Verse/Us

 

Verse I loved you like window glass loves morning light. Cats envied me my easy silence and singularity of heart. Perverse If I found you dying by the roadside, my eyes would be as blank as china plates and my silence entire. Verse I wrote a bloom of poems for you an origami of your face, your voice, your scent. My love reshaped into rows of you, riots of you, and every shape of you. Perverse Pearls before swine is strange jewelry. A thing is worth what it's worth to the one who receives it, so receive my scorn, my bitter spade, and these branches broken. Verse Look, the moon, your twin and avatar. I blazed for you, and shed light with every loving gesture which you reflected back, quarter-strength, and only in the dark.

Asters

 Here is a gift--it isn't much

like an analgesic for a lost limb.

Still, the shape of your ears

and the asters in your voice

make me long to become a gardener

or a choralist.

Sadness like bad whiskey takes me when someone speaks

without your regional hard "R"

that made me want to sign on as cook

on a doomed vessel full of haunted sailors.

I love you. I did then and I do still. 

I am a quivering aspen , slender

with black scars, a recorder playing only one tune.

I play it for you, for the shape of your ears, and the sound of your voice.

Philomela of the Bungalows

 

I feel forsaken

like a rolled newspaper in the rain.

Is that You? in the window box?

Is that You? magnificent in a woken engine?

I don't mean to be sullen,

a crushed flower with a brave yellow bloom--

I'm a vine growing in through the window

of your abandoned holy room.

Oh honey. My fingers flat upon

your smooth chest made of smoke,

I am rain falling ever further from her cloud.

Call me back---use your voice of spade-shaped leaves.

I will come, across the lawns and waters

to kneel at your feet

and sing.

__________

for Word Garden Word List--D.H.Lawrence

Music: John Waite "Missing You"

Evening Out, Recalled

 

It was a delicious meal.

My heart pumped all through the time I was eating it

as it had before and has continued to do every moment since.

As it was in the beginning, 

It was snowing outside

but the restaurant had a fireplace and was softly lit.

You were there, and as I ate, I loved you and felt happy.

is now

On my plate, the gone moments

of a breeze and the scent of new grass; the rhythm 

of a place and season. The ability to move and exist.

and ever shall be

I remember that evening

even as it has vanished, as you have vanished,

as the meal and place and I myself have vanished

world without end

The gold of the brandy

in your glass, the smoothness of the skin of my hands,

all appears and vanishes in my memory as it, too, vanishes.

Amen, my love. Amen.

__________________

Music: Vivaldi Gloria

Gray Cat In the Paperbacks

 

At the most unexpected time

on the most unlikely of days

I met someone who couldn't stay, 

and yet stayed forever.

I wasn't then who I am now

which is both a good and a sad thing.

I didn't really love the one who gave me a ring

but meant well by them.

No poetry, on paper or in my heart

but I had one regret and so made a wish

to know the real thing with someone, only that and only this.

I knew the weight of asking.

I had asked to know peaceful days

before I grew old, and was given them.

I asked for sobriety and the craving was gone as if it had never been.

Still, out of the blue, out of left field...

I saw green eyes and they saw mine

just walking by at the end of an ordinary day.

Imagine someone feeling the same way; hit by lightning, swept away

from the next morning, for one glorious day.

Would you believe in a love at first sight?

Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time.

Two people utterly bowled over--one day to remember forever--mine.

Talk about the luck of the Irish.

Would I walk away from it again?

Would I be so rulebound? Was I right to head back home?

It doesn't matter now. I'm okay the rest of the way alone. 

I have that day, and the card you sent

to keep and remember what an answered prayer meant.

_________

for What's Going On?: Keepsakes and Treasure Chests (newwhatsgoingon.blogspot.com)

(Blogger isn't letting me do links normally, lately.) 

Image at top is the card mentioned in the poem. I've kept it for 27 years. The gray cat is because I told them about a poem I had read in which a gray cat is a symbol for randomness and kismet. The poem was "untitled" by Carl Rickert. I would link to it but have never found it anywhere except in the magazine where I first read it. 

Music: Holly Cole I've Just Seen A Face  (If the Beatles object to me quoting Help From My Friends in this poem, I place myself at their mercy. I'd kill me if I were them!)

Palomas Perdidas

"How different it all was from what you'd planned." --F Scott Fitzgerald

 Here's the thing about love--

you can't finesse it for long once it's

worn away

                      like a river stone,

lost in the mail,

the ring gone down the trap.

