Without Even the Grace to Blush

 

Humble is the sparrow

on the sill at the end of the year.

Sorry is the miller

who has no barley for the beer.

Vain are the dolls

wrapped with a bow on the box.

Red is the rooster

who rides in the jaws of the fox.

Soft is the ivy

where the robin who died lies so still.

Hard is hangman

who works in the dawn's bitter chill.

Sweet are the tulips

elegant in spring, in summer so terse.

So pale your dying love

as a corporal folded in a burse.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Sharon Olds.

A corporal is a folded linen cloth upon which the Host and chalice are placed during the celebration of Mass. The corporal is carried in a container called a burse for reasons of reverence. 

February Light

 

Two months from the lamplit darkness that was December,

wrapped in a delicious affair with books, and poetry,

when I lamented the stubborn snow's refusal, once again, to visit,

February has arrived, changing the game, wanting everything its way.

This month has been as cold and severe as the lover who leaves

in the morning, after a thousand others, transfigured behind a screen

of secrets and silence. New snow is peaceful, people say, but no one

volunteers to go out and live in it, lie down in it, die in it.

Sometimes one wakes up confused, as if animated from inside

a capsule, with no history, no map, no landmarks. What then?

Maybe clarity comes with the next breath--or, everything remains

foreign, multiplying itself obscenely, crowded to bursting with horrors.

Sun on snow has the brightness of surgical lights to a person tied

down and drugged. The sun is the optometrist's penlight aimed

at an infected eye hardly able to bear it. It is February and the new way,

a cold intensity that can't be stopped, ravenous, stronger every day.

___________________

for What's Going On? --Light.

Music: Tears For Fears Pale Shelter

I Gave You What You Asked For

 

I gave you what you asked for--

a funny book which I know now

you surely never read.

I gave you what you asked for--

someone you could maneuver into

saying, "I thee wed."

I gave you what you asked for--

someone to tie the tourniquet

every time you bled.

I gave you what you asked for--

a foil to be the fodder for

the monsters in your head.

I gave you what you asked for--

seven years of love alive and

six more stood up dead.

I gave you what you asked for--

my heart's writing you called "nice."

That's when I gave you all my scorn

and back your rotten rice.

________

for What's Going On?--"Home Made"

Music: Sara Bareilles Wicked Love

Your Angel

 In a curio shop you bought a small angel.

The first thing the two of you did was to eat each other's hearts,

Hospital or cemetery? I asked, wiping spatter off my sleeve.

We have a nest inside Danielle Steele's blastoma, you said.

Take us there. 

Little soft-spoken angel, my partner's darling

breaks playmate's noses when things don't go right. 

There is the law, and there is what is clearly sick and wrong.

The two of you swing on a blade between the two.

Brilliant Ideas, you get them by the bushelful.

Marriage, madness, ill-advised rambles, and your angel

smashing the crucifixes.

Yes, I tried setting her on fire but your tears put her out.

It is her nature to be unnatural. It is mine to try to survive.

Dawn breaks. The neighbor's rooster kills itself. The sun lists.

What about our family, you ask? I scream, I want a divorce!

You smile and it shatters the Hummels like a cheekbone.

_______________

Fireman

 

You're right, I was here.

The cats let me in, they are as untrustworthy 

as a broken elevator.

You're right, I had hidden

pieces of myself, like a nightbird's nest

right under your nose.

Sorry about the fire department.

Sorry about my dual nature, always waving my arms

for balance like a drunken signalman.

You know that they burn

saints and witches alike, and me most of all,

but thieves stole the taps

And you just sat there,

like Buddha of the first editions, plastered in poetry,

a wall unto yourself.

You're right, I meant me

but the cats advised me to say you, over and over

begging to be let in

then out

then in

just like them.

The firemen saved them--

the cats, the other tenants, the stairwells and stars.

Me? I died in the fire I had set because I was in pain, 

did not know how to end things,

and you were not there to get that blasé look on your face

and put me out. 

________________

for Sunday Muse #261. 

top image created with Bing A.I.

Laika

 

There is no one

more unkind than me.

In the evening hour I see

my sandpaper skin.

In every embrace,

a delving to the bone.

I have a peeled orange

beneath my ribs

that swells, overflowing, when it rains.

I cannot go back.

Blackberry vines have overtaken the track.

I cannot strike out.

Fog has dampened the maps. They curl and come back.

Still, I lift my head to every fresh breeze

and interesting face,

mistaking the world in a mural, the sky in a frieze. 

Every creeping weed believes

its home is just inches away.

So do I, and so I hope until each day dies done

and there is no one

more unkind than me.

_______

for The Sunday Muse #225.

Music: Lilliana de los Reyes & Max Quilici "Can't Find My Way Home"

On The Subject of Enduring Love

I have sent my driver, with the map in his head.

He'd be better off blindfold.

Better off dead.

Banter with him as events unfold.

Pretend you've not gone mephitic and old.

Forever is the thing, forever is the word.

Forever the mounted, desiccated bird.

I have sent my car with the soft leather seats.

All the ash trays nailed,

sick with sweets.

I wait for you breathless, gloved and veiled

tubercular, powdered, primped and paled.

Here love's cricket who last night chirred

lies dead in the mouth of that god-damned bird.

____________

for The Sunday Muse #165, where I am hosting.