Mother-In-Law's Tongues

 

even

as the edges grow

cutting open my body-womb

spirit sheath,

I speak the wound called poetry

blooming dying leaning to

the light.

_________

A cameo poem for What's Going On?-- "A Cameo Appearance".

Word Garden Word List--A.E. Stallings

 

Hello my little epic heroes! As promised, a special treat this week, as our List is taken from the collection "Like" by A. E. Stallings. I love her because she alternates between ordinary domestic situations and Greek myth with the ease of a circus juggler. 

A.E.Stallings

What I particularly love about her poems is her deceptively easy-looking use of form and rhyme, which lends elegance to everything she has to say. Raggedy raggamuffin that I am, I hope to emulate her in this, but you may do as you wish and either rhyme or not, and use form or not! You can learn all about her and see examples of her work HERE. 

Meanwhile, what we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then sit back and defend the pass at Thermopylae with all of your brave poet pals! This prompt remains active through Sunday.

And now, your List!

amazed

clover

devout

dreams

eggs

glass

glue

huge

leggy

luck

mystery

numbered

proverbial

quiet

snack

sweetness

temporary

toy

winter

yarn

Yarn Ball

 

The devout go to graveyards, too.

numbered from the day we are born;

winter-bearers disguised in gentian blue.

Every cat knows the yarn ball has its end.

stitched into a world of glorious patterns

comprised of flesh, genomes, accident, atoms.

I am the baby playing in the April clover

riding inside the disappearing bone-brittle

biddy, herself a rider who with Charon must settle.

In between I live my dream within a dream

within a buzzing hive of urgent ephemeral illusion,

a corporeal toy. an aspect of God, in a barrel on a waterfall stream.

___________________

for Word Garden Word List--A.E.Stallings

Hobby Horse

 

I should have known

when I offered Hobby sweet, lovely sugar cubes

and she just sat there

like, lobotomized or something.

Sing a song with me Hobby!

Tell me a story about horses!

Recite a fun rhyme!

Dance with me!

Or, just fall over on the floor. 

~sigh~

Doctor Dollie, Hobby seems sick.

She won't eat anything,

she hasn't used the bathroom, like ever

and seems out of touch with her body.

Neigh if you can hear us, Hobby!

Stamp your hoo--

Oh, right. 

Wink, then! 

Oh Hobby, I love you

even though you don't do anything

or say anything

or even seem to know I'm alive

just like Mommy loves Daddy!

Hobby, we shall ride the range

even though you're passing strange

I will love you, love you true

and never make you into glue

Hobby, wild horse of the western bedroom!

with a head full of fluff

and a body like a broom!

Hi-yo, hi-yo Hobby! Awayyy!

I will do everything!

Do for you and talk for you 

preparing me for marriage 

somedayyy! Hoorayyyyyy!

____________

for  Poetics: "Running  With Horses" hosted by my friend Queen Cool Dora!

The adorable hobby horse pictured is available on Etsy from HappyHobbyHorsesHH. 

Music: Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band Equestrian Statue.

Flight of the Arctic Tern

 

Come on this polar expedition

they said.

It'll be fun.

You might meet someone

bring a gun

they said.

Where are they now, those golden friends

with their golden 

spilt ends

and their friendship that never ends

written on a napkin

in pencil?

Oh, wire cage towel mother,

how about a hug?

How about a rug to take a nap on?

All of this pretty blue ice

seems to be getting the best of me

lo these

many years on the floe. 

Oh, furious angry white bear with your

cotton-ball cubs

somebody loves you, don't they?

I could tell

as you were shredding me all to hell

that you were the white carpet type

with the correct wine

a smart address

and annual membership at the wishing well.

I'd like to be an Inuit with a movie library

here on the hard-pack.

Given six months of sunlight,

I could repair the damage from the constant calving

and get right. 

I'd go home, with my raging PTSD carefully cradled

in a nest of newspapers 

inside my luggage. 

