Beautiful Is A Tired Word

 

Beautiful is a tired word but I found you so

with the intensity of your obsidian hardness, and silver starburst flaws.

A black-leaved water lily with 

blooms of conventional white, like a nun

if the nun were carnal, and clever, 

and forever drowning in her own roots.

How like the Host are your white blooms,

a transubstantiation from habit-black to bland bright,

a false face like a lady's fan

or a death's head

and I just had to touch, take into me, and be wounded by

the carmine-edged cuttings you took from yourself.

Weren't we beautiful, for an hour as the day turned crimson,

making poetry from nothing but dirt and gold?

We wore only our flimsy paper costumes 

printed with deadnames and roses

and a garland of sun-shy violets for a crown. 

Finally, we saw each other for what we were--

one a shadow inside a censer swung by the claw of a talking crow

and the other as dim as a dog and as keen to roll in the foul thing it finds.

Beautiful is a tired word but I hung it around your neck

like a prize won for knocking down milk bottles on the midway.

a feat remembered with both pride and shame for far too long.

___________

for desperatepoets LOVE SONGS ON A GHOST JUKEBOX. 

images created with Bing A.I.

Music: The Japanese House Dionne

Lilacs And Ashes

 

1. ‘The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.’- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dent Dutton, 1955

I brought you lilacs and ashes

wrapped in paper milled from early mornings and blind starlings.

On the paper were written a million words

that when translated sickened and when spoken disappeared.

I touched you and grew old but was reborn in the lilacs.

You gave me caramels and sickrooms,

wide verandas where ghosts sang madrigals with sisters of the moon.

You gave me the world's most beautiful door but kept the key.

Your skin was sweet on my tongue, but my tongue became a road to nowhere.

In the ditches there were lilacs, on the hillsides, marigolds.

I wrote you a million poems and grew leaner with each stanza.

You said, "Come in! Come in!" from a dark hall that narrowed into nothing. 

Such was our love. Such was the starling with its injuries,

hiding in the lilac ditch. Such was the silent book,

the radiant rose, the bright marigolds on the coffin of time.

The moon makes me remember and I cannot forgive

its ruined face

so pale

so luminous

so sorrowful

like a Japanese lantern at the canceled wedding of joy and misery.

_________

for Dverse Poetics, hosted by Linda Lyberg. 

La Famiglia

Mom would have done well as an underworld figure,
sticking the steel into some poor bastard
then doing the perp walk holding a Le Creuset enameled cast iron skillet in front of her face.

There is something to be said for always seething with petty resentments--
it keeps a girl from going lazy,
idling away the hours wandering the arboreal colonnade
with a peach in one hand and a bible in the other.

Better  to brood under a starved star and crescent moon
bad-tempered as a sick camel,
rooting out infidels from the shadows and making them bow to the east.
After all, what's family for?

Then again, we all have our foolish hour and faint notion,
stumbling along in silver slippers,
carrying the quilled bowling ball handed us by our elders and betters.

Mom, she never believed for one minute in butterball sunshine and rock candy mountains.
She harbored a crow scrabbling just beneath her heart,
telling her quite sensibly to kill that child and kill it quick,
just like she learned at her own mother's knee.

Grandma wore ice boots,
Grandpa had no tongue and a nail through his eye.
Into the world they sent their girl to birth a scapegoat upon an altar
built from fear and silence,
the perfect place to start a family of her own.
______

for Sunday Muse #93, using the word list below for Skylover Word List.

Image at top is Ruby Cruz as teenage Annie Wilkes in "Castelrock." 

And finally, some music to read poetry by.