, not speaking,
like poets, or the damned.

I was an urchin once, making cat shit castles in my sandbox,
wondering what I'd be when I became a woman.
It rained and I became a mermaid instead--
winter stilled the waves and left me half in and half out,
half a woman who will never bear a child,
half a fish caught on a glittering hook.

I'm a beautiful girl, made of ice.
I am water when it stops moving.
If I want you it is either because I'm desperate,
or because I feel summer's seed, still, inside me--
a season destroyed, yet suspended in my touch.
_______

Tell Me Everything

"Tell me everything," you said.
"Let's have no secrets between us."
Then you sent your ten sorceresses--
four around the hill, with one at the crest,
three together in the garden at rest,
and two down into the valley. Such beautiful dancers, these.

My name is Melusine,
a love letter written on wine-dark pages,
sealed in a jewelry box with a serpent in gold at the edges.
You were a spilled apple bushel,
not realizing that it is the seed, not the fruit that matters.
What was it in the one thing I asked you not to do,
not to know,
that made you so keen and cruel to know?

Not cruel to me, though I am angry; though I am gone.
You undid yourself, making me the instrument of it.
Don't you get it?
I asked only to be left alone at my bath,
that I might bobble the skulls of all my old loves
and wind around them in clumsy recompense.

The next time you come to a locked door, remember me.
Wind a grape vine around your hair,
wind the hemp and kick the chair,
do anything to give yourself a moment to think--
then, my used-to-be darling,
open that idiot mouth of yours
and swallow that forged metal apple, the key.
_______

For Magpie #258.

Thank you to Hedgewitch, for making me think of Melusine. 

Book Worm In Seal Skin

I'm a book worm in seal skin,
Gladys on the half shell,
exiting the surf wearing a long wool skirt,
a smart jacket,
librarian glasses,
and an antiquarian hat.

(I meant to trip in my high button shoes.
I meant to do that.)

So, now, come out from the stacks, you.
Bring me a rose
and state your business.

Yes, yes. I'm the most beautiful woman
that you've ever spotted behind a reference desk.
Your heart is mine,
to catalog and shelve,
and so forth and so on. I've heard it all before.

Do something different.
Throw your electronic gadgets in the trash.
Do an interpretive dance around the safety cones
which mark the wet spot on the floor.
Then,
lie down with me there,
play with my hair and read to me your own poem
about having to be lashed to the microfiche reader,
so that you won't throw your life away
for love of my song.

Wrap me in a net and slide the chopsticks from my head.
Check me out, Padawan.
Get lost in me, as in a book, or Old Briney.
If you whisper the correct call number, I will sigh
--in that way you just knew all librarians can sigh--
and stay seven years with you,
getting on top,
making spot-on recommendations,
and organizing your special collections like nobody ever has before.

Or, you can stand there gaping,
and I'll slide back into the surf as if I had never existed at all,
here and gone,
leaving just my hat ribbon floating in the foam.
_______ 

Travel Story For Girls

One had a boyfriend,
but never found Howland Island.
The other was an odd duck
looking for mermaids after every rainstorm.

One was Catholic,
the other Lutheran.
Both believed in female clergy
wearing Roman collars, and red hair long.

One lived at home,
the other in a flat where the gulls glide.
When they kissed the first time,
whole flocks moved in circles, like stars.

One liked Anna Ternheim,
the other, Eva Dahlgren.
When they made love the first time,
it was like piloting through easy clouds.

That May it rained every day for a week.
Water landings are dicey things;
Selkies find their buried skins and go back home,
forgetting they were ever human at all.

One moved away,
but the other stayed and wrote swells of storm-blue poems
about transformed women 
wearing Roman collars, and their red hair long.
_______

for Magpie Tales #238, and for Bjorn Rudberg's mini-challenge at Real Toads.

I've featured the this song once before on my blog, but it is so hard to find, and so cool, that I'm featuring it again. Plus, it fits the poem perfectly. Anna Ternheim is a Swedish singer who performs in English. 

Heaven

Hey, babe,
it's me.
Your same old girl
who fell out of the sky--
slipped up from the sea.

These days,
there's not as much of me left.
I'm light as a breeze,
the way I used to be--
but with more things before--
not as many next.

I love you, sugar,
like a black-faced ewe loves 
milkweed and sunflowers.
I'm always at sixes and sevens,
eternally wool-gathering,
eternally wandering watersides and bowers.

Here's an old path we could take,
or here's another--
which one d'you like?
When I was a girl, a lot of times, I'd be a bird,
but there are sea-songs, too--
and I try, at night, to work out the ones
floating like lilies in my dreams, half submerged, half heard.

