Snow Day

 

Bosco 2003-2014

Zacky, my spring-heeled dog, goes bouncing into the middle

of the flyers around the bird feeder--

his pure simple joy as he watches them rise.

his tongue hanging out, his eyes alight, defies the winter.

We have had snow, then thaw, then rain, then refreeze.

The world here is icebound.

The rain pooled almost to the doorstep, but the

still frozen ground could not accept it and iced over again.

The rinks have endured for two weeks now.

My dog comes to the door, exhilarated, certain

that his mama will be there to let him in for a cookie and a nap.

I am his open door, his open heart, his centering sun.

Someone I know has just lost her dog--

she is crying. I am crying for them.

Two to four more inches is expected here shortly,

while winter plays the immortal.

As I hold my smiling pal, I think of my old dogs,

Sundance and Bosco, and how much I miss them.

They passed.

Winter will pass.

I too will pass, along with all my stuff and memories.

Today I will sit stroking Zacky and watching out the window

as the snow falls and falls. 

Winter will have its day but will fade, as will 

presidents and peacocks,

blue jays and babies,

a constant falling, 

with all of us aboard for the ride.

(Detroit Michigan, 2/13/25)

_____________

Written for What's Going On? "Landscapes."

Music: Dave Grusin The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter theme

Freezing Rain On A February Evening

inside, the pages, outside, the ice

outside, the night, here sweet delight

inside the tale, outside rages

a frozen fall of rattling white

playing out on facing stages

outside, the ice, inside, the pages.

_______

a sparrowlet

with a nod to William Blake's

Auguries of Innocence

for Dverse MTB

hosted by Laura Bloomsbury

Music: The Doors

End of the Night

 

January

 

I said to January,

just born and tilting like an upset vase

between heartbeat and nothingness,

"Borrow my hands

to hold yourself here. Rock yourself

into this motherless place."

Summer is an orange

in sections, skin as thin as a pulse,

her bright dress never meant for us. 

I said to January

with her hair of stars and darkness,

"You were born to grace the river ice."

January said to me,

"There is one kimono, spun of morning silence--

wrap with me inside it, as pleasure does with melancholy."

We slept and were steeped

in both love and loneliness. When she vanished,

I kept both and went on, into what was, and would be.

_______________

Shared with What's Going On?

Bimbo Season

 

Summer and I cannot really be friends--

she is tiresomely popular

with her garish daylight that extends

heedlessly into my delicious darkness.

She's the hot girl, skin-deep,

boring me to death with her obviousness

too loud, too cheap,

queen of the surfer boy entourage. 

If only there were some ceremony

that I could perform

to summon chilly winter here for me,

my old bestie returned.

I would live in a bus with bed and blankets

and a storm outside,

all the windows hung with trinkets

and--weirdly--streaming tv.

Yes, an all-comforts bare-bones hideaway

out in the distant sticks

up on four wheels on a winter's day

with soup and chocolate!

Sadly, here I am with this bimbo season summer,

my imagined paradise

far away and impossible--bummer!

White it out winter,

Come back with your cool quiet and I'll write you a killer poem 

to knock your woolly socks off. 

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Night Road

Music: Fleetwood Mac Bare Trees

1/31/24

 Some say this the two-hundredth of January,

and are as weary of it as if it were 

cold leftover meatloaf again

or their boss's face.

I shall miss it, though.

When I was 25, I saw Jim off at the train station,

his rucksack slung over a bony shoulder,

and I cried on the empty platform

not realizing until he was gone

that I loved him. 

January brought heavy wet snow that made me sore with shoveling,

then it turned to ice for a while, and now slush.

My heart is forever surprised and jumps when touched,

then sags as it dies like the snow, a stuttering death that repeats itself. 

I was wrecked as the melt set in,

the old familiar malaise in its favorite straight back chair.

Some say this is the two-hundredth of January,

and feel numb with it as if medicated. 

I hate to see it go, as I always do, my favorite season except for Fall.

Its sharp, unsentimental freeze breaks my ease,

and I know, even as it goes,

that I love it for how it hurts me

letting me know I still can care. 

_______

for What's Going On? "It's Wednesday" 

Music: Mazzy Star Fade Into You

The Ash Tree In Winter

 

In winter, the ash is a liar like me

no different in the copse from its fellows

a beauty in death for its filigree.

Its costume of stillness and symmetry

in the fullness of summer turned yellow.

In winter the ash is a liar like me.

It looks to the wind to lend piquancy

by enlivening motionless sorrow

a beauty in death for its filigree.

