Poetry Reading

In my open shoulder bag,
the second dream
from my third night with you.
It is wrapped in satin taken
from the step of a tomcat on the sill in the dark.

That night,
clocks were lit and lined my book shelf like roosting dawn.
I was a caravan crossing your skin,
wearing borrowed Moroccan prayers
and dizzy as a thief after a chase.
I have grown my hair long, since then,
yet still it contains only certain birds, rising suns, water cups--
never the Saint Creolan medal you wore every day
when we were together. 

In my open shoulder bag,
there are patchouli leaves and musk.
I will read them to seventeen people from a small stage,
and describe in dunes what I felt that night--
our third, and the second dream I had
while resting in your arms; a baked curve of horizon
with heat lines rising 
like waterbirds taking flight 
from each glorious thorn of our entwined mirage.
______

for Karin's "April Second" prompt at Toads.

Jane's Guide To Engines

She finds eyes in a flea market basket,
hands in the sand at the beach.
When she gets home, the civil servant in her bed doesn't recognize her,
is desultory, communicating in lazy gestures,
dying of something 
and has been for years.

"I will leave the door standing open when I go," she thinks, and does,
knowing it will drive the civil servant insane.
This is as cruel as she ever gets,
but it feels good like a train station
when the cars are new, 
the line is clear and
the clocks are told by tarot and text message

sent by St. Creola,
Our Lady of the Favorable Signal Light.
____

Cherokee Kiss

Saint Creola,
patroness of crows and Gypsies,
hear my prayer
and bless our Cherokee kiss

in the asters and black jack--
like anything--
like this.
_______

For Play It Again, Toads #20 at Real Toads. I did Mama Zen's. (well no shirt, Shitlock.)

Sounds kind of like a song. I wonder who should sing it? ;-) 

Creola the Kind

Hive-heads, you human honeycombs of disordered thought,
drip yourselves out of day rooms across the complex.
You have been made to feel like ants in a land of bustling giants,
each one of them wearing enormous, iron-soled clown shoes,
and I'm here to tell you--
things are about to change.

Come out to the green paradise of the asylum courtyard,
where morning glory and clematis vines climb the catatonics.
Which the cleric, which the classic presenter?
Come to where the learned diagnostician finally shuts his yap
and sits the fuck down 
on a pretty, donated bench depicting tiger swallowtails in flight.

Feel that? Inside your poor flood-damaged skull?
It isn't the medication.
This is real.

Even if you aren't Catholic--
though the mind reels at such easily remediable error--
Creola the Kind can help you.
See her enter by the main gate, with a cheetah on a chain.
The tethered cat is emblematic of the mind caught up in the Play-Doh sludge of encumbering madness.
Enter the healer.
Enter the liberator,
Creola the Kind.

As she joins you in the garden, 
she brings with her the sea breezes characteristic of the Creolan Mission,
though this institution exists landlocked,
blighted,
sandbagged into torpidity by a ballast of text books and dogma.
At the touch of her hand on your cheek,
you begin to feel something nearly forgotten,
as if she carries in her fingers a series of bees
who introduce peace, and a spreading sweetness.

Forget about your doctor.
Her nervous condition has become acute,
causing her to build elaborate nests out of prescription pads.
To burn sacred candles there would only result in disaster.
Instead, my dear florid crazies,
lean into Creola's offered remedy like infants at the breast.
Watch the clouds float by like milkships,
honeyships,
sending nets over the side and into your stormy constellation of symptoms,
plucking you new and gleaming from the tempest.

She is a fisher of men, and more particularly of women,
sent here with your own personal Bonus Round from God.
She is Our Lady of the Falling Piano,
Creola the Kind.
________

written with inspiration from a word list invented by mood wings!

image: the ridiculously cool Cristina Scabbia

 
 
 
 

Healers of the Creolan Mission

Saint Creola keeps cats.
treats them as her children,
even though, upon interview,
--and perhaps strangely--
they have not learned any catechism
and have no idea who the Pope is.

What the cats do know, is the moon
and how it lives in the windows of the Creolan Mission.
They hear how it pulls the waves themselves toward the cliffs
as a mother would; without words,
or, at least,
without words being the important thing.

During daylight,
the cats are allowed to wander in and out of the sanctuary.
I have never known them to act any differently
on one side of the arched doors
than on the other,
and while it is true that the toms go off to scrap at night,
they cause no refugees to appear in the morning;
everyone still has their beds,
their bibles,
and their babies in their arms.

