Moonbird

 I was speaking, a moaning call,

a spreading gray constellation,

a smoke of words

but you weren't listening anymore.

It is the only language I have.

I live in the interstices

between seed and fruit,

seed and earth,

sea and air,

love and absence.

I have come a very long way, and yet

I am as gray and unremarkable as old lumber.

My love expresses itself inside the earth

and produces a single emissary.

The way is long, the continents pass by.

We meet again only at intervals, but on the same ground.

I was trying to tell you about moonbirds

in their secrecy and their millions.

They seem to vanish, they glide without effort,

but are always there, like love or frailty.

I was speaking, a moaning call,

a smoke of words between sea and air

but you, you love the smell of milled wood,

and weren't listening anymore.

__________

Shanty

 

I had a planet,

just a little one

but still.

it had activities--

recreational

illicit

volcanic.

from a promontory above one of its seas,

I pondered what to do with a drunken sailor

early in the morning.

I had to rent out my little planet

due to the commute.

Years passed. 

When I returned and saw

what the renters had done,

I brought the flood in my righteous anger.

Things are better now,

lo these many months gone by.

I have a koi pond with native goldfish.

I sleep in until lazy o'clock

or until the stars wheel above my gingerbread cottage.

The sailor got sober, survived the flood,

and sings, "Weigh-hay and up she rises" 

when I stir

both my happy ass,

and the coffee he has kindly fixed

the way he knows I like it.

I have a planet,

just a little one

but still.

________

for What's Going On? -- "In Uncertain Times"

Music: Johathan Edwards "Shanty"

Two Sharks

 

I have two sharks inside me

swimming in tandem and holding my heart

between them like a little family 

walking in the dark.

I send them gulps of air from outside

as if I were some sort of oxygenated charity

with a face and feet, operating in the world

on their behalf like a proxy or prosthetic.

Oh fishies, confined and angry in the bowl of my ribs,

here come those old blues again.

Why does life go on so long, demand so much,

slowly dribbling out the cracked glass of years?

I have had ideas all along, fine ideas

to open a ministry in a dumpster,

a ballroom in an attic, a cemetery 

on a space station with the whole Earth for Ouija board.

I'm scared, fishies. Will the moon call you

and will you answer her tidal madrigal?

Will she require three voices, you and my heart?

Will you rise in glory, leaving me hollow, in salt and sorrow?

_________________

for Word Garden Word List--How To Sell a Haunted House

Conversant Animals In Stovepipe Hats

 In those days,

the skies were closer--

God peered down from nearer by

still tinkering.

Animals had names

and wore stovepipe hats

or tam o' shanters in various shades

and could speak.

Why tell us this

now, when vipers emerge

from every apple, with tongues

hollow and stiff?

I wish to soothe

your two exhausted ears

and place fish there, in the waters

of your mind.

Here is the boat

and the cloaks of soft fabric

to wear on the decks on the sea on the sphere

spinning the tale

of us,

every moment,

even now.

_____

for Word Garden Word List--Immortal Poems

Music: Cream (lyrics by poet Peter Brown)  Deserted Cities of the Heart 

Ballad of the Lost Shark

 A song for the lost shark

at the bottom of the sea

A song for the notions

that line up perfectly

A song for the children

who once were you and me

A song for the west wind

and the nest high in a tree

Sing, sing, sing, for no reason

just because you can

A song for the lost car

rusting in a field

A song for the card sharp

who says shut up and deal

A song for the baby

who was born and then grew old

A song for the kind ones

who give their hand to hold

Sing, sing, sing for no reason

just because you can

for the shark down in the deep sea

and you there on the sand.

Seaside Fable

 A memory came to me, riding in a wagon

pulled by a baboon. Sick and white-faced,

this memory asked for a glass of vinegar

and told me in Spanish that the baboon was a doctor.

"She can cure you," the memory assured me 

in a terrible cross-saw voice. "I'm not sick," I

insisted, but the memory barked, balancing

a world on its nose like a seal and said, "You are dead already."

