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

Farm

 

The butter is hard--

the biscuit takes it like a punch.

Eat your crumbs, child.

The milk expands, exploding the jug.

Cold cows care for nothing,

least of all the farmer's hands blue on the udder. 

This is agri-business. There are rules.

The clerk is here to count the kernels.

 No kindness from crows hard and polished as obsidian.

The vane is a zig-zag escapee

shouting "Freedom!" from inside the wind's mouth

where white teeth worry at fogged-up windows.

Automated fakes pass out promises

in Dixie cups, hats bobbing like generator vent caps,

a rooster in every head, erupting with cold words. 

Paint the chickens black and white

and dress them in freezer bags like crunchy raincoats.

Salute the magpie, child,

for luck, your ribs bent into a horseshoe and nailed

above the big open door

where our policies are performed.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Philip K. Dick

Bimbo Season

 

Summer and I cannot really be friends--

she is tiresomely popular

with her garish daylight that extends

heedlessly into my delicious darkness.

She's the hot girl, skin-deep,

boring me to death with her obviousness

too loud, too cheap,

queen of the surfer boy entourage. 

If only there were some ceremony

that I could perform

to summon chilly winter here for me,

my old bestie returned.

I would live in a bus with bed and blankets

and a storm outside,

all the windows hung with trinkets

and--weirdly--streaming tv.

Yes, an all-comforts bare-bones hideaway

out in the distant sticks

up on four wheels on a winter's day

with soup and chocolate!

Sadly, here I am with this bimbo season summer,

my imagined paradise

far away and impossible--bummer!

White it out winter,

Come back with your cool quiet and I'll write you a killer poem 

to knock your woolly socks off. 

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Night Road

Music: Fleetwood Mac Bare Trees

Honey Locust

 

Delicate, graceful honey locust tree

jeweled in jade as if Orient-made

thorn-pierced I came and wearily

sick of sun and parched for shade.

Faithful, silent honey locust tree

binding the burns that words had done

constantly and steadily

easing the sting of a dream undone.

Summer's darling, the honey locust tree

July and August's waving dancer

when asked to say that you cared for me

dipped in the dark but gave no answer.

Yellowing honey locust tree

not so constant after all

your chill-bared arms revealed to me

the twisting thorns that pierced the fall.

_________

for desperate poets--"woe my spurs; desperate elegies." I have used the spurs above. 

Music: Larkin Poe Day Tripper

Self-Portrait

 I carry black cherries and woodsmoke

in the upturned crescent where the memory of your face is kept.

Winter pales the world and I am prayer flags flying,

sherpas hauling,

I am peaks where the air becomes dear.

Under wicker fans, G&T's sweat on the mahogany bar.

An aesthete in a sedan chair snaps his fingers and starlings rise and wheel

carrying your voice 

feathered and black

above sea level, above all heads, beyond calling back.

I carry black cherries and woodsmoke

on a glass tray draped with night stars and the music of ouds.

A vendor in a Panama hat offers me your scent

in exchange for 

the season of his choice.

I turn my back and start ascending, to freeze and fall, 

guided by your indifferent ghost and my maps milled from ice and ache.

__________

for Dverse Open Link, hosted by Sanaa Rizvi

image: the Dyatlov Pass hikers

Music: "Qalanderi" by Cheb i Sabbah. 

Dr. Morphia

A doctor was sent for the season

called counterfeit by

summer's heart.

No use in the cure, or the reason

that shadows and rings

keep apart

from the cure that coils in the foyer

of the house that love recommends

to the moon and its lilies who crave for

the stitches that wound

as they mend. 

The doctor prescribes herself autumn

and waits for ice to inscribe

a vow to be broken at midnight

by the needle

disguised as a bride

and when the old brag fades to nothing

and the peacocks their colors remove

the idiot winter with moon lilies wins her

with remedies

borrowed

and blue.

_________

for Word Garden Word List #2. 

Oreithyia

 

I've caught this bird

with a thorn under its wing

and laid it by your beauty

the same as everything

I've ever brought you.

I've wrought this bell

from soapstone green

with its tongue struck mute

the same as anything

that's ever loved you.

____

for Quadrille #137 at dverse.

Benediction

There is a bell in the tower by the lake of the swans

and a blind priest with his stick on the path.

What hymn can matter to these bickering birds?

What pew can comfort the bewildered dead?

The swans trick the dead to come into the lake

and fool the bell to fall from the rope. 

The priest is found on the bench in the dawn

his mouth filled with feathers as if they belonged.

__________

The Blemish

In the morning, the blemish appears.

Haughty mountains, snow-topped, hard as weapons.

Brave explorers dying in a violent wind.

The blemish brings with it

divorce,

financial ruin,

the sniggering of false friends who ride in your ears.

Blemishes through history:

the canker of Robespierre.

the pimple of Marie Curie.

the cold sore of Trostsky, as he folds papers into bullets,

himself the hapless one,

sitting in a chair with an antimacassar,

a revised edition with limited press run.

On the thankless mountain side, Sir Edmund Hillary

examines a blemish with gloved hands,

his visage cracked across the cheek in a broken mirror.

The sherpa sniggers, riding in his ear.

Upon return, parades,

dinners,

divorce,

disaster.

The appearance of the blemish betokens the icy  marksman,

behind you there,

delivering the avalanche

dead center, mid-beat, shattering.

_______

The Pines

I made my skin call itself snow,

and wrapped that body around my heart.

There was no sound except the groaning of the pines.

The world has died, I said.

I have died, there is no sound except the pines.

There was still the sun, 91 million miles away,

dribbling through the branches of the groaning pines. 

There was still my skin of snow.

There was still my heart, a stunned bird fallen from the pines.

Hear the song of the snow falling from the pines,

falling on itself, increasing itself

in thrall to its remote Master,

saying, we are small white suns without heat,

bright, blinding.

I made my skin call itself cold,

and wrapped myself around my heart. 

I said, idiot pines, here is peace, here is stillness.

The pines stood groaning, green day and night,

oblivious to the Master's moods, saying glory glory.

All the while, my heart stirred, brown and puny,

whispering itself out as friable desire

for light, for voice, for the pines that sway

in the unseen, unending movement

of the empty, restless sky.

_______

for Sunday Muse #145.

On The Thin Edge Of November

 On the thin edge of November

smoky air flirts with freezing and the stunned birds

seem to lean forward on the precipice of a warning cry.

Last night I dreamed of you,

my chest a redding leaf poised at a point of immobility.

A wind came up.

Windows grayed.

I rose, denying ghosts.

(Even yours.)

----------

for my BFF's Flash 55 bash.