Hollyhocks, Sunflowers, Marigolds

 

Hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

in a field by a white barn waving

where the orange cat searches for the little voles

hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

just a stone's throw over from the spring foals

and the little stream its low banks laving

hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

in a field by a white barn waving.

______

a triolet for Lillian's image

over at Dverse Open Link. 

 

My Rat Friend

 my rat friend

lives in my garage.

i feed him

kibble, neat.

friend owl is hungry as well--

they play cat-and-mouse.

moon is high

owl on the branch waits.

neighbor has

a floodlight.

when it shuts off, rat comes out.

so far so good, bud.

in summer

a hawk eats pigeons

rat is safe.

in winter

i watch owl watch my rat friend

feasting in the dark.

___________

a shadorma for Dverse OLN.

Wild Garlic

 First thing in the spring I see the sprigs of wild garlic

and should mine seem a giant's hand that reaches down to harm it,

remember how the neighbor's legions grew to five feet tall

and how I itched to yank and pitch each one of them to Hell,

You'll then indulge me as I hover murd'rously above it

to kill it quick and understand that I shall never love it.

Unchecked, you'll find the stinking stuff takes over every garden,

so if I windmill arms to pull, I do not beg your pardon.

________

for Dverse Open Link.

Wild Garlic

 

wild garlic grows

between our teeth, those fallen stones

from the ruined church of our mouths.

wild garlic roots

are round and thin,

a lie we wear as shoes.

we waver, tall and gaudy,

our white flowers like lace,

seeding every time we prate our nonsense

no more significant than

the markings of wandering dogs.

we are legion, the first to appear in Spring,

a disease of the soil,

dying even as we conquer everything

even the air

with false plenty,

and the thoughtless vanity of pretty parasites.

______

image: The Muse Inspiring The Poet by Henri Rousseau

for dverse OLN

The Lovely Bride

She made a lovely bride.
Wearing her white dress, she looked like a sexy cloud.

Her happy groom had their days planned out ahead of them,
As numerous and alike as the whiskers on his cheeks when he smiled.

Later, no one would admit to having invited the wolf--
To having brought the wolf;
Perhaps he brought himself, from deep in the forest's secret heart.

Up the aisle he came,
Right in the middle of the ceremony.
No one had a gun,
(it wasn't that kind of wedding)
And so no one knew a way to stop him.
He helped himself to a big fat bite of organdy and lace--
As if confusing the bride
With the wedding cake--
And half-dragged, half-carried her off to his sylvan hideaway.

Well.
Pandemonium!

Maybe her perfume attracted him.
Maybe she knew him before.
Maybe she knew him still!
She had only been standing there, trying to get married,
But the woman always gets the blame, yes?

The groom wept, then shouted,
"What do they want?"

Here is what we want:
In the morning, the bride crawled out of the wolf's den,
Her dress in shreds and tatters, bloody,
With scratches all over her skin and leaves in her hair,
Stinking to high heaven of wolf.
"Wow!" said the bride.

In a few years,
She will divorce the wolf
When he forgets her birthday again--
When he forgets to bathe or use cutlery--
When he drags home another big dead-ass elk, expecting her to turn it into pot roast.

But it will be all right.
There will be no kids.
In time, she will find somebody different--
More human, maybe.
More verbal.
Maybe even female!
Who really knows? But when that day comes,
One thing won't have changed at all--

She will make a lovely bride.
_______

for dverse open link #36

The Finches

If the finches should call you
On the land line
In the hall
Of the old house,

There is no need to set aside your book
Or to trouble yourself at all--
It is only a draft
Through a window
Where an empty vase still sits.

It is only the gone summer,
Only the things that could never be;
It is only these.
It is only me.

And if there is a nest
On the pole,
Above the transformer,
Where the snow clouds skulk and glower...

There is an egg,
And in the egg, a memory that does not change,
But is, instead,
As static as a china dish.
Likewise, there is a lace-edged wound,

And within the wound,
An hour,
And within that hour,
The high-grown fields,
Your bare arms with their gooseflesh skin,

And one secreted, hoarded darling--
Palmed in my hand to kiss.

