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.

Pawn

 

I want to pawn my grave

but they tell me it is worthless

and want my skin instead. 

the sky meets a pickpocket

who lifts the sun and sells it on eBay.

roosters' GoFundMe falls short.

the world spins but produces no cloth.

naked world, let me know you, and love you.

it responds with acid ink on sandpaper.

I buy the sun and slaughter the roosters.

I set the world on fire but die alone.

I miss my skin but have lost the ticket.

________

Shared with Word Garden Word List--Shy Creatures

Oasis

 

Well ducks, it was the place to gather in those days.

There were ceiling fans that made one think 

that Baron Von Richtofen might fly in at any moment. 

I wondered whether a man wearing coveralls had to climb

 up on a ladder each morning

to heave the blades into motion.

They served a concoction of fruit, gin, crushed ice,

the low notes from Hernando's Hideaway, and who knew

what else. It tasted like children's party punch

but made our high perches start to  pitch

on the rough seas beneath our jelly legs.

Down some white stone stairs, there was a blue pond

someone had stocked with mallards, as green and gold

as my jewelry. They were free to fly

but could never leave--the desert

would have turned them to cardboard.

We slept with scorpion nets. One night I dreamt

that a handsome man in a uniform of water lay with me,

told me my hair was good rope from India, and

that I had been a snake charmer

in a previous life. He kissed me and it stung.

Ah, love, there you are looking at me through your new

telescope, your young face behind the lens like an egg.

I gave up gin, and traveling, and most other things long ago.

Now I'm talking to you with my bird beak,

free to choose but forbidden to leave

except via packing box, to be sent by air mail over the dunes

to the oasis bar, c/o my younger self, cash on delivery, payable

in florins, code phrase "wing walker." The Baron will be there waiting.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Across the River and into the Trees

Music: Hernando's Hideaway

Five Reasons Why We Divorced

 

1. The phase of the moon. 

      Full in perpetuity inside your head,

     disturbing your vision from behind,

     creating avid ghosts. 

     Me, caught in tides, no handhold,

     every current riding over my tongue,

    a deep-water language for one.

2. The snowdrops in the front garden.

     You, the monarch of sweet beginnings,

     pale with presentiments, failing

     and dying in the first strong light.

    Me, the Queen of January, lover

    of the silent empty street, made 

    nervous by crowds and heat. 

3. The thespian masks on our wall.

     You were the thousand-in-one,

     going for a glass of water and

     returning a complete stranger.

    Me, forgetting what was real or scripted,

    playing a part, blundering in borrowed limbs,

    smiling, crying, ad-libbing, hating it.

4. The crow feathers on my desk.

     You liked doves, wanted everything white,

     like living in a child's storybook, letting

    someone else absorb all the splinters.

    Me, a dark star happiest at height, 

    but having foresworn the breeze

    except the one in my dreams. I called

   all night, lips never moving at all.

5. The child between us and of us.

     The Viking funeral you loaded

     your guilt upon, disguised as

     kindness, consuming itself brightly.

    Me, trying to be sober, trying 

   to be better than the mother

   I had myself, and failing, failing,

   until our child needed me most

and I swam out to him, with my real face, and a ticket out of there. 

________

for What's Going On? Fifteen Reasons 

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List is still open through Sunday. 

Music: Roberta Flack Just Like A Woman

   

     

And Now You Know.... The Rest of The Story

 

Somehow, the Modesto Mud Pigeons vault into second place in the Pacific Crust League baseball season of 1930.

A perennial doormat playing in a ramshackle firetrap of a ballpark and managed by an unstable loon called Double Hatchet MacGillicuddy, the team's fortunes changed when rookie phenom Handsome Henry Faraday arrived and slugged 42 home runs in 25 games, all while setting ladies' hearts aflutter.

Imagine then, how Double Hatchet and the soft-hearted ladies reacted when fire-balling Franco "Frank" Spizeymeatballi cracked Faraday right in the dome with a pitch! 

Down he went, and down went the Mud Pigeons with him, finishing a distant fifth as Spizeymeatballi's San Jose Hosers took the championship. :-(

Double Hatchet MacGillicuddy was last seen running amok on the Pacific island of Watyagonnadonow where he vanished into a grove of palm trees and was killed by a falling coconut.