This world spun on a wash of wine, yellow and sour,

and was no world of mine. "Listen, horrid seaside ghost,

ashes can never be castles again, and you don't exist."

That's when the sick, dying, putrescent memory-thing

bit me in the heart, and laughing, threw back its head as if hanged.

There was nothing the baboon doctor could do,

and seeing this, she hocked my memory and gave

me the ticket, saying, "Swap me your forgiveness,"

but I injected her with roaring fury and beat her to death 

with my empty heart.

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Giovanni's Room

Music: Men At Work Down By The Sea

Ode to Jimbo

 

"Kitten," he said to me,

"you are the worst kind of witless cow,"

adding, of course, the rest of the usual blandishments. 

What he meant, translated from Jimbo-ese

and run through a blender filled with

fresh fruits and nectar, was

"You are the sweetest, most appealingly goofy lovebug

that anyone could ever meet, and I am delirious with joy

to know you are mine, my little millstone." 

This is how I ended up on the beach, albeit the one

grandly known as the Salton Sea. Like Jimbo,

it is salty and ruined. Like him, it needs me.

There are locals here, and they eye me dubiously

but warm up and offer encouragements like

"Who the fuck are you? Are you stupid? Get lost."

They've made me feel right at home, they are so like my Jimbo.

I pick up a dead fish and wonder if I could save it.

Just some Evian and Aveeno could work wonders.

My Jimbo lies over the ocean; my Jimbo lies over the (Salton) Sea.

No wait, he's right here, dropping the butt of a Lucky Strike

onto the gray, contaminated sand. "Come home," he says.

He looks like a lost puppy wearing a days-old shirt

and is eating something he probably shouldn't. 

I say, "Miss me, dontcha?" Jimbo squints. "Shut up."

(That's Jimbo-ese for "Yes, baby.")  

Aw shucks and shiny silver dollars, 

if that's not love, I don't know what is!

___________

for Word Garden Word List--Last Seen LeavingLast Seen Leaving

Big Sur

 

Back in bus-and-duffel days

turned out, less to than away,

half-high, with no plan,

I went up the coast.

San Luis Obisbo, Carmel, San Fran

and on up to Portland.

That's where we go now

--people my age--

but this was then

when I had no means, no ways,

and just my naivete.

Out in the water, somebody said

to watch for the whales.

They live in the dark underneath,

and like me, come up, then back down

without learning a thing or so it seemed.

On the bus some guy liked

Gordon Lightfoot

You've Been Talking In Your Sleep. 

He spoke my language like a native

better than the pidgin kid that was me.

He told me a blue whale's heart

weighs as much as a grand piano

and can be heard from two miles away.

Bye daddy, behind me down the coast--

thanks for kicking me out.

I wondered, as Seattle became B.C.,

what if it's all just big empty water,

and me lugging some big booming beater for nothing?

Or what if I'm all ears

but the watersong was never for me?

What then? 

And what now?

I look out these days not at California coast

but at Michigan lakes,

cold and deep, choppy or still.

I know only that I still don't know

and never will.

________

for What's Going On? -- Whales and Other Wonders.

Music: Bobby Womack California Dreamin'

Seaside Jump Rope Chant

 

Take me down to ocean side

where sirens work in vending stalls

selling sea glass by the pound

and tide crabs leave their gazing balls.

I was young once, for an instant

and strewed my bones with bright confetti

made myself a red flag flying

as storm surge overtopped the jetty.

I married well, a starfish navvy

who built the seaside park their Ferris

They paid his labor with box jellies

who by their envy made him perish.

I asked the sirens for a chocolate

to hide from gulls who ate the season

when I was halfway into evening

and honey sunset let the bees in.

Take me down to ocean side

bring the digger in common clothes

to move the sand and move me on

in my folded-handed pose.

________

Rán

 

I can't recall what this place was like

before the renovations.

