Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun rides again.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Mykonos

 Sugar plum, fairy
who kindly took me in,
you looked like one of those
white buildings on Mykonos
clean as a tide
in an open shirt.

Me, just a ragamuffin then, but
you treated me like turquoise and silver,
a small sparkling thing.
I loved your love of Gato Barbieri
and the notion
that I was worth the introduction.

Sugar pea, you knew me better
than I knew myself,
didn't you?
That soothing shade of Greek blue is called
Ambiguous,
and it's lovely, like early morning
or an offered hand

in a pearly cuff.
______

for Dverse Poetics "double dipper." 
I used Sugar Plum. 




Sunday, July 24, 2022

Blue Train

 

Come on, we're taking the blue train.
You've tried crack, Coke, Eckankar and cans of spinach,
but all you get is dry sex with stick men
who babble all night about can't-miss ground floors in clown shoes you must be this dead to wear. 

Come down the gone escalator to the blue train.
Do a swan dive into a crystal bowl of beautiful doubletalk
and meet us inside the celestial suitcase,
lost between Rome and Bangkok but returned in the ice cream morning
to the hotel squirreled away in the pocket your spontaneous anthem.

Come in, we're just leaving to catch the blue train.
It's the overdose you can't find in stores, the big bass beat
the blood makes in your ears each time you dive off an ordinary Wednesday.
Nurse is here in case you faint, Electric Jimmy is here in case you don't.
Get into this, get right, get straight, get after it,

get in loser,

we're taking the humdingity third-rail high-speed no refunds blue train.
________






Sunday, July 17, 2022

Isla de los Fantasmas

 

On the Isla de los Fantasmas, the keeper's wife
spends dawn searching out exhausted birds on the pebbled beach.
She comes to them as if she were light itself
and believes herself to be light itself
but she is as broken as they are.

Realizing this, and wishing to compensate her for her kindness,
they transfer to her their laments, worn around her heart
like dolmens of sound. Within each one, she dies.
With each dawn, each bird, each song, she dies.
The wind is the keeper's wife singing.

It is not the currents of sky or water that exhaust the birds.
It is the endless impassivity of the surface they cannot bear.
Their wings are the pages of hymnals
their bodies are the bindings of hymnals
that can only close at last on the Isla de los Fantasmas.

The keeper's task is to keep the enormous eye of the light
emptying itself out at the water, and the weary birds.
The light comes to them as if it were the keeper's wife,
and believes itself to be the keeper's wife,
but she is down on the pebbled beach, in her dolmen, singing.
_________


Isla de los Fantasmas = Island of the Ghosts

a dolmen is a table-shaped tomb made of large flat stones






Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Poet

 


Loving you is like dreaming I am made of water
and then trying to run within myself.
I hallucinate a sun that rises in you refracting,
while the real one grows dull and tired turning grass to hay.

I compose ridiculous letters on bird feathers about the sky and its desires
with dust ink and lead bindings, to be read in the dark.
Nonetheless, all the brilliance with which you rule me, all the fascination you wield
is just a trick of reflection and depends upon this whim I dress up as magic

like a rabbit out of a hat, a thing that seems like a better thing, grand, ordinary, pure trickery.
____________

for Linda Lyberg's Poetics: Breakfast At Tiffany's. I used the following quote:

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.” 

― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories


Saturday, July 2, 2022

Common Fence

 

Some kind of poison, like a wounding word
has found the vines on the common fence.

My neighbor, fond of bottles,
goes around spraying when he's sober enough--
whole years go by when he's not.

I love the vines, the green view, their wild blind reaching.
They have more faith than a cleric,
more will than any new arrival with a nickel.

The vines are sick and brown on the neighbor's side,
thick and green on mine, and yet,
at the tips of the sick stems healthy tendrils have appeared.

Each morning I go out with my dog to check the vines.
I move slowly. Sleep is an old love whose face is a memory.
The seasons come and go, one dog is followed by a new one.

I worry for the vines, though they seem to be immortal.
The neighbor is the third there's been on that side.
My dog is the seventh of seven and may be a charmed soul.

I can't remember when the vines first appeared, or how the sun
got so high. Ten years go by in an afternoon.
I'm tired and call my dog to go inside. He follows me instantly,

with no thought for the vines, and no doubt at all
that he should follow me. I could cry for loving him so.
_________