Sylvia

 

The doorbell rang.

My pet rooster

George Washington Crower 

objected loudly.

Who's that knocking at my door

who's that knocking at my door

who's that knocking at my door

cried the ...  well, me at any rate. 

There, standing on tippy toes

trying to get a grip 

to climb in through the transom

was some dude.

I said hey there aardvark face,

monkey fingers 

jumpin' Jack trash Houdini,

what gives?

He say, I am here on behalf

of the half serious jolly jokers club

and we are having 

a half off sale. 

With that he tore off one shoe,

a trouser leg,

and one sleeve,

then bowed to the ring camera.

Straightening, he recited,

Who is Sylivia, what is she

that all our swains commend her?

I said that's cute, she is me, and all your swains can't mend her.

I am an antique,

an ancient wreck

a Hesperus on the rocks of bad poetry

but he climbed through the milk chute

quite dashing in his half-suit.

and won my favor with his drollery. 

______

for Word Garden Word List--Enter the Aardvark.

Music: Lazy Larry Barnacle Bill the Sailor

Stone House

 

There is a stone house

with a soft bed

on a metal frame.

The sheets are sky-stolen blue,

the blanket tartan.

I have the feeling I was

a child there, or died

or held someone with love

or was held.

The air is fragrant

like a meal just finished

or being prepared.

I feel sure that you are there

in the next room

or arriving or remembered.

I wrote this poem

yesterday or some other day

or will write it soon.

Now the door is open.

Come in.

_______

Music: Cat Stevens Into White

Lazy Fireblossom !

 

No Word Garden Word List this week, but it will be back next week! No good reason, I'm just feeling pleasantly lazy this week. :-)

Glass Acrobat

I stood on my head for years

and grew glass skin

to keep myself contained. 

I stood on the sky

and wept on the ground.

All my birds died of thirst.

 I let go and fell up,

became an ocean in all directions

carrying a second sky on my back.

"It's dangerous!" someone screamed

from the shore, but I could hardly hear them 

over the wild rush, and shattering roar.

______

for Sunday Muse #203.

If God Had Meant Us To See The Sky, He'd Have Given Us Eyes On Stalks

Imagine my surprise, my perplexity,

groping around the living room while seeing the bedroom before me. 

Wherever I leave my glasses, I see what they see. They have abducted my vision.

Beware, junior. 

I can actually have eyes in the back of my head now.

Never mind the way I blunder into things.

Hello? Hi dear.

Oh, you say i forgot my glasses on your secretary's desk? 

Silly me! 

(That man-stealing harlot.)

Enjoy your meatloaf.

I made it by feel and it may have some unusual ingredients. 

Two forks? Pick one.

I always use the dog's dish as a salad bowl, don't I? 

Well, it makes a nice change anyway.

Ah! Thank you for bringing home my eyeglasses.

Now I can read your report card, junior.

And sign these divorce papers, dear.

Just give the meatloaf to Rover.

_________

for Sunday Muse #194.

Problem Solver Hat

Let me put on my Problem Solver Hat;
you, the Leotard of Cosmic Awareness.
At the Millinery of Magnified Presence
I purchase the Fez of Authentic Living,
the Tam O' Shanter of Burnished Truth,
and the Toque of Conscious Benevolence.

At the Holy Haberdashery,
you shed the Muumuu of Self-Doubt
and don the Necktie of Numberless Eternity.
To this you add the Cummerbund of Creative Existence,
the Skorts of Peaceful Intention,
and the Jeggings of American Luminescence.

Exhausted, we tumble to the Divan of Divine Passion
but find ourselves encased in cocoons of unending cloth.
I murmur to you from under heavy layers of gauze
and you reach for me through geologic strata of material.
How can this be?
The frustration is maddening!
What to do?
Let me put on my Problem Solver Hat...
_______

for Just One Word at Toads.

Guanacos

At St. Catherine's

Master had a bowling ball in his throat.

A heavy fog drifted around our desks,

in our hair,

everywhere.

Ship's horns blew.

Some drowned.

I still can't identify the hypotenuse of a right triangle

or the bodies of the girls who turned to pussy-willows

during the long afternoons.

At night at St. Catherine's

I was in love with a girl who was not in love with me.

She spent her evenings stitching the windows closed,

while I fell in and out of clouds

like a blackbird in a storm in a book in my head.

St. Catherine's became a sea port,

then an art gallery,

then a candle wax manufactory.

It groaned under heavy currents,

the bricks ran in the rain,

then it caught fire and drifted into the harbor.

