A Brief Instruction On Style

 Many hands make light work

and many hats make the Hydra happy,

thus, the night shift at the haberdashers.

Dig the butterscotch factory windows,

the glittery silver mercury pulse of industry!

Have you ever felt the urge to relocate to France,

reinvent yourself as a nun in a nation where faith is an artifact?

You and Saint Joan and a renegade postman

delivering visions, swordplay, and cafe au lait around the clock?

I have spoken to the Hydra with its ruby eye and hissing susurrations

hidden in a yellow profusion of forsythia.

It keeps a Wurlitzer and baseball cards and the Cretan Bull in there with it

and the beauty of their hats makes statues weep and flagstones dance.

Whether fez or porkpie, bowler or kepi,

one cannot think without a lure for angels atop one's golden dome.

Whether wide-brimmed or ostrich-feathered,

loveliness must begin nearest the seat of the Divine

And the Hydra with a set of nine, waves like sea grass

by the coastal shores of Nice

with the haberdashery humming behind it, all lit at night

like a cause,

a very banner 

or a blue streamer above the brim of the shining world.

____________ 

for Word Garden Word List #17 (Joni Mitchell).

and

Dverse Poetics: Leave Your Hat On.

 

 

 

 

 

Tell Me Everything

"Tell me everything," you said.
"Let's have no secrets between us."
Then you sent your ten sorceresses--
four around the hill, with one at the crest,
three together in the garden at rest,
and two down into the valley. Such beautiful dancers, these.

My name is Melusine,
a love letter written on wine-dark pages,
sealed in a jewelry box with a serpent in gold at the edges.
You were a spilled apple bushel,
not realizing that it is the seed, not the fruit that matters.
What was it in the one thing I asked you not to do,
not to know,
that made you so keen and cruel to know?

Not cruel to me, though I am angry; though I am gone.
You undid yourself, making me the instrument of it.
Don't you get it?
I asked only to be left alone at my bath,
that I might bobble the skulls of all my old loves
and wind around them in clumsy recompense.

The next time you come to a locked door, remember me.
Wind a grape vine around your hair,
wind the hemp and kick the chair,
do anything to give yourself a moment to think--
then, my used-to-be darling,
open that idiot mouth of yours
and swallow that forged metal apple, the key.
_______

For Magpie #258.

Thank you to Hedgewitch, for making me think of Melusine. 

Kind

The snake curled around my arm is not jewelry.
Go ahead; touch it.

Oh dear. I should have warned you
that I sometimes give terrible advice.

Never mind. Let me suck out the venom,
even if never quite enough--

and if my lips taste bitter as I kiss you, darling,
I apologize.

Please, while there's still time,
be kind
by whispering me your forgiveness--
my love so saturnine.
_______