My Lost Friend

 

My lost friend

is dreaming now of moon-silvered streets

and the lawns in tones of blue and green

like peacocks in repose

Is your lover, my lost friend

one of those?

My lost friend

has disguised herself in the ivy vines

twining around the garden stones

where the gray cats sleep

Is your lover, my lost friend

one of these?

My lost friend

wraps her heart in fox fur red and black

and waits in the dawn for the light to come back

across the lawns in morning mist

Is your lover, my lost friend

coming back to you like this?

Snowblind Jane

 

I have thought of the gray cat for years now,

though the gray cat thinks of me

no more than a gray cloud would,

or a window pane,

or a key chain.

I leave my life in a dish for the gray cat to find,

but the gray cat is gone

like yesterday's breath.

Who knew I could hurt like this?

If I drop the dish, it doesn't even shatter.

The gray cat's main concern is the moon

and garbage and gray cats and food.

I was sick once,

and became more beautiful.

The fever fell in love with me, poor thing.

Outside myself at last, I hover,

asking what's wrong.

"Bring me my gray cat," I whisper, crying like a child.

Other Me laughs,

says you'll never come back

and were never gray,

                           never gray,

                                      never gray,

but black, dear, black.

______

shared with Sunday Muse #243. 

image at top by Jocelin Carmes

music: Once Blue Now That I've Disappeared

On The Way Home From Finishing School

 

On her way home through a deep dark wood, after studying rhyme and meter, what do you suppose should greet her but a big burly black bear. 

"You are in my woods," said the bear, "and I don't know if I should eat you or lick you."

Hands behind her back, the girl replied, "You are a very burly bear, and I don't know if I should teach you or trick you."

The bear eyed her hidden hands and pointed out that "you could be holding a pistol or a picnic basket, a treat for us or a blunderbuss." 

The girl brought out her hands and the bear's eyes grew wide, his face funny.

Then the bear said, "Oh, honey..."

_______

A bit of fun for Thursday's Six Sentence Link-Up. The required word was "meter." A bit out of my métier, I must say. ;-)

Music: The Bare Necessities

Penance

I am a ghost looking for spirits; steam searching for smoke. 

I wear my long duster, and carry a kerosene sun.

I am a nun praying my penance; a singer struck by stroke.

I am your grave digger; you, better loved than anyone.

I wear my long duster, and carry a kerosene sun.

I am found by dire-light, turning scripture to palimpsest. 

I am never done, though my diet is the slenderest.

I am a nun paying my penance; a singer struck by stroke.

Collecting throats in my pockets, renaming them all night.

I have choked back every longing, and paled your name with white.

I am your grave digger; you,  better loved than anyone.

My all-and-none, my crossroads queen awoke,

I am a ghost looking for spirits; light transformed to smoke.

________

This is a trimeric, for Sunday Muse #184.  

Spraying For Aphids

A fondness for tomatoes is just more lies.

The leaves are ugly,

the stems weak, sagging like a tubercular outcast waiting for her next beating.

And "love apples"? 

Poets are dreamy defectives who should be drowned like cats at the earliest convenience. 

No.

I kill aphids because they are so smug.

They crawl around on their stupid stalks,

fat with sap,

experts on everything except what is that big brick thing with the patio,

what are seasons?

and what garden, what planet?

Aphids have never felt any ache and rush

at the sight of you, undressing.

They do not run into traffic like some inevitable idiot,

talking nonsense to the gorgeous grille that will kill them.

They do not bury their dogs or their children.

No aphid feels unable to contain the moment's misery,

and they don't--wise vermin--hope next time will be different.

And so, stupidly unwilling to bring myself to burn

these poems, 

these pretties, 

these pictures from a shoebox kept like guilty dope in a drawer,

I spray for aphids instead.

I watch them fall, from the noxious cloud,

never having felt or thought about anything at all.

The same heart-drop that wrecked me

at certain suitcases and closing doors overtakes me now as the aphids die.

I realize I haven't changed them,

just stopped their motion.

There will be so many mocking Beefsteaks and Early Girls to give away,

almost begging,

as if they held all my mistakes and desires in their dumb meaty red hearts.

I will clutch the arms of near strangers, piping

"Take one! Take them all!" 

A pathetic madwoman for whom "no" has become an expectation, a way of life, a savagery,

like the gardening so many of us take up.