After St. Catherine's,

the girl who was not in love with me died

when her skirts became sails and sank 

somewhere off South America.

The guanacos  came down to eat her jewelry from her ears and fingers.

Then it rained but never touched the ground.

St Catherine's girls' choir

saved itself under my skin.

In the silent hours when my new love turns like stirred batter in my arms,

I can hear Handel.

Then I am alone except for the guanacos with their sorrowful eyes

who graze on the lichen in my palm, around my heart, and in this poem.

__________________________

Process note, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Some guanacos live in the Atacama Desert, where in some areas it has not rained for over 50 years. A mountainous coastline running parallel to the desert enables them to survive in what are called "fog oases" or lomas. Where the cool water touches the hotter land, the air above the desert is cooled, creating a fog and thus, water vapor. Winds carry the fog across the desert, where cacti catch the water droplets and lichens that cling to the cacti soak it in like a sponge. Guanacos then eat the cacti flowers and the lichens.

And: 
St. Catherine's Taffy is a candy made by girls in Quebec to honour St. Catherine, the patron saint of unmarried women on her feast day, November 25.^[1] St. Catherine's day is sometimes known in Quebec as "taffy day," a day when marriage-age girls would make taffy for eligible boys. Marguerite Bourgeoys, a founder of the Notre-Dame de Montréal and an early teacher at Ville-Marie, the colonial settlement that would later become Montreal is credited with starting the tradition as a way of keeping the attention of her young students.

Rosary

I wear a rosary, five decades long
around my neck--all summer, all winter. 
I keep it close--you can't touch the beads without touching my skin
or occasional sidewalk seraphim.

I've got a thousand faces, wigs on wire stands
kept at the bottom of a duffel--in the closet at the back of my skull.
Choose one, kiss me, wrap a strand around your knuckle
and behold me--raving beauty, former flame, ordinary uggo. 

Water, blessed, still and calm
for angel or centurion--
bless dawn, bless noon, bless sprays of stars
and all that were and all that are.

I've got a lineage, five mothers long
around my neck--all summer, all winter. 
I'm the little girl made of snow, the bride in the vestibule gartered, veiled,
given away--then gone through a dream door, armored, mailed. 

I speak a thousand tongues, Latin and patois
tell scalding truths--in solitude, under storm and palm--
I'm the girl next door, a holy whore, a musical prodigy without instrument
or tenets, a wild child--your pass around pack, your sacrament.

Water, blessed, still and calm
for angel or centurion--
bless dawn, bless noon, bless spray of stars
and all that were and all that are.
_______

For Brendan's multiplicity prompt at Toads on Day 4.

Dustlips

Come over.
For dinner.
Here's a box and a bowl.
Something wrong with Rice Chex?

What I want,
what I'm in a fever for,
is that book.
Dja bring it?

Here I am,
ever the lady,
climbing you like a fire ladder.
Not kissing you--
I want the book.

Got it!
Go, now. 
Thanks.
Toodles.
______ 

for Flash 55 at Toads.

Graduate Studies

She kissed me, but she 
did it symbolically,
as part of her final exam with Professor Goodbar,
known far and wide 
for his success with electricity, molasses, and girls who wear glasses. 

She attached a papier-mache head to a wheel, and 
turned a crank;
never did a lump of dailies and glue
express such dumbstruck speechless desire for me.
It came around, leaned in by means of a flexible metal vetebra,
and laid one on me.

Oh the hours
we had spent
deposited across her bed like rag dolls,
discussing emotional boundaries,
primitive impulses among Thai villagers,
and deflecting each other's endearments and tender fumblings.

This is when something went wrong.
Just as my Inner Wanton was awakened
by the kiss of her oscillating manufactured surrogate,
in walked Professor Goodbar and oh,
the smile she gave him.
Oh the sugared data.

There's a limit, you know,
to what a girl can take, 
even in the name of course completion.
I realized I had been a dupe,
a foil,
a representation
of fetish and fantasy, of foolery and fuck-headedness,
trotted out like a show pony with a little engine hidden in its tossing head.

Well.

For months, 
we had learned symbology, transference, 
normal and abnormal expression, data collection and interpretation.
But when I brained the Professor with my darling's papier-mache double,
THAT was real and he fell face first into her lap
like unexpected erratum,
mumbling some other woman's name
and it felt good, yes so good, to walk out of there and become a 

guitar shredder or a softball pitcher instead.  
________

For Play it Again, Toads and Hedgewitch's Get Listed challenge.

