Green House, Black Trim

 My house is lime green

with black trim

like a garden

for grave diggers.

Surrounding it on rainy afternoons

are rings of brilliant jade leaves

on shiny black trunks

swaying like boxers.

One of the spindles

has come out from the porch rail.

It holds steady, but

I don't trust it like I used to

when the noisy morning starlings

and the raucous ones in evening

sounded and numbered

the same. 

Dreams of Shiva

 

There is a thing I wanted so much--

a thing always denied.

The evil and the angelic made a pact

and placed this desire in my heart

like a ticket hidden in a boot

worn by someone desperate in a station.

I tell people this desire is over--

that I visit its grave on holy days

to leave woven weeds,

but there is no grave because it is not dead--

only paralyzed like an aster when there is no wind,

no sun, no moon, no garden.

There is someone coming up the stairs

to hurt my heart, and they are so lit with beauty,

such an ordinary marvel.

The hallway floor is wood, the light there yellow in autumn.

It is morning, but the birds are mute.

My heart stops, the visitor walks past, the world ends,

but no one notices. There is no fool like an old fool,

no desire that cannot exalt or destroy,

over and over, in silence, like Shiva in a recurring dream. 

______

Ooga Booga

 

Ooga booga, darling.

It's me, sunflower face

the fox-hearted misdirected letter of your dreams.

I live in the space between the walls.

I play Candyland with brain-injured devils

for a pot of chilly blue dawns.

I raid your fridge while you dream of dolphins.

I tip-toe around your place, judging the art,

boiling the pasta, making a mess.

That's me saying, "love me" from the heat vents.

That's my voice on the tv during your ballgame,

making you fuck with the settings.

Give in, please. I haven't got all day.

Once, I was an Egyptian queen.

Once, I was a Dutch laundress.

Now I live inside your Jiffy-Pop, getting hot, expanding suddenly.

It's me, sunflower face,

the fox-hearted misdirected letter of your dreams.

You'll wake up in love with me.

You'll wake up as a black horse wearing a feather plume.

You'll wake up to find me in bed next to you, staring.

I've put my stamp, my kiss, my spell on you.

Easy, my high stepping Friesian, shh shh...

It's all right, I'm a specter and I've got the cure

for all your missteps, I'm an oval track, fresh spring clover,

a pinch of salt, and a lot of black cat. 

______

Espantajo

 Espantajo,

I kissed you

but my lips knew no remedy

for you, standing cruciform

  in a desert wind.

Espantajo,

wrapped in

  cornhusk feathers,

no sky knows you.

Espantajo,

I could not move you

from your place in the night.

   For you,

all things rise in the west

sleep in the west

make love in the west

and die in the west.

   You married a northern woman

like un espirito muerto

   appearing in a photograph.

Espantajo,

Face away from my house now. 

I have green glass

   bottles sleeping 

in the branches all night

   to snare spirits.

Espantajo,

The same old wind

rattles you

   and you call it talking.

Silencio, damned scarecrow.

If you can't love,

can't move,

can't hold a woman,

   what good are you?

_________

For Dverse Poetics "I Have No Word In English For..." hosted by my friend Dora.

The formal word for "ghost" in Spanish is fantasma, but espantajo, while literally meaning "scarecrow," also colloquially refers to a ghost or apparition. 

Iris Indigo

 

Iris Indigo used to sing on shore and shipboard

with the voice given her by some broken, incandescent god

now and in the hour of her death, amen. 

Loved by the moneyed and shanghaied, 

tuxedoed and tommyrotters,

Iris Indigo

indiglorious

into everything,

indi gone. 

_______

for dverse quadrille monday "indigo"

Music: Melody Gardot La Llorona

Wings & Anvils

 

September was vivid as a kiss

or a hard push back then--

one scarce, one common.

The smell of a new eraser, the pungent insistence

of a just-opened jar of paste, the grind of a sharpener,

or the sound of snubbed scissors cutting through 

construction paper--I remember them all.

I loved the school library with the soft edges

of books read a thousand times, the dark wooden

window frames, the rows of tables like boats at a marina.

