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. 

Motto

 

This is the hospital

where the nicked-up blown-up bastards show up.

We give them ice cream 

and a priest.

There is a river

down the middle.  We launch ourselves into the current

and it is unclear

who is drowning, who saving.

It's a system of gradations, and if you don't die in Emergency,

why then, we come into your room with cake and streamers.

Presto! You're ambulatory, then outpatient, then nurse, doctor,

surgeon, administrator, president emeritus, cutting ribbons

instead of flesh.

See one, do one, teach one is the motto. See the staggering

son of a gun falling to the floor with wounds beyond telling.

We lift him as if we were angels.

Yesterday, we were lifted.

Tomorrow, who knows?

Nothing stops the flow of the river or the flow of patients.

We are Boatmen, and Mermaids, reaching, 

saving, being saved. We are heroes of the

Carousel Horse Cavalry, coming over the 

hill, with bugle and blood pressure cuff,

dizzy with purpose, maybe dying, learning as we go. 

________

for Desperate Poets We Can Be (SUPER) Heroes. 

Music: Brass Band of Battle Creek Song of the Volga Boatmen

Oreithyia

 

I've caught this bird

with a thorn under its wing

and laid it by your beauty

the same as everything

I've ever brought you.

I've wrought this bell

from soapstone green

with its tongue struck mute

the same as anything

that's ever loved you.

____

for Quadrille #137 at dverse.

They Are Marching

 They are marching

where the red flowers bloom

They are marching and sometimes stoop to gather

the white and fallen fragments of the moon

They are sleeping

and dying with the hours

they are sleeping and hallucinating sweetly

white swans and lilies in their bowers

They are falling

where bones turn into pennants

They are falling like the spines of dusty hymnals

where angels count forgetfulness as penance.

Maureen

Maureen tied summer to her wrist with a shoelace--
now the sun rises and sets in her sleeves.
Maureen left home at age 8, became a nun, quit, joined the army.
Now she wears her hair loose, 
knows the algebra of your every word before you sigh it.

Maureen talks to the Holsteins in the pasture,
contemplates the squares of the fields as seen from the air in planes
taken from high school geometry and woodworking class. 
"This was all a salt water sea," she tells the cows with a wide gesture,
sun spilling across the sloping green with the arc of her arms.

Maureen likes her milk frothy, her paintings surreal.
She likes you when you tell her she's a habitable planet in a colorform sky.
"We are rapidly approaching a tipping point," she opines dramatically
as you roll her over, then she rolls you, you haystack fool,
stood up on a stick with a silly grin because summer, because crows, 

because Maureen.
_______

for Wordy Thursday at Toads. I have used vintage jellies' word list for reasons explained in the comments there. Just as a nod to the original intent of Sherry's prompt, there is a Grover Lewis reference hidden away here. 2 points for finding it.

Back in the 80's I had about a dozen buttons pinned to my jean jacket. One of them was Nena, who I thought was just the coolest ever. I also had Chrissie Hynde. I still have the jacket, and it still has a couple of buttons but not those. The one everybody likes is a crayon face with a big smile that says CHEER THE FUCK UP.