Steampunk Starling

 

Steampunk starling is noisy at dawn

at the base of the window, not the tops of the trees.

The steampunk sun and the regular one

animate her heart that is wound with keys.

Steampunk bird, lonely trifle

wheels and sits in interpretive fits

her gears all meshing with teeth all threshing

the odious this from the marvelous that.

Steampunk starling, nobody's darling

but God's if mechanical God may be

she sits in the gloaming prevented from roaming

an ornament for Master's library.

_________

for Dverse Poetics: "Passions Stamped On Lifeless Things"

Mrs. Daedalus

 

At twenty, I loved how you always had to have the wind in your hair.

You and Diogenes, honest, blunt, tactless assholes

drinking wine on the balcony,

grabbing truth out of thin air with gesticulating hands. 

I adored you and that's nothing new.

At forty-five you haven't changed,

You're still the Greek MacGyver,

but it only makes me want to vomit.

Our son is dead

I don't forgive you

and that's the stone fucking truth.

___________

for Sunday Muse #153.

Psalm For Students Out of Windows Staring

It's yours--that spot of sky obscured.
Dream aviary day and night.
It's yours, that blue by distance blurred.
It's yours--that spot of sky obscured.
Woolgather wing, woolgather bird
with astronaut for acolyte.
It's yours--that spot of sky obscured.
Dream aviary day and night.
_____

for Sunday Muse #66.

Remember Me To Julian

Remember me to Julian McNickelbaker,
the high-wire equestrian from Trash Dump, Wisconsin.
If you're ever in Trash Dump,
having landed via sea plane with a load of 

Supplies in the middle of a hundred-year flood,
make sure to look for Julian.
Check his trailer at the mobile home park.
(Ask Judy, at the rental office, which one is Julian's.)
Scout out Super Burger and Sunview Lanes,
where I once beat him at bowling 154-132.

Stand for a moment inside the post office,
and check the photograph I gave you against those on the wall. 
And, of course, go out to the horse boarder,
and look there--look around--look up!
If you brought an apple, toss it as high as you can.

Julian McNickelbaker was the foremost high-wire equestrian
in the southern Wisconsin division for seven years running.
You should have seen the "wires" we used,
which were actually a weave of tungsten, New England hemp, and local sod.
You could have walked an African elephant out there,
with bowling balls in a bag on his back. 

I said--while balancing on one foot, 50 feet in the air, on horseback,
in front of a crowd of almost two thousand--
"I love you, Julian McNickelbaker," and I did, at that moment.
But later, he was angry, disappointed, 
and I wanted a drink rather badly but was 10 years sober,
and too proud to have to face anybody after.

I left that night, on a Greyhound bus,headed to Racine.
I didn't see a horse again for days, just cows,
and I stayed right on the ground like skittish schoolgirl. 
For years after, I suffered from vertigo and impetigo,
slept with no one and read about ten thousand trash novels.
But Racine boasts many splendors.

Tiring, at last, of Petrifying Springs Park,
I made my way to Wind Point Lighthouse.
It has a light bulb inside a Fresnel lens, placed there by angels
or the Parks Department or some other soul weary of shadows.
The keeper, who does not operate the light (it's automated),
and is there mostly to foil graffiti artists,

Approached me and confiscated my can of spray paint.
She could see that I was having a "moment."
"Do you want to go bowling?" she asked me. 
Gosh, it had been a long time.
"Yes. I'd like that," I said. I stopped staring at my shoes then,
tilted my head back and gawped, 
all the way up the spiral stairs to the top of the light.
_________

 

Paper Wings

Here are candy hearts,
paper wings,
sailing charts, and a thousand things

I made for you
in hopes they'd do--
oh can't you hear

how my paper bird sings?
______ 

For Karin Gustafson's "Flight of Write" at Real Toads. The artwork is hers. 

cerulean

The Moon is 238,900 miles away
in a sky
so immense
that it may as well be asleep inside itself;
and you,
me,
we are less than motes--
less than the least detail
of a dream
spread out from cell to cosmos
like reflected sunlight
caught in an iris
at night on a small patch of grass.

Do you miss me?
How long will I live?
What is the funniest joke
anyone has ever heard?

The Moon is
238,900 miles away, but seems as if
it would fit inside a tea cup
and that is because
we taste its light in dreams--
we hear its gravity in the lakes of our bodies
as the next moment arrives and there it is---
what?
The Moon, pale as certainty
in the lightening morning sky.
_____

for "synethesia" at real toads.