Yellow Mums

 yellow mums

little dark green shadow

to june's

boastful, favored roses--

they have all

turned to twisted thorns

married to

the clippers' blades

but you

love the autumn

and are

humbly lovely now

aren't you,

yellow mums?

Ice

 

Winter went too far that year

like a friend who shows her ugly side,

as heedless as some smartphone fuck in a bookstore

as numb and hard as a cop's baton.

Southern beauty, transplanted lady

brought here as a baby, 

my English walnut tree was shivered--shocked--

a dazed involuntary wandering the halls of summer for years after.

This year, unfed, the bandit squirrels stopped knocking down 

her new growth bouquets.

This year her gown is lush, her branches heavy with baubles,

the first walnuts in five years.

I love to sit beneath her, bathed in green

and the susurration of her clustered feathers.

No silent era star wearing ostrich plumes

could compete with her now--she preens in the pleasant weather.

This spring, she is an Impressionist lady 

holding a parasol over me as I am shivered--shocked--

by my country showing her ugly side

my sanctuary soft and sweet, the future hard as a cop's baton.

________

for Dverse--"A View of One's Own" hosted by Dora. 

The images are taken by me, of the walnut tree in my yard. 

Music: Glee cast Don't Make Me Over

Hollyhocks, Sunflowers, Marigolds

 

Hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

in a field by a white barn waving

where the orange cat searches for the little voles

hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

just a stone's throw over from the spring foals

and the little stream its low banks laving

hollyhocks, sunflowers, marigolds

in a field by a white barn waving.

______

a triolet for Lillian's image

over at Dverse Open Link. 

 

Mount Pleasant

 "But in the grey of the morning 

my mind becomes confused

between the dead and the sleeping

and the road that I must choose"

The Moody Blues Question 

I remember a secret place behind new house construction

still untouched, with a little brook; I knew the hidden entry.

It was September, yellow leaves nattering on thick birches

with impossible blue sky behind. My solitary sanctuary.

I've not been back but know

that a sub and casino took its place.

SUVs, neon signs, leaf blowers,

but in my mind it's still my private place. 

My wandering discoveries now unfold in recurring dreams

of curious, fey, deserted neighborhoods found just beyond a rise.

The streets are new, but the homes deserted and crumbling

with just a face here or there behind a curtain, calmly waiting to die.

In these latter years, one seems

as real and compelling as the other.

I once saw a pheasant burst from a bush

and a grackle's lost feather flutter.

___________

for Word Garden Word List--Autumn. 

Music: Frank Sinatra The September of My Years

English Walnut

 every day

the black squirrels raid Heaven.

I find leaf clusters

like fallen angels

everywhere.

they want

the hard nuts growing high

in the tree I tend

with loving care

these twenty odd years.

each time

they find their desire,

the Icarus clusters fall.

my tree expands, produces,

then incrementally loses 

all summer long.

I learn

from watching all this

a new behavior

a new ache.

will you bury me as well one day, squirrels

or float me old green feathers

in kind aerial gesture?

_____

for Sherry's prompt at desperatepoets. 

image of leaf cluster and walnut my own

Indolence

"There you stood on the edge of your feather/expecting to fly" --Neil Young

April rain came like a too-long book.

Aimless starlings, poised buds, everything waits as I do also, indolent, supposing suns behind closed lids.

_______

for Wednesday Muse "Busy Body" .

Wind

The wind is blowing

(I have skin, like anybody else.)

The sky is moving

(I have one face, the sky has many.)

I live,

I die.

(Sun, rain, crickets touch my skin.)

 The wind hurries on.

The Woman Who Does Not Trust Roses

The woman who does not trust roses
consults a dream her lover has left
concealed between sections of orange.

Breeze loves roses, 
both stem and bloom.
The woman who does not trust roses
reads by fingertip the morning moon.

Her lover's dream 
is of breeze in a secret bower,
and crescent hips gone almondine. 
______

for both "camera FLASH! at Real Toads, and Flash 55 hosted by my BFF Hedgy.

Almondine:
 Adjective

1. Garnished with almond slices.

Usage notes

Unlike most English adjectives, almondine typically follows the noun it describes, rather than preceding it.

Origin From French.

Noun (plural almondines)

1. A gemstone that is either a deep red garnet or a purple spinel.

The Woman Who Could Not Remember

Winter, pale and fat, presses himself against me,
insistent and stupid, dead oak leaves spilling
from his windy lips.

"Darling," I hear my voice confabulate. My memory
fell through the ice of his pride six years ago and hasn't been seen since.
So I make shit up:

"I missed you," and such fantastic idiocy. I send
weevils into his head to hunt for what went before,
and find my affair with his brother, Fall, and his 
first love turned bitter enemy and destroyer, Spring. 

She and I conspire by telepathy, though I forget afterwards. 