Take my hand, sweetheart,
and if anybody's watching us,
then let them be jealous.
There is a shore road, 
and also a way through the fields where the warblers are.
Either way,
you and me, babe, we're Heaven-bound--

though I couldn't say by what direction,
or tell you, honey, how far.
_____

for KJ.

image: Alicja Bachleda from the movie "Ondine".  

local girls

Don't be an idiot.
The whole of the ocean
is a fool's desire.
It teems with men and ships
hauling who knows what
to who knows where,
and, really,
who the hell cares?

Dreams are better drawn
from the little
local
bit of wet
at the tips of her fingers.

Once, a lady of advanced years
told me, dear,
every fox goes gray;
every beautiful face 
must give its grace
away or lose it for nothing.

Look out at the water, honey.
Let's leave it,
it will still be there
should we care to come back.
For now, I only desire
the little
local
bit of wet
at the tip of your tongue--

a tide that rides from me 
to you
to me again
sweeter than anything 
any selkie
could pursue.
_____

for Susie's "Bits Of Inspiration" at Real Toads. I pursued a water theme.

photo: from a 1957 issue of Playboy, or so the source says. 

 

Plath at 350

At the top of some stairs,
at The Bus Stop of the Eternal Downpour,
I met a man.

He wore a beret,
and an old-fashioned high collar,
giving the impression that he was forever being jauntily hanged.

He told me that he had recently broken up with a life sized doll named D'zeray,
and then taken up with a cello.
Either one of them--but not both--
could fit easily beneath his bed.

He went on to explain that although the doll had been a fine listener,
she was a disaster as a dancer,
and Farran (for this was my new acquaintance's name)
could not live without music in his world.

I whistled a little of the Trumpet Voluntary,
and swayed on my boot heels like a Sikh snake charmer.
Nearby, a depressive fought a losing battle with a watercolor,
but I could tell my cello man had better possibilities.

"Where did you get your...companion?" I asked.
"I slipped her out from under Sylvia Plath's tear-stained cheek," he told me,
but the temperature in her final dream had dried out the wood,
and ruined its tone.

"I'm taking her down to the boat docks
to use as an oar,
and I will tell her the fable of the Selkie and the fisherman."

"Oh my sweet and idiotic owl," I said softly,
"she can never be the listener your old love was."
Then I slipped my arm through his and asked if he wanted to get out of there.

He did.
I feel certain that he never saw my tail switch beneath my raincoat,
but when he saw my cottage on the sand 
and plenitude of tuna fish cans,

he only told me how much he liked the soothing green of my bedding,
and, kissing the bell on the collar around my neck,
assured me that I was all the music anyone could ever need.
_________

for The Mag #203

image" "Musician In The Rain" by Robert Doisneau

poem girl

packed deep in the roots of my teeth,
i keep everything i long to say, but don't.
i am as pleasant and sweet as a drink of anti-freeze--
kiss me, i hold thirty-two volcanoes. 

it turned cold, but you had your scarf,
your soft gloves,
your navy pea coat;
what did you need me for?
nothing.

longing cracks my bones open
as if they had been dropped from height by birds.
impossibility is a handy rock--
bombs away, 
the fall,
the split,
the blood-heart in the white shell.
i am a love letter written in angel spit,
misdelivered into hell.

i thought of you last night
and moaned.
there is no other mercy like your hair, your voice, your body;
i am krakatoa
i am a siberian fireball--
my ribs lay flattened for miles,
they heard my stupid whimpering on the streets of paris,
and the skies over new york stayed dusky and dark at noon.

i'm just a girl,
in love with you.
you have a husband you keep close like a voodoo doll--
you hang your heart on him like a blue star.
here is my smile,
empty and harmless.
here are my words, crimson-black on the page,
and when they hit the sea, the sea boils
and every beautiful creature
every mermaid
every siren
every humble shell
is turned to ashes with the expression of my useless flow of sorrow.
_______

image from weheartit.com

Hooked

Dear

pretty

fishy--

I'm

smitten

to

the

gills.
____

8 words for Mama Zen

Beach Bonnie

Beach Bonnie
makes her bed
from an old fine sail;
catches incautious starfish
by the tail--
those special ones
with silver tongues,
who sing about Beach Bonnie--
fairest of all.

A Liar's Prophecy

"You will never be anything,"
my mother told me often,
"Least of all beautiful.
Least of all loved."

She also told me that I never listen,
though I do.
I listen, but I keep my own counsel as to what I think about the things I hear.