The green of the ash has invisibly

diminished as the borer could tell you.

In winter, the ash is a liar like me.

Quick heart gone dry inside of the ash tree

A dancer swaying beneath the gallows

a beauty in death for its filigree.

A carve that kills leaves it fine and fancy

from just the proper angle, heaven knows.

In winter the ash is a liar like me,

a beauty in death for its filigree.

______

for Dverse Poetics: Pounding the Pantemeter, hosted by Ingrid. 

Impossible Riddles

 " After last night's storm, the tulip petals are strewn across the patio where they mortally fluttered" --Church, Jim Harrison

I woke around 3am again this morning. 

Someone had been talking to me

pushing pebble words through cotton teeth, 

posing impossible riddles,

or,

I was in love with someone already vanishing,

or

something important was expected of me that I could not do.

At 7am I set out seed and peanuts

for the birds and whomever may appear,

maybe even myself, in a new body

not made of seed and feathers.

Everything hurts and I am always tired.

I am as soft and ridiculous as snow, 

holding winter's hand by instinct, leery of warmth, gray as January.

Here come the jays and starlings,

crows and cardinals,

like clockwork.

I watch them from the window and remember a day years ago.

I am both there and not,

here and not.

Dear eager raucous birds, 

will you be here again tomorrow?

Will I?

_______

for Dverse Poetics: "Songs of Unreason"

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. 

Dr. Morphia

A doctor was sent for the season

called counterfeit by

summer's heart.

No use in the cure, or the reason

that shadows and rings

keep apart

from the cure that coils in the foyer

of the house that love recommends

to the moon and its lilies who crave for

the stitches that wound

as they mend. 

The doctor prescribes herself autumn

and waits for ice to inscribe

a vow to be broken at midnight

by the needle

disguised as a bride

and when the old brag fades to nothing

and the peacocks their colors remove

the idiot winter with moon lilies wins her

with remedies

borrowed

and blue.

_________

for Word Garden Word List #2. 

In The Birch Forest

In the birch forest,

my lazy sister poses as a river.

In her hair, rims of ice 

where she runs an orphanage for birch leaves.

The chill black water is God's mustache.

He has crows for barbers

and my sister is His postmistress.

A workman carries in his sack

things said to his wife,

a few hours from a week in July,

and a small statue of St. Joseph.

His train will come soon, smelling of hay fields and lady slippers.

People say to me, is that your sister?

We invite them to stay, but they fade as we forget them.

Papa arrives home in the winter.

He is the Northern Lights, we are belled reindeer.

As Russian Orthodox,

we celebrate Christmas in January and Easter out of doors.

Papa carries my mother's lost babies in his work sack

where they turn into inked letters.

His love is their postage,

my sister their patroness.

Once each year they return, with ice in their hair,

to sit by July and remark how his whiskers look like birches in the breeze 

when he sees them, and smiles.

________

obligatory link back to Dverse OLN. 

The Pines

I made my skin call itself snow,

and wrapped that body around my heart.

There was no sound except the groaning of the pines.

The world has died, I said.

I have died, there is no sound except the pines.

There was still the sun, 91 million miles away,

dribbling through the branches of the groaning pines. 

There was still my skin of snow.

There was still my heart, a stunned bird fallen from the pines.

Hear the song of the snow falling from the pines,

falling on itself, increasing itself

in thrall to its remote Master,

saying, we are small white suns without heat,

bright, blinding.

I made my skin call itself cold,

and wrapped myself around my heart. 

I said, idiot pines, here is peace, here is stillness.

The pines stood groaning, green day and night,

oblivious to the Master's moods, saying glory glory.

All the while, my heart stirred, brown and puny,

whispering itself out as friable desire

for light, for voice, for the pines that sway

in the unseen, unending movement

of the empty, restless sky.

_______

for Sunday Muse #145.

On The Thin Edge Of November

 On the thin edge of November

smoky air flirts with freezing and the stunned birds

seem to lean forward on the precipice of a warning cry.

Last night I dreamed of you,

my chest a redding leaf poised at a point of immobility.

A wind came up.

Windows grayed.

I rose, denying ghosts.

(Even yours.)

----------

for my BFF's Flash 55 bash.

Apes In The Coffee

There are apes in a woman's coffee.

"We warm ourselves against a hostile environment," say the faces upturned in the steam.

"Asian disciplines,

activism,

on-line broadsides,

these failed.

But this warm pool...is become our haven."

The woman's mind and limbs are heavy as asteroids, 

her heart a falling anvil,

her simian teachers ascended, sanguine.