_________

for Sunday Muse where Chrissa presides, faithful dog at her side.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary would love these steps

(I would think,

watching my black-stockinged knees 

appear in front of me 

as I climbed.)

There should be sherpas

and glory,

admirers to celebrate my sister and I.

I remember my flat palm against the stone,

warm as a bird's breast 

rough as burlap,

hard as any other thing that had always been

and would always be.

Today I can't recall 

any sunrise in particular.

Lovers' names elude me like the love itself,

and months go by as hours did then.

How clear the memory of a hat's woven straw

or the smooth handle of a red umbrella.

How faint the sounds outside my window now.

What day is it? What difference

does it make?

Nothing disturbs me with yearning or surprise.

I recall we had dolls, trolleys,

skates, books,

and a million days ahead of us.

There was a doorbell,

a screen in summer time,

and always (of course!)

someone busy, and ours, inside.

______

for The Sunday Muse.

 

untitled 55

Sound isn't what you think.
Your boot soles flat on the wooden floor
is how your feet make fools of your ears.

"Forever" is the froth
offered up by every stranger I have loved.
I turn to it like a bloom,
but fissures up my back 
is how time finds the fool in the room.
______

A 55 for Kerry.

Monsters of Me

I'm not so sure I would want to face
the monsters of me
that might have been, under different stars.

How heavy and foreign, how bizarre,
the clunky telephone and the safety glass.
What to say to the hardened, lined face on the other side?

Taken further, what about the locked ward,
what about the chilling disturb of the rolling lawn
with its markers and dates?

Then again, maybe Goddess spared enough angels
to save the other me, too.
Maybe the bars, the taverns, the prisons, the asylums,
and yes, the graveyards, had to do without me there, too.

What if, on that different Earth where the same sun seems to rise,
and where coffee brews the same, warming the hands, the body, the soul,
I should find something even harder to see?

What if there were a white-painted porch in early daylight,
a soft gray throw, and a pair of dogs at my feet on the painted boards?
What if a face as familiar as my favorite poem appeared...
what if she had lips for mine,
her body close and known?
What if I had her close at hand, there, in that other life?

What if, looking on, I didn't even know her name?
What if, having seen, I had to go back?
I wonder,

if that might be the hardest of all to bear.

_______

for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads

 
 

Third Moon

The moon,
the usual moon,
set itself in the dark of your hair.

At your shoulders,
waves took on silent motion,
but I stayed quiet, having seen that before.

A second moon
lit the dampness on your skin,
making anyone who saw you, dream you.

In strange light,
the long hair down your summer-colored back
looked like tiger stripes, and seeing, I was bitten.

I could still have lied to you, then,
could still have gotten dressed, exhaled, escaped,
slipping sly across a thorn stem.

But oh, Love, how you command the third moon,
the one behind your eyes,
that leaves me thrilled, speechless, compromised.
______

for Words Count with Mama Zen at Real Toads. At 105 words, I blew the count again, but maybe she'll forgive me since I did such a nice job with the theme of threes. :-)

Ursa

A bear is no creature to be trifled with.
She's a ferocious mother,
out there in the piney woods, making something out of nothing,
top of the food chain,
taking out a hiker or two any time she wants.

Still, with all her talents,
she's got a fat ass and smells bad.
She sticks her snout in old rotten logs going after termites,
and when she vocalizes, 
she sounds like a old city bus.

So,
spray her with a little lavender.
Have you ever seen such a nonplussed look?
You can almost see the memories floating reluctantly up 
from the deeps of her big bad bruin brain,
reminding her of a time when she was young enough to think
that she might one day be pretty
or popular
or loved.

There was a time, indeed, 
when she could go up a tree as easy as a breeze in June,
and look out over everything from a height,
thinking she was just mighty special and fine.
Goldilocks had nothing on her,
and even though she could put away all the porridge in three counties,
she was still cute,
and young,
and full of herself.

These days,
--at least right up until you spritzed her--
she wanders the forest on ankles that ache every time it rains,
and a back that feels like a creaky bridge.
She looks behind her for her cub, only to recall
that he has gone off on his own long ago,
and has grown to twice her size.
Now, he leaves her a carcass from time to time,
looking after her instead of the other way around.

