Sharing an Orange

 

I will share my orange with you,

passing the sharp sweet sections

across the table, and in so doing

pass the branches, the roots,

the sunny days and the rain,

the small leaves and blossoms, 

the whole tree and sky.

I sit across from you smiling,

a child, a woman, and old crone,

eating an orange, existing

as the breeze does, in fluidity.

This orange is gone, but the world

is full of other oranges. One day

we will be gone too, from each other,

from ourselves, from this life,

but time is full of other bodies,

other names, other days. We will

recognize each other. We will pause,

and share an orange again.

_________

Black Calla Lilies On My Grave

 

When my home was made in the wind

in owl-silence, as patient as the planets,

black calla lilies grew upon my grave

where Hera's spilled drops transformed.

I had a million sisters, the scattered stars,

a sibling mobile telling night-stories

as I slept on the silver surface of a stream.

My mother was the moon; my father flame.

Black calla lilies grow upon my grave,

where I was born into flesh, a sentient stone.

I wandered off, unattended or so it seemed,

and made my home in sand and sorrow.

Like a branch in the rain, my body grows

heavy, a stiff cocoon my winding sheet.

Below me, the black calla lilies watch

as if I were now the sister-star singing.

Where is the wind where I made my home?

Where the owl-silence and the patient planets?

By day my father whittles, by night my mother shines,

whispering, " 'Calla' means 'beauty' dear child--

Come home to the lilies, to the wind, and to us."

________

for What's Going On? --"say it with flowers"

Music: Ane Brun All My Tears

Three Views of a Singularity

 

There were

     a fox 

     in the wildflowers,

a coyote

     in the weeds,

and me

     lying in the lilies, waiting.

The fox offered

     certain pieties

that the red-necked chicken

     spoke tacitly against.

The coyote carried

     a lucky amulet

that the rabbit might be missing

     could she rise from his belly.

There was

      a soup

     strained from April,

a blues

     blown from 

     scents of oranges

and me

     lying in the lilies

     waiting.

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Yusef Komunyakka 

Music: Anouar Brahem The Astounding Eyes of Rita

Promenade In Green & Gray

 

Spring is the season of madness,

as fine and also bitter as any high always is in the end.

Every doomed thing that grows boasts in beauty,

and who wouldn't finger the new green blades?

who wouldn't close their eyes in the warm stranger sun and sigh?

Every heart is a blind radio, and what good is the word or song

without someone to hear it, turn toward it,

and seem to know the meaning?

Summer is a fever we invite, because we long to be feverish.

What fool thinks a bonfire will burn a hundred years? 

Look, legions of fools consumed by the thing that feeds them,

vanishing because we long to vanish, and then crying, lost, surprised.

In autumn, I have felt myself fall in a million pieces, until I stood

naked as any idiot tree. I was beautiful in a million ways,

pick me up, press me in pages, even just one leaf between leaves,

but I end up with all the others, up against some fence, silent, far from home. 

Winter is the season of stillness, and those who have stored up sorrows

find they do not lack for much. Snowy ground makes others much clearer--

where they've come from, where they're headed. There's no need anymore

to build with strips and shreds, we become our own nest and wait,

astonished and patient, a quiet station at rest in the moonlight. 

_______________

for Desperate Poets "Desperately Different". 

Title adapted from the song Green Rocky Road

Music: The Motels Only The Lonely

The Mandolin, the Bouzouki, and the Oud

 

As we mount the scaffold

(and when

have we not been climbing?

when?)

let there be 

the marvelous kiss of a lively mandolin.

the wry, sensual bouzouki

or

at least, 

the mournful deep pool of the oud.

Let the hangman arrive

on a plumed black Arabian,

the doula with her arms around his belly.

(and when

have they not been so entwined?

when?)

Let her feed him Greek Easter bread from her fingers

with blackberry jam

and churned butter.

There is no word for him 

or us

to say.

Allow him these joys before his task.

Let there be wags

irreverent, wearing bright smocks.

(and when

have they not appeared costumed this way?

when?)

let them tell jokes and ribald stories

so that we might forget our aching knees and hearts.

Let them tilt back their heads 

lifting geysers of Athiri wine up to God

alone in His white pagoda.

Let the blind boy in his dusty thawb 

hand us grapes 

as we ascend.

Let him strike the gong 

announcing our circular travels.

(and when

have we ever left these stairs, even in dreams?

when?)

Let a young woman lead a gray donkey

peacefully across the streets we leave behind.

Let the sky be almost clear and blue

but for one cloud, one bird,

and one sun unblinking.

Let the rope be strong and well tested.

Let the holy man sleep,

his book falling from his lap like a restless child.

Let our memories 

explode like confetti,

and sleep like lions.

