Winter Wheat

I tried to make a bargain with the morning

Out on the dirt road

Frozen hard.

I said,

"I will swap you one of my dreams--"

But she shook her hair, the way straight women do;

(It was made of slanting light--

I could see right through)

Her boredom made my joints ache,

And kind of pissed me off, too.



I did something bad to the morning,

And had all I could handle

Rolling her down into the half ice of the river.

Ever seen a girl like her fall off a star?

The river held her for just a moment,

Then cracked its bones

And let her fall.

She sank

Like my heart does

Whenever you leave my little room.



I came back and told you what I'd done to the morning,

Though you were still sleeping

With one hand under your pillow

And the other

Waiting for me to kiss it

And fill it with wet delicious cherries.



What I had wanted from the morning

Was to swap out one of my dreams

(One of the good ones, with lightning and talking cats and fields of winter wheat grown high in a Kansas July)

For a simple promise:

That you would stay.

That you would wrap your body around mine and not leave;

That I could bury my face in your coarse black hair and breathe,

As if it were smoke from a smudge stick,

Keeping devils away.



But I killed the morning,

And left her blankly tossing her hair at the bottom of the river.

You will wake up, see the time,

And those perfect hands of yours will only grace cold car keys

While I kiss the devil

And call her by your name.

________

Disasters Elsewhere

What is more dull than other people's lovers?

And what is less compelling

Than disasters elsewhere

And the people who wring their hands over them?



What matters is

My coffee isn't right

And you have not kissed me

In more than ten hours.



I am a dry leaf.

Shall I shade you?

I need all the world's rain for myself--

Get out of here,

And take with you all the places I never go.



Once,

I was a messenger of divine kindness.

I taped together wounded butterflies,

And even watched your damn kids.

Now,

I have someone else do my dancing, though badly,

And I steal songs from the throats of yellow birds

To stuff into my stiff black shoes

Lest they lose their shape.



Someone else's lover came knocking at my door

With an earthquake in his hands.

People fell from him.

My steps shivered and cracked.



You know,

This coffee just isn't right

And you have not kissed me

In more than ten years,

But you hang all over that bastard at the door.

Did you get sick of women?

Or was it because my brown autumn eyes

Left you in famine,

So you sought out the flood?

_________

a little portrait of the butch from hell, for One Shot Wednesday

Feral Flux

I tried to fit in.

I did.

I tried to sleep in a bed,

To stretch out on linen sheets with the scent of lavender on my skin,  light as a blessing,

Or like snow on the frozen,

Staring straight up.



After a while, I always begin to itch and wear out razors by the pack full,

Every day,

Watching the dirt on my feet turn to pads,

My nails to claws.



I tried to lunch with the ladies.

I swear.

They ordered salads, and I meant to, too,

But before I knew it,

I was skidding across the table with a rabbit in my jaws

And it bled

On the cutlery and the bread,

And I grew nervous

As I lay it down dead and jumped through the plate glass

And into the night.



I tried to be what I saw.

Honestly.

But I have always been so hungry,

So wild,

So other.

I have skulked around garbage cans and allowed housewives to shoo me with brooms.

Now, though,

I will drag one by her dreams to my home dug into the earth.

I will call her by the name of the eclipsed moon.

I will wait for her until she comes barefoot to seek my golden gaze

On the coldest night of the year.



Then,

I will tend as smooth and soft as such things can ever go;

I will speak in the voice I forgot before my earliest memory,

And I will make love with her

This time--

Oh, this time,

Without searching.

_________

THE WINTER SCHOOL by Fireblossom and Hedgewitch

Darlings, I'm taking a departure from my usual unicorns and sugar fairies this morning, in order to bring you this collaborative effort from the almost illegally talented Hedgewitch and (for ballast) Yours Truly. Blame her for the absence of anime bunnies. I would have included them. And now, without further tedious ceremony, our poem...

THE WINTER SCHOOL



At the Winter School,
Classes were held at night--
Girls on the left,
Spirits on the right;
Our elbows scratched lessons on frosted windows,
And our teachers sang us lullabyes
While appearing to us as crows.

But they were not as kind as crows.
They cawed and pecked at living and dead--
We learned to cover the eyes, and stuff the nose
Inside a book, reading through our fingers, pass or fail,
Fettered with sweaty palms and liquid sighs,
Dancing with dragons and jumping from their tails
Was all we knew to do to see the sky.

But girls have their ways, and we had ours.
We hid tar in our traveling bags,
And stars in brown deserted bowers;
When the time was right,
We crept down the stair and into the night;
No stay or whalebone could keep us there--
Not with our summer-drunk dragons in sight.

I would be Circe and you dark Medea,
Me for the luring and you for the kill.
It was all a game, though we knew that such pastimes
As crows put together are contests of will;
Chaos would call us to fight their knight goblins, stranglers
With garlands of weeds, green gilded with lies
Gifting masks of agreement we knew would not fit us
So we called the black dragons to come from the skies.

_________

image: Medea

PS--fans of the ongoing Fireblossom-G Man grudge match have GOT to click HERE!

Sylvia Plath's TV

Twilight Zone wife turns beautiful over night;
Speaks eastern European languages--
Can train a cat to dance.

Is there a lesson here?
Is there light beyond despair?
Is there?

Twilight Zone wife joins the New York ballet;
Sees the future and the past--
Can bring back your man.

So, I'm asking again...
Is there light beyond despair?
A lesson to this nonsense
Behind her delicately
spreading
fan?

_______

for One Shoot Sunday

photo by Danielle Kelly

_______

Kali

Kali comes to me
In shell necklace and rings--
She stands by the water
By the water, and sings
For sailors and the water
And the bones that it brings.

Come, Kali, come
To my cove near the beach--
My cove by the water
Where we'll sing each to each;
Sing to each other
And share the split peach...

Kali is gone
But the peach it was sweet--
And the bones from the water
Lay smooth at my feet;
Smooth at my feet
And sharp at my heart--
The sailors cry, Kali,
From far down the deep.

________

Did you read this morning's poem, The Lycanthrope? If you didn't, go read it. I'll know if you don't, and I'll put a big black mark by your name in my awful little book.

photo: Kate Beckinsale
____________

The Lycanthrope

I look human.

I am not human.



She lived on the edge of the ice,

Like water running too fast to freeze;

She had long smoky hair--

Something heavy within her was always burning.

She had come back to the stony earth to die;

She was every element.

She had nothing.

She contained everything.

So, when the crow

(I know well)

Came to collect her soul like so much carrion,

I was waiting in concealment.



The world seems to die in winter.

It does not die.



I came down across the snow,

Quickly, like passion from a perfect touch--

And I almost caught that crow.

He lost feathers, and several heart beats,

Before flying away, a disturbing dream upon waking,

Hardly even real.

I lay down beside the dead gypsy.

I said,

Why did we not take each other in, like air, like restless spirits?

Why did we not carry each other like currents, like blackberries in cupped hands?

Why did we not bury each other, away from dull eyes, wrapped together like sticks with the same skin?

Why are you so still?

Why do the shadows slowly move across us anyway, indolent and indifferent?



I love, though I hate love.

I am human.

__________