Oh, you're right, it doesn't stay

cinema big-screen hothouse bloomed

the way it

                   starts out,

all fever-fine experiments in joy.

Just because you get lucid in the drowse of time,

doesn't mean call the hearse,

cut the roses,

ask the waiter for something mild and bland

like some blue hair breakdown of the heart.

No.

When we reduced, though, in the long shadow of years

to a shorthand slang for what used to be

a poem written

                                 with the soul-vase of our bodies,

we became pilots in a sky without any gardens below.

I'm sorry, you know? I envy the old dog still loved,

still a sunrise in someone's eyes,

or to be the one with a candescent heart as fine

as old art,

                    stars forever swirling over lamplit groves.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Our Man In Havana

Palomas Perdidas "Lost Doves"

Music: Concrete Blonde Mexican Moon

My Detective

 

When a detective falls in love, he does not know who to bill for expenses--

everything is up in the air. 

At a mixer for suspects, he invites me to dance via loudspeaker.

Radiant in my white dress, I resemble a snowy owl

even down to my carefully bandaged hand which he takes without hesitation.

I whisper in his ear:

I am Leon Czolgosz. 

Your heart is the President of the United States of America. 

We are dancing in Buffalo, city by the Niagara. 

My detective, of course, falls hard.

The next time we meet, I wait for him in the bullpen at the police station.

They know him there.

They hire cellists. 

He confesses his deepest fantasy to me:

I want to speak words of love to you

via telephone

with our hands naked and separated only by the safety glass.

I want the call recorded

and broadcast to wild lovers around the globe. 

Shortly after, we are married. I wear my favorite bearskin robe.

My small black cubs frolick nearby, 

climbing the pews and then tumbling gaily down again.

My detective is resplendent in his tuxedo. 

The hired band plays Funiculi Funicula.

I snarl when my detective gets too close to the cubs, and this inflames him.

At last, we lie in bed together, like busy machines come to rest.

I am wearing nothing but the revolver-shaped earrings he has given me.

My detective wears a felt fedora

and a look of smug adoration like a daredevil over the falls in a barrel. 

I am The Queen of the Mist,

suspected in various thieveries, check kiting, and jaywalking.

Our love is an aviary

where birds wheel above the thundering water like intelligent confetti. 

Look in your mailbox, I tell my detective.

I have left you a valentine and an Easter egg. 

He asks if, after all, I am his mystery client.

I am innocent. 

Love is a marvelous thing, a joyful thing. My love is happy now, laughing.

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Zachary Schomburg.

Music: Angelo De Pippa Funiculi Funicula

Poets of Light

 

You said you like the curtains drawn

that lips are best in the dark

and that such things as kissing your ring

should be done in a circle of salt

that the kind of love

that you speak of

when your seance is channeling

old Poets of Light

wearing cloaks made of Night

appears and then quickly is gone.

You promised that on our wedding night

your kiss would wear a new face

a stand-in for your heart would come

and deal the Ace of Spades

for love of the black

you've stuffed in the crack

between three, and two, and one

where my love grows ill

on your window sill

and dies with all its might.

________________

for Dverse Poetics: prelude to a kiss. 

Music: Labrinth Jealous

Things She Would Tell You If She Could

 

Romeo, gosh, I'm sorry how things turned out,

and sorry I didn't die after all like you thought.

I'm old now, you wouldn't look twice at me 

but I miss you still, even so, most definitely.

You could find me tonight across from a cornfield

working the St. Lucy's Fall Festival and how would you feel

about that, babe? I wear a lumpy old overcoat

and sell tickets to teenagers so in love they almost float.

I get feeling sentimental and sad about everything

remembering how you said you were the All-Powerful Weather King

and could make the sun come out if I wished it,

or kiss me and kiss me again if I told you I missed it.

My goodness, Romeo, you don't know how often I still think of you,

like when I saw some crestfallen kid with wild hair walking through

the festival like he had something on his mind

and he seemed lonesome, like you, and quiet and kind.

It's almost midnight and the lights are going dim

so I've got to pack up and go home alone again.

I wish so hard that things had turned out different

and I'd say, "Romeo, oh Romeo," and you'd know what I meant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Tom Waits.

Music: Tom Waits "Blue Valentines"

The Landlord of the Moon

 

The landlord of the moon 

likes a little respect with her coffee,

a rose on her pillow 

                                  and all the rest.

