Garden Bells

September rings its
garden bells
when the year picks up its skirts
to run.

Some mornings
it has rained,
and others, the sky is
that impossible autumn blue. 

I wish I knew
why, even in sobriety,
even in maturity,
I am September's motherless child.

Before long, perhaps,
It will no longer matter
about the ache of wet leaf mornings
and impossible autumn blue.
______

 

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 

 

 

Black & White

Few things in life
are black and white--

so they say.

There is a small world, hidden and spinning,
that I call my heart.

It has days,
nights.
Black,
white.

Oh what I wouldn't give to see your trusting smile one more time.

I have a new friend,
and she's a gem--

better behaved than you ever were, at that age--

but I can't help this rocking with my arms around myself, sometimes.
Black,
white,
and this silly mama crying

because you are gone and I don't know how to be in this world without you.
______

Red-Haired Jane

Red haired jane
smells like fresh cut grass
and the black behind the moon;

if you're on your way to red haired jane,
come soon
come soon.

Red haired jane 
knows every nested branch
and how beds and plans get disarranged;

red haired jane knows leaving light and calling jay,
then the rain.
then the rain.

 

 

From The Mouths Of Crows

From the mouths of crows came a second sun,
pinned to the sky by a minor bureaucrat filled with holy half-light.
Marie Antoinette stepped out of a suitcase and asked, where is the other one?
The first one, and why is the jug painted blue and the sky painted white?

Did I say crows? They were not crows.
They were emblems made of ash, blowing themselves into new glass.
This is the kind of mistake I've been making, wearing the wrong clothes,
and going around selling blank subscriptions, riding on an ass.

I wept because there were pear blossoms.
I wept because it rained and a splintered bench curled green stems from itself.
Crows memorized my face, for reasons of their own.

Under a second sun, a second spring,
false, crafty, from which I hid in the shadows between ivy leaves.
A city worker collected blood from the pavement. I heard a cardinal sing.
See the light in bands, refracted. See how the night, resurrected, weaves.

I wept because wandering dogs were removed by ordinance.
I wept because they had blessed my cold sleep with their simple comfort.
In the morning, the crows in their kindness gave me back my face,

then flew away
forming circles
like smoke rings.
______

 

Chanel and Shibboleth

You held a grapefruit in one hand
and a knife in the other,
the morning you called down a coffee ground curse
in my kitchen, off the bedroom, in blackberry June.

Mousers know, as crows do,
that an unmade bed in the afternoon 
is sweet green thick as an ivy vine,
a tangle of moon drawn out before the sun is even gone.

You knew, standing there with your summer robe open,
your eyes dreamy-closed,
and the grapefruit in your hand,
what you could do to me, 
and how to kitty the solstice whichever way you chose.

Now, it is always night, always summer,
and blackbirds do your bidding at every blue hour;
I can kiss someone else until my lips are bruised,
but the pot is cold, the kitchen is empty,
and the robe hangs itself for trying, but 

can't
bring you back
no matter that I promise it Chanel and shibboleth,
pretty as a calico cat.
______

Izy at Real Toads says, write about a curse, so I have. 

Fun fact: calico cats are nearly always female.

 
 

Ugly Bird

In the night garden,
there are two gates, side by side.
There are twin paths,
doubling back on themselves.
There is one sky,
in shades of indigo.

In the night garden,
there are two trees, leaning each into each.
There are hours,
and minutes within the hours.
There is an ugly bird with a beautiful song.
There are two vines entwined.
There are the distant, lonely stars.

white bird

i was in bed
when a buzzing curled inside my ears--
it may have been music i forgot to turn off, in the other room.
it may have been roadwork down in the dirt-turned, workboot street.
it may have been your name
spoken from my dreams by a female priest,
wearing denim and flannel,
on her day off, smoking on the steps of Saint T's.

i get so confused--
one rain drop and i'm growing green skin,
building arks,
playing midwife, saving the world.
then again,
there are days when i would barter the world away
just to be in your arms.

i grew you a song,
carefully,
in a coffee can on my window sill.
that spring, each white bloom
had dove's wings and flew
across all of this blue-edged snag-hearted geography we call living.
i told them to go to you.
i gave them sweet jam messages.
i leaned out my window and screamed, hurting my throat for a week,
and then i slept until winter.

i woke in bed
with a buzzing in my ears.
solitude embraced me from both sides,
whispering a bitter catechism.
they hid your name.
they silenced all music.
they said, "you are ashes, dear,
nothing more."

that was when my bird-blooms came back.
all of them, soft and lovely and innumerable,
each of them bearing your reply--
you said,
"these came from you and to you i return them."
i finally understood, and that was when i went up,
vaporizing my weird guests but sparing the birds,
scorching out poems like some kind of vengeful torch.

my immediate world reduced to ache and feathers, 
carbon and snow,
swirling black
white
black
white
black
white

magic i own
magic i birth
magic i can't stop.
blue
indigo
black

white.
______

for Kerry's black-and-white challenge at Real Toads.

