The Days Left Behind

I asked the mourning dove

where to find the days left behind. 

"In the dew," she replied.

"In the wild grass

 on the slope beside the river.

Hurry," she warned. "Winter already whispers."

I asked the vulture

where to find the days left behind.

"In the fire pit," he replied.

"In the ashes 

full of hands and faces.

Go slowly," he warned. "They will wait."

I asked the falcon

where to find the days left behind.

"In my nest," she replied.

"I used them

for my children, bald and bottomless.

Go now," she warned. "My talons are teachers."

I asked the gentle mourning dove.

I asked the grim vulture,

but the lesson lay

at the feet of the falcon

in a slurry of time, need, and blood.

Moonbird

 I was speaking, a moaning call,

a spreading gray constellation,

a smoke of words

but you weren't listening anymore.

It is the only language I have.

I live in the interstices

between seed and fruit,

seed and earth,

sea and air,

love and absence.

I have come a very long way, and yet

I am as gray and unremarkable as old lumber.

My love expresses itself inside the earth

and produces a single emissary.

The way is long, the continents pass by.

We meet again only at intervals, but on the same ground.

I was trying to tell you about moonbirds

in their secrecy and their millions.

They seem to vanish, they glide without effort,

but are always there, like love or frailty.

I was speaking, a moaning call,

a smoke of words between sea and air

but you, you love the smell of milled wood,

and weren't listening anymore.

__________

Travel Stories For Girls

 

Someone messed with my story when I was still young,

trying to bend it like a bonsai tree

and so I wrapped it in paper and hid it away

in the throat of a bird, clandestinely. 

I was obliged to call my assaulter "mother"

and expected to pretend devotion.

Her mask was on her face so long

that her true face had become the illusion.

Grown, I went where the robins gathered

and found the cardinal who carried my loss.

It was in a grave, wrapped with quilts, 

but had marked its place with two twigs crossed.

I put it back in my body and felt its ice,

then its beat and its fine red heat.

There is nothing I love more than the thing

I smuggled past the killer-- the best of me.

That is not to say that all survived--

those who say they love are heard as fakes,

assassins or fools; give this hungry woman jewels

and see what a pretty figure my turned back makes.

______________

for Word Garden Word List--Sula 

Music: Damien Jurado Orphans in the Key of E

Cirque de Soliel

 

Coins fell from the sun--

I ate one and lived in darkness for a year.

I said to the sun, "I can never trust you again."

A peach appeared in my hand.

I hired a cook who worked in dough and ash.

I fed bread to my dogs and lived on the last.

Magpies fell from the sun--

they mated in my mirror and made eggs out of glass.

My cook killed the birds, my dogs killed the cook

and married me off to an eight-winged ghost.

My house has a thousand turrets and attics.

The sun rises pink and sets red, automatic.

I put a coin inside a peach like a pit.

There's a ghost inside my skull in a nest.

My dogs fuss and tear and bury the rest

in my heart with my hopes and such similar shit.

_______________

for Word Garden Word List--Kindred

Music: Jackson C. Frank My Name Is Carnival 

The Silent Bird

The bird does not sing, yet you suppose your melody

swings inside her throat just waiting to burst free.

The bird does not fly, but you suppose it loves your shoulder

as if it were her Ararat, some wonder that you showed her.

Perhaps she's ill and dying, hiding everything she can.

Perhaps she curls within herself like a feathered ampersand.

Perhaps she's silent just to vex you, cruel withholding thing.

Perhaps she sings when you're not there and makes the courtyard ring.

She may have sung before you knew her, then not sung again.

Perhaps she makes of poise and pride a royal diadem.

Does she not love, or does her heart go by another name?

And if she sings, is her voice true or just legerdemain?

_________________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar--positivity through negation 

The Wedding of the Mourning Dove (a de Chirico)

 

A crippled dove is dying; her wound a dusky red

in the maple's crook she's hiding.

Her heart her wedding song; herself the newlywed.

A carmine blaze upon her breast to mark the place she's bled

like a penitent confiding

A crippled dove is dying; her wound a dusky red

The purple splay of sunset now reveals a fraying thread

in her tiny breast subsiding--

her heart her wedding song; herself the newlywed.