If the finches should call you
Before rot
And ice
Destroy...

It is only me, up on the wire,
Sealed and
Cauterized
With my voice.

I remain as mad
As mad has always been--
A balance pole
Of oriole
And owl bones

Long and thin.
Find the dazed bird on your porch boards,
Dashed against your doorway, dying;
Uncurl my fingers,
Lean close, and laugh,

And love me
One last time.
_______

Picture by Eugenio Recuenco, sent to me by Kerry O'Connor, my fellow Toad. It was originally part of her challenge to me to write to the pictures of Recuenco, which I did, but not to this one, until now.

This is for dverse OLN, because my bestie, Hedgewitch, is hosting. 

Cindy & The Unfortunate Birthday Cake

Cindy did for the birthday cake.
Damn the thing anyway,
As if enough Bisquick and bullshit could 
Make her husband keep his dipstick where it belongs,
And keep her kids from going wrong,
And make everything as orderly as the numbered pages of a Redbook magazine,
Lined up flush and sequential,
Not loonbat crazy in the middle of the afternoon.

Cindy did for the birthday cake
With a ginormous honking big knife
Longer than a mother in law's memory,
And someone's got to answer for that,
For the gashes in the easy to clean table cloth
And the fucked up frosting
And anything and everything that Cindy faked since forever,
Like interest and orgasms and staying sober until five.

Cindy did for the birthday cake,
And it felt hella good.
____

for the dverse Tuesday night cattle call

my 300th Word Garden post of 2011 

Parlor Game

Open this room.
Open this jar.
Come sit cozy
Where the dead things are.

Hush.
Not so loud.
Not so pretty.
Not so proud.

Hideous germ
Infects and wastes.
Shape by the berm
Seeks embrace.

Open this room.
Open this jar.
Let's see how strong
You really are.

_____

for dverse OLN

La Loba Habla

Let me in.
Let me in now, in the morning,
While the early autumn chill has frosted your blabbermouthed busybody neighbors' lips shut.

All right,
Go ahead, play it coy.
Spread out on the musty cushions of the old glider.
Wear last night's gauzy white dress that loves your skin as if it were whipped cream on coffee.
Throw your man's red-checked hunting jacket around your shoulders.
Pretend to read that sin-black bible of yours,
All the while with your finger to your lips
Like a saloon whore.

I can wait.
I'm a glacier, stopped at the picket fence.
I'm a pair of eyes and a set of teeth.
You know I'm here.

Let me in.
Let me in now, before virtuousness sours you.
The dance goes like this:
You set down that bible,
I raise my eyes,
You raise the rifle.
In that moment, sweet honey, I know one thing:
One of us
Is never gonna be the same.

_____

for dverse OLN 11

Meow

The bitches at the grocery store discuss me--
They say, "get a load of her broad nose,
And short hair;
She's fucked up
Beyond repair,"
Like they all just won pageants or something.

I smell like the trees I live in--
The ones I drag their boyfriends up into
After I close my jaws
Over their faces
In a fatal kiss.
Just a little revenge,
A touch of mischief,
But I do think, as I snap their squeezes' greasy bones,
Discuss this,
Bitches.

Then again, a gal could turn herself hard that way.
She could start to hate
Store clerks,
Hyenas,
And the like,
If she dwelt on them and the vile sounds
They send out into the world.
There are better things to think about
For such as me--
For such a pussycat,
Such a remarkable,
Sweet honey-eyed
Killer of a girl.

_____ 

linked to dverse OLN #10

Beep Beep

Caroline loved Megan.
Loved her olive skin.
Loved her in her suede boots, coming in the door.
Loved her, next to her, sleeping.

Caroline loved Megan, but,
Megan's crafts turned cruel.
Who knew that the big wind would come?
Who knew that knitting needles, left out,
Could become arrows?