September also meant doctor's waiting rooms,

the assault of hospital smells and rooms full of

us guilty damaged goons, our mothers' faces

as brittle as dropped plates. We're defectives and know it.

I remember. Here is my hat being thrown ahead,

out of sight, down the hall. Here is the boy touching his face

while staring at mine, afraid he might catch the ugly.

Here are the mimics, a circus of relentless clowns.

I remember all of it, though to look at me, you'd never know. 

That child rides on my shoulders and inside my mouth--

the one that could not make herself understood.

I was educated and the lessons were both wings and anvils,

the thorn in my flesh that God gave His stunned child.

________________-

for What's Going On?--"Education."

Image: The Broken Witness by MistiStudios, redbubble. 

Music: Morrissey November Spawned A Monster

Flight of the Arctic Tern

 

Come on this polar expedition

they said.

It'll be fun.

You might meet someone

bring a gun

they said.

Where are they now, those golden friends

with their golden 

spilt ends

and their friendship that never ends

written on a napkin

in pencil?

Oh, wire cage towel mother,

how about a hug?

How about a rug to take a nap on?

All of this pretty blue ice

seems to be getting the best of me

lo these

many years on the floe. 

Oh, furious angry white bear with your

cotton-ball cubs

somebody loves you, don't they?

I could tell

as you were shredding me all to hell

that you were the white carpet type

with the correct wine

a smart address

and annual membership at the wishing well.

I'd like to be an Inuit with a movie library

here on the hard-pack.

Given six months of sunlight,

I could repair the damage from the constant calving

and get right. 

I'd go home, with my raging PTSD carefully cradled

in a nest of newspapers 

inside my luggage. 

The airline would charge me extra to carry it

and make me jump out

after calculating

altitude and windage.

Hello dear friends, I'm back

I would say

landing hard at Cuckooville Subdivision

in a spray of

wing ice and duty-free fragrances

direct from nowhere

where your children are doing well,

your husbands are golf course gods

and you,

oh you,

pretend not to notice that I'm sliced to smithereens

hanging unfashionably upside-down

like the tongue 

who once brought music

to your bell.

______

for Word Garden Word List--Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Music: Donna Lewis Agenais

Crow & Astrolabe

 

Crow, obscured by wing and leaf,

there we were

under the stars.

Who knew then that we would bond

over common language

and common loneliness. 

You came when you would, and not that often,

like others of your kind

I had known before.

I thought, if I can crack the seed your heart will open

starved as you were

starved as I was. 

Crow so black against indigo sky, I lacked

Rosetta Stone

or Tarot deck.

So, I wrote you poems upon an astrolabe

looking for heaven

Deus ex machina.

Crow with your song in ghost-ship semaphore,

you sang to me

beautifully

Yet crows are crows, and stars are reclusive.

Astrolabe and downdraft

broke both our hearts.

I have learned wariness of crows, and they the same

both poorer but safer

for such sad education.

Still, I have my astrolabe, an antique affectation

like the love I once had

for an obscure bird.

_________

Jennifer over at Poet Laundry--no doubt prodded to do so by a thousand devils--challenged me to write a poem about or including an astrolabe. This is that poem. I encourage you to go visit her there; she is a genuine peach of a poet. 

Music: Alana Davis Can't Find My Way Home

Nyx

 

Here is the Moon, with its baton,

puppetmaster of waters and women

low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

My head is a bowl whose edges ring.

I have buried the years in flowerboxes

under every window. They bud into regrets.

Here is my marriage to a wildflower grave.

Here is the Moon, with its baton.

I want to run amok like an islander,

and may already have done, bobbing 

in my cradle like an avid nun before Nyx,

puppetmaster of waters and women.

Listen, I need a month in the countryside

to knock these Perspex-eyed monsters

out of my dreams, to lighten me and render me

a low gravity dancer in the skies over Anytown.

Baby, I'm freezing, I can't take delivery

of myself anymore. The Sun has reversed

herself, gone down the well, and my head oh

my head is a bowl whose edges ring

with unbearable Moon-song I don't know how to stop.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Music: Kim Carnes Breakin' Away From Sanity

Self Portrait in Red and White

 

I was just out of the hospital. It was snowing,

and my spirit was leading my body around

like an old dog

on a long leash.

