Black Blooms

 

If black flowers gave the earth its bones

and with their roots made purpose for a heart

could they--in profusion--each bloom alone

when innumerable leaves keep petals apart?

I bring you black blooms

which in dreams were red

strewn on a grave

which must do for a bed.

If black flowers' heads nod with heat

as a lover's will when told it's over

will frost only make them more discreet

and scornful of the simple clover?

I bring you black blooms

which October will kill

with inevitable, merciful

pitiless skill.

If black flowers die in a devil's vase

will November lament it's empty sill?

And will I curse your indifferent face

like black blooms preserved in a frozen rill?

Incarnation In Red

 

"Go to this place," I was told

or perhaps I told myself.

"You will be no one's darling,

and you will always be cold."

So I went, wrapped in damaged flesh.

My mother said, "Let's not show her to the neighbors."

In time, I showed myself,

swinging from our elm like an ape.

"Doesn't she ever stop talking?" someone asked my father,

He answered, "Not if I have anything to do with it." Bless him.

Once grown, I did all the usual things, had all the usual hopes.

Passed out with strangers. Saw spiders on the ceiling.

Angels came in dreams, and as animals.

I was helped by a man in a western shirt, and another with a Fu Manchu.

I decided, more than once, not to kill myself.

I was healed, more than once, simply by asking.

Always, I had roses wrapped in broken glass; I said a million times,

"I can do a thousand things with red, all of them fucking gorgeous."

"Why does she think she cannot be loved, why does she think she is ugly?"

Time said, "Because all the mirrors are warped, and the devil loves constancy."

"Go to this place," I was told,

or perhaps I told myself. 

I was gone so long, I stopped believing, except to be certain

that I am no one's darling, and will always be cold.

_______

Image at top is a manipulated image of Sleeping Lady Mountain, Alaska. 

Music: Lisa Gerard Sacrifice

Christening

 

By the lake there's a bakery that's sinking

and the lilies wear wimples all fall

they'll sell you croquettes of your bitter regrets

that can no longer hurt you at all.

When the moon sells its light to a lady

as a gift for her children to break

you'll hear their laughter for all the years after

until it dies down to an ache.

When everything dies in November,

a baby is found in the reeds

with such a fair face that you'll long to embrace

its body of riverbank weeds.

You'll declare yourself poet in a graveyard

emblazoned with roses and jade,

then you'll write a sonnet with the world scratched on it

and die in the bed that you've made. 

_________

 

The Duenna

 The light now is a young man

at a long table

with a full plate,

holding forth as jeweled women lean

to catch his words and scent like hungry cats. 

I stay next to the duenna, summer's old widow,

her skin a dead garden under the high neck and long black sleeves.

She used to read him stories

when the silence scared him

and he grew there in the crook of her arm

like a plum added to a grocery sack.

"I wish it would rain," I say to her as I have every day

since summer arrived like a visiting bishop

waving from a sedan chair,

cheered by women wearing head scarves

because others do, and God is watching.

The duenna pats my hand.

I am sick of the brightness of white shirt and linen jacket,

arms gesticulating as children's do when feeding the swans,

and the swans dip their faces in mock modesty.

If only the wind would rise and the sky darken,

this tablecloth would show

how wings are meant to be used,

plates and wine glasses smashing on the stone floor.

"In time," whispers the duenna, as calm as a bread loaf.

These blowy tales will wear themselves out,

the cats and swans will begin to bicker,

and the nights will lengthen beneath our feet like shadows.

Then the duenna will shed her weeds

and wear the moon on her shoulders glittering.

_______

Musci: Bananarama Cruel Summer

Canada Heart

The chime of your kiss

Made me forget the chalk 

that marked the stitch-line

where madness

met easy charm.

I don't wear vanilla scent

anymore--it reminds me of

your flocked, bread-crumb skin

the braille I

got lost in.

Toronto has Billy Bishop Airport--

you can fly in,

fill a bag at the duty-free

then cab it

to Yonge Street.

We made love at the Double Tree

with a balcony

to waver on the edge of, after.

Oh, Canada--

Canada heart

is the half sweet, half bitter

half bustling,

half empty landscape where

missionaries say,

"I knew her."

That is where I found this poem, north of Yellowknife,

and south of solace not looked for anymore. 

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Music: Gordon Lightfoot Affair On 8th Avenue

October

 

These early evenings, the sun sinks slowly,

like a 'do-ragged painter down spider-leg scaffolding.

We are all weary these days

as the world rolls beneath us and we logwalk,

our eventual fall following beside us like an unpredictable dog.

Then quietly, as crickets guard the evening filigree,

your ghost comes to me

where I smoke in the Adirondack

under the weak-sister yellow moon of the outside light,

to portend a storm that's already passed and gone.

In a canning jar, under the basement stairs, 

I have kept your hoodoo,

that sacrifice chant-dance made of woodsmoke and razor grass

that you wove to your bones

to make me love you as if you were food, as if you were solid earth.