The cats do not care
who may be Russian Blue, or tiger striped.
They do not fear the power of females;
they have sex, and kittens, and catnip,
and sleep on the sill without a qualm.

At night, if I am afraid,
Saint Creola gathers me to her breasts and the peace there;
when I am feeling bold,
I offer her mine and let my hair trail down over us
like a blessing from God.

Saint Creola keeps cats,
and a single shepherd dog who belongs mostly to me,
though he attends Mass at best sporadically,
and, like the cats, can't name the Pope.
He is what is called a Blue Heeler,
though I misspelled it for the longest time
in light of his gifts, Saint Creola's kindness, and my need.
______

Inspired by the cat art of Guido Vedovato, and linked to Fireblossom Friday.

 

The Feast of Saint Creola

We are the adherents,
the Sisters of Saint Creola,
Our Lady of the Falling Piano.

We are a strictly female enclave,
here at the edge of a continent,
at cliffside,
with the surge of the waves below us
and within us.

Today we honor our blessed Saint C.,
she of the fair face and the wise word.
Born in the year 1899, she remains beautiful
in appearance,
in utterance,
and in her endless inspiration of us, her Sisters.

"Soooo, what's chocolate?" she demands in her honey voice,
entering the room like light from a taper.
If the Pope could see us,
in our unconventional garb,
and our unconventional affections,
he would want to be one of us, I feel certain.

Blessed Saint Creola teaches us that God 
is a waitress
in a coffee shop;
an expert at creating chalk menu boards,
and at assuaging that indescribable homesickness
we all carry inside us like some melancholy luggage
we don't know how to set down.

Today there will be blends from Turkey and the Orient;
chocolate from Europe and from two old hippies
who have a store down the coast a little way.
There will be the cerulean sky
and the indigo waves.
There will be the white stucco of our convent,
and the toasted tan of the cliffs,
the high grasses of late summer,
and our warm skins.

Today we celebrate Creola,
living saint and mother hen to all of us.
We are off the grid,
off the radar,
off the chain.
Have a chocolate truffle,
have a Girl Scout cookie.
The sun is right at home in the sky, her hammock,
and the pianos have long ago flown over the cliff 
and into the sea,
like gulls.
_____

for Out of Standard at Real Toads.

Nurse Gina

Nurse Gina is a Sister of the Creolan Mission.
She has not attended any recognized school of nursing.
She does not submit to any formal schedule,
and she does not date your doctor, fumbling in the break room like a teenager.

The Creolan Sisters have a mission on Earth,
and their mission does not include such tawdry stuff.
Here, have a hit of holiness
from the fingertips of Nurse Gina--
don't bogart it.
Don't think that this is anything but transformative.

The Sisters have seen
how you fail;
how you have fallen open like a dropped cardboard box in the rain.
They have seen how the very bones within you have drifted,
leaving your tired spirit to gasp on the sidewalk of sickness;
They come as you expire,
bedeviled,
so weary that rain stops half way to your face, as you look to the skies.

Now,
Nurse Gina appears.
She will not clip tedious notations and reports to the foot of your bed,
nor crank it to an upright position like some angelic elevator operator.
No.
She will climb in with you,
her skin miraculous and dark from the sunny cliffs at San Creola;
you will believe that a compact and very feminine sun has covered you,
and she has.

Here is a new narcotic,
one of healing,
one that sharpens perception
even as it soothes the overburdened lonely chambers of your heart.
Kiss her, and know that you are loved--
not only by Nurse Gina and the whole of the Creolan Order,
but by the Goddess herself.

She has reserved for you a holy bounty
which She created even before the seas themselves--
the seas Our Lady presides over at her sacred birthplace,
where the waves undulate and smooth themselves over every trouble
just as Nurse Gina does
in the restorative hour before dawn,
when she reminds you of who you are
and why you are worthy
of her tender attentions in the first place.
_________

Poem On January 1st

Lovely, sorrowful Saint Creola,
lift this heaviness from me
as easily as taking muffins from the oven.
Turn my tears to blueberries
in the palm of your hand.

It is no small thing,
no trifle,
to take the thorns from a heart
and make it beat again;
blow softly on my blood--
send it rushing, released and contained
all in the same instant.

Sweet Saint Creola,
Mother of all that soothes the eyes
and restores the spirit,
will you think me juvenile and vain when I say
that I could have been beautiful
had not dark roses used my flesh for earth,
spreading small insistent roots through my very breath
like children?

