Ice

 

Winter went too far that year

like a friend who shows her ugly side,

as heedless as some smartphone fuck in a bookstore

as numb and hard as a cop's baton.

Southern beauty, transplanted lady

brought here as a baby, 

my English walnut tree was shivered--shocked--

a dazed involuntary wandering the halls of summer for years after.

This year, unfed, the bandit squirrels stopped knocking down 

her new growth bouquets.

This year her gown is lush, her branches heavy with baubles,

the first walnuts in five years.

I love to sit beneath her, bathed in green

and the susurration of her clustered feathers.

No silent era star wearing ostrich plumes

could compete with her now--she preens in the pleasant weather.

This spring, she is an Impressionist lady 

holding a parasol over me as I am shivered--shocked--

by my country showing her ugly side

my sanctuary soft and sweet, the future hard as a cop's baton.

________

for Dverse--"A View of One's Own" hosted by Dora. 

The images are taken by me, of the walnut tree in my yard. 

Music: Glee cast Don't Make Me Over

Word Garden Word List--Anne Sexton

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Word Garden Word List poetry prompt. I'm a day early with it since I didn't post one last week. Our source this time is Anne Sexton's collection entitled To Bedlam and Part Way Back. 

Anne Sexton

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others as you are able, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. This prompt remains active through next Saturday. 

Your List:

animals

begat

calling

carvings

cures

elephants

erasers

hotel

jackpot

madness

mine

noon

poets

postmarks

radio

roller coaster

rowboat

silk

spoons

wooden

My Child

 

My child was born over the radio at noon

calling, crying, appearing--clearly mine.

She displayed an instant madness, an affinity for the moon

accepting only pomegranate and warm plum wine

as Nurse counted up the medications and the spoons.

We communicate by carvings, deep and raw

and love words mercurial and gritty as a dune,

that respect no wound, no custom, no law.

My elephant child, heavy, hunted, wise

eludes rubber-handed teachers of the exhausted strike

arriving in little rowboats in full courtly disguise

to mine my little darling as she rides her phantasmal bike

down to the grave of stars to kiss the thing that dies

in a tiny wooden cradle beneath a concrete sun

to bring it back, to make it rise

and then her work is done.

Come, child of animals, black earth and fire

to the shelter I have cobbled from discarded turtle shells

where poets burn on pages, porches, pyres

and all variety of heavens, limbos, hells

to arrange your dolls named Judgement and Desire

who sit on silken pillows or in coffins fit with bells

to call their mothers, those beauties, belles and hags

combined into an advocate for my child with tongue flat-felled

by a celebrated seamstress, dumbly mute and dressed in rags.

_____

for Word Garden Word List--Anne Sexton

Music:

Sin City 

Cowgirl's Lament

 

Yippee yi o

and ki yi yay

I've got just one 

more thing to say--

Please don't let me

die here all alone.

Across the mesa  

and through the pass

Old Scratch has gone and 

nailed my ass--

Please don't let me

die here all alone.

Around the campfire

with beer and beans

Who knows what the

hell it means--

Please don't let me

die here all alone.

Kiss me, cowboy

and trim the wick

Had no notion

I was even sick

Please don't let me

die here all alone.

Here's a letter

here's my will

The night is silent

sweet and still--

Please don't let me

die here all alone.

_______

No List today--under the weather. Back next week. 

Word Garden Word List--Bittersweet

 

Hello my little holiday weekend warriors! You may be suffering from too much potato salad or the aftereffects of that spiked lemonade, but I know what real  suffering is. I have just hate-read to the bitter end of Michael Ondaatje's overwritten, torpid, preachy, over-ornamented, meandering, disjointed mess entitled The English Patient. Now, I usually cull your weekly List from something I have recently read, but that turkey is snug in the bin and is not ever seeing the light of day again and soooo... I have decided to feature and old favorite, Nevada Barr's Bittersweet. 

Nevada Barr is known for her mystery/thrillers set in various national parks and those are fine reads, but Bittersweet is a love story between two women in the old west. I love it and thank my BFF for gifting it to me. 

Nevada Barr

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others as you are able, and then sit back and read something more like Bittersweet, and less like The English Patient. (I did love the movie, though.) This prompt remains active through next Saturday.

And now, your List!

autumn

basket

bible

birds

candy

crush

doctor

dreams

frizzy

glasses

honey

kitten

mail

moon

onions

shyness

soft

stars

texts

watercolor

Greenhouse Afternoon

 

There should be a bible for things like this--

something dependable

something I could grab onto

when I feel bewildered,

   dizzy,

from your smile and your scent

when you stand closer

   than I expect.