The airline would charge me extra to carry it

and make me jump out

after calculating

altitude and windage.

Hello dear friends, I'm back

I would say

landing hard at Cuckooville Subdivision

in a spray of

wing ice and duty-free fragrances

direct from nowhere

where your children are doing well,

your husbands are golf course gods

and you,

oh you,

pretend not to notice that I'm sliced to smithereens

hanging unfashionably upside-down

like the tongue 

who once brought music

to your bell.

______

for Word Garden Word List--Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Music: Donna Lewis Agenais

Word Garden Word List--Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

 

Hello my little eccentrics! I am running a little bit behind getting the List up for you this afternoon but am working my happy behind off to deliver it to you in good order.  This week our source is a 2012 novel by Maria Semple entitled Where'd You Go, Bernadette?  (There is also a movie version.) 

Maria Semple

The book is quite a hoot, and worth it just for the bit about the blackberry vines. You'll see, if you read it! 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others and then bask in the perhaps unexpected place where your poem took you. 

And now, your List!

annoyed

bitch goddess

brooms

cow

cuckooville

elegant

furious

hostage

library

music

parkas

pencil

polar

politely

PTSD

puppet

robot

sadness

shocked

unhinged

The Way It Looks

Oh your friends call you Lily Faloma

but that's not the way that you are

It's too much of a gentle misnomer

for a shooting star

                                                 --Al Stewart

It's not the way it looks

the moon in the sky

your face in the mirror

the thing that was done or not done. 

It's not the way it looks

the moon, lonesome rock out in space

ask the fascinated tide

about the gravity of lit soul

It's not the way it looks

your face in the mirror so lined

ask the devils, those angels that free you

from a birdcage of bones 

The mirror limits vison

the moon limits sense

and everything you are or are not

will, in time, incandesce. 

____________

This song has been on my mind for days now. The woman he's singing about reminds me of me.

Al Stewart Song On the Radio

 

Word Garden Word List--Richard Wilbur

 

Hello again my versifying valorous flock! This week our source is the poems of Richard Wilbur. Find copious information about him, as well as many of his poems HERE.

I have chosen him because I feel a sharp thirst for poets who employ rhyme and form in their work and Wilbur fills the bill very nicely, though I have a stupendous example to use in a future List once her books arrive and I have read them! Shh, it's a secret!

"Wilburrrr!"

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then just link up, visit others, and then sit down for an enjoyable episode of your favorite old tv show! This prompt remains active through next Sunday.

And now, your List:

airy

ashen

bells

ceremony

cheat

city

dead

grackle

hasty

mix

motors

natural

office

oven

sand

shells

speech

tigers

toxic

voices

Bird Watching

 

grackle, expounding

A cowbird and grackle were in disagreement

over a definition of terms.

Astride a dead sparrow, its small breast pierced,

the grackle explained this action

in terms of disbursement of seeds. 

The cowbird objected, arguing that the grackle

was a cheat, ending a life

already in progress and pointed to the ashen sparrow,

non-renewable, lying still

as a stone and twice as useless. 

Don't get holy with me cowbird, scoffed the grackle.

You're nothing but a flim-flam bird

and a deadbeat parent, letting the other raise your brood

by knocking the originals

out of the nest like so many shucked hulls.

Murderer! they both cried, each to the other with scorn.

The grackle strutted about,

proud and righteous, while the cowbird sang the faux

river in its throat,

that beautiful false flow from which none may drink.

I saw all this from my window, an avian stage play

with knives and subterfuge.

All day until dusk I turned over the problem of who

was in the right, but was interrupted

by a million starlings screaming for either, or both,

or just to hear their own voices in cacophony as the

weary sun gave up the yard to shadows and moonlight.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Richard Wilbur.  