Nurses are funny creatures, kissing the glass

of the locked cabinet as if it held a month in the country

where fountains flow patients

to the bathroom by themselves.

As a child, I lay in the snow sideways to the sky

and believed I would always have a place to go,

full of tomato soup 

and rag rugs for the floors.

That day, though, I was just out of the hospital

and been beaten up besides, for the fun of it

by someone younger

with healthy fists.

Bent like a damaged tree with red leaves,

I fell into a cab and got the stink eye from

a driver concerned 

about his upholstery.

At the hotel, in my sixth floor room, I kissed

the mirror above the sink. It was cold and smooth

with always that little

gap denying contact. 

With my prescription lost, real pain embraced me,

saying, write about the red of the blood and the white

of the weather,

the gray of cement and concussion.

I wrote the red of a fire welcomed by wood, a white bird

on a black branch outside the window from a warm bed

and a day that ended

years ago where I mended, more or less,

I still have that poem, a good one, full of the best of me,

a beautiful thing

still whole and fine

and standing on its own

when all the rest has gone.

_______

for Desperate Beauty at Desperate Poets. 

You

"Maybe tomorrow honey

Some place down the line, I'll wake up older

So much older mama,

I'll wake up older and I'll just stop all my trying." --Jackson C. Frank

You, wearing your father's coat

and a ribbon in your hair,

you're the one I spoke to in a blackbird dream.

You, like a pocket sun,

burning down and rising up in continual blaze

all while reading a book, riding the bus, counting raindrops on the pane.

At home you wear a long shirt

made from calendar pages and paste.

Both are white as summer light, or a fallen blue jay's breast.

You, in love with Michigan in the fall, Morrocco in hazel eyes.

In your boot, a trove of travel tickets,

bad paper, and the echo of smoke-gone nights.

You lay your heart in the curve of the sickle moon

and claim to have no desires,

but they leave your skin and howl in the hills all night. 

You, with a sense of home in your chest like a tumor,

wounding and soothing you like the gin you used to love

until you can hardly stand it anymore.

There is a house from 1925, with a Packard in the drive.

Someone is washing it as if it were a memory

there on the tarmac arc beneath the pear tree.

You held your dolls up against the leaded windows

before you were born, after you died, 

before any of this thorned tapestry you're stitched into now.

The leaves are turning red, the nights are cool.

There is no kiss that holds a hospital for souls,

no soft-bound convent that knows the right prayer.

You can just listen to the yarn-ball clock and when you're ready

let it fall, think of nothing, and find yourself home

where we're waiting for you, those whose names you knew, and now recall.

______

shared with Desperate Poets open link. 

Music: Janis Joplin Little Girl Blue

Let's Talk

 "Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars.

Out here, we is stoned, immaculate."  --Jim Morrison

Let's talk about the elephant in the room.

I'm not some sort of spokesperson for eternity.

Still, you keep popping up,

asking if anyone wishes to communicate,

then you wig out when I answer back.

Let's talk about how I got here. 

I was in the back seat of Daddy's Oldsmobile.

The baseball game was on. 

Then I was launching off from some crazy trapeze into...this place. 

No mom.

No dad.

Just another bauble in the costume jewelry box of the universe

shining brightly in the dark.

Now let's talk about you. 

You're miffed when I don't answer, but shit your pants when I do. 

I can't tell you where your dead Granny is.

I can't tell you if she's in glory or misery.

I can't tell you how much I'm starting to hate that silly planchette of yours.

So why did I answer in the first place?

Like Cole Porter says, It was just one of those things. 

Let's talk about not talking anymore.

Whatever you're asking about--it's not my clowns, not my circus.

I'm just a bit of incorporeal ash floating around in the ether.

I vant to be alone

and boy, am I.

At least, until you came along, like a chatty seatmate on an airplane.

You say hello--hello hello!--I dont know why you say hello, I say

Goodbye.

________

for Word Garden Word List--The Circus In Winter.

and

The Sunday Muse #255. 