Will you think less of me when I say
that my hair could have been blacker than stars' edges
and longer than the line of Gypsy witches I come from,
if orioles and crows had not nested in me,
using my thoughts to weave
around my dreams
to make their shelter?

Wise Saint Creola,
Mistress of mornings that forgive,
scourge of demons,
speak plainly to me this once, I beg you.
When you touch me with the touch
that I have longed for and not had--
when you sing quietly to me,
your voice calm, holy, and feminine--

I think I must have misheard.
I think I must have been given a taste too sweet
for my wildgirl tongue to take,
when you tell me that you are God's,
and that I am Yours,
more beautiful than
bloom
or bird
or body can be.
_______

Admiral MacFarquhar's Lady

Admiral MacFarquhar's lady
had eyes the color of a Caribbean sea.
Her hair held the many reds of an east African sunrise,
but, given her choice, she'd keep a cottage on the Rue de Compiegne.

Admiral MacFarquhar's lady
was, to her husband, a quaint gew-gaw; an astrolabe.
And while her ways did tend toward the stagey and the sensual,
even women in the bible are sometimes allowed a little strut and promenade.

"Look, Edward," she said, showing the Admiral his new son,
lately a denizen of his own secret waterway--
"Is he not more beautiful than any Antediluvian curiosity?
What will your search for Atlantis gain you, that you couldn't find here, with him, and with me?"

Alone again shortly thereafter,
Mrs. Admiral MacFarquhar took a train car to Paris
to visit the National Saint Creola Shrine.

There, she knelt, sending silver prayers to dance between the rafters
where the holy are said to be housed, and there is
at least a gambler's chance of intercession from the hand of the Divine.

Admiral MacFarquhar's lady
had eyes the color of a Caribbean sea;
her hair held the many reds of an east African sunrise,

and they say she lived for many years in a cottage purchased by her son--
quite a pretty one, with a garden full of climbing vines
that bloomed in Spring on the Rue de Compiegne.
_______

for the dolls at Real Toads mini challenge #24. This flame-haired beauty is the creation of Ms. Chelsea Bednar. The photograph is by her mom, Margaret Bednar, whose photographs so often tell me stories that I just have to write down.

Midnight Jane

Midnight Jane knows a thousand candles
won't carry her prayer any faster.
Beautiful and blessed Saint Creola,
paint me a center line--
press a macadam pavement from every heart I ever carried between breath and skin;
give me, I pray, strong coffee and a name I can keep.

Outside Danny's Coffee Shop,
cranes contracted by the city manager raise the sun.
He would like to zone Danny's out of existence,
but it is as if God Herself were against him;
seven plagues have sogged his cereal
and set his ties to clash.

Midnight Jane, stay as long as you like.
Danny's is always open, even on a Sunday.
Margie, the city manager's wife, didn't get The Light sprayed on her blonde
directly from the Hand of The Divine;
she just lets on as if she did.

Jane, try the arms of the Succubus.
There, in a quiet corner booth,
it can always be night as smooth as new blacktop
and the stars that flash by like lane markers
belong to anyone.
_______

This is my 1200th post at Word Garden!
 

Relativity

St. Creola is Our Lady of the Shoreline.
Drowning sailors call to her,
but beautifully, like carolers.

St. Creola is unperturbed by them.
They are leaves gently falling
from those trees--their wooden ships.

The beach has so many grains of sand,
changing color with every passing wave;
and the waves arrive ceaselessly, like babies.

St. Creola advises to accept peace where and when you can.
Rushing water makes as poor a floor as roof,
so bless the dry interlude, and the fruit section offered at noon.

The sun has warmed St. Creola,
and when the moon arrives, later,
she will still be here--
a pretty Constant
under the imprimatur of the clouds and stars.
_______

The Stone Baby

Blessed Saint Creola appears in a village where, they say,
A woman has borne a stone baby.

No suitable bassinet can be found, and so the stone baby is placed
In a wheelbarrow. Religious graffiti soon covers it.

The mother is unhappy. Her baby does not have babysoft skin.
He does not smell nice. He seems to belong in a quarry.

Driven mad by having to lift her baby with a hoist, she takes him to bathe
In the lake near Saint Creola's shrine, but of course,

He sinks immediately to the bottom. A tow truck hauls him out
On the end of a good sturdy chain; the good news is

That the stone baby has no injuries. No skinned knee, no
scraped elbow. Still, he cannot play with the other children

Out of fear that he will will topple over on them. Sitting by himself,
He is accosted by the village bully, who hits him, breaking his own hand.