Goodbye, the world will say

and then again, always again,

Hello.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--George Hitchcock

and The Sunday Muse #245.

Music: Zorba's Dance-Sirtaki

The Boffin

 Of course, we all fumble at first,

doofing up out of our childhood like baby turtles.

There it is, all at once, 

the Sea of Love,

and we scramble for it, driven by

instinct

movies

pop songs

and our own bodies bolting away with us.

But that's kid stuff.

At some point we think we've got it,

that we've become some sort of love boffin

smug in the sugar bowl of partnered mid-life.

Look! No hands! 

Up on the two-wheeler and thinking NASA needs us.

Oh, little turtle, little turtle rules the waves. 

Hang your heart on the sawtooth coat hook a few times

and all that changes. 

You find out you married a Matryoshka,

a total stranger.

Big and slow, you're back out there among the hatchlings,

drinking too much

doing stupid things to your hair,

fumbling again, tangled in the seaweed,

wishing you were dead.

Oh little boffin, doofing up out of Love's trash can,

now you know how much you never knew.

What was it all for?

You'll find the answer to that when your own grown child

sits crying at the kitchen table, saying mom it hurts so much.

You'll reach out, try to wick away their pain, and helplessly say,

I know,

honey,

I know.

_______

for Sunday Muse #241. 

Music: Tom Waits Sea of Love

Why I Stopped Reading Robert Frost

As I reach the bottom
of the bag
of some shit I used to like,
I realize
I'm bored,
and don't want it anymore.

It's like
when I was mad for what's-her-name
or
mad to be what's-her-name
and the tide 
was mad to go
first to
then fro.
What a waste of time.

So here
are my
seventy-five million poems
that lifted,
shifted,
expressed the flesh around these bones.
But today
I may
get up and walk right through the wall
and the me I leave behind
is just a stupid staring doll.

At the bottom
of this bag
is some shit I used to like.
Can you dig
can you see
the fish there riding on its bike?
in a lather
in a circle
with miles to go before it sleeps?
_________

for Sunday Muse # 105.

art by Samy Charnine.

Aphelion & Perihelion --- A Child's Anthem

I was a wall-walking ballerina 
dancing in an incinerator,
arms out, bending each way,
light as ash but not consumed.

Now I'm heavy as an old oak clock,
creaky as a forgotten stair,
yet somehow, I know the language of birds.

I'm hard to see in bright light
~always was~
but I shine continuously, weightless.
_______

for Friday Flash 55 at VerseEscape.

Photography by Christine Kapuschinsky Johnson.

Sadie Hawkins Dance

At eleven, we were hollow-stemmed, yellow-haired flowering weeds,

all taller than the boys,

chained around a crab apple branch like thaw drops.

We were departing swallows

quicker than afternoon;

smug with our lessers, cowed by our betters,

kites with cat-tails, casting for a clue.

Want to go with me?

Say no, say yes, say no, say yes!

Whatever they said, it would be years before we felt this power again,

at the high arc of a cycle of seasons,

calling the steps, knowing the music would change.

___________

day 16

for Rommy's "Fun and Games" prompt at Toads.

The Nun Clock

In the abbey,
over the arch
with the hooded fleur-de-lis at its apex,
is the Nun Clock.

The black arms,
the white tips which circle the numbers,
turn time French,
and the cat--whose favorite is quatre,
speaks the mother tongue both rough and sweet.

La chatte is at the heart of everything I care about,
and she is the darling of the abbey,
unconcerned and calm
as the Nun Clock chimes these poems--
Ma soeur, je t'aime, je t'aime toujours...
________

For Mama Zen. Words Count. 80 words on the button.

 

Old Fashioned

I'm an old-fashioned girl.
When I go down through the reeds, 
making my skirts muddy,
my high-button shoes neatly together on the grass nearby,

birds extinct for years except as specimens
flock to me, calling.
Butterflies and moths in all peculiar colors
appear once again,

and I speak to them in the lost language
of former summers.
Here, I am a girl again, with a different name
but the same soul.

I'm an old-timey girl, daydreaming beneath the willows.
This morning, I collected the hens' eggs,
and holding them in my hand, the white shells made me think
of snowdrops, and writing paper, and June clouds.

No one will ever join me here, I realize.
I am a firefly girl inside the jar of my body,
graced with an afternoon's worth of air, but floating out,
always out,

until, by bullfrog dark, I will be only a curiosity, 
like my birds, the butterflies and moths,
barely seen by a child leaning in her upstairs window not far away,
and she will wonder at what she seems to see,

a light on the water, there and then vanishing,
like her own summer days, though she doesn't know it yet.
______

May 28, 1908 Life magazine cover illustrated by Coles Phillips