Can he hear the cicadas inside my bones, feel the
mosquito pond of my stilled airless blood?
My benefactor, the Sun, waits for him to subside and die

So that we can be together.

But this time the infuriating fool has the vitality of the nearly-expired,
and as he enters me, the shock of cold sends cracks 
from toes to skull and back again, I am riven
by lost and desperate ice-beaked birds who need me to the point of misery.

Secretly, as he bucks and the wind rises,
I receive the tiny crocus blooms his destroyer sends me
to help me hold on, to fashion together into a time,

Mine, when I will strangle him with rose vines,
sway to my feet as stalks of wheat, heavy as viburnum,
entirely forgetful and ascendant. 

"That's right," I coo, opening myself willingly now,
as a grave does, doing what it was born to do, 
becoming solid and sun-warmed, anticipating lilies.
________

For "take the weather with you" at Toads. Day #5 of Napo Nap Time. Greetings from the (still!) frozen wastes of the north.

 

Weaver Bird

When I was young, I had the words
but nothing to wrap them around--
I was a weaver bird with the instinct to build, but not the flock memory.

Now I am old, and still have the words,
but find that I have said most of what I needed to say.
I no longer bleed as much, nor yearn so hard. The seasons change by themselves.

In the middle of this oddly mild mid-winter,
I set out, by myself this time.
My favorite dogs are gone, but I have this new one, and she wanted to come along.

I wore new boots with purple laces
and a stick I've grown attached to, and sometimes really need.
The sun stayed low but bright while we walked, and time turned easy and slow.

I didn't know, when we set out,
how much I would love that walk and the cold air in my lungs.
I called to my friend; she came back from the trees and we turned back.

Now I hate to have left that walk behind--
taking off my boots inside the door, I wonder when I can wear them again,
but somehow, aches are assuaged, and there is sometimes balm

for all the things we lack.
_______
 

Black Walnut

The moon shows through the filigree
of my black walnut tree's
branches.

All summer, the boastful sun 
kept after her, one
day into the next,

And though she did not love him,
she needed him. She thinned
by degrees.

The moon paints my black walnut tree silver
where the thick green of her
is gone.

The sun comes less and less, bored
with his conquest;
the moon stays, but is mad, 

And my walnut tree lays her beauty down
upon the earth cold and brown,
indifferent as a grave.
__________

Still

"What matters most is how well we walk through the fire." --Charles Bukowski

The maple keys are falling, as they do every year.
I have taken to reading out in the yard,
while my new dog wanders.

My walnut tree, the one the winter nearly killed two years ago,
is green again, a home and pantry for squirrels.
It is Michigan cool, late May, but warming.

I don't dream of your body as much as I used to,
but my dreams are full of you all the same.
I line up these poems like dolls, a puppet show to please you.

Books end, dogs die, summer runs its course.
Stay, won't you, sweetheart? Call me when you can--
I will be here, spinning like a maple key, still your breezy northern girl.
______

For Play it Again, Toads. I chose Kenia's challenge to start with a line from a poet you don't like. I dislike Charles Bukowski, the idol of many. Too much booze, too much ugliness. I got the idea to write a very gentle poem about a very bold thing--making it through this life with some sort of grace.

Come To Me

Come, though I have no claim on you,
and you have none on me.
The first wet snow arrives tenuous as a schoolgirl's crush,
and yet, there it is, on every edge of the still unfallen leaves.

Along the rail fence, and in the saucers of the flower pots,
pale and perfect as stationery just bought,
is the signature and sign of what you are to me.
Everything that was there before, remains, but changed in spirit, subtly.

There is no way to explain the ineffable,
or my simple wholehearted pleasure at what is given and become--
Just promise me that you understand,
and that, one more time, you'll come.
_____

for Grace's mini-challenge at Real Toads.

Heaven

Hey, babe,
it's me.
Your same old girl
who fell out of the sky--
slipped up from the sea.

These days,
there's not as much of me left.
I'm light as a breeze,
the way I used to be--
but with more things before--
not as many next.

I love you, sugar,
like a black-faced ewe loves 
milkweed and sunflowers.
I'm always at sixes and sevens,
eternally wool-gathering,
eternally wandering watersides and bowers.

Here's an old path we could take,
or here's another--
which one d'you like?
When I was a girl, a lot of times, I'd be a bird,
but there are sea-songs, too--
and I try, at night, to work out the ones
floating like lilies in my dreams, half submerged, half heard.

Take my hand, sweetheart,
and if anybody's watching us,
then let them be jealous.
There is a shore road, 
and also a way through the fields where the warblers are.
Either way,
you and me, babe, we're Heaven-bound--

though I couldn't say by what direction,
or tell you, honey, how far.
_____

for KJ.

image: Alicja Bachleda from the movie "Ondine".  