 
 

 

A Witch's Instructional

This is what it means to be La Bruja, the witch--
(swab honey on your ears before I speak, or they will curl like dry leaves.) 
It isn't like people think,
from storybooks and bullshit they've heard.
It's like this--
a candleflame-colored Moon rising 
through dreams and trees
into night sky, and not nearly so distant as it seems.

If you are La Bruja, you must barter with every wild thing-- 
taking some of each, as they keep some of you.
Sorters appear,
you know the ones...
made of hair spray and bibles, scared of the dark,
rattling on about their birth right.
You will kill them,
whether you choose to or not; whether you feel good about it or not.
Ah well.

There will be those who come into the trees,
even into your dreams,
to avenge what you've done while you were sleeping, 
walking the stick path,
or baying at the moon.
All I can tell you is, wear a long cloak,
keep moving to the stone-feather pulse inside you,
and know the Moon saves her favor for you, not dwarves or fools. 
______

Portrait of A.

She was an actress.
She ran for office.
She married the owner of the local baseball team.

In the winter she walks her yellow dog,
wearing a watch cap and pea coat.
There are curls at the edge of the cap.
She wears glasses.

In the spring she clears the gardens,
plants seeds,
hums.

I would like to buy her a wide-brimmed hat for summer.
A journal for her notices.
A gazebo made entirely out of election signs.
A bobble-head of her favorite player.

Instead, I deliver her mail,
slipping letters carefully into the slot
with a sigh.
______

Hospital Food

It takes a certain kind of woman
to make me give up a perfectly good spot out on the ledge,
but your voice was soft,
and you were wearing those cute glasses.
The rest of your clothes were all in the laundry, and so,
I folded my wings and came back to bed,
true as a swallow.

The Spanish established missions all over the west,
and brought with them rosaries and refried beans--
all the things that they loved best.
You'll say it was the native tribes
with the best recipes for every sort of hunger, 
and that the Spanish can claim only diseases and Catholicism;
still, you kiss my silver cross
where it rests between my breasts,
and you whisper that I am the nicest nun this side of St. Anyplace.

I was blue all day until you got here, honey.
I was fidgety and cross and off my feed.
But now, here you are,
your glasses on the side table.
I love it when your knees find east and west,
your fingers curl around my ears as if they were Indian jewelry,
and you say "Eat. It's good for you."
Well yes it is, sweetheart.
Yes it is.
_______ 

for Karin's mini challenge at Toads.

The Feast of Saint Creola

We are the adherents,
the Sisters of Saint Creola,
Our Lady of the Falling Piano.

We are a strictly female enclave,
here at the edge of a continent,
at cliffside,
with the surge of the waves below us
and within us.

Today we honor our blessed Saint C.,
she of the fair face and the wise word.
Born in the year 1899, she remains beautiful
in appearance,
in utterance,
and in her endless inspiration of us, her Sisters.

"Soooo, what's chocolate?" she demands in her honey voice,
entering the room like light from a taper.
If the Pope could see us,
in our unconventional garb,
and our unconventional affections,
he would want to be one of us, I feel certain.

Blessed Saint Creola teaches us that God 
is a waitress
in a coffee shop;
an expert at creating chalk menu boards,
and at assuaging that indescribable homesickness
we all carry inside us like some melancholy luggage
we don't know how to set down.

Today there will be blends from Turkey and the Orient;
chocolate from Europe and from two old hippies
who have a store down the coast a little way.
There will be the cerulean sky
and the indigo waves.
There will be the white stucco of our convent,
and the toasted tan of the cliffs,
the high grasses of late summer,
and our warm skins.

Today we celebrate Creola,
living saint and mother hen to all of us.
We are off the grid,
off the radar,
off the chain.
Have a chocolate truffle,
have a Girl Scout cookie.
The sun is right at home in the sky, her hammock,
and the pianos have long ago flown over the cliff 
and into the sea,
like gulls.
_____

for Out of Standard at Real Toads.

Three Wishes

This day,
as I lay musing with my cheek upon the chopping block,
I may as well wish for anything.
What's to stop my REM-eyes from following
what they will while they can?
Who's to tell the old bird
that she cannot sing while circling
earthbound on one good and one broken wing?

I have three wishes, and the first wish
is for the Amish, the Amazon,
the changeling who bears the mark of my tribe.
Like me, she wrapped herself in plain disguise
before trying talons and flight feathers rare and serious.
What wish might I find fulfilled
while looking into 
her eyes
my eyes
eagle to eagle
eye to eye?