There were difficulties--

bombings, whatnot,

and the removal to the madhouse of the construction foreman. 

Blueprints are lovely, don't you think?

Smooth and blue as calm seas. 

Birth, though, that's a bloody messy business

of screaming gobsmacked arrival

held up in the hands of the midwife who never cuts her nails.

It's not so much that I love this place as it is that I was presented with it.

I woke in these rooms

with the hammering already in progress. 

I long for waterfalls and love,

but have skin like bricks, and hair like shingles.

People say, make it beautiful, you can do it!

Be your own fetch, a siren of the flooded basement,

luring yourself with your own song.

Make it your home away from home as drowning sailors do,

find the bright side of blistering paint and warped floors like heavy seas.

All right then. I have tattooed the name Ran

on my arm, see it when I hold you.

We are limited only by burst plumbing, crumbling rebar,

and our own imaginations.

We are castaways keeping our heads above water

in our Rubik's Cube Winchester House 

of gorgeous possibility.

__________

for Sunday Muse and shared with desperatepoets open link. 

Cottage On The Shore

 

Perhaps we are emotional gypsies

though our bodies become a sailor's cottage on the shore.

The heart, like a child, gets lost in reveries

and though it beats in stationary stasis evermore

it remembers warm July, desire, petrichor.

Let me sleep that I might dream and feel again the wagon's motion,

a scarecrow slinging duffel over shoulder, on to ocean.

_____

This is a rhyme royal. 

for Word Garden Word List--Randy Newman and Sunday Muse #251.

Music: Judy Collins Farwell To Tarwathie

Angel For Alley Cats

 

"Never trust a man in a blue trench coat,

never drive a car when you're dead" --Tom Waits, "Telephone Call From Istanbul"

Don't drink that donkey piss, Angelo.

It'll make you dream of broken bells.

You'll wake up with a six-armed woman

who keeps her heart inside a sandy shell.

Come with me, Angelo,

say you'll pay them tomorrow with windfall money.

I know a place where saints serve spring water 

from blue painted pitchers, and it tastes like honey.

Angelo, don't you have a mother somewhere

waiting by the window where the spiders spin?

Pretend I'm a rolling bottle and follow me

down the Old Beach Road where she'll let us in.

What am I gonna do with you, Angelo?

Is there fare for fortune under your hat?

Leave it, but bring your bouzouki

to play like an angel for the alley cats.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #224.

Music: The Psychedelic Furs "Heaven"

 

Between Miami And Havana

 It is hot.

a young man, affected and

slightly drunk,

is playing a conga drum in the heat.

I should shoot you right now, 

says the captain of the boat.

What if you cause a fire  playing that conga drum

on the deck in the hot sun?

Firemen swim out to the boat.

They climb nets

in time to the conga drum being played in the heat 

by a tuna fish disguised as an actor.

I am a tuna fish, says the affected young man.

I should shoot you right now, says the captain of the boat.

It is hot on deck in the sun. 

The firemen turn into seahorses wearing suspenders made from sugar cane.

------------

for Sunday Muse #193.

Black Jaye

He said, "Black Jaye, when you strike a match

you so quickly shake it out

as if each time you find you're with,

you long to be without."

I can't spare love for the Promenade

where searchlights cut the sky.

I paint my dreams in a bed of wheat

growing golden four feet high.

"Black Jaye," he said, "so small and slight

with your scarves of indigo,

why do you sing in Quebecois

telling no one where you go?"

Down by the shore, down by the sea

I loose my hair and call

to bones of birds all crossed and cursed

to stop me if I fall. 

________________

Courtship On The Edge Of The World

The girl whose face was time
was sought after for love, though she was immune.
Sailors dashed their splintering ships at her feet
and crawled the carapace of the rising moon.

Beauty is the star-marker, the sailors called,
and your visage the horizon we perish to unfurl.
She scoffed and said, my face is a mask
and you a troupe of clambering fools.