She knows she's not loved 

but that's not the point hardly.

She keeps rum on her wrist

                                                and salt on her breast.

It's nothing personal.

No weary argument moves her much,

and it's best to remember

                                             her bird can't sing

except when it's raining

inside suitcases, outside train stations, and such.

Better bow to the east

                                        and kiss the ring.

Still, the landlord of the moon

falters while the factory turns 

and the sun, her master

                                          lounges and leans,

casual and careless

mocking her with jazz hands and money to burn

til she lays, each noon

                                        her heart at his feet.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List #7 (Langston Hughes)                                       

and your bird can sing ^^

For Our Lady of Smoke & Window Sills

 You Are Our Lady of smoke and window sills

and I am a wheel made of rope and memories

A birch skin sun, full of poetry and rum

lays out its playing cards on the breeze

If I have hurt you, take this yellow bird

and ask it to sing your childhood back

If it dies in your palm, then you'll know that all along

we've lain our hearts together on the track

There is no dome of heaven blue enough,

to pose as Sunday's ornament

no coin to buy the peacock's lovely strut

and no tongue to tell you what it meant

In every water well, a witching stick

to guide the thirst back to our lips

where we could cure the snowblind trumpeter

and offer him our silence like a kiss

There is no morning glory blue enough

to pose our fanned out deck of saints

or to repair the garland in your hair

that falls like leaves we pretty up with paints.

A Fool In Love Is Soon Made Wise

Vase so shapely upon the shelf

holding so lightly within herself

the finest faces all gathered to her

which start to bore and bother and blur

until she meets the one who moves her,

beckoning her come quickly closer

to fall so hard and tumble o'er

to spread her shards upon the floor.

_______

for Dverse poetics--the proverbial. Mine is in the title.

the artwork is Flowers In A Basket 1910 by Seraphine de Senlis 

On A Station Stair

On a station stair, my wrist catches in a double railing and snaps.

Monet ladies promenade prettily on the wall.

_______

for Toni's thing at Toads.

 

Library Science

"Goddess, make this mirror your river...
show me what you would have me see." 
Another woman walks in
as I stand at the sink taking in
my own face and flaws and shaking in my boots.

Silly girl.
Silly woman.
Go out that door and up to the reference desk.
All this time,
all the books checked out,
and I still haven't talked to her--not really--yet.

I wonder what's in her mind?
Austen? Ferlinghetti or Faust?
I wonder what's in her bag?
Lipstick? A leather cord with an ankh?

Goddess, make my lips your instrument,
let me say what you would have me say.
I want to kiss her. I want to hear her whisper "yes..."
I want her not to think me a fool. 
Goddess hear me, Goddess bless.

She's with someone...at her desk. In her life?
Is my boho baby someone's girl? Someone's wife?
Gee I love her hair, her smart-girl glasses, 
her long fingers, her long skirt.
I think we could be really beautiful
or I could just look stupid and get hurt.

(Anyway, here goes nothing.)

Goddess, make my lips your instrument,
let me say what you would have me say.
I want to kiss her. I want to hear her whisper "yes..."
I want her to see me, and understand.
Goddess hear me, Goddess bless.

Now's the moment. Smile! 
Say something! "I...."
She tilts her head, I think she knows...
And then, so softly, "Yes?" 
________

For my last Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads. "Love."

I love this song. Good grief, scratch a cynic find a romantic, I guess.

 

Anything

Anything.

That is what I would do for you--
anything.

Write my name....here.
Put it on pastels, the little squares I keep just for these occasions.
My heart, and the ornate clock on the face of the observation level
are in harmony--

tick...oh.....tick....ohhh.

Anything.
That is what stirs me when I look at you
and your sweater rides up in a fold at your hip, soft as a cat.
How could I deny you
if you stand there and tease me, so deliberately, like that?

Here is the key.
The one I keep next to my heart, warm from the skin of my breast,
where the two freckles stay, inseparable, like us.
Here is the key.
The one for opening the carefully restricted,
faculty-only
strictly-by-appointment reading room with the soft lamps and the throws.

Anything.
Possessed by me, made accessible to you,
with fragrance of rosemary, pansies,
fennel, columbine, rue, daisies, and violets.
Find me, look for me
at the desk beneath the clock at two,
across from the locked doors,
I'll be waiting--wearing colors, not white, and my little slippers.