 

Juniper Berries

Use juniper berries to season blackbirds.
For best results, 
serve them in the middle of the night--
wake your guests from their claustrophobic nightmares
with the ringing of small bells.
Offer relishes, garnishes,
cold water from a cistern,
and, if necessary,
warm illumination from shattered lantern glass and kerosene.

None of this will make you miss her any less.
None of this will make you forget how her long black hair felt
wrapped around your fingers or
trailing slowly across your breasts.
It is too much to ask of a juniper berry to restore sweet skin
where you are now nothing more than ropey white waste from old burns.

However, when you withdraw from the panic-scented chambers 
where your offered dish has been refused,
you may then feel free to retire.
Go moan into a backwards wind,
imagining feathers the color of her hair.
Capitulate to a nest of new misery
and an egg to enter
like time,
like regret,
like a hard beak-shell that will presently vomit you,
caroling poetry,
into Hell.
_______

your kiss

Your kiss,
one of the last ones,
after I already knew that you had lied and cheated and played with my heart,

was still something I had to have.
I hadn't wanted to confront you on my birthday
with what I had so cleverly put together about what you had done;
I wanted one more day of being stupidly happy, first.

You put everything you had into everything you did,
and when you turned that on me, it was thrilling.
I'll never deny that.

Oh, I was noble and righteous and proud.
The next night I gave you one chance to come clean--
a chance you wasted.
So I broke it off, and told the world what and who you really are.

But what of that kiss, the one I remember,
the one right before you handed me the cat card, saying,
"I thought you should have some really good pussy for your birthday!"

You won't believe me when I tell you that your kiss sat in a museum
for years, in a glass case,
a forgotten exhibit ignored even by me.

Then the zoo took it over, because it had bitten someone,
or buckled her knees, or something,
and I heard about it from a friend, or a friend of a friend,
and by then I wasn't so proud anymore.
Being alone will erode a girl's confidence, and I have been alone.

No surprise, then, that the khaki-wearing student volunteer should find me
in the very early morning,
with my naked body wrapped around your kiss,
which still fit perfectly with my heartbeat.

Stop crying, she said.
Get dressed. You can't stay here.
It was just like the morning after I broke up with you,
except with no one to admire my backbone this time,
because
I no longer have any.
_________

Caroline

Caroline's feet are black on the bottom from going barefoot.
She doesn't attend teas.
Her old handbags moulder on a shelf in the closet,
pretty and delicate and all in a row as if they were empty birds.

Caroline loves cheetahs,
and watches every nature show that she can find.
Once, she painted their characteristic black tear tracks across her face,
and was pleased how they looked with her spiky yellow-orange hair.

Caroline's married love calls,
and with every word she hears, it is like flying
loose-backed and sweet-quick across the savannah.
She pours out her heart as if a dry season were coming
and she might not get another chance.

Later, after sunset,
blue and sinking,
she goes out walking with no shoes
across the tall wild grass behind her little one bedroom house.

Caroline thinks of the cheetahs all evening
as she writes her poems by silence and lamplight.
They are so gorgeously gifted--
she envies them so much it becomes an ache,
and she wonders how they know not to spend themselves
on hoof or heartbeat
they can never catch.

By midnight,
she feels stupidly human and separate from her beloved cats
as she lies on her back near the tiny window fan,
overheated,
hungry,
and as still as a stone.
_________

for Fireblossom Friday: "Loss"
  

bird and bat

bird and bat both claimed the sky,
and each to that element kept--

except one by day and the other by night,
in nest or cave where they slept.

bird had no fur, and so, to keep warm,
began to sing and sings yet--

bat heard her song in his cellar of stone,
but bat couldn't sing, and so, wept.
_______

The Wind

The wind came up out of the north-northwest,
and knocked the living bejesus out of everything it met.

It made windows explode from their frames.
It ripped shingles off the houses and pitched them into people's cars.

Still and all,
the wind couldn't move my heart.

The one I love couldn't find the breath to speak my name,
so ask me what I exactly give a damn about.

The wind?
Please.

The wind is loud,
but it's empty.
__________

Workshop By Full Moon

your workshop is so quiet--
I smell the shavings
and the varnish.

there is your sander--
how can such a thing make things smooth?
this missing you is awful--
I feel as chafed and inconsolable as the moon.

here are your darlings you scrape and cut--
I envy them so much;
the perfectly planed cabinet door
closing at a touch.
_______

Night Sky With Ashes

The earth in summer
loves nothing as she loves the night sky;
and though that dark beauty presses skin-close,
stretched out upon the length of her for hours at a time beneath the moon,
here is the harsh truth:
she can never really have her--
not now,
and not ever.