Beneath her injured wing, she hides her tawny head

as the sun is lower gliding

a crippled dove is dying; her wound a dusky red. 

The summer grass, soon bereft, would take her place instead

except for circumstance dividing--

her heart her wedding song; herself the newlywed.

The presiding night has finished; the ceremony said--

her new master toward the threshold swiftly striding.

A crippled dove is dying; her wound a dusky red--

her heart her wedding song; herself the newlywed. 

_______

the de Chirico is similar to a pantoum, except that tercets replace quatrains. 

Lebanese Dove Lost in A Mexican Market

 

I awake on a sidewalk as a bird

and in a moment of comic idiocy

I fly into a store

                         where a woman swings a broom at me,

shouting, "Un pájaro!"

She misses me by inches

as I have missed so many things

by inches or miles

                             and if she breaks my wings

her dustpan will be my grave.

Once, I knew--or dreamed

your skin by Tiffany lamp.

In those days,

                      the mornings were quiet and damp

like a woods at first light

where we could go walking

and not worry where we'd been.

I careen into packages of pasta

which fall like pilgrims to the floor.

The woman spits, 

                              "Ay! Diablo!" and has no more

pity for me than a loaded gun.

How did I become a bird

in this ridiculous situation?

I remember the day when you left

with your bags like a brood of chicks

gathered at your feet

                                   in their nest of sticks

like burning incense.

Now, I am a mourning dove without a sky

with a new woman now, who shouts, "Diablo! Ay!"

_______________

For Word Garden Word List--Light, Coming Back

Music: Gary BB Coleman The Sky Is Crying

Wishbone

 

When I was young, I learned the art of

decisions made with wishbones. 

A living heart had informed them

with a love of yellow corn and a fear of silver hatchets. 

I came out of my shell one night during 

a traffic accident like waking during surgery.

Wrecked Chevies turn shy as little girls

but their drivers find illumination in oil and blood and pavement. 

Jail and church are cousins and I found

in one what had eluded me in the other. 

That morning they returned my effects.

A crow had nested inside my leather satchel like swag from limbo.

Why bring all of this up? Why now, when

October is just a penny on the railroad track

shiny and done with, like an old flame?

I guess I'm just telling how I got here, the whole swerve of my life.

Living alone takes nerve, more than I ever had young.

Magic never gets the laundry done, or the

chicken fried, but I have it in spades these

rainy days, when my hawk-heart feels the wishbone

and I wonder what it will tell about me, how it will split

between sweetheart and shrew, drunk and duena,

all the spilled tiles and tears that depicted my face,

the one I wore while here, doing the best I could, grandmother and memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--She Had Some Horses

Music: Katey Sagal Bird On The Wire. 

Birds At Dawn

 

Dawn mists shroud the preening swan

forever in her bridal gown

down near the shore where footsteps end

then floating out to mourn again

This is the pond where my true love drowned

never seen and never found

by water lilies twined and kept

in green and silent alphabet.

Dawn obscures the calling crow

forever dressed in black who goes

along the branch that holds the knot

and every cherished thing he's got

This is the tree where my true love fell

as gracefully as Pachelbel

a dancer to adagio

as far as woven strands dare go.

Dawn comes dim and damp in hours

just light enough for owl's eyes

that see the hidden bower nest,

where silent birds don't sermonize.

This is the hour when my true love comes

in melancholy misted dawn

to call me on and call me down

demanding his sine qua non. 

_______

Crow & Astrolabe

 

Crow, obscured by wing and leaf,

there we were

under the stars.

Who knew then that we would bond

over common language

and common loneliness. 

You came when you would, and not that often,

like others of your kind

I had known before.

I thought, if I can crack the seed your heart will open

starved as you were

starved as I was. 

Crow so black against indigo sky, I lacked

Rosetta Stone

or Tarot deck.

So, I wrote you poems upon an astrolabe

looking for heaven

Deus ex machina.