I have catalogued our love, collected our sweetest words.
Find me, curl your arms around my head, whisper to me and don't stop,
don't leave, just kiss my hair, trace the edge of my ear, and love me back
like Anything.
______

 for my own Fireblossom Friday challenge "Looking Beyond The Obvious."

Nuns

The nuns kept birds
and, by necessity,
kept it from the diocese. 

The nuns kept chaste,
but kept birds against the loneliness
because symbolic husbands never come home.

I live in the nuns' quarters,
now renovated with appliances and art on the walls,
but still silent at sundown.

I know what a calling is,
and for that I am as quaint as a rare sparrow.
Is there even such a thing?

Mornings, I think about you,
but I keep it to myself; only my body knows the lie
I tell, by my silence, my hymn unsung.

My love, you are a birdkeeper.
You've sent me a picture, and your face is the air;
before I can think, my arms open,

knowing more by instinct than any censure can deny.
_______

for Real Toads birds challenge
 

Life With Super Zac

Zacky pees on the computer room carpet. Again.

"Zacky, what did you DO?" I ask, pointing. Zacky says raccoons came in and did that. Zacky says it rained last night, just in that one spot. Indoors. Zacky says maybe it is oil bubbling up through the floor and we are rich.

"It isn't black, and it smells like pee."

Zacky calls 1-800-MIKE-WINS. Mike Morse, attorney at law, petitions the court for carpet samples, lab reports, camera footage (if any) and lines up character witnesses. As Zac's mom, I am asked to testify on his behalf, which is awkward.

Zac goes on Oprah and says his mom is mean for no reason, blaming him for what the raccoons did. The audience gasps. There are hugs and tears. Oprah gives everyone in the audience a chew bone, hidden under their seat. 

"Zacky, PLEASE. Just stop peeing in the computer room!"

"I wuz framed!" maintains Zacky from behind bars. He has to wear a little striped prison outfit and he plays the harmonica so sad it breaks the guards' hearts. They let him out. He comes home and pees on the computer room floor. Again.

"ZACKY!!!!!!!!" (chase ensues.) Zacky is very fast. He laughs as he runs. 

Maybe it really was raccoons. 

"C'mere, Zacky," I say. He jumps up in my lap and chews one of my hands as I pet him with the other. "Who's a good boy?" I say, giving him a kiss on his noggin. "Who's such a sweet smart wonderful boy?" Well duh, mom. (He holds these truths to be self-evident.)

I hope there are no more raccoons.

Fall

If you're going to fall for me,
do it just as the sun is going down,
or not at all.

I've always needed someone to kick the chocks back in under my wheels,
and to reach up and stop the propeller.
Otherwise, the sky calls me with its own backassward gravity;

My hair stands straight up, 
all the blood rushes to my head,
and the next time you see me, there I am, crossing in front of the moon.

If you're going to fall for me,
feel me up, fill my ear with all the things you imagine that I am,
wait until the last leaf falls. 

Then, up to our haunches in October snow,
I will kiss you the same way I kissed the woman I really loved;
the one who wore red flannel, raised ravens, and was nothing like you.

If you're going to fall for me,
whoever you are, do it on Halloween.
Brain me with a shovel,

Or else I'll be running down the center of the airstrip at dawn,
a gas can in one hand, passport in the other,
taking off in Le Corbeau, my arms in the air,

Singing "Mon amour est folle comme la lune,"
and as red --oh! as soft-- as my hair.
______

For Karin's "Falling Into Lines" mini-challenge at Real Toads. 

"Le Courbeau" = The Raven

"Mon amour est folle comme la lune" = "My love is as crazy as the moon"

Confidential to Buddha Moskowitz: Is this more like it? *grin*

 

In A Land Of Birds, And Night

In a land as close as birds to the branch
and as far as the moon from the window,
I came to do the one thing I must do, and that is

to kiss your hair because it is the night wind
and to kiss your lips which are the river beneath the night wind,
and to be inside your arms like a lost star.

In a land where to look at birds is to fall,
and falling, to make them seem to shift and fly,
it is really us who move, who fall, who flock and who have no language, 

but yet, in wind and darkness, entwine and sing.
 

My Love Is Like

My love is like asphalt and loose gravel.
She's a fifty foot drop;
no guard rail, just a descanso.

My love is not straight,
and it's always been raining.
She is nothing but the tops of pine trees
reaching up for things that are not meant to fly, but suddenly, do.
_______

 The Perfect Love Poem, for Kenia at Real Toads. I have used comparison.

Note: a descanso is a roadside shrine.