Incarnation In Red

 

"Go to this place," I was told

or perhaps I told myself.

"You will be no one's darling,

and you will always be cold."

So I went, wrapped in damaged flesh.

My mother said, "Let's not show her to the neighbors."

In time, I showed myself,

swinging from our elm like an ape.

"Doesn't she ever stop talking?" someone asked my father,

He answered, "Not if I have anything to do with it." Bless him.

Once grown, I did all the usual things, had all the usual hopes.

Passed out with strangers. Saw spiders on the ceiling.

Angels came in dreams, and as animals.

I was helped by a man in a western shirt, and another with a Fu Manchu.

I decided, more than once, not to kill myself.

I was healed, more than once, simply by asking.

Always, I had roses wrapped in broken glass; I said a million times,

"I can do a thousand things with red, all of them fucking gorgeous."

"Why does she think she cannot be loved, why does she think she is ugly?"

Time said, "Because all the mirrors are warped, and the devil loves constancy."

"Go to this place," I was told,

or perhaps I told myself. 

I was gone so long, I stopped believing, except to be certain

that I am no one's darling, and will always be cold.

_______

Image at top is a manipulated image of Sleeping Lady Mountain, Alaska. 

Music: Lisa Gerard Sacrifice

Nyx

 

Here is the Moon, with its baton,

puppetmaster of waters and women

low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

My head is a bowl whose edges ring.

I have buried the years in flowerboxes

under every window. They bud into regrets.

Here is my marriage to a wildflower grave.

Here is the Moon, with its baton.

I want to run amok like an islander,

and may already have done, bobbing 

in my cradle like an avid nun before Nyx,

puppetmaster of waters and women.

Listen, I need a month in the countryside

to knock these Perspex-eyed monsters

out of my dreams, to lighten me and render me

a low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

Baby, I'm freezing, I can't take delivery

of myself anymore. The Sun has reversed

herself, gone down the well, and my head oh

my head is a bowl whose edges ring

with unbearable Moon-song I don't know how to stop.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Music: Kim Carnes Breakin' Away From Sanity

My Kept Crow

My kept crow
collects paper stars, ribbons, various weathers
stolen from the top-shelf box
in the locked room
where I keep what I must forget.

Here is my nun's cell in its spare austerity.
My kept crow comes to my hand,
and I see myself in his tilted eye.
His gift is vertigo dreams
where, at last, I let go of balance
and approximate flight as sleeping dogs and suicides do.

In riven night, I arise
--as my crow would understand--
and go to him, my dark swain, my confessor.
He gives me paper stars, ribbons, various weathers;
I leave him with a bauble
red, meaty, useless
to pull apart.

My kept crow
is kind in the gray-white ash of morning.
He makes no insistence that I rise,
though he sees my open eyes,
my open bleed,
and the open window that shows his free brothers
and mocks our combined, if pretty, superfluity.
________

Painter

image by Ali Falik

She is the painter with the borrowed style,
squinting as if every thing and person were the sun.
On canvas, her stars struggle.
Here is her garret, on stilts, shifting in the wind.

She is the painter with a surgeon's skill.
Her models go home with acquired malaise.
In space, she paints solar flairs as ruined starlets,
already seen, grasping, scorn in every stroke of her brush.

She is the painter with one set of supplies,
mail ordering locks from ghosts with discontinued accounts.
Galleries are cruel, declining her work before she creates it,
claiming they know as well as she does the grays of cats in the dark.
______

for Sunday Muse #70

Figure 8's On A Frozen Pond

He told me they were hiding, he and his wife and son,
when the air ripped, his eardrums ruptured and by the time he got to his feet,
his house was gone and he wasn't married anymore.

I set his broken arm, treated his gashed forehead. 
I asked him his name, but I don't think he answered.
His son is here, as are so many. Some will survive and wander off.

I was trained as a nurse in a hospital in France, with a job promise
back home in Quebec. I am multi-lingual:
I can say "You're going to die," in seven languages.

I am slight. My movements are deliberate.
I was never any help in our backyard hockey games, growing up. 
Now, I am as healthy as a chambered bullet.

I thought he was blind for a minute, but he was only in shock.
Once, I saw a lightning-struck tree next to a frozen pond where I was skating. 
I put my arms out. Ta da. I will save this guy's arm, stop his head from bleeding.

You can see the tracers. All this death, it gets into your head,
the blood forever under my bitten nails.
Things bodies were never intended to withstand come from the air,
sent by strangers, wiping heartbeats from the face of the earth.

"Would you like to see your son?" I don't add, "while there's still time."
He is ambulatory and triple-oriented. He is blown up, within himself.
We pick our way around the cots, shelves, and treatment stations.

