The Memory Place

 

This is the memory place, the preserve

of hollow wallpaper grandmothers,

stale gingerbread eyes balanced on

straw shoulders, fragile as a dream.

In this place, maple-leaf red and long

as love letters, her hair revives again.

The swing rope rewinds itself and 

her feet are steady on the knot. 

This is the place where what once was

soaks the air like a diary left on a porch rail. 

Everything is musty, throats close, eyes water

until I take my place, brittle, superannuated,

a carousel horse with painted eyes, spinning.

In The Garden Of The Moon

 

In the garden of the full moon

the pregnant moon

the mother-moon,

a silent copper bell rests its eyes.

Bronze from autumn evenings

gives the silent bell

a voice to pray with,

asters to sleep with, and deep red Malaga wine.

Outside the casement windows

which look out on the garden,

the Seasons argue

in voices poured from porcelain ewers.

Do you remember the crows

who ate the pears that hung 

dark and shy like lost children

in the garden of the Moon?

The mother-moon gathers them

with a thimble on her finger

stitching them into tomorrow and tomorrow

while the copper bell and the quarrelsome Seasons sleep.

The child we might have had,

is curled in the casement window

where crows bring silver stars from indigo nights

and a bell rings in prayer and sorrow.

_______

for Sunday Muse #171

A Man

A man grew
up, out of the April Michigan ice
in my brown grave of a garden.

This man was never a child.
He never bounced some goddamned ball
or climbed into my lap for a story.

What I'm saying is, this man wasn't natural,
though he grew there
among the astonished screaming jays.

How can I sleep, knowing this shapeless bastard
is leaning upright out there,
moaning like the last lover on earth?

For now, the hard earth is his vice,
he stays half-born, entire,
fucking with my head, expecting some sick future.

Slashing rain and warmth as sudden and wrong
as a stranger in one's kitchen
will free him, he will roar the mud from his throat and tarnish my name on the dead medicine of his lips.

He will call, I will come, terrified and scalded,
to be touched and opened by him,
to weep in his arms, hissing damn you, darling, damn you."
_______

for day 13.

Mums

When I die,

may it be at mid-afternoon, in autumn.

May there be a a westerly breeze

carrying the scent of a burn barrel not much distant.

When I die,

lay my dog's old leash and collar across my hands.

If my life has had roses, sunflowers, asters,

leave me with simple mums

Like distracted children made to see off 

an old auntie they hardly know

and who is less interesting

than today's red leaf, or tomorrow's taste of cider.

_____

for Sunday Muse #46

 

 

In This House, The Ghosts

In this house, the ghosts are as common as hung laundry--

they are yellowed newspapers caught behind the lattice-work,beneath the porch.

Down a long straight hallway--the bloom at stem's tip--

a paper lily,

my collection of you, shining with rain.

A woman got in the only way I had left unguarded,

in the steam from a midnight kettle.

She wore silk from Chinese mulberry 

and dismissed me as curator with softness and tongue.

She made her body a maze between me and my lily room,

a baffle for your gifted ghosts.

My desk is in the bedroom now

with an aubade on the wood, in fresh polish. 

________________________

for Micro Poetry "Long Ago Rooms"

 

Lilacs

My desire has changed its name
to the scent of lilacs.
How can I call it back?

The night wears a purple cape
and stores the sun inside a lace-up shoe.
In the morning, I dangle it from my fingers, still dreaming.

Woman of the green lawns,
you with words composed from lilac wood,
make your body a boundary for birds to mark their way by.

The night is a grandmother I never knew.
She drapes the sun in a tent of dough, with practiced fingers,
calling to me in the morning, when she is gone.

Woman of the curious starling,
you'll find my house easily enough.
There is music from a violin, then none. Then again. Then both.

My desire has changed its name
to the scent of lilacs.
In the morning, I dangle it from my fingers, still dreaming.
_______

For day 8.

Between Order And Chaos

Between order and chaos,
in the interstice between air and swallow's wing--
in the silent interlude between rippled pond and snow-dusted ice,
there lies the thing I have wanted to say.

I have been thinking about the difference between old glass and new;
whether the wave is perceived or actual--
in the pane, the mind, or somewhere beyond.
And....is the smooth order of new glass wanted--needed--
in every window, upstairs and down, from vane to garden shed?

Today, I thought of your hands,
swallow-small; and like them, never still.
I thought of you holding a knife, an orchard apple, a fallen bird, my face.
I knelt among the tomato vines held on their stakes,
thick with green leaves going yellow around red offerings.
I sobbed. 
I couldn't help myself.