Such a bible would have shed its

shall-nots

in favor of

more love-thy-neighbor

   especially

when the sky is full of soft stars

and you remove my glasses

   along with my reserve.

This bible would be full of watercolors

and nested in by drowsy birds.

This bible would be

   lit like a greenhouse afternoon

or suggested in midnight indigo.

Lay hands on my shyness

   and let me lay my burden down--

turn me to the text of oh-gosh-yes

   like a prodigal

whose lips can finally confess.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Bittersweet.

Music: Denise King Say You Say me

My Gibbet

My gibbet is a fine and private place

where a lady may tarry of a summer afternoon

elevated and untouchable--

an ideal love just out of reach

like fruit for Tantalus, all pointless sweetness.

Allen Ginsberg appears from out of the crowd,

pink as a schoolmarm, fat as a Christmas goose

carrying his harmonium

singing about plutonium,

barefoot as any angel, toking on the Golden Blunt.

He looks up, mistaking me for a caught kite

dangling above the street in my gibbet

making other women's children

point and cry

demanding candy or weather reports.

Someone climbs up and ties tin cans

to the bottom of my gibbet

in an atmosphere of giddy holiday.

I die and begin to stink

pieces falling away like confetti.

Here I sway to this very day, high above 

the Emily Dickinson Parkway

a paragon of virtue and demure reserve,

dead as hell

black as a bowling ball

ring still on my finger, an ingenue of the afterlife, 

until gentrification when they'll take me down

because gibbets are out, they're upsetting,

like poetry, 

like dead dodos

like buskers in the subway, beautiful, buried, irrelevant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List.

Word Garden Word List--Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

 

Hello my little repeated themes! Welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt which features the same author--Diane Seuss-- as last week but a different source book. This time we zoom three years beyond last week's collection and land at Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, from 2018. 

Chick just won't leave and go home

Everyone seemed to like her, so I figure if something was fun once, do it again, right? Pass me another piece of that cheesecake mmm, remember (I say while chewing, holding up an index finger), moderation in all things is my motto! 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own (and don't try to squeak by with a haibun). Then simply link up, visit others as you are able, and then paint a lovely still life involving birds and bowls of fruit. This prompt remains active through next Saturday. Enjoy!

And now, your List:

aura

blur

barefoot

cattails

charmingly

colonial

flock

gangplank

Ginsberg

holiday

levitated

mallet

minks

nobodies

peacocks

pilgrimage

schoolmarm

smuggled

spangles

tabernacle

Espantajo

 Espantajo,

I kissed you

but my lips knew no remedy

for you, standing cruciform

  in a desert wind.

Espantajo,

wrapped in

  cornhusk feathers,

no sky knows you.

Espantajo,

I could not move you

from your place in the night.

   For you,

all things rise in the west

sleep in the west

make love in the west

and die in the west.

   You married a northern woman

like un espirito muerto

   appearing in a photograph.

Espantajo,

Face away from my house now. 

I have green glass

   bottles sleeping 

in the branches all night

   to snare spirits.

Espantajo,

The same old wind

rattles you

   and you call it talking.

Silencio, damned scarecrow.

If you can't love,

can't move,

can't hold a woman,

   what good are you?

_________

For Dverse Poetics "I Have No Word In English For..." hosted by my friend Dora.

The formal word for "ghost" in Spanish is fantasma, but espantajo, while literally meaning "scarecrow," also colloquially refers to a ghost or apparition. 

Word Garden Word List--Four-Legged Girl

 

Hello my little extra appendages, and welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt. Step right up, because our source this week was a Pulitzer finalist in poetry--Four -Legged Girl  by Diane Seuss. It's impossible to describe except to say that reading these poems is like stepping through the looking glass while high on some powerful hallucinogen. It is amazing stuff, and not just long on style, but substance as well.

Find information about Diane Seuss and a selection of her poetry HERE. It should open in a new window. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others as you are able, and then wander down the midway as the spirit moves you. This prompt remains active through Saturday.

And now, your List:

absinthe

costumes

dollhouse

flock

flying squirrel(s)

helium

henhouse

horse

jazz

jump rope

lily

ossuary

Papal

porkpie hat

rainwater

tornado

tuna fish

umbraculum

vernix

wig

Weebles

 

Remembering my dollhouse,

full of thalidomide Weebles, armless, legless

and sleepless as well--always upright,

awake all night wandering the rooms.

No use locking the doors or pulling the shades--

the entire back of the house open to flood and tornado.

The whole place an ossuary--urn your keep, Weebs.

And me, Queen of the whole shebang, a six-year-old Persephone.