Music: Pink Floyd Comfortably Numb

Chorus

 Our Lady of the Golden Voice

who makes the shepherds howl

and leaves the clerics' eyes all moist

then gifts them salted towels

Oh Lady fair, oh Lady cruel

riding a treble clef

admit us to your Music School

to chisel loose each breath.

____

for quadrille Monday

hosted by Linda Lyberg

Word Garden Word List--Ghost Eaters

 

Hello, my intrepid group, and welcome to another Word Garden Word List! Not long ago, I was on Goodreads and saw an ad for a new book called Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman, an author I was not familiar with. The cover art was creepy and striking, plus it was Halloween time, so I investigated. 

The novel is about a girl named Erin, who has lost her friend Silas, whose lead she always has followed, for good or ill. She's pretty lost after his death, so when she hears about a drug called Ghost that lets you actually see the dead, she's game. What she doesn't count on is how it will take over her life. The hard part, it turns out, is to unsee. 

It's a great horror novel and also a terrifyingly accurate portrayal of addiction, whether to a person or a substance, how strong the allure can be, and how difficult to break free of. I absolutely recommend it. And so, our list this week is 20 words taken from the pages of Ghost Eaters. Enjoy, but use only as directed, and the directions are as follows: use at least 3 of the 20 words on the list in a new poem of your own, in any style, length or form. Then link up and visit others. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Oh and... don't let it haunt you. ;-)

Your list:

bake

bomber

custodian

elevated

emblem

exposed

fever

fixed

inhabit

itch

makeshift

milky

nattering

phantom

quitters

romantic

smokers

sultry

tundra

wobbling

October

 

These early evenings, the sun sinks slowly,

like a 'do-ragged painter down spider-leg scaffolding.

We are all weary these days

as the world rolls beneath us and we logwalk,

our eventual fall following beside us like an unpredictable dog.

Then quietly, as crickets guard the evening filigree,

your ghost comes to me

where I smoke in the Adirondack

under the weak-sister yellow moon of the outside light,

to portend a storm that's already passed and gone.

In a canning jar, under the basement stairs, 

I have kept your hoodoo,

that sacrifice chant-dance made of woodsmoke and razor grass

that you wove to your bones

to make me love you as if you were food, as if you were solid earth.

Whether in Butte or Chicago, Pushmataha County

or Devil's Hand, it makes no difference.

Even the ocean is not shatterproof, so my bags drowse in the attic,

with old costumes and dressmaker's dummies

that you went to while I slept off the soft poison of your words.

I know why you're here.

I know why yellowjacks have stingers

and I can't write these poems forever just to stave you off.

You'll use the knife I gave you as a pick

and play some stupid banjo breakdown at my funeral

as if it were spring, as if you were sane, as if I didn't matter.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ric Masten.

I don't smoke. The poem lies!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot "Dreamland"

Self-Portrait

 I carry black cherries and woodsmoke

in the upturned crescent where the memory of your face is kept.

Winter pales the world and I am prayer flags flying,

sherpas hauling,

I am peaks where the air becomes dear.

Under wicker fans, G&T's sweat on the mahogany bar.

An aesthete in a sedan chair snaps his fingers and starlings rise and wheel

carrying your voice 

feathered and black

above sea level, above all heads, beyond calling back.

I carry black cherries and woodsmoke

on a glass tray draped with night stars and the music of ouds.

A vendor in a Panama hat offers me your scent

in exchange for 

the season of his choice.

I turn my back and start ascending, to freeze and fall, 

guided by your indifferent ghost and my maps milled from ice and ache.

__________

for Dverse Open Link, hosted by Sanaa Rizvi

image: the Dyatlov Pass hikers

Music: "Qalanderi" by Cheb i Sabbah. 

Nutshell

 In a nutshell, meat and wings

and infinite other disturbing things

that rise and rule with iron fist

the little nest that crowns your kiss

Curse the summer, curse the tree

that swelled such nutshells patiently

gardener saw, gardener knew

even as those nutshells grew.

______

written for quadrille monday at dverse "crown"

image: syd barrett, a founding member of pink floyd whose life was derailed by mental illness. However, this poem is about whatever you think it's about.