Crow with your song in ghost-ship semaphore,

you sang to me

beautifully

Yet crows are crows, and stars are reclusive.

Astrolabe and downdraft

broke both our hearts.

I have learned wariness of crows, and they the same

both poorer but safer

for such sad education.

Still, I have my astrolabe, an antique affectation

like the love I once had

for an obscure bird.

_________

Jennifer over at Poet Laundry--no doubt prodded to do so by a thousand devils--challenged me to write a poem about or including an astrolabe. This is that poem. I encourage you to go visit her there; she is a genuine peach of a poet. 

Music: Alana Davis Can't Find My Way Home

Concubine of the Quarter Moon

 

I did not hire the day laborer inside whose bones I ride. 

Here is motion, here is time, here is the spinning world.

Here is the trowel, mortar, and metronome hand industrious.

Here is the moon, the hidden language, the valuable burl. 

Here is my compulsion to sing, and my throat empty as a new vase. 

Here is the afflicted tree holding one jewel and a thousand birds.

Merged, the swordsman and the healer, missionary from God.

Ice and ivy grown on my tongue break the bricks with words.

I am a scorched bird born of lightning, hatched from geode silence.

I am more beautiful than any river. I am cloaked in thorns and tar.

One day, laborer and wall will dissolve intestate

and I will rise, concubine of the quarter moon, magna voce avatar.

_______

August & Crickets

 

As a girl, I carried the cage I was given

and searched for the bird with the duende call,

its heart spread thick by a grandmother's hand,

there in each prayer and then not there at all.

As a girl I was given soot in a basket

and told not to sift but to husband it close

then sent to a seaside cliff via landslide

where the mayor of filth gave himself the last dose.

O bird! O sky! O flesh made of lilies,

grow light on the bones of the bird on the stalk

of my sorrow, my bloom made of August and crickets

transformed in its throat to an arcing flock.

As a girl I was given a purse with a ticket

to a room with stucco walls and a bed

where a woman crawled from the wreck of the fire

and stood by the window, my bird on her hand.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #172.

Here

Here

is the place where starlings gather thick as macchiato,

singing expressivo in the morning, bedlam fortissimo at sunset.

Here

is where the old gather silent, still as a reverie,

rallentando until dawn, then second-souled,

blue-eyed, demanding life again, vivace.

Here

discard heavy indigo, the ultramarine of too many days,

dissolve into a new chromatic scale, alive with starlings,

expressing without thinking, dolce, 

glissando,

Here.

______

for The Sunday Muse #150.

The Pines

I made my skin call itself snow,

and wrapped that body around my heart.

There was no sound except the groaning of the pines.

The world has died, I said.

I have died, there is no sound except the pines.

There was still the sun, 91 million miles away,

dribbling through the branches of the groaning pines. 

There was still my skin of snow.

There was still my heart, a stunned bird fallen from the pines.

Hear the song of the snow falling from the pines,

falling on itself, increasing itself

in thrall to its remote Master,

saying, we are small white suns without heat,

bright, blinding.

I made my skin call itself cold,

and wrapped myself around my heart. 

I said, idiot pines, here is peace, here is stillness.

The pines stood groaning, green day and night,

oblivious to the Master's moods, saying glory glory.

All the while, my heart stirred, brown and puny,

whispering itself out as friable desire

for light, for voice, for the pines that sway

in the unseen, unending movement

of the empty, restless sky.

_______

for Sunday Muse #145.

Buck Moonskull, Private Eye

 Buck Moonskull, private eye

slugs down a spring water, heaves his hooves up on his desk, and coolly sizes up his client.

What a dame. 

Big "who, me?" brown eyes behind long lashes and a come-hither look. Buck laid odds they'd be sharing a salt lick before this case was over. 

"Jane Doe," she said when he asked her name.

"Sure, dollface." Did she think he was born yesterday? Why, it had to have been three years ago now. He watched a blush creep up that perfect face.

"I--" she began.

"Stow it, Toots," said Buck Moonskull, a little sharply. He didn't like being played with.

