When You Love a Doomed Thing

 

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win. 

Friends say, can't you feel

the tremble, can't you see the lean?

but love is a bird that can only do as birds do

until the day it dies.

There is a fire and split inside me now

with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would.

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win.

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.

Slough O' Despond

 

Welcome to the Slough O' Despond Shopper!

Oh, the warmhearted clerk you liked won't be back--

we chained her to a stove and dumped the stove down the 

roiling 

          oilspill

                     of our ravenous bellies.

Don't be bitter, we still offer a wide selection

of watery logic and dubious ingredients.

Our highly satisfactory laundry products get everything

whiter than white like a terrified horse's eyes

when we ride him into our slaughterdreams

which are

                 members-only

                                           and fully automatic. 

Check out today's special! BOGO on genders

of which there are two but only one matters.

Recite with us our shopper's guarantee! We

pledge allegiance to our public, but only

those who happened to be born in our parking lot. 

Come on,

                 crawl in, 

                                leap in, but don't look 

at the price tags cleverly hidden in plain sight and doubled every day.

_________________

for Word Garden Word List and WGO? open link. 

"Slough O' Despond Shopper" taken from a line in Grover Lewis's poem You Know Where. 

I am in a state of utter despair today about my country and the apparently innumerable people in it who just voted in a doddering Christo-fascist dictator.

Music: Celine Dion Think Twice. It's a break-up song. It reminds me of my country.

Hornpipe

 Everything is fine until it isn't.

Stars wheel in the sky, then turn back upon themselves

as we have, deaf dancers to music with too many sharps.

Gazing at constellations,

no one sets out to disarrange them.

Most of us aren't cruel by nature, don't dark our own world,

we just forget to tend the light, like distracted keepers

who look up and lose hope,

the shore obscured,

the hour too late,

the storm already arrived where no soft word

or brave promise can stop it.

________

for Dverse "Dancing Queen"

Oreithyia

 

I've caught this bird

with a thorn under its wing

and laid it by your beauty

the same as everything

I've ever brought you.

I've wrought this bell

from soapstone green

with its tongue struck mute

the same as anything

that's ever loved you.

____

for Quadrille #137 at dverse.

Die Reise

Does it burn, dear, does it trouble you
to see these dropped stitches letting the wind in?
Walls disappear even as they shelter,
hollow as bird bones or violins
stacked each upon each like the worst regrets
of ghosts bewildered, emigrating
with dust of memory gilding frayed keepsakes
as we hold each other, advancing, disintegrating.
_________

the opening line is by Kerry O'Connor, used by permission as part of the mini-challenge at Real Toads, where she presides.

image: one of the lost suitcases of Willard Asylum

The Night Jar

For the longest time,
the tin and phosphorous stars seemed to hold pose in the sky--
the jasmine night blooms dismissed notions of mourning,
and yellow-white candles embraced their wicks
as if flame were dreams,
and their bright sleep knew the gods' blessing to continue, endless.

For a charmed while,
the moon shrugged off her chill, orange-warmed by breezed leaves--
the nightjar hid herself along a wet-black branch above us,
and though she seemed to be only rhyme and rumor
tucked between pointed wings,
she carried her children in her mouth to move them, secretly.

For just those moments, however sustained or brief they really were,
everything around us bent kindly our way--
all green things, and all feathered,
brought us our own names and the desired other's
to build ourselves, our keenest hunger, and our softest satiety from.

We were there,
for the longest time,
for that charmed while,
for just those moments,

and then?
Then we weren't,
and the way back had burned behind us
as inevitable and harshly bright as sunrise.
_______

for Mag #205