In the indigo between coin-moon and a million stars,
between ink and score where the fermata speaks to a single heart beat,
there lies the explanation, the cold-water borderline
between order and chaos, wrapped in silk, 
held between fingers like a tarot card.

Oh...chaos the surface and the core at once.
Order, these lines, these rows, these days and weeks;
the ones I live in now,
with my routines, my dog, and this terrible, lovely music
pressed between my ear and the late-year air--
for you,
for angels and devils,
for sane and insane,
carried on a gust that swirls forward in a round dance,
no end or beginning,
called by no one, moving through rows and woods, over water, into winter.
_______

Violent Vegans Speak Peace

At the rally, the crowd was already at a rolling boil
by the time I climbed the makeshift stairs to the platform.
I gave them truth!
Fire!
A little leg!
They responded with howls!
Bouquets!
Bottles!
Drunken gunfire!

I am the associate director and alternate treasurer
of Violent Vegans Speak Peace.
We have our own passwords,
catch phrases,
gestures;
you may have seen people making a vee with their fingers
and waggling their tongue.
This is the Violent Vegan trademark, a call to speak peace around the world.

In New York, Oslo, Paris and Moscow,
we spread our message
with pamphlets,
sit-ins,
arson
and instructive art.
In each city, I deliver my spiel--
I talk and talk and will continue to talk until the creature-eating stops.

Dar L., our leader, handsome in her beret and boots, is concerned about me.
She says that my workshops,
broadsides
and letters to the editor 
have become infused with nonsense about Mariah.
Her who-me? smile,
her widow's peak,
her clever use of rude language,
and my increasing--and, in this case, irrelevant--speculations about her sexuality
have begun to turn up regularly in my polemics.

Dar L. is right, of course.
I believe in the V.V. cause and all that,
but where my genuine passion lies is in imagining that Mariah carries my pamphlets in her boho bag,
that she is there, at the edge of the crowd,
wearing her turtleneck and tam-o'-shanter,
listening raptly as I talk about
revolution,
kindness,
hand grenades and the shape of her incredibly sexy lips.

I am in danger of being expelled
from the Violent Vegans Speak Peace movement.
My loose lips,
my never-ending single-minded sick-making sappy bullshit about Mariah
flows like a Niagra of smitten idiocy
and my inability to stop yapping about her is costing me everything.

Nonetheless, here she comes,
up to my table
with the stickers,
manifestos,
and vegan refreshments.
I can see it in her face, she has heard everything, knows everything,
except for the one thing I have managed to hold back
for fear she might stop doing it if she knew.

Oh sweet reward! There it is,
the who-me? smile,
the "hey, whatcha doin'?" from her impossible lips.
oh goddess
oh goddess
oh gee
aw shucks!
"Want to get out of here?" I ask her, the boldest thing I have ever said. 
"Want to grab a burger? or...."
She does! Here's to my secret slyly kept,
though everything else be compromised, ad infinitum. For Mariah! For love!
__________ 

For my "Secret Love" challenge at Real Toads.

Proof

Let's be together. We'll take pictures for proof.
Fill our mouths with those heart-shaped candies
and say the words, those melting words--
a dollar hidden in your hat brim, an amulet tucked inside my shoe.

Pretty wildflowers grow
fed from the slack-jawed smiles below--
blackbird, bluebird,
cowbird, crow.

Here is our memory book, let's fill it and call it a life.
If you need anything, ring this little bell;
I'll blow in to say the words, those healing words--
like the cutest little Christ-girl, your do-the-devil wife.

See the sunflowers, tall and fine
lining the road from our prairie cottage here--
sun burn, sour churn,
your lies, mine.
_______

"Ghost Maiden in the Meadow," 2015, by Angela Deane

A little scribble for The Storialist.   

AGS

In the high grass place behind the half-built house,
there were grasshoppers on stalks
and it was just a short, secret walk 
down to a creek no one else knew about but us.

Back there, we didn't care about the real world--
there were willows and birch
and a glorious feeling of being out of the reach
of those who didn't like the girls we'd become.

I brought Peach Creek and you had Berry Frost,
and then there was a bottle of Plum Hollow just in case.
You lay back on the grass and raised your arm,
shading your eyes as you watched the red-winged blackbirds race.

We should have been in class, mute and bored silly,
but instead we went down there and talked about everything,
most of it ridiculous, but it didn't matter--
we had the day and a buzz and our mood rings stayed cherry red.

I shouldn't have kissed you, I guess.
I shouldn't have given in to the comfort and the blur.
There were things we kept secret after that,
truth we saved for Annie Greensprings, and only spoke for her.
______

For the Real Toads mini-challenge. For anyone who doesn't know, Annie Greensprings was a cheap wine they had in the 70s. I loved the stuff. You kind of had to be there.