"I know who you are. I'm not the kind of flatfoot who can't see the forest for the trees." Buck picked up a cheap plastic folder and waved it. "Does the name Bambi mean anything to you, doll?"

"Where did you--"

"You're his mother. Don't bother to deny it. Oh sure, that faked death scheme paid off when Stag Antlersen copped the insurance money. I'm on to you sister."

A sly smile played around the edges of her kissable lips as she drew the .22 and purred, "So. You found out about Stag." She raised an eyebrow. "You're good, dear. But not good enough." She raised the gun and, as fast as a landlord on rent day, Buck Moonskull dipped his rack and knocked it away with a practiced swipe of a his 8 points.

"I must have been crazy to try to con a con," stammered Ms. Doe. 

"Lunacy," said Buck Moonskull as a gold halo of light shone above his head, like tacky foil on the neck of a bottle of drug store champagne. He picked up the black rotary phone from his desk and, gesturing with it, asked, "Do you want to come clean to Bambi, or do I put him straight myself?"

Jane Doe sighed, crossed her legs provocatively, and reached for the phone. In the middle of the dialer it said "Buck Moonskull. CLOverfield 5-2999." Watching her, he had a feeling that number would be ringing again soon.

_______

for Sunday Muse #120. 

This Morning At Danny's Coffee Shop

A well-dressed bird talks on a cell phone. We only hear one side of the convo.

"Take the long view," advises the bird.

"Okay...just give me the nut of the problem." 

"They'll need seed money..."

"Piggy bank, nest egg...whatever..."

"Take a flyer? No...they'll take a bath."

"Yep, same old song. Bye, Robin."
________

A Friday 55 for my BFF at Verse Escape blog.

Today's birbs:

The Thing I Couldn't Tell You

I wear black gloves, and in my palm
a white candle burns. The priest wears
a black shirt, and offers the wafer
from a silver ciborium lined with gold.

The magpie is a white bird ashed with black.
In its nest, the thieved medals of saints,
and a tryptich taken from my superstitious lips:
Good morning, Captain. Good morning Sir.

I have thick black hair, and on my breath
is the white lie I tell with the tongue
of a sanctus bell. In my palm,
the icon to whom I neither listen nor pay.

So you see, I am damned by the lie
and by the bird who stole my honest word.
My love is white but ashed with black,
stubborn as a mule with thorny roses on her back.
________

for Sunday Muse #99.

My Kept Crow

My kept crow
collects paper stars, ribbons, various weathers
stolen from the top-shelf box
in the locked room
where I keep what I must forget.

Here is my nun's cell in its spare austerity.
My kept crow comes to my hand,
and I see myself in his tilted eye.
His gift is vertigo dreams
where, at last, I let go of balance
and approximate flight as sleeping dogs and suicides do.

In riven night, I arise
--as my crow would understand--
and go to him, my dark swain, my confessor.
He gives me paper stars, ribbons, various weathers;
I leave him with a bauble
red, meaty, useless
to pull apart.

My kept crow
is kind in the gray-white ash of morning.
He makes no insistence that I rise,
though he sees my open eyes,
my open bleed,
and the open window that shows his free brothers
and mocks our combined, if pretty, superfluity.
________

Armageddon Lullaby

Birds flew high above a world on fire.
Around my neck a river worn as below my body burned.
In my hair a water-garland where water birds turned.
All around, the black-robed dead, on legion ashen pyres.

I called to the birds above a world on fire.
Called and sang to the birds from my disintegrating throat.
The birds spun from glass and the heavens entire
were turned by my song first to whispers, then to smoke.

Around my neck I wore a childhood stream.
In my hair a feather garland made of swans and steam.
The world turned red, then orange, then white
and the birds to choristers of anthracite.
________

for Sunday Muse #89. And for the world in flood and fire.

Itinerary On The Fly

Do not place

your piano on the tracks.

Do not bind to a base

A bird of any kind.

Still, facts are facts

and the unforeseen may occur

Without warning--without a word.

"I knew a tune," says the man.

"I knew the sky," says the bird.

And so they sit with what they know.

Man and bird at peace in place

with one stop left to go.

_____

for The Sunday Muse #74.