The cowbird leaves its eggs in other birds' nests; the hatchlings shove the parent bird's eggs out and run the parent ragged feeding the cowbird chicks who are often much larger than the bird's own chicks would have been. Also, the adult cowbird can make a sound that sounds like gurgling water. You can hear it here:

As for the grackle, they are sometimes bad neighbors at the feeder, stabbing smaller birds with their beaks or raiding other birds' nests and killing the babies. They don't always do this, but sometimes they do. I have been feeding the birds for over 20 years and there have only been one or two years when the grackles were like that, but when they are, they're relentless. 

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?

Word Garden Word List--Whisper Down the Lane

 

Hello my gabbling grown-ups! What if... what IF... something you had done and thought was far behind you started gaining on you? Yes, you with the steady job and respectable situation; what if someone or something from yesterday's mistakes started leaving you little messages, little reminders that all is not, after all, forgotten and not nearly forgiven? Why, then you would have Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman, and you would also have the source novel for this week's Word List!

Clay McLeod Chapman

I first found out about this author when I read Ghost Eaters, a novel that knocked me off my chair, out the window, and into next week. Alas, I have already used that one as a source. I think. Maybe. Perhaps. Where am I? Who are you people? Oh yes, my Listies! So, I bring you another one I loved by this author. Or, at least the ensuing 20 words taken from it. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then just link up, haunt, er, visit others, and then relax in the security of your sweet and blameless circumstances for as long as that lasts. *smiles benignly* 

And now, your Word List:

art

candy

certificate

circle

classes

cupcake

destroyed

dude

error

exactly

included

mug

pink

rabbit

remembered

replica

secret

somnambulistic

sugar

unwrapped

Summer

 

Here's a secret:

summer isn't real. 

It's a replica cooked up in an industrial oven somewhere.

Want to know 

how I know

how I know 

want to know?

hmm hmm hmm?

Sugar, I could enlighten you about a few things,

lay out the deets like an Alexa  but with way better hair.

You see, the real summer, 

the one we grew up in like 

wogs in a puddle with our

bikes and Kool-Aid and

sense of endless warm nose-in-the-green-grass days ahead,

she's gone, my dude. 

They have her secured at Gitmo or Bethesda or somewhere,

trying to find out HOW, like HOW, summer? Give it up already!

She's a clam, she tells them to fuck right off, so there she stays.

This new summer, the one we're in now

like koi fish swimming around saying looky,

our orbit is decaying, mayday mayday!

water temp rising, abandon ship!

is

not

real.

This cheap knock-off, this ersatz season, is as fake as an Eligible Bachelor

with a certificate of authenticity laminated and embossed

with a realistic official seal sticking out of his man purse. I mean

gimme a break.

You don't know me and shit, I get that.

I could just be somebody off their meds

or trolling you because because because...

because that's the wonderful thing she does!

So here is 

one

true

sentence,

and it is the truest sentence that I know:

I long for Fall, because Fall knows me, keeps the windows

yellow-lit and has my long sweater ready, laundered

and scented, laid out next to my cute sox and funky newsboy cap;

Fall wants me, lets me know that I am a work of art and a woman

in the right flesh at the right time to carry the right soul  and a mug

of hot mocha straight into an October morning and live there.

Now imma cry and bake in the phony replacement sun

and maybe if you're any kind of friend you'll say shh shh

baby and tell me softly

in my ear

about leaves

and frost

and hope

and all that happy hopscotch,

ok?

Hang a while with me 

and be my balm in Gilead, 

 my Saint Anthony to the lost.

___________

For Word Garden Word List--Whisper Down the Lane. 

I kind of lifted my man Ernest's words for that one part. No wait, it's an homage!

Music: Fontella Bass Rescue Me

Tulips In Headscarves

 

Rain comes at night

wandering between buildings,

wearing a long black coat

and the silent hours.

Pink tulips beside the walk

dip their heads,

delicate and disappointed

as fallen birds.

Slate roofs facing the moon

shine for the rain

but feel nothing, admit nothing

aloof and blank.

Rain is the sky's child

but dies earthbound.

Tulips in their headscarves

mourn in

performative

pantomime.

_________

For What's Going On? "Rain".