A tv is on, powered by generator. We pass by it.
Someone is talking about the war. My patient can't hear a word.
Here is his boy. I smile at him out of old habit, gesture at a box where he can sit.

I have been here six months. These people, they shiver and cough,
hemorrhage from catastrophic wounds, ask for water, go still.
I will go back to Canada in January, empty and silent,

Healthy as a chambered round.
_______

For Karin's "A Glance At Narrative" challenge at Real Toads.


 

Grackles

"Why?" she asked,
holding a headless sparrow
that the grackles had killed.

The sun was out,
but could as easily not have been.
I could have been someplace else.
She could have never been born.

Here, it is like
stepping off of the unfurled tongue of a devil.
For hell, it's cold.
People work here, collect checks like anybody else.

Once, she was spinning.
I caught her in my arms.
It could have been someone else,
but that day, the sun was out.
That day, the sparrows were thick around the backyard feeder.

At a certain age, she started locking
her bedroom door. There I'd stand, blind in the hallway,
holding laundry warm from the dryer against my arms.
Here, they let you look, their faces a question.

His eye is on the sparrow, so they say.
I was someplace else, collecting a check like anybody would.
I came rushing through the front doors,
from a window to a hallway to an elevator, one level down.

Someone caught her in their arms.
Now she's here, oh Jesus.
Oh God oh sweet Jesus, yes that's her.
My knees buckled, the floor came up. It could as easily have been someone else.

"Give her some water," someone said.
"Is her husband on his way?" 
Oh oh oh oh no no no no.

Every day of her life has run through
every day of mine. Once, she was spinning,
dancing to some song in the living room. 
She was smiling. Her arms might have been wings.
_______

For the Real Toads mini-challenge. Write about a building. I wrote about a morgue.
 

Mourning Dove

 "This is what it sounds like, when doves cry" --Prince Rogers Nelson


The Moon, secretive and flighty,
turned her dark side and within that cradle I was born--
a dove of dust fed glue-milk and told to sing.

The Sky was not crazy but loved Crazy's eyes.
His silent daughter collected sand timers and seahorses because
all girls love horses; all girls hear ship's bells 
and can feel those same ships foundering.

The Moon kept two faces in a sea shell--
one for the Sky and the other to use as a trowel
to create The Sea of Suicide and The Sea of Insanity.

Every mother takes her child to the beach;
every keeper takes her doves to the temple with a good sharp blade
wrapped in her skirts for utility, for God, and for the fucking hell of it.

The Moon is dead now, dead before, dead always with only death to hand down,
but Mama, I breathe and I sing just to spite you
The Sky we both loved is gone and my heart is full of sea water and stones.

I put my song where the Moon was,  
as beautiful as I can make it, that it might shame you,
and bring you back just to die again
from the music of my mourning, the lightness of my empty bones.
_____

for "Where Do I Come From" at Real Toads. 

Rich In Words

I am rich in words,
but words are shadows.

Every beautiful thing I can twist out of nothing
is just the fuck-you of a joke prayer.

The lens of the eye is a bald liar--
refraction masquerading as color,
upside down on the back of the brain

like love, like sky 
the blue-black
of rotting
card sharps.
_________

Nice

I tried to be nice,
but when I opened my mouth, ghosts on fire flew out.

People started calling me the Dragon Lady,
but the dragon was its own creature,
sitting inside my bones switching its tail.

I crawled inside of myself to see, and what I saw was this:
The dragon had no arms,
no legs,
no wings,
no spines,
but it had a heart and the heart was full of broken glass.

I tried to go back, but the dragon whispered in my ear,
offering a deal.
"Take my heart, make your womb a shell."
Nine months later I gave birth to a little bad tempered sun.

Everywhere I go, people call me Mother Light,
but they are shadows, and I can't find a real soul among them.
Kiss me;
me and my dragon.
We're lonely.

I tried to be nice, but my heart was a dragon's child,
and my mouth made ghosts on fire that no one could love,
though I wanted them to, so badly,
all the more for having no body, 
no face, 
no ash or angel that I could call my own.
_______

 
 

Devils

Devils stole my face before I drew my first breath,
and so the laughter of devils became my lullaby.

Mothers were scarce, though I searched for them
sang for them; I was a mermaid with a tail of shame.

I had no face, so I stole other faces.
I never realized that they had been left by the devils, for me to find.

My faces were kissed, but the lips weren't mine.
My faces were mocked,
stabbed,
turned to nightmares;

I went to a wedding in a false face, and the wedding was mine.
The devils congratulated us.

I drowned a hundred faces in every spirit I could lay my hands on.
They grinned, vomited, and ate words the devils gave them.