_______

for Flash 55, hosted by the amazing Hedgewitch O' The Wilds, noted connoisseur of cofveve. 

__________

Dogs

There are dogs who carry Winter in their mouths
and when they smile, it is your smile
with teeth as white as pitcher-cream.

Like you, the dogs do not speak
because what they want cannot be put in words.
With eyes like November noon-dusk,
they radiate need and knock my heart over
low enough to be carried off and cached.

In frost-dark, I am the Moon,
and the dogs are rings around me.
We howl at every kindness because we know
it isn't freeze that makes us flinch, but thaw. 

Like the dogs, I carry Winter in my mouth,
and when I smile, it is your smile
like a collar around my tongue
from a Master who wanted me
silent, but devoted, and other such prideful notions.
______ 

Big Boss Z

Peanut Man goes out in his back yard on a windy afternoon, picking his way carefully over the ice beside the house, and then high-tailing it over the snow to the back fence to see what neighbor dog Quinn has to say. That accomplished, he sees the birds under the feeder and takes a duty run at them, delighting in making them fly.

windy afternoon

bird house on its string swaying

as winter hangs on

______

for Season Your Poetry pt. 2

If those birdies want their seed, got to talk to Mister Z

 

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.

 

Music Box Church Bells

Music box church bells
over river rocks in a week-long dream;
the rosewood resonance still there come the daylight hour
with walnut splines for the curve of that fine aural wheel.

Music box church bells
in the snow-brush fingers of your gloves at sunset fall
with quilted maple and the movement gone melodious 
was religion enough, and that's enough...my love...that's all.
_______

for Tree Sisters.

Thank you to The Wood Whisperer for information about making a music box. 

 
 

Stymphalian Birds

for KJS

Zeus,
reduced to a fairy story,
his powers a parlor trick,
is told a joke by the Stymphalian Birds,
themselves now kept by old ladies who clip coupons
and attend Mass on Wednesday,
scattered like matrix dots around the pews.

Zeus laughs,
frothing around his too-fat lips.
This froth falls as snow flakes, here,
on the shoulders of our wool coats,
colored charcoal and navy blue.
Isn't that just like a man
to leave a mess?
And why this place, this park, this January dusk?
Why us?

"Stop bitching, sweetheart," you tell me,
turning to face me, slow as a blizzard cloud.
You place one black-gloved hand in my pocket,
the other over my heart,
and kiss me quiet as midnight.

"I want a Stymphalian Bird," I whisper,
later,
in your ear,
my tongue as careless as grandma's Siamese.
"You have one," you say to me.
It's true,
and isn't that just like a woman
to love such hard sharp feathers,
trusting her heart to a matchstick nest
balanced in a tinder tree?

Zeus,
you has-been, you local character,
boring the birds right out of the sky--
behold my darling, your daughter, your headache from the start--
with beak of bronze, bolts of fire,
and her pretty owl--
my heart.
________

for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads.  

Mulier Loquitur Mortuis

Winter is coming,
like ice jammed into an envelope, 
mailed sharp to the heart of your flabby complacency.

Oh, I'm sorry, dear.
I know how you hate talk of the slaughter
which necessarily precedes your roast of beef on its platter.

Still,
something just hit the window
hard enough to dent the lead and crack the old glass.

Rev'rend on his black horse rode,
passage marked with one red rose;
He found Esther, Esther cried,
one red rose by the waterside.

Get out of bed.
It's time we talked.
Don't you find me appealing anymore, with red in my hair?

The ostler had a fine shovel,
and my last thought was of nothing in particular.
Now learn, at my insistence, the value of doing a job yourself.

You look gray,
as if all your blood had turned to smoke.
Listen to you sputtering, ridiculous, invoking your cotton-eared god.

Rev'rend on your errand rode.
Esther cried and Esther chose.
Gospel came surprisingly
in bloom and thorn blood-picked by me.
_______

for grapeling's word list at Real Toads. I used "smoke", "winter" and "slaughter".

 

We Snow What We'll Be Doing Today

Bosco and I met this morning, as we normally do, to consider activities and procedures for the day.

As investigative officer, I took a look out of my computer room window to get a read on the weather.

As border patrol chief, Bosco peed near the gate to warn off intruders. Snow removal supervisor Fireblossom had cleared his work area previously.

Educational chair Bosco suggests that we spend the day reading. I concur. This concludes the minutes of the meeting of the Planning Board.

Risking charges of workplace impropriety, Fireblossom sent the following memo to Bosco via inter-office mail: