Shift

 

Mid-August, the weather patterns change,

but slowly,

like something forgotten in the fridge;

the holy

turning secular, then profane.

We had our own world, you and I,

a beautiful in-joke

but, behind your back as I looked at you,

a green-screen took

over and spoiled it with the whisper of a lie.

All summer, verdant leaves and cool shade

were hiding

the dying brown when the sugar stops flowing.

I'm finding

endings gorgeous, and terrible, like the love we almost made. 

_______

for Sunday Muse #230.

Music: Jennifer Warnes "Pretending To Care" (written by Todd Rundgren)

Mariana In The Morning

 Mariana in the morning

by Morning's light possessed

all afternoon she walks the cliff's edge

trying to forget.

Mariana by the window

in a yellow aster smock

She knows November brings the end

of all your foolish talk.

And the mermaids come to die

on her lonely rocky shore

they ask her for her anodyne

then ask for nothing more.

Mariana, bride of Sorrow

in Sorrow's cottage kept

She counts the coins the stars deliver

and medicates the debt.

Mariana, in her silence

braids the horses' tails

She knows November brings the ostler

with his shoes and nails.

And the mermaids come to die

on her lonely rocky shore

asking for her anodyne

then asking nothing more.

_______

Fox With A Feather

Fox with a feather

wait until dark.

Fox-brother with your clever face

calm the careless bird without a mark.

September is your gotten grace

fallen from a limb.

Remember when the keeper comes

to hide where he's just been.

Lonely is the blue light of the moon reflected so

upon the calm and silent bird roosting on the snow

without a song, with unlit eyes, its feathers pulled and dull

with sobriquet of red it gets from names your teeth bestow.

Fox with a feather

wait until dawn.

The keeper loads his gun to bless

the live ones on the lawn.

_______

for Sunday Muse #125.

Incantesimo

In a cage with bars of foxfire,

I kept an apparition who claimed

to have made, from flax and piano wire

your nom de guerre, your midnight name.

"Tell me, moonless one, " I said,

"Sunless, starless nattering ghost,

Is there gravity for the dead?

A superseding circle outermost?"

She moaned and split to sugar and salt

identical in paleness to your kiss,

and offered a platitude neatly got

from a serpent poisoned with nothingness.

I burnt a root and bled a bird,

a canary-colored silent fake

whose solitude was ringed by words

that only my love or the damned could make. 

______

for Skylover's word list.

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

In A Room-Box

In a room-box with unmade bed, you bloomed
(in time, ajar)
In a room-box with night-sign light, you bloomed
(a venom star)
On the wall, shadow of your swaying head
(crepuscular)
Your odd gift of what is shown, then vanished,
In after-image of gorgeous damage. 
_______ 

for Fussy Little Forms--cavatina.

The Other Sister

Born in a house of wind,

I leaned hard, a little animated stalk.

In a house of rain and mud,

Mother Rot stuffed endings in every word.

The Other Sister, the One Denied,

set the fields on fire

as signal and salvation.

Catching her scent on the gale,

I ran hell-for-Sunday

into the burning wild.

_____

A 55 for my BFF.

Pottery Of Ancient Cultures

In your eyes,

the pottery of ancient cultures.

From your smile,

sunspots

that leave vervet monkeys sitting, perplexed

At the breath-thinness of a peasant blouse

reclining between August stars 

and the skin of your shoulder. 

They find, in every stitch and design,

a catalog of figs, and vertigo.

They are drunk

on the ferment of your lazy accent.

At the Museum of Utilitarian Wonders,

I find

the pottery of ancient cultures.

A brochure contains the beginnings of nests

for birds who do not exist--

vervets who do not exist--

drunk under a sun hidden by clouds.

I clasp ancient ornaments onto your wrists,

your throat,

your ankle,

but your body is clouds.

You cannot accept these gifts, or anything else--

Just rain,

love,

colors,
reversed images,

that do not exist except in the singular attentions

of these useless lines.