Whether in Butte or Chicago, Pushmataha County

or Devil's Hand, it makes no difference.

Even the ocean is not shatterproof, so my bags drowse in the attic,

with old costumes and dressmaker's dummies

that you went to while I slept off the soft poison of your words.

I know why you're here.

I know why yellowjacks have stingers

and I can't write these poems forever just to stave you off.

You'll use the knife I gave you as a pick

and play some stupid banjo breakdown at my funeral

as if it were spring, as if you were sane, as if I didn't matter.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ric Masten.

I don't smoke. The poem lies!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot "Dreamland"

Imprinted

 

A ten year old girl gave birth to a black swan,

a dead priest resurrected. 

The first living thing the swan saw

was a weasel, and it took up residence in a dusty burrow under the porch, 

    behind the broken latticework.

From there, it flew out at passersby

with a great explosion of feathers and hatred.

It liked to ride on the back of its father,

making declamations about the nature of love

     while depicting the hand of God in bird shit down its father's coat.

The swan was elevated to high position

and saw to it that the girl was punished in accordance

with Old Testament teaching. 

It was really a vulture, its father a demon,

     but it ate well, fathered a numberless flock, and was well-respected

by those who wore its symbol, carried its banner, and aped its empty fury.

__________________

for Sunday Muse # 226. 

Music: Jethro Tull "Song For Jeffrey"

The Boathouse In Winter

 Fishing poles lean against the wall like sailors

bewitched by sirens

or made lazy by plum wine and local taxis.

Oars, rejected by the frozen lake,

brood and search the grain of their wood

for bitter poems of chard and cranberry.

Outside, the willow is a mother whose children have gone.

In the ice, willow leaves wear the panic of stopped hearts.

In their minds

a path stretches into and between orange groves.

In their dreams

there is dancing, though with whom and to what music, they cannot say.

In their souls

the grief of the fallen, the motherless, the snow-blind.

Lake, why do you scorn sailors.

poets,

and fools in their clumsy boots on your shore?

Gone is the memory of holding the boat against your body

and the murmur of your voice

like a great heart about to fail

from the thorn

and the hook

and the plum wine sky of evening.

______________

for Word Garden Word List #13 (Gordon Lightfoot). 

There Is Snow

 

There is snow

on the steps of a church where nuns' lives turn to dust.

a mute sun sleeps dazed in the low sky

and starlings let their wings fall, giving up all memory of flight.

The street is empty,

the silent intersection a cross

held in the still hands of an old priest

turned to stone forever.

Women in their black shawls move quickly

but the low sky has stopped and falls

bit by bit

on the steps of a church where an old priest has died.

The nuns are silent.

The women wear their black shawls,

and always,

there is snow. 

_________

I guess this is sort of a sketch. It interrupted what I was doing this morning and demanded to be written. There are a lot of abandoned churches in Detroit, and while editing this, I had them in mind. The congregations, often ethnic,  grew smaller and older until the parishes were no longer viable. 

Eyeglasses Like Morning Mist

1.

Eyeglasses like morning mist one wakes to

or a neighbor's house seen through falling snow.

I can't recall or summon up the moment

when they began to film, smear, obscure

and soften every object like a too-polite host.

2. 

He is a secret creature, keeping his own counsel,

his heart right there in his eyes, but his eyes useless.

"Here, boy," I say in my love-voice, as if I were a river

and he the one born in love with the blind leap.

He fears nothing, I am his safe shore, kind, constant.

3.

I was twenty, though I was sixty, in love, sitting alone

with my novel when the bus creaked up, its numbers

broken, aslant with rain. I closed my umbrella, got on,

dropped my change in the box, swayed when we moved

and saw through the window my book, blurred, forgotten.

4.

After, you know, I saw you everywhere, and never again.

A certain wave of black hair, someone's careless rhythm

crossing a parking lot, swinging a bag or a child's hand,

I mistook you everywhere, nearly kissed strangers, blinked

back sudden tears, so angry, so confused, so blind sad.

5.

Eyeglasses like morning mist when one wakes to

to find the beloved novel on the floor face up

and opened to the wrong page. Was I on pavement?

in the back yard? in bed? in grief? when the stars tilted

and I knew I had lost the heart, the luxury, to leap.

_________

for dverse Meeting The Bar, "Cadralor."

Hybrid Perennial

 

He brought her a manuscript made from sidewalks

and evening air.

He had eaten stars, nearly died, fathered a revolution,

all while admiring the lilies in her hair.

She complained of her situation and boredom while drinking

formaldehyde.

He developed a cough, and from the cough

came the man she now lounges beside.

Someone buried the manuscript and where it was buried

roses unfurled.

He fills his pipe with suicide, does not recognize his only child

and the woman smiles, become an ingenue, a cipher, a nattering girl.