The warm earth waits until her bones go cold,
and the moon adorns the night sky's river shore hair with years of waiting;
they manifest as ashes, silvering the black.
Such unrequited longing has a name, and its name is
Night Sky With Ashes.

The bone-earth waits,
holding white lilies for her lover and herself,
in a kind of hopeless dawn known best to those
who will never have their heart's desire--
not now, though her bloodbeat slows, dying, because of it,
and not ever.
__________

To A Kind Gravedigger

in the black garden
all my words unsay themselves
behind my lips
unbloomed.

in the black garden
things shrink backward down to the root
and the root is
rotten.

where are the beds, the borders, the paths that i planned?
where is anyone, anything,
some rare soil
that forgives?

fuck it, just bury me here and keep your ear to the ground--
that will be me beneath the blackflowers, rolling slow as grief through the pitch-dark bedrock of Despair.
_______

14 lines for Real Toads mini challenge. Top photograph by Isadora Gruye.

 

 

Merciful The Shortening Days

Merciful the shortening days
When leopard hours incline toward black,

Gather my grief in corset and stays
A Plenty against dissembling lack...

Bring tonic of time that forgetting invites,
Let gray go the cat whose claws score the wound;

Just soften my sorrow with poppy-gone nights
When merciful dreams lay me skin-close with you.
_______

for Kerry's challenge at Real Toads.

Thoughts From A Walk In The Blue Dawn

I received a letter from my own near future,
and it said
oh,
girl,
oh.

I made a poem upon a window pane,
but I drew it
slow
so
slow.

Hurry Autumn, hurry love--
I so seldom feel beautiful at all;
I've no idea what I've been thinking of,
or who that is that
calls
and 
calls.
_____

The Abbess

The Abbess said,
--each loaf has its limit--
--each fish, its own skin--

Though I am here, you there,
and the wall with its cross upon it strong between us,

Don't breath and beat sit side by side
within the same breast
wrapped in soul, keeping it?

There is God,
and there is You,

One seeming to keep me from the other
like words obscuring prayer
until I feel dizzy, and more lost than before.

I must accept what cannot be mine,

Remembering that the door without a frame
is superfluous,
mocks itself,
and leads nowhere.
__________

for Real Toads. Kerry wanted a monk's tale, but femcentric me wrote about an abbess, instead.

Keeping Tigers

My tigers become restless, locked up in the house all day.
I have a service, which comes by and feeds them,
leaving carcasses 
and the long bones of domestic cattle.

These meals are cold from the refrigerated truck,
and they do not struggle,
and so are not satisfying to my tigers.

I can feel their rage vibrating against the chambers of my heart as I work,
like a murmur,
or an embolism.

My tigers dream of high grasses,
dizzy with unending heat.
The sun teases them from the high windows,
until they are crazy with frustration.

The houses on my street are new, and identical.
Differentiation only arrives with occupancy--
the houses are like virgin lungs, and the buyers, air.

There is a woman inside the walls of the house across from me and over one.
The sun-hot bricks contain her, and her soft skin.
Whatever bounty she possesses
is closed off from me, as by a hard cupboard door.

I long to deliver myself into her life.
She sometimes comes out, Queen of the Green Lawn,
and when she does,
my tigers and I tear each other bloody for a place at the window.

Not everyone can keep tigers.
The daughter of the couple next door kept a bird,
a beautiful tropical specimen, which flitted from sill to ceiling fixture
to the trees outside, in summer.

When the bird disappeared, the girl reached her china-fine hand into the empty cage,
and slammed the metal door on herself
until she was bleeding so badly that paramedics had to be called.

"Were you trying to hurt yourself?" inquired the doctor.
"What made you do this?"
The girl replied, "Lack of music."

I know this because I transcribe the doctor's session recordings.
I know this because it was my tigers who murdered her bird.
I know that my silence is vile,
and that Beauty should never lower its guard around Appetite.

I grow restless in my cubicle, doing my work.
I dream of my across-the-street neighbor, and in these dreams
I run my fingertips down the backs of her thighs--
I kiss her hip, and turn her over
like a page of religious text, and I the ecstatic ecclesiastic.

In the evenings, I go home alone.
My tigers are waiting, ravenous and angry.
At my front door, I kiss the key,
and make the sign of the cross over the lock.

All night,
my tigers scratch to get into the room where I sleep.
The door quivers and splits, but holds, barely.

My neighbor is inside her house, mixing calm with catkins,
like batter with a finger.
I start across the street, though it is past midnight.

I wear only my black kimono.
My tigers trail after me, lit like candles with excitement at being out of doors.
I knock, haloed in the porch light.
She answers, and I stand there like a little innocent bird,
offering her my heart like an Aztec.

_______

for Real Toads OLM