Winter & Wanting

 

You wanted

To break my cold reserve

To be a flame on the frozen stream

I wanted

To protect my stillness

To be snow in the presence of May

Charming one

You remind me of me

When I was hopeful and still believed

I thank you

For the moment's respite

When you touched my sleep with honeyed light.

______

For Dverse MTB "A Lover as Second Nature" hosted by Laura B.

Music: Jai Jagdeesh In Dreams

Consultation at the Hospital

 

The doctor said,

"This is what I found

inside her."

An orange

a white horse with one hoof up

Roberta Flack 'First Take' on vinyl

A river, rushing over smooth stones

and a knitting needle

through her heart.

The family sagged to one side a little

like a tent in wind.

The father said,

"You're talking nonsense."

The mother said nothing.

The husband said,

"Are you sure you had the right patient?

   I could sue."

The best friend said,

"Of course you did." 

"Where is the orange?" 

the mother asked.

"I ate the orange."

"There was no horse,"

insisted the father.

"There was a herd."

The best friend smiled 

but was silent.

The husband looked at his watch.

The mother added,

"If there was a knitting needle

through her heart,

she must have put it there herself."

The father waved his hand

and walked away.

The husband said,

"I wonder what all this will cost?."

The best friend asked

if she could see her.

The mother leaned on her husband

and walked away 

carrying her purse

and her bag of knitting.

____________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar. "Magical Realism" 

Music: Roberta Flack No Way To Say Goodbye

Sensei At Sunset

 

And so, once again

I speak to you of the rat--

the bachelor rat--

who visits my garage.

He is a good rat,

even a fine one as rats go.

Never once has he lied to me

or tried to be anything

but what he is.

I feed him each evening

but tried to stop when the weather improved.

He came out and looked at me

as if to ask what had happened

and couldn't we overcome it?

I admire the rat.

He harbors no silent resentments.

He is who he is

all the time

and perhaps that is why he is alone.

I am alone also

and I am who I am, as the rat teaches.

I have a fine dog.

Many birds come to visit

and I feed this rat

rather than trying to kill him.

Goodnight, good sir.

I am grateful for your life

and my own.

___________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar. 

Music: Leon Russell Stranger In A Strange Land

Freezing Rain On A February Evening

inside, the pages, outside, the ice

outside, the night, here sweet delight

inside the tale, outside rages

a frozen fall of rattling white

playing out on facing stages

outside, the ice, inside, the pages.

_______

a sparrowlet

with a nod to William Blake's

Auguries of Innocence

for Dverse MTB

hosted by Laura Bloomsbury

Music: The Doors

End of the Night

 

The Silent Bird

The bird does not sing, yet you suppose your melody

swings inside her throat just waiting to burst free.

The bird does not fly, but you suppose it loves your shoulder

as if it were her Ararat, some wonder that you showed her.

Perhaps she's ill and dying, hiding everything she can.

Perhaps she curls within herself like a feathered ampersand.

Perhaps she's silent just to vex you, cruel withholding thing.

Perhaps she sings when you're not there and makes the courtyard ring.

She may have sung before you knew her, then not sung again.

Perhaps she makes of poise and pride a royal diadem.

Does she not love, or does her heart go by another name?

And if she sings, is her voice true or just legerdemain?

_________________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar--positivity through negation 

Mistral

 

In Spring the madding winds arrive

and leave the winter to its dreams

of fools such as my love and I.

In your eyes Provence does lie--

false Spring is never what it seems

when Mistral sings the lullaby. 

The ring is left to rust and die

by drowning pool or icy stream

while scudding clouds above it fly.

Your wind has temper come alive

to kill the bud or turn the cream

and howl unchecked to Italy.

So comes the Mistral, mad with spring

My love, destroying everything.

_______

for Dverse Meeting the Bar "Wild Wind."

The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean. It produces sustained winds averaging 31 miles an hour.

It is said that madness occurs particularly often in the Spring. I believe it.