"Beautiful Saint Creola," cries the mother. "I have given birth to a
Cannon ball. His own weight breaks his bed. What can we do?"

It is said by those who were there, that the lovely and holy Saint Creola
Took up the stone child in her slender arms, and prayed over him,

Turning him to a cloud, which disappeared into the open blue sky.
In time, the child's mother gave birth to numerous birds,

Unmatched in the perfection of both their feathers and their souls;
"Behold, I give you sisters to bear your spirit up to God," spoke the mother.

It is another miracle of the celebrated Saint Creola...
Birds and brother, wheeling upon the very countenance of the Divine.
______
for Ella's mini challenge at Real Toads. 

My Petition To St. Creola

Beautiful St. Creola,
Our Lady of the Sea Shore,
The pockets of your blue linen smock stuffed with dawn clouds,
Intercede for me,
I beg you.

My nights have become unpretty, pungent, abrasive,
Like tar roofs,
Patched and leaning,
Unable to hold the rain.

St. Creola, patroness of all that is lovely and ambiguous,
I cannot decide
Between My Love in the morning, her skin warm as east-facing Italian stucco,
Or My Love in evening, wearing moonstone earrings and making a bird perch from sea ripples and snakeskin.

She is the bootleg water-dove,
The posey nightcatcher.
I am the indigo bloom, and your adherent.

St. Creola, hear me.
The stars turn at your command,
The skies open at your pleasure;
Let there be a rain of cormorants, sapphires, silver dust...
Let there be your own jasmine scent in her dark hair;
Let there be bells,
And within their ringing or their silence,
Her answer.
_______ 

linked to dverse OLN #33

A Parable

On the beach at San Creola
--the very one where the famous Miracle occurred--
A little boy cries because a sea bird has stolen his candy.

If he were older,
He would curse the bird colorfully and with passion;
But if he were older,
What confection could matter so much?

Suddenly, the child senses someone near.
He looks up, a fresh-faced little ball of innocence, tears, and snot;
And sees a lady--
It is the Saint herself!
The beautiful and wise Saint Creola!

"Once upon a time,"
Says the saint, carefully blowing her cigarette smoke off to one side,
"There was a greedy sea gull."
Saint Creola wears a black dress,
A silver cross,
And a shawl,
Yet even by Divine standards, the woman is hot.
This is truth. 
She continues.
"This gull stole so much candy from the local children,
That its fine white feathers turned to sugar.
'Foolish bird,'
Scolded an old woman,
'Now you can never return to the sea.'
And with that, she caught him and kept him inside of a sugar bowl,
So that he could never steal candy again."

This is why, over the doorway to the girls' school at San Creola,
There is a seal,
Composed of a white bird with its beautiful wings spread above a gleaming and holy sugar bowl.

The little boy, despite being visited by the Saint,
Can never attend.
He is a boy.
Tough rocks, Butch,
You will have to wait for a mixer when you're older.
On that day, you can approach one of the girls as our beloved Creola once approached you,
And you can ask her to dance.
She may refuse you,
Or she may pluck your offered heart high into the air and spin with it
Like a pilfered trifle.
______


for Real Toads fairy tale prompt

St. Creola

St. Creola keeps canaries
and doesn't care if they crap on the
good
back-snapping
for-show
furniture
that's been rolled in here like coffins at a starting line.

St. Creola keeps cats
and that, dear little pie-eyed pilgrim,
keeps the birds from getting sedentary
or old.
Behold,
another miracle of the beautiful St. Creola.

So,
has rain afflicted your world until
great monsters leap from the guttering?
Does the devil
sleep with your girlfriend,
help herself to your make-up,
your feather bed,
and your little funky vintage Renault?

Tell St. Creola,
like she could care,
like the jelly buttered muffin would stop at her mouth
and she would say, her eyes filling with blessed tears,
oh,
angel...

Pffft,
sweet canary,
land here,
learn.
Today St. Creola has called the moving men,
so muscular that they ripple while standing still.
They will roll the coffins off the cliff at San Creola,
birthplace of Our Lady;
Honey, she will live forever,
as will her parasol,
as will all who love her,
cleansed in the spray of the coffins returning like swallows to the sea.

St. Creola is serene.
She offers her hand--
kiss it!
Tonight you will share her bed, and in the morning
sleep right through services.
Let your softness leave her boneless, beatific, even a little bruised;
certainly in no condition to notice how
when you pray now,
your gaze is always up
where the birds chirp and flutter
like excited virgins.

______

"Nothing is as vulnerable as entrenched success."