Daffodil Namaste Chooses A Head Scarf

Hi.
It's me.
In you. Part of you.
Natural as can be.

Nestled among my pretty neighbors.
Singing to them, endlessly,
the traditional song of my people--
"Die, you jackasses. Make more room for me."

If I had a mind,
it would have a voice:
shredder, chipper. 
White noise.

I give the gardener
something busy to do.
Listen to my heart beat:
"fuckyou, fuckyou, fuckyou..."

Love me or nuke me.
I don't care.
I'm nature's perfect engine.
Growing. Gaining. There.

Girl, I feel good,
but you're starting to look like shit.
I do what I do, that's Ms. Nature to you,
frightening Miss Muffet to bits.
_______

For Real Toads mini-challenge, "Making a heart out of wild plants." I chose the weed.

 

a delay in moonlight

Here is what I think it was--
the edges of elm leaves were oval, like slow hours,
and they fell along the edge of the creek,
yellow as the lights in strangers' windows at early dusk.

Here is what hurt my heart--
a delay in moonlight, as the last crickets stumbled,
bewildered, into the crack in the dry wood 
at the base of my step.

I have been hearing them even in the overcast afternoons--
they know that my favorite soft black boots will only last
for one more season,
and that by the time it gets here, you will be gone.

Here is what I think will happen--
there will be ice, a little further from the banks each day,
and both itself and the elm leaves caught in it
will have edges, like each breath I take from now on.

Here is what I think it means--
there is nothing I could have done,
because the moon is caught in a reflection at my feet,
but will ripple and blur with the first step I take.
_______

 
 

Contemplating the Divine

The locust trees have turned yellow,
and the sunset comes early in the evening.

Living across the street from Saint T's,
and feeling my own seasons shift,
I take to contemplating the Divine.

All that I am and am not
swirls in my imagination like leaves down the sidewalk.

How I love these poems,
and all the days and years distilled within them;

If you should see me looking half-lidded and sleepy in the wicker chair,
it is just this poet contemplating the Divine--

all the miraculous things
that I am
and am not.
_________

in the season of catkins and maple keys

This year, my yard and walks are thick with maple keys
and catkins from the walnut tree,
washed in heaps at every fence and barrier.
They believe in time,
having faith in the thing they need.
Me?
I haven't got that kind of time, not anymore.

When I was young, I wanted the whole sky,
without an idea at all what it might contain.
Now, the dome of Heaven has become, for me, particular and small,
but as full as my heart, which is just a heart,
but as tempestuous within me as beating wings.

I would like to say, darling, that now is the moment
for a tender comfort in each other,
a whispering in the evening hour, as all the red goes for sunset,
leaving our blood light and calm at last--
but you, My Love, would call me out,
and I can't lie to you, even for the sake of pretty lines.

We have had to do what we have had to do.
Our patterns are not perfect at all,
and the things that have given us lift are showing the damage of their utility.
There is blood; ours and others', 
mixed with our markings.

Open your arms for me as I will, mine, for you.
We know that doing this is dangerous,
but like will always seek like,
because that is the way home,
even if we spin and roll in mid-air in the dare of loving.
The vain sunset is still there, a spoiled prima donna, 
but we have this moment 
to forget her.

I love you, in every imperfection.
I trust you to touch talons to my scars,
and to somehow soothe them despite all sharpness.
Here is where we have come to, and it is a fine enough thing.
Look at the maple keys and the catkins--
they are blameless, 
but the minute they leave their mothers, they are looking up at us.
_______

Ron, at Shutterbugs, has very kindly allowed me to use his breathtaking photograph at the top of this post. The image is his and may not be used elsewhere without permission. Please visit him.

maple keys

catkins

The Storm Chaser

The storm chaser
found the narrow way
down a straight road
into the wind's dark blue heart.

There, she found
Athena with her bolts,
wearing a silver-black snake around her arm,
falcon feathers in her hair,
and not much else.

When the storm chaser kissed Athena--
rippling strikes across the sky.
When the storm chaser loved Athena--
hail from the heavens, honey on her thigh.

When the storm chaser got home,
there was no sign of the damage to her car.
She had swapped out the mirrors
and bumped out the dents
herself, at a truck stop in Stephens County.

"Where did you go?"
"Shopping," she said,
with a forked tongue as sure and sweet as tupelo. 
_________

_________

In The Spring

Wolves came.
They did not come to see the flower garden.
Winter's last squall blew at their heels.
They had black faces,
and eyes as yellow as an elk bone.

I was writing a poem--
this poem,
for you,
but wolves came
and I curled myself around the April moon.

I'm sorry if you've come
and not found me here.
I'm sorry there is nothing left but a little blood-
my blood--
on the page,

but if the moon rises,
we'll talk, just as if summer was our favorite season after all;
and should the wolves come for you,
we can still be together, though it won't be the same,
in the fall.
________