Alician Red

 

There we were, all alike in white

little siren-sailors calling ourselves,

faux black hearts beat Alician red

guided still by the stuffies atop our shelves.

Chittering big-eared receiving stations

gathering gossip in the vegetable patch

to take back to our warrens to sort and parse out

which colors clash and which might match.

We lived on pellets but dreamed of rows

of fat tomatoes to pile in a pram.

We had the side-eyes of those good to eat

and batted our lashes at the young huntsman.

_________

for Bjorn at Dverse--"get to know kennings"

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List stays active through Sunday1

A Vagabond Hour

 

It was just an afternoon in a blur of afternoons

scattered in a line like a row of troll dolls.

Where is the screen porch where we played

when an hour was long and a year eternity?

Where are the mud pies we put in tins?

Where are those houses, those girls, that summer?

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned. 

On a steel rack at the foot of the basement stairs

was a parade of winter coats in plastic sheaths

crowned brightly by hat boxes across the top.

One yellow box had a silhouetted carriage on the lid

and we swooned at the idea of suitors arriving 

as we stood tip-toe on a fold-out stool, snooping.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

Best friends, families, afternoons, troll dolls

all scatter, our solid center become fragile 

bric-a-brac. Today a package came, and in it

a yellow hat box, and in the hat box, the scent

of my late aunt's house, my childhood, and an afternoon

in summer 1966, perfectly preserved and vivid.

I found a box, and in that box, a vagabond hour returned.

________

for Dverse MTB: Boxing Clever to The Bop.

One day I received a package containing a book (which I changed to a hat box in the poem). The book was inside a plastic sleeve, and when I took it out and opened it, I was instantly back in my aunt's house as a child. I think the book had been kept at some time on a shelf where someone had used the same furniture polish as my aunt used. In any event, I buried my smiling face in the pages and breathed in that long-forgotten scent.  As for the troll dolls, mudpies, screen porches and coat rack with the yellow hat box on top, that was all stuff that I remember from childhood.

Image at top found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Grateful Dead Box of Rain

The Notion Of You

 

I loved you

and that has left me

a sister of a dead order. 

I carry in asters

gone from purple to brown

to lay on the altar

but can't set them down.

Faith is a funny thing and I carry a cross

though the texts are tainted,

the deity lost.

St. Catherine of Alexandria

was nourished by milk from doves--

not by the relics and bones

of the notion of you, that I loved.

I am of the order, but not the abbess

at whose jeweled theca ghosts bow--

I carry my head like the body and bread

of the Chosen One loved by you now. 

______

for Dverse Meeting The Bar "Conceit"

Eyeglasses Like Morning Mist

1.

Eyeglasses like morning mist one wakes to

or a neighbor's house seen through falling snow.

I can't recall or summon up the moment

when they began to film, smear, obscure

and soften every object like a too-polite host.

2. 

He is a secret creature, keeping his own counsel,

his heart right there in his eyes, but his eyes useless.

"Here, boy," I say in my love-voice, as if I were a river

and he the one born in love with the blind leap.

He fears nothing, I am his safe shore, kind, constant.

3.

I was twenty, though I was sixty, in love, sitting alone

with my novel when the bus creaked up, its numbers

broken, aslant with rain. I closed my umbrella, got on,

dropped my change in the box, swayed when we moved

and saw through the window my book, blurred, forgotten.

4.

After, you know, I saw you everywhere, and never again.

A certain wave of black hair, someone's careless rhythm

crossing a parking lot, swinging a bag or a child's hand,

I mistook you everywhere, nearly kissed strangers, blinked

back sudden tears, so angry, so confused, so blind sad.

5.

Eyeglasses like morning mist when one wakes to

to find the beloved novel on the floor face up

and opened to the wrong page. Was I on pavement?

in the back yard? in bed? in grief? when the stars tilted

and I knew I had lost the heart, the luxury, to leap.

_________

for dverse Meeting The Bar, "Cadralor."