______

Three Short Poems

"Jones"

Jones
finds Empty
and fills it
with lonesome lies
in a fake truth suit.
There were better Parts Unknown meant for you.
_____

"Chop Shop"

Chop
this shit
into lines-
it still won't be
poetry, baby.
You have to pay to learn that foreign tongue.
_____

"Mercy Clouds"

Look--
water
ripple-topped.
Gone tomorrow
with the mercy clouds.
Kiss me now. The sun will warm my suitcase.
______

for Fussy Little Forms--tetractys. 

Suicide happens when a person's emotional pain exceeds their ability to cope with that pain. But there is help. If you are in trouble, pick up that ten ton phone--tomorrow can be better, even if you don't believe it right now. National Suicide Prevention Help Line: 1-800-273-TALK.

"Goodbye...my friend. I didn't know you, but I've been places you've been." (Tim Hardin)

 

Involuntary

"I was born here and I'll die here/against my will" --Bob Dylan

 

Borne by a yellow-black bitch and dark as a plum,

our cat tried to asphyxiate me,

but angels slipped me breaths 

disguised as fists.

I became the cellar fighter of the infant ward,

with a smile that peeled paint

and the ability to read minds.

I planted nightmares

with bone-breakers 

from the little perfect fingers of every thought.

Now, here I am on the street,

baking bricks on my tongue

and cursing up cathedrals where burger places sank.

Come to bed with me, woman,

here in the alley on my mattress barge.

I'm a woman too, under the bruises and fractures.

In the middle of the night,

my instincts will kick in and I'll thrash,

whipping and snapping like a downed wire--

I can't control it. 

I'll sorry you a dove from my prison cell. 

All I want

is to be arrested with my dogs under the Mann Act

while trying to die in the pansy garden

under the birch branches

in Michigan in the spring.

Custody can be mistaken for love. Can't it?

I'll straighten my fingers for the first time in my life,

crawl out from a crease in my target-face,

and pretend I'm some beauty

on the Mackinac Bridge

stepping over into the clean of the breeze.

_______

for both Poets Of April and An Antic Disposition at Toads.

 

 

Snow

It snowed.
People left for work with wipers and defrosters going,
came back shimmying up the street, 
wheels scrambling and bulling their way up the drives. 

I put on coffee, watched movies,
stared at the thick flakes in the shifting wind outside.
Trees bore it, branches burdened low,
slung by a stationary gust called ice. 
______

a 55.

 

Dido

She's so proud of her jugs, but they're only full of wash water.
Who else would wear diadems and diaphanous gowns to do a load of colors?

She says she gets a weird high down there in the basement,
and tells the future to Pecky, miserable in his cage,
more fascinated with millet than prophecy.
The sun, to him, is a fairy tale;
the rattling furnace is as close to a tree as he'll ever get. 

God, I hate her. She's so nice, and so stupid.
Going through the pockets of her man's jeans, she pulls out a diamond
from among the phone numbers and weed dust.
She sticks it in her eye and starts speaking in tongues. 

For fuck's sake, the cycle's almost done,
her kid is howling upstairs because Thomas the motherfucking Tank Engine ended,
and now I have to pick up her slack while she la-dee-dah's around 
like a brain damaged nymph.
"Snap out of it!" I screech, and she blinks, then frowns,
then flips open the machine.

"When did you buy that?" I ask her. What about your precious jugs?
She waves her hand.
Her one diamond eye sparkles, the other looks vaguely up at the ceiling.
Pecky screams, apropos of nothing.
"Bless your heart," she says. 
The furnace kicks on.
Her dog comes down and circles three times, then shits next to the dryer.
"We're blessed," she adds as she hefts a plastic basket on her hip,
then turns and rises up the basement stairs 
like carbon monoxide inside a party balloon. 
_______

for Camera FLASH! at Toads.

Left Unsaid

The time change, this forward jerk
offends God--
look it up, Poindexter. 

It will be dark again in the morning--
a half star from the night will fall like an acrobat,
and the deaf ear will snow itself silent.

All I wanted was a particular voice of yours;
the soft one, lavender-scented, rare.
I tried to let you know,

but the order of things was already skewed.
Maybe in the fall I'll get you back for one sweet reclaimed hour,
but until then, 

stay out of the chronology of my poems,
Stranger.
______

Oh man. Say it's not true.

I am saddened this morning to hear of the death--apparently by heroin overdose--of the great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. I loved him in "Flawless", "Doubt","Capote" and "Magnolia". Not so much in "Love, Liza", though it was the script, which had him huffing gasoline throughout, and not his acting that I didn't care for. As a recovering person, I'm shattered that such a talented person has died by that familiar demon. I'm grateful to have escaped, one day at a time. I'm sick that this incredible actor didn't.

It's amazing to me how personally connected one can feel to an actor or actress, because something they brought to life resonated in one's heart and soul. Actors and writers do the same thing, don't they; they make tangible those intangible feelings we all have, and give them form we can look at and nod our heads and say, "Yes, that's it." And we feel that we come away with a little piece of truth. A little more humanity.

Goddess rest his soul. He'll be missed.