In the emergency room,
A young intern who had been on duty since Tuesday
Laughed, because
Caroline looked like Wile E. Coyote
With a knitting needle through her head;
But Wile E. Coyote
Never looked so terribly confused, and lost.

After the accident,
Caroline changed.
She began to dream of stars, like children make,
With points.
She began to see the world like an old tv
With horizontal lines rising, rising, rising,
And she sees the flag, with its stripes
Promptly at 2 a.m.
Every night.

Caroline asks Megan,
"Take me to the salt flats."
There,
Megan holds her hand,
With silent tears running down her dusky cheeks.

Once, Caroline loved Megan,
But now she can't remember.
A little blank,
She looks around.
Another storm could come, you know.

Caroline smiles her weird vacant smile,
The one that Megan can hardly bear.
"Beep beep," she says,
Looking at the sky.
As Megan turns away, she says it again,
Like a broken blonde doll.
"Beep beep,"
But she can never catch up with herself,
Or the teasing after-image of contentment
In the foggy broken clock of her mind.

______


for OLN 8

Candi McIntosh And The Tiger

Candi McIntosh is swallowed by a tiger.
Now, she can compose herself and think what to do
Without his snow and caramel face turning her to goo.

He is the same tiger
Who used to get in trouble for catching the birds off Mrs. Densmore's feeder,
Taking Tweety,
The feeder,
The branch it hung from,
And some of the siding off the house in the effort.


But his parents had hauled their childlessness behind them
For too long,
Like a house trailer filled with bowling balls.
How could they scold him?
In the end,
He received chocolates, not chastisement, for his crimes.

In high school,
He excelled at debate--
A remarkable thing for one who could not speak!
And yet,
Who would argue with him?
Who could mistake his meaning
When faced with his warm breath,
His rough tongue,
Or his basso profundo contented sighs?

Candi McIntosh never had a chance.
From the moment she saw him,
She wished to be the stars
So that when he moved silently across the sky at night,
His great soft paws
With all of their implied and restrained power,
Would touch her at every step.

Still,
The wedding was marred
By his insistence upon marking all the pews
And by his repeated lunging at the minister,
So that the vows were delayed
And disrupted
Again and again.

Now, after seven years together,
And so may beefsteaks and band-aids between them,
He has swallowed her.
Curled inside of him,
If her phone is ringing somewhere, she can't get to it;
If someone has rung the doorbell,
She can't come.
In the darkness of him,
She is eclipsed.

It is always true, however,
That a woman has her ways.
No matter what he may believe,
Or how sure and complacent he may have become,
She can stroke him
Or stagger him
As she chooses,
From within,
And there is nothing he can do about it now
But to tread softly
And--a little confused--
Sit center ring
To await his Mistress's command.


_____


for dverse OLN 7

Shoot The Ballerina

When the revolution came,
Katya was in mid-air.
Her partner was so taken with the sight of the soldiers in their uniforms,
That he forgot himself
Like Jesus' luggage,
And forgot Katya as well.

She came down from the spinning embrace of God,
Not into her partner's strong hands,
But behind the blankness of his back
As he smiled at a cavalryman.
She fell like a sputnik
To the hard stage
And the monkey within
Howled Tchaikovsky flawlessly.

This is where they shoot me,
She thought, amazed.
My leg is broken
Just like the performance,
Just like the dynasty,
Or the regime.
This is where they shoot me
Quick and clean behind one pitch-perfect ear.

But the cavalryman lay dead
At the hands of the second violinist,
Who,
In fierce regret,
Shook him like a puppet to revive him
That he might rejoin the violence and stupidity of the moment.

Like an equine saint, came the cavalryman's horse.
She grabbed a stirrup,
And he plunged magnificently over each row of seats
As if they were river stones or fence rails.
Again,
Katya was launched Heavenward;
Her lips at his velvet ear whispered,
Tonight, we both escape the glue factory!

This time, when she came down,
It was on his back
On the cobbled street outside,
And they went like hell,
Like anything,
Like that,
Til the moon disappeared, a fresh-healed bone.
_______

for dverse OLN #6