Winter & Wanting

 

You wanted

To break my cold reserve

To be a flame on the frozen stream

I wanted

To protect my stillness

To be snow in the presence of May

Charming one

You remind me of me

When I was hopeful and still believed

I thank you

For the moment's respite

When you touched my sleep with honeyed light.

______

For Dverse MTB "A Lover as Second Nature" hosted by Laura B.

Music: Jai Jagdeesh In Dreams

Isla de los Fantasmas

 

On the Isla de los Fantasmas, the keeper's wife

spends dawn searching out exhausted birds on the pebbled beach.

She comes to them as if she were light itself

and believes herself to be light itself

but she is as broken as they are.

Realizing this, and wishing to compensate her for her kindness,

they transfer to her their laments, worn around her heart

like dolmens of sound. Within each one, she dies.

With each dawn, each bird, each song, she dies.

The wind is the keeper's wife singing.

It is not the currents of sky or water that exhaust the birds.

It is the endless impassivity of the surface they cannot bear.

Their wings are the pages of hymnals

their bodies are the bindings of hymnals

that can only close at last on the Isla de los Fantasmas.

The keeper's task is to keep the enormous eye of the light

emptying itself out at the water, and the weary birds.

The light comes to them as if it were the keeper's wife,

and believes itself to be the keeper's wife,

but she is down on the pebbled beach, in her dolmen, singing.

_________

for Sunday Muse #219. 

Isla de los Fantasmas = Island of the Ghosts

a dolmen is a table-shaped tomb made of large flat stones

Post Card

Greetings from Goon Island. 
If you feel ugly or are on the run from Sea Hag,
climb into a cannon and have them shoot you here.
You won't have to shave your legs,
and everything is served Florentine.

Greetings from Goon Island.
I must've got brained, I can't recall arriving or why.
I am 8 feet tall,
and tiny gals who would fit in a tea spoon always insist
on standing next to me. 
I am Blue LaGoon, the mumbling nightclub singer
with the flower in her hat.

Doesn't narrow it down much, I know.

Oh baby,
what I do remember is being Eugenia the Jeep,
arriving in a box with a printed message
all the way from India.
"I have magical powers" said my note,
which I had written
while walking through a wall just because I could.

Greetings from Goon Island.
Here, when I try to signal "yes", I just fall on my face. 
When I try to be HERE
and then
.
.
.
.
HERE, 
I just go in circles until I'm dizzy.

Despite the kindness of the Goons on Goon Island,
I wish you were here. 
Try to find a cannon.
Watch out for Bluto.
Elocution isn't everything, Toots--
try the sailor's semaphore,
head for the horizon,
and I will watch for you by the silent and singular 
light of the stars. 

_____

For "Rhubarb" at Real Toads.

I have chosen "Popeye" (originally Thimble Theater) characters Alice the Goon and Eugene the Jeep, staples of my young childhood. I watched them faithfully on channel 9 out of Windsor, Ontario.

Alice the Goon was an 8 foot tall gender non-specific slave of the Sea Hag, who had threatened to hurt her baby if she didn't obey. We found out she was a girl when Sea Hag finally called her by name, "Alice." Eventually saved by Popeye, in later versions Alice donned a skirt and flowered hat. She only spoke in mumbles. 

Eugene the Jeep was a creature from the 4th dimension, who managed to land himself here. In print, he was discovered in Africa, in cartoons it was India. He was mailed to Popeye in a box, with a note of introduction. Popeye's reaction? "Well, blow me down!" Eugene could walk through walls and jump from location to location in the bat of an eye. Eugene the Jeep didn't speak either, but he shook his head for "no" and bowed down and swished his tail for "yes."  The military vehicle was named for him because it was small and maneuverable.