_____

One Arm

(for Kerry)

One arm is all you need
to smooth a dress
raise a glass
light a fuse
hide a face
turn a page
tease a clit
hold a hand.

In the land of the lion,
this is known:

The empty side allows the dark that holds the roar from miles away.

One sun lights every head,
drives every thirst,
greens every leaf on every stalk
from east to west
down all the years.

In the land of the lion,
this is known:

One arm is all you need. 
________

for Marian's "One Love" prompt at Toads.

 

letter

A house
inhabited 
by blackbirds.
A window
where a woman stood
after losing her child.
A lawn
once anointed
with lemonade.
A fence 
repaired three times
by the same hands.
A porch
where a deaf dog
slept away his days. 
No car
with JUST MARRIED
and a suitcase in the back.
A letter saying
VACATE. UNSAFE.
THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED. 
______

for dverse poetics. photograph by sharon knight.

 

Love Me

Love me.
Do it by post,
semaphore,
or even by foot messenger.
(By the way,
I've moved.)

Poor drowsy tippler,
so sad for so little reason.
There are only a smattering of countries.
Don't you see, we can hardly avoid crashing into one another
at some point
if only we stop looking.

Remember when I read you
the poem about the falconer?
The widening gyre, and all of that?
You'll remember Yeats better for the way I recited it
with my tongue in your ear
and my finger lightly circling with every syllable.

One day, not soon,
I'll be giving myself a manicure with a jack knife,
having forgotten all my softer ways, when your signal will arrive.
Send love, little sparrow.
Send me your heart with a red silk ribbon tied around it.
Time is pitiless, and I need a tangible token
to prove that someone, once, looked for me

Even though I'm the way I am--
just bones and scrimshaw
in a language that whales know, and sing, and go...
to find harpoons that only hit us when we rise.
________

for Get Listed at Real Toads.

Chanson Pour Les Voyageurs

They slumped dead in their soup, those Canadian Frenchmen,
Their hearts stopped like cheap clocks
by the winter
or the wet
or the notions some men get...

Down from them came my grandfather, the one I never knew--
The thing to do, it seemed to him,
was to take a Native wife--
The one who bore him twins, then
went mad,
went dodgy, foggy,
like summer grain gone bad.

The institution did what they could for her, the rest of her life--
The alcohol did what it could to him, with no wife and two boys
dark of hair
dark of eye
until the day he died.

And so now, here I am, a seed blown down from northern winds,
An island of French Canada and New York state,
in love,
as my grandfather was,
with the midnight moon.

There are no islands where you are from, and so mine has come to you.
What I really long to do is to stripe
color across your cheeks,
your shoulders, your thighs--
to paint a hand print on your pony
and a circle around her eye.

Pretend I am prairie, though I am snow and river ice.
Lay yourself soft across me and I will gather you like a willow,
murmuring something you can't quite catch
in French,
which means:
God is a madwoman after all, but as sweet as nickel candy--
as dark as owl's eyes,
and as beautiful as your hair.
_____

For the Sunday Mini-Challenge at the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads, this time hosted by Brendan, who requests that we write about islands. The word "island" is supposed to be in the title, and it was in my working title, but I changed it when I was finished. I hope this does not disqualify me. 

Process notes: Much of the story in this poem is from my actual family history. However, the French-Canadian men with the inherited cardiac condition were on my mother's side. My father's mother divorced his father when he was five years old, in 1917, quite the scandal in those days. He really did marry a Native woman who bore him twin sons, but something happened to her after that and she was never right again. She lived out her days in an asylum. My grandfather became a heavy drinker, a gene that I inherited, though I have been able to be sober now for thirty years. My father told me that, when he went back to upstate New York for his father's funeral, everyone knew right away who he was, because the family resemblance was so strong. He also said that all the men asked after his mother--my grandmother--who was, it seems, the local beauty. She died when I was two, so unfortunately, I don't remember her. 

Voici! Mon livre.