Years later, I slipped into sleep
like bare feet off a smooth shoreside stone,
and slowly sank.
My hair was long, so long,
that it trailed in the currents
around the coasts of South America,
and I held starfish in my hands
which sang, impossibly and in languages beyond interpreting.

I stretched myself naked on the backs of orcas,
and across the arms of pink anemones,
but it wasn't until near dawn
when true beauty found me and settled itself in my humble flesh.

Still drifting, I stretched my legs out together,
long and sleek like a mermaid's tail;
I felt the rise and fall of the waters I belong to,
and those currents
those warm, containing currents
were just your arms
circling in sleep, around me.
______

for A Word With Laurie at Real Toads. We were to write something "phantasmagoric." 

Rachel

Gilled creatures,
go back.
Back to the sludge-depths,
down where the dead-roots rise.

What were you thinking you could offer me?
I wear white lace gloves
even while shucking oysters.
They must be bought live, in their shells,
so that they may whisper to their conquerors
at the fateful moment.

All right.
I'm being ridiculous,
but you didn't know me back in mushroom days.
We took our German professor
down to the cold beach.
I have his accent still, in a jewelry box, in a drawer,
a little trophy for me to keep.

Back then,
I admit it, I was toasted most of the time.
I have a lot to answer for,
but I'm not sorry for the road I took.
I had a cute top I made from hurricane flags;
when black-haired Rachel ran her fingers up under it,
I blessed her for it, as the gooseflesh rose.

My universal veil and my bullshit affectations are gone.
I'm sober these days,
no shrooms, no Schlitz.
Listen, I could give a shit less
for the dead things
and the depths.

Let me just stand here,
sailor,
mermaid,
woman of my dreams...
when I sing to you, let me do it in daylight,
facing into the wind
like a sea bird.
______

I got some of my words HERE. Flipside, do you like that picture? I knew you would!

Selkie

Has she bewitched you?
She never set out to do it.
She came up from the sea to dance upon the rocks with her sisters
--wet gleaming smooth grace against hard gray stones--
Your eyes and hopeful nature did the rest.

"She would never say where she came from"
You would die there,
So you cannot go--
While she must always return,
Dying in her own way,
Leaving the antique ring upon the table.

There is darkness,
And there is cold,
And some become beautiful there.
Play your fiddle, fool,
She will come.
She is like no other you will ever know--
More enchanted,
More dangerous,
And neither by choice.

On the day when you cannot find her--
When the stony sands mock your panic with their resolute vacancy,
Will you believe that she did not love you?
She will have loved you
Until she could bear it no more.

The weakness will be yours,
And she knows it better, and sooner, than you do.
She is a beauty who will change, and see your face change, too.
She can surface, but the depths reclaim her.
She is human, in your arms,
But she is both more and less than that in her deepest nature.
You will lose each other and suffer for it;
Only the stones, in their hard indifference,
Will endure.

_________

The song "Ruby Tuesday", from which I have quoted a line above, was written by Keith Richards.

sel·kie also sil·kie (s l k ). n. A creature or spirit in Scottish and Irish folklore that has the form of a seal but can also assume human form. 

Many thanks to my blogger friend Lydia, for inspiring me this morning with this post.

 

Nantucket Sleigh Ride

In a room where I had already been,
I used a dictionary of words I already knew,
To help me write poems backwards.

When my hair broke the scissors,
I set fire to my shoes.
The smoke spoke only Spanish and wore a red shawl--
Why I was surprised by this is a riddle for a lunatic.

In the stream, down the hill,
The rocks are black and slippery, like whales' backs.
I am dancing across them barefoot when my heart starts again like a Nantucket sleigh ride--
I laugh, a thawing bell, in the moment that I realize
How careless real love is,
And that I might fall.

______

A Nantucket sleigh ride was when New England sailors and their boat were pulled along by a harpooned whale.

This is a poem about the end of my marriage, a decade ago.

For One Shot Wednesday. Happy one year!

Kali

Kali comes to me
In shell necklace and rings--
She stands by the water
By the water, and sings
For sailors and the water
And the bones that it brings.

Come, Kali, come
To my cove near the beach--
My cove by the water
Where we'll sing each to each;
Sing to each other
And share the split peach...

Kali is gone
But the peach it was sweet--
And the bones from the water
Lay smooth at my feet;
Smooth at my feet
And sharp at my heart--
The sailors cry, Kali,
From far down the deep.

________

Did you read this morning's poem, The Lycanthrope? If you didn't, go read it. I'll know if you don't, and I'll put a big black mark by your name in my awful little book.

photo: Kate Beckinsale
____________