Oh well, now there will be a temporarily sweet-smelling bear out there,
rooting through the town dump for treasures, 
or breaking into somebody's car for Tostitos.
Maybe she'll get a wild hare and take a loping run at some hikers
just for old time's sake;
hidden in her goofy gait will be the girl cub of so many summers ago,
running just because she could,
because it felt good,
and there was the whole wide world to head into
top speed,
with nothing out there big enough or dumb enough to stop her.
______  

Fever

In the day of the fever,
at the end of the war,
you'll take up my hand and I'll give up my place--
my customary place--
in the hall, on the floor,

to go riding with you.
Remember the days when willows leaned low
over the canal, where we girls used to go?
And oh, the things we liked to do.
But you, dear, my Only One, you already know.

In those days when the voices were sweet in my head,
the willows leaned low, as if putting babies to bed;
there were no air raids,
no rubble, cracked and sharp-edged--
just mama's little angels passed out in the hedge.

So now...what, My Pet?
Kisses to catch up on?
Rooms to let?
Do you want to fuck me slow and easy?
I'll take all I can get, I'm not so far gone
that I would say no to that.

In the fields at the far end
of the old road to town,
you can see the hulk of the Junker
that the home guard shot down.
I just like to think that it fell 
from its bedding of clouds
like a baby...My Baby...
where the willows lean down.
______

 

Mamba

See the mamba in the little garden--
all the neat rows I've planted show a green face to Heaven
and a splintered white one to the airless dark.

Droplet heartbeats couched in fur and heat
fancy themselves tiny suns, and cross my garden to the mamba.
She receives them and they set, as silent as servants.

Each night, the mamba goes home, and each night
I am so alone that my skin suffocates patch by pore
for lack of contact.

As my faculties wane and the sun boasts itself higher,
I have actually spoken to the mamba and discovered her history.
Between killings. Between intoxications.

She storied me her three sisters, each one green and fine--
the tall one, the dark one, and the one whose lover died by dreams.
I remember them now, and the skins they left behind.

How I suffer at night, when the mamba is away--
how absurd the rows seem, without the quick and the dead.
Every twenty minutes I am born again, more infected than before.

Last night, I gave the mamba a name--Apophis.
She is a black mamba, and it is not for her gray body she is so named--
it is for her mouth, so fatal and so perfect.

Tonight I will invite her into my bed, try to turn her
from her homeward ways. One strike will leave me at her mercy,
forever reduced to minutes, but I'll have asked the mamba to love me and she will,

filling me with dendrotoxin that's almost love-like,
or at least,
the version of it that I learned from childhood days in Eden.

__________

Gypsy

I was born in a taxi cab--
mama had to rush home and dust,
so the cop who came
laid me on the seat of his cruiser,
near the shotgun.

I had such a tiny ten card
that it kept getting lost,
so I kept getting off.
I had a cardboard nest behind the bus station,
where I dreamed often of the prettiest judge
in the juvenile division.

When I met you, so many years later,
I fell in love with you instantly,
with an instinct and a hope
that you might be lenient in your sentencing.
Your kimono reminded me of Her Honor, and of a black sail,
and dragons who kindly devour those
who know they will never find their way.

The London, Ontario Holiday Inn parking lot
turned out to be a fine place to make out.
Businessmen shifting briefcases from one hand to the other
and beeping their car doors open, would have a story to tell
about the two women poets they saw
Frenching in the January wind.

It was the best day of my life--
better than my wedding day, better than my divorce,
better than not being able to afford an attorney,
but being provided with one.
When you took my hand inside the mall,
and the girl at the ice cream stand liked us because we were in love,
it was like blowing up against a bank bag full of happiness.

The car I drove home that day had a sticker that said,
"Sorry I missed church, but I was busy practicing witchcraft
and becoming a lesbian". 
It died one day, next to the freeway,
having forgotten Canada, and you, and its own name.

These days, I wait for buses on the slushy crap-ass streets of Detroit,
and I don't expect to be loved, or let off,
or forgiven for my Gypsy ways.
I've heard the mermaids singing and I've heard another woman moan,
but I was born in a taxi cab--
I'm never going home.
___________

for Corey's "Person of Interest" challenge at Real Toads. I have written about a woman I knew on a lesbian poetry forum, and we met in person half way between us, in London, Ontario. It really was one of the best days of my life. Weirdly, I experienced one of the worst days of my life two years later in a different London....the one in England.

image at top found on weheartit.com

I was inspired also by Tom Waits' song "Whistling Past The Graveyard".