I would have died, you know;
many times, I wanted to die.

In the time before my first breath,
in the time before devils,

I was loved. Someone told me that, and from then on, inside my head,
was a church made of those words.

Mothers were scarce, and so I turned to the Mother of All.
I said, I have no face. She said, use Mine.

Devils are everywhere, on top of skyscrapers,
wrapped around the wheels of city buses,

killing the best of us, killing the spirits of the brightest of us,
whispering in my ear like a flock of empty crows;

but someone told me that I was loved
in the time before my first breath; in the time before devils.

Someone told me that, before the beginning, I was loved,
and in a church made from those words, I kept living.

Here is a poem. Here is a little light from the Mother of All.
I said to her, in tears, I have no face.
She said to me, wandering child, use Mine.
__________

The Forgotten Birds

Forget birds.
All they want to do is sing, anyway.

Draw flowers out by lizard's tongue;
leave them language pooling in their blooms
with a hundred words,
a thousand subtle shades
of one feeling, a pollen of blue starvation.

Don't walk on the wet grass.
It will pack the earth, stunt the roots,
and then you will have to take the same worn path every day
until screaming seems normal,
and the sun comes out like a gaudy so-what.

Some asshole called me "sir" today.
Don't set prickly lettuce in a tourist trap coffee cup on my table
and call it anything but what it is--
weed and kitsch.
Do you know what this is, this skin-trapped life, this leggy vine going on?
And where is the gardener?
Lazy absent bastard.

I have a second-floor window box
five steps from my bed, if I still bothered to get up.
Every morning, the sun rises out of it,
facing east as it does,
a cemetery of little plastic sticks, evidence of the ghosts of myself.

Forget summer.
I wish it were winter, cold and dark as a banshee's hair in the wind.
Forget that stooge, hope,
forget her face and your garden homage to her;
forget spring's vacant creeping stupidity,
forget May.

And forget birds--
they only want to sing anyway. 
______

for Marian's music challenge at Real Toads, today featuring Jonatha Brooke.

 

 

The Second Garden

In the Second Garden, the poison vine
as thin as a thought, as long as a doubt,
the devil's darling, nocturne saturnine.

The hangman's weaver bird slips in, slips out,
creating lace of loss, brocade of dark,
as thin as a thought, as long as a doubt.

By second moon, burn the bloom, climb the bark;
a slender creeper who kills by embrace,
creating lace of loss, brocade of dark.

Dream by the lily pond, drown in the race;
the high-shown face is mere mask for the root,
a slender climber who kills by embrace.

Here find bloom for the blind, song for the mute;
black-gone fruit is the dark garden's heart.
The high-shown face is mere mask for the root.

The snake's second skin is fine seed to start
in the Second Garden, the poison vine.
Black-gone fruit is the dark garden's heart;
the devil's darling, nocturne saturnine.
______

A Terzanelle for Real Toads form challenge. Curse you, Kerry O'Connor!

monster

Verse

See the crone that comes
through the thorn-walk and the breaks,
with a ribbon for the coffin key
and a dead-scroll curled with snakes,

she will never die.
she will never die.
roll her bones through the catacombs--
she hasn't the grace to die.

Inverse

My eyes were tired, so I set them soft
in the cotton-bedded heart of a pale red box;
deep under the earth with the coldsong quick,
was nothing--and nothing--I reveled in it.

Verse

Hear the crone who lies
with a dead tongue, poison-sweet,
words chopped blind with a kitchen knife
tourniquet-wrapped and awfully neat.

her teeth in the flesh
her teeth in the flesh
slips gangrene dreams through the finest screens
making rot-milk sold as fresh.

Inverse

My soul was sick, so I intertwined
its feminine face with androgyne,
to speak itself twice in a language of thorns
to bleed--to bear--where vermilion's born.

Verse

Bury the crone who's filled
with a paste of hate in her hollow bones,
a candle kept in the bag of her gut
to wax the devil a hag-head stone.

she will never die.
she will never die.
resurrected, insane, infected,
she hasn't the grace to die.
________  

trash trees

my yard is thick with what they call
trash trees--
mulberry, ficus and others I don't know the name for.
I love them ferociously,
as a mother does.

my companion is what they call
a mill dog from the pet store--
he'd never been out of a cage before,
and space astounded him.
I love him fiercely,
as a mother does.

I used to think
that I might meet somebody--
maybe by Christmas,
or in the spring time.
I used to think that I would not always carry this weight,
me and Sisyphus
idle and laughing by the road side.