Behold, behind you, infinity spread!
cried the sailors as one, then fell down dead.

Dropping the guise, the girl confessed
my face is a cipher, the void my nightdress.
__________

for Sunday Muse #88. I have the flu so be kind, please.

When The Circus Boat Sank

When the circus boat sank

there in the sound,

both schedule and physical limitations were suspended

and everything slowed down.

Children dove to us as falling leaves

with apples in their mouths for our horses; 
manes like the arms of women whose chests hum with lullabies 

remembered from the drowsy south.

The tiger and I dance as months go by

and rescue loses meaning, light its immediacy.

One child has kept with us, here,

and looks to me for starfish and story.

"Once upon a time," I say to her,

"there was blue tiger, blue water, drowsy you, dreamy me." 

And so the story goes,

ever blue,

ever more,

everlastingly.

_____ 

for Sunday Muse #4

Diving Bell

Give a girl a diving bell and she'll get the message
that you think she walks on water, or dances on it, or
some romantic fah-de-lah like that.
There was whiskey on the wreck out by the sand bar
and the barkeep went there in waders, then wondered
how he'd get back to the tavern with all those bottles without drowning.

I said, hey ho, here I am, a girl who owns a net.
There aren't a lot of us left--
not since that weird with a beard came around
and everybody wandered off to do open mic about looking up, not back.
Here's a confidence, Mr. Barkeep
(I'll bet you hear a lot of them)
I'm not forgiving those assholes.

Give a girl the time of day around here
and she'll think you walk on water, or waltz across it, or
some low self-esteem rigmarole like that. 
I'm not that way,
but I'm willing to help you get the hooch.
Alls you have to do is come around and fix what needs fixing,

Including the broken window, 
and my child who needs to hear a dopey joke.
Do that, and I'll lend you my net, and all my old boyfriends, too,
to help you stock your larder, as it were.
(Like how I said that? "As it were.")
So let's just be real, okie dokie artichokee?
Fortune favors the bold, and I'd say
it looks like I'm your lucky starfish, Captain,
ain't I?
_______

for Camera FLASH at Toads.

Sand & Water

"Solid stone is just sand and water, baby; sand and water, and a million years gone by." --Beth Nielsen Chapman

They say that if you love a Selkie,
she will leave with the tide, and not return for seven years.
Lovers of Selkies walk the beach collecting shells
and other empty things, here...and here...and here.

They say that if you love a Selkie,
to keep her, you burn the seal-coat she's shed.
Then you'll have a Selkie wife
silently crying in your bed. 

Here I've been, since who knows when,
Drawing pictures in the dust on the sill while you slept.
Don't say you believe, in me, in us
anymore; what's been burned can't still be kept.

Down through the town, past the fields, to the water
with my seal-coat stitched from paper and leather,
I slip back home, on my back I'm carried
by the change in the waves, in your heart, and the weather.
_______

for Margaret's Artistic Impressions at Real Toads.



 

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. 

Love Me

Love me.
Do it by post,
semaphore,
or even by foot messenger.
(By the way,
I've moved.)

Poor drowsy tippler,
so sad for so little reason.
There are only a smattering of countries.
Don't you see, we can hardly avoid crashing into one another
at some point
if only we stop looking.

Remember when I read you
the poem about the falconer?
The widening gyre, and all of that?
You'll remember Yeats better for the way I recited it
with my tongue in your ear
and my finger lightly circling with every syllable.

One day, not soon,
I'll be giving myself a manicure with a jack knife,
having forgotten all my softer ways, when your signal will arrive.
Send love, little sparrow.
Send me your heart with a red silk ribbon tied around it.
Time is pitiless, and I need a tangible token
to prove that someone, once, looked for me

Even though I'm the way I am--
just bones and scrimshaw
in a language that whales know, and sing, and go...
to find harpoons that only hit us when we rise.
________

for Get Listed at Real Toads.