No surprise, then, to find me in new adulthood,

still covered with the vernix of near-innocence,

living on tuna fish and rainwater, perched

in the henhouse on my hope chest, waiting.

That was when you appeared, rising like a helium balloon,

floating in place beneath the crude umbraculum

with a censer in one hand and a lily in the other,

in full Papal costume, my real-life Weeble-God. 

We fed each other party crackers and absinthe,

le fee verte, "The Green Fairy," faux artists in our henhouse garret. 

Our flock all turned from Rhode island Reds to common crows.

We are a House that cannot be toppled, like Weebles ourselves,

though the giant half-grown bitch beyond the open back wall

keeps trying to poke us, smoke us out, or otherwise tamper

with our great love and legacy--hers if only she would pause,

consider, and accept us as deities. cast in plastic and immortal.

_______________

for Word Garden Word List--Four-Legged Girl

Music: Van Halen Little Dreamer

 

Detroit

 

Detroit is 

sun shining off chrome

Detroit is 

my heart my home

Detroit is

MCDC going  for it

Detroit is

done burning now it's lit

Detroit is

Motown and Greta Van Fleet

Detroit is

Greektown where the people eat

Detroit is

grit! that's right!

Detroit is

Detroit vs. Everybody fight!

Detroit is 

coney dogs from Lafayette

Detroit is

what you work for is what you get

Detroit is

the Freep, DIA, this poem,

Detroit is

my place, my heart, my home. 

_______

for What's Going On? --"ruins" which mentions "the precarious condition of Detroit."  Aw hell no.

Music: Eminem Detroit

Word Garden Word List--Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Kaveh Akbar

Hello my little canids, and welcome to this week's Word List poetry prompt! For our source this time, we have Kaveh Akbar's poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf. 

In it, he writes about addiction, recovery, being gay, and his Iranian background. It is powerful poetry, as honest and demanding of attention as a sandpaper massage. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then, simply link up, visit others as you are able, and then stare at a wolf who stares back at you, as this author does in one of the poems in this collection. This prompt remains active through next Saturday. 

And now, your List:

blue

churches

crow

fumble

fur

goblets

gravity

hammer

hourglass

mail

moonstruck

orchids

parrot

pink

ribbons

saw

soapy

sugar

windmills

wolf

Stephen Miller Meets Adolph Hitler on the Tarmac at a Tesla Dealership

 

Ask the man

falling from a high building

whether gravity is a matter of opinion.

The ground will be

explaining things

shortly.

There are those,

bedecked with self-awarded

ribbons, who sculpt

with a hammer

and operate (on others only)

with a saw

and call it Vision.

Sipping from 

half-filled goblets

gilded with a fur of mold,

their soapy smiles house parrot tongues,

moonstruck by 

a slug in wolf's clothing.

Crows laugh

at windmills, and 

nobody is eating the pets.

Fearful shills leave poisoned sugar out for each other

and force feed it to everyone

but no hourglass

fills upward.

Ask the man

falling from a high building

whether gravity is a matter of opinion.

The ground will be

explaining things

with impactful clarity

presently.

________

I hate most topical poetry and almost never write it, but something came over me. For Word Garden Word List--Calling a Wolf a Wolf. 

Music: Emerson, Lake & Palmer Carn Evil #9

Love Poem In Filigree & Hickory

 

I was sitting on a filigree bench

on a balcony

with no building behind it.

Then I was dressed in black

at a funeral for my own loneliness.

The sun was warm

and the priest was a peacock.

My love, my love,

in your thousands of scarves,

you were there, and we slept in the sky--

your arms silver, mine indigo.

I wound rose stems around the filigree

at the balcony's edge,

red blooms seeking the sun, which was a breast.

Then I was wearing this poem

at a wake for my own loneliness.

There were little cakes

with icing as white as a page.

You were there, my love, each of us inside the other.

Then I woke, and wept,

the breath filling my body

like smothering smoke from wet hickory burning.

_______

for What's Going On? "Last Night I Had A Dream"

Music: Emmylou Harris Hickory Wind 

Harvest, 1921

 

Have you ever seen a fat man hanging from a tree?

like a pendant suspended

from the throat of a wrinkled old woman?

Have you ever seen a skinny man hauled up

in front of his burning shop?

the plate glass shattered where he used to look out

at the magnolia blossoms in spring?

It gets hot in June in Tulsa. If you leave a skinny man 

strung up a few days, you get a fat man 

hanging like strange fruit in the devil's grove.

______

for Dverse Poetics: Getting hooked on opening lines. 

Music: Nina Simone Strange Fruit