Passion is the acid that eats me alive,
but I go up so gorgeously--
poet with her trash trees and her mill dog, beloved.
I've given up on finding anybody that's free to be found,
but I have come to love sleep--
where someone, maybe God,
holds me in a moment of respite and tells me I am worth something,
as a mother does.
_________

for the Real Toads mini challenge: passion.

In Character

The actor portraying the character of my significant other walks in.
I have to kiss him,
though I'd really rather beat him to death with a shoe.

My character is mild.
Kind.
Self-effacing.
It's in the script, written by some man.

Lighting and make-up's gonna make me look fetching
despite my bad night.
I had interminable dreams of being stalked by tigers
inside a house contaminated with hostile spirits.
I blame it on the medication
given to me by the character of my quack-ass doctor.

I shovel out some really stupid dialogue.
"Have a nice day.
Thanks for the rose.
I love you."
Who wrote this shit?
Probably some hermit trash novelist from Erie,
wearing a ratty sweater with elbow patches,
head down over his keyboard like a hunchback.

I let the actor portraying the character of my significant other fuck me last time
on a different set,
because at the time I was trying to be normal;
I'm an actress, I sleep with my leading men,
even though they wobble their heads and kiss me like ticks--
I exsanguinate slowly, and look up at them, pale as a blank page.
They fill me in,
in a foreign language,
and in black and white.

Suddenly, I can't stand any of it anymore--
the fat pretentious director in his chair,
the endless re-takes,
the sheer idiocy of the story itself.
My mild,
kind,
self-effacing character breaks a prop dish against a table,
and holds the jagged edge to the throat of the devil who imagined all of this.

Someone calls 911.
Someone else calls the producer.
A rent-a-cop shows up, disturbed from his detective novel,
fumbling for his starter's pistol, mistakenly restraining the continuity editor.
At last, here is the character of my quack-ass doctor,
with his palms out,
trying to calm me.

I make the familiar motion to cut the scene,
and this crew of self-important baboons gasps like they'd never seen that simple gesture before.
I try to tell them all to fuck off,
do not pass Go,
just please, for once and for all, fuck off and leave me alone,
but I can't articulate my lines, because

I've gone off-script,
off the rails,
off my nut,
and the feeling is glorious
for as long as it lasts.
________

 

Beautiful Indigo

Summer is the stack of dishes the busboy drops--
too bright, too loud, too public;
A harsh-edged sun carves me from my nested silence,
dries me and stitches my mouth shut--
I choke on the songs I would have sung, come fall.

If I could kiss ice, I would.
If I could teach the clouds a good strong gray, I would.
If I could split November into wings, and fold them,
I would send myself into a steep dive
and kill summer with a single sudden strike.

All of this is because I miss your voice.
All of this is because you are too far to touch,
and too taken to ever be mine.
All of this is because of the skew of the stars,
and the curse of longing that has snaked between my ribs,
forming a second heart, jammed with poems,
a jar for beautiful indigo.

Summer spares me one gift, though she knows how I resent her--
She finds me on the floor, beating my brains with my fist
for the poems that refuse to come.
She gives me something--
not the thing I need, but still something--
light through blue lace,
making delicate, shifting patterns
on my untouched skin.
_________

bone

i am the daughter of a bone,
i was born starving.

i shed my skin like a laundered swamp spirit--
i'm naked now, so kiss me,
fuck me,
make me feel like i'm worth something for a minute.

hold me, i'm a sentient plastic bag blowing on a branch.
i make a lot of noise,
but it isn't music,
no more than screaming is singing.

see the sun.
it mocks me,
it spins across the sky out of reach,
teasing.

little things rise green out of the dirt,
snow around their necks;
the pretty rising dead, out to visit themselves upon the spring--
they stab their way into being.
they pretend to recognize the air, when all they know is suffocation.

i am the daughter of a bone,
willing to do anything just to feel wanted.
otherwise,
i will crack the moon and call it my covering,

ill-white,
pulling but never having,
glowing but stone dead and more bitter than any man could ever understand.
______

for real toads mini challenge, april come she will.

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.

 

 

dark bird by coal black

dark bird come on so quiet,
you dun even know she there
til she start to steal your heart and hair
to make her tarry nest.

dark bird stick her beak in your ear,
say, listen to me dear,
you ain't worth much.
then she tell another lie--
there ain't no sky.

dark bird turn your blood too thick
til you feel so sick
you can't fight. can't work up the nerve.
then one day she gone, just the way she came.
so now you know her name--
goddam dark bird.
_______

You

Is that you
with your hair full of night,
the night full of crows,
the crows gone sorrowful and silent?

Is that you
with your black-step soft,
your moon-gone face,
and the dark coming loose behind it?
_____

this poem written by Fireblossom with invaluable help from Hedgewitch.