My second wish is a southerly desire,
a migration my lighter self yearns to undertake.
Could I just let go and fall, find myself in gulf-warm waters,
where what is spoken is often sweet but never simple
like the bible hidden under the bed,
filling with better psalms by proxy,
strung out and sung on the heard sighs of women instead of
ladies, promenading and proper,
privately contemplating sultry summer on the church steps 
while holding folded gloves empty and colorless as a northern winter?

My third wish is as southern as the second,
though a hickory wind has swept out the ashes of the morning
to be built back into fire all the way to the match tip strike.
Silver is a fine color for the sky in such dreams,
and whenever I spare a girlish glance at the expected blade,
and shift my unkissed cheek as the executioner sets aside my hair,
I think that surely now is the time
for dreams that can never be,
desires that laze just out of reach,
because, after all,
if my wishes are worth the quicksilver they are drawn upon,
a girl could find herself together again
with the wished-for squeeze, and why not?
If I'm to be mistress of my own madness,
let it be all that I imagined. 
Let it be soon. Let it be sweet.
_______

for Real Toads mini-challenge featuring artist Lisa Graham. The image at top, "Wishing Sisters" is hers, used with permission.

Process notes, only for the truly curious. If my poem pleased you with no explanations, then skip this!

After a month of living my life unencumbered by having to go to work, tomorrow the salt mine beckons. Hence, the images of pending execution. But while a girl sits daintily on a hard bench in Hell's waiting room, she can dream, can't she? And so my three idle wishes involve my three celebrity crushes, in ascending order.

First, Kelly McGillis (on the left above, with Jodi Foster), who is as tall as I am, and who is also a lesbian, making her doubly "one of my tribe".  She starred as an Amish woman in "Witness", and so there's the Amish and the Amazon of it. The "plain disguise" is because she says she didn't think she was attractive as a girl, and in fact was teased for being "fat". I didn't think I was attractive, either. But we grew, into nothing so predictable as swans, but rather, birds to be dealt with!

Second, Sela Ward, who is from Alabama. She's got that whole southern charm thing going on, and is just ridiculously sexy, seemingly without half trying, which I think is an art. I went into deep mourning when I ran out of Once & Again dvd's to watch, and have been reduced to watching her on CSI:NY instead. Nonetheless, her Once & Again character Lily Manning is my favorite, though I never know if I want more to be with her or just be her. Yes, I know, she's fictional, but we're talking wishes here.

Third, and most ardently daydreamed over, is singer Emmylou Harris who was born in Alabama and grew up in North Carolina and Virginia. I referenced some of her songs, "Hickory Wind" (also associated with Gram Parsons), "We'll Sweep Out The Ashes" and "Together Again." Silver is a fine color for the sky and also for Emmylou's gorgeous hair. She said she started going gray in her 20s. 

My life of freedom and happiness may soon be over, but perhaps one of my honeys will swoop in at the last minute and support me in the style that I wish to become accustomed to. What, I'm the only one here with rescue fantasies??? Send me my Dyke In Shining Armor, even though two of them are straight. Damn. But hey, my wishes, my rules! :-) 

white bird

i was in bed
when a buzzing curled inside my ears--
it may have been music i forgot to turn off, in the other room.
it may have been roadwork down in the dirt-turned, workboot street.
it may have been your name
spoken from my dreams by a female priest,
wearing denim and flannel,
on her day off, smoking on the steps of Saint T's.

i get so confused--
one rain drop and i'm growing green skin,
building arks,
playing midwife, saving the world.
then again,
there are days when i would barter the world away
just to be in your arms.

i grew you a song,
carefully,
in a coffee can on my window sill.
that spring, each white bloom
had dove's wings and flew
across all of this blue-edged snag-hearted geography we call living.
i told them to go to you.
i gave them sweet jam messages.
i leaned out my window and screamed, hurting my throat for a week,
and then i slept until winter.

i woke in bed
with a buzzing in my ears.
solitude embraced me from both sides,
whispering a bitter catechism.
they hid your name.
they silenced all music.
they said, "you are ashes, dear,
nothing more."

that was when my bird-blooms came back.
all of them, soft and lovely and innumerable,
each of them bearing your reply--
you said,
"these came from you and to you i return them."
i finally understood, and that was when i went up,
vaporizing my weird guests but sparing the birds,
scorching out poems like some kind of vengeful torch.

my immediate world reduced to ache and feathers, 
carbon and snow,
swirling black
white
black
white
black
white

magic i own
magic i birth
magic i can't stop.
blue
indigo
black

white.
______

for Kerry's black-and-white challenge at Real Toads.