As for our hero Handsome Henry Faraday, his head injury resulted in a new and amazing musical talent, enabling him to invent the electric piano--not popularized until some 40 years later--when his recording of a barrelhouse version of One Meat Ball unexpectedly (and posthumously) topped the charts, making Handsome Henry second only to Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin in 1970's musical importance. 

_____________

for Denise's Six Sentence Stories. Key word: "vault"

Music: Tony Pastor One Meat Ball

Oracle

 I was raised on the page of a magazine,

a pencil rammed down my spine that I might

keep better time.

My mother said, here, marry this potato,

this barbell,

this party hat,

this disease.

In the night they came to me

on the night trapeze.

I collected hallucinations--Laika in a capsule made of experts.

That winter, my husbands built priests in the garage,

confessed to plates of spaghetti

and drove down mine shafts to golf club coffins.

Now, I begin with new bones,

eyes placed on coins like hor d'ouevres 

for the Oracle who breathes deep

and tells my future

even knowing that no one will believe her.

Penance

I am a ghost looking for spirits; steam searching for smoke. 

I wear my long duster, and carry a kerosene sun.

I am a nun praying my penance; a singer struck by stroke.

I am your grave digger; you, better loved than anyone.

I wear my long duster, and carry a kerosene sun.

I am found by dire-light, turning scripture to palimpsest. 

I am never done, though my diet is the slenderest.

I am a nun paying my penance; a singer struck by stroke.

Collecting throats in my pockets, renaming them all night.

I have choked back every longing, and paled your name with white.

I am your grave digger; you,  better loved than anyone.

My all-and-none, my crossroads queen awoke,

I am a ghost looking for spirits; light transformed to smoke.

________

This is a trimeric, for Sunday Muse #184.  

Cricket

 A bold black cricket came in from the night

with a message wrapped around his leg

I offered him bread, my body, my bed

and an indigo blue Russian egg.

He had only the song that crickets know

taught them by their dying mothers

He played it on the silk and scar of my skin

and told me there would be no others.

My hair is blond, his body was black

and hard as the truth in a mirror

The night was warm, the dawn too quick

and the last time drew one season nearer.

_____

for dverse creepy crawlies. 

Aberdeen

 

Here is the vine that weakened the wall

that dripped with rain in the shrouded dawn.

Here is the touch that tenderly kills,

and climbs so slowly, on and on.

I've forgotten the hat that I wore in the wet

and the path to take to your black-latched door.

I only remember the cardinal that kept

its perch on the pine, and petrichor.

Mornings are early, dusk comes late

and the wall is gone beyond the gate

but the fallen bricks still hold the green

of the ivy, cruel potentate.

__________

the photo is mine, from my yard.

Cartography

I represent actual things

with a representation of those things.

Come in,

sit down.

I'll select posture, expression and language

like semaphore,

 an agreed-upon symbology

like mailing some version of myself

to some version of you.

Behold this Orinoco

made of ink;

this range

comprised of bumps.

Roll your fingers over them.

That, is real.

Let us fall in love

with what we seem to be.

Let us share a border

clear on charts but apocryphal on scene

where we may meet and express our confusion.

I am a cartographer.

I can tell you how far from here

 to there,

from where I am

 to where you are,

and at how many degrees

 longitude and latitutude

we can expect to find various landmarks--

happiness,

children,

retirement and so forth.

I am a cartographer;

come live with me

and be my love.

Some day,

I may write you a poem

throwing everything we depend upon

into chaos.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #122.

Mike Pence, Gemini, Visits The Mayo Clinic

We made our own zodiac from prayer books and beating-sticks, 
kept folded in narrow creases,
vermin parables for rot-paper effigies
writ down as paragons in the cheap potboiler of continuous torrent and industry.

Down at the harbor,
salt angels wave goodbye to ships laden
with cream-skinned babies in barrels,
alive in a circumscribed commerce
of palm
and funeral
and coral-colored sunrise.

We peddle our peculiar zodiac at stations
where all trains have evaporated,
the green and violet of bruises rain themselves clean,
and ballads are sung with lark tongues lodged
in mother throats that cannot exist, 
but which sing and sing and sing.

Come, find our graves in the rockery,
lend us new deaths by instant contract.
Arrange us on new stars aloft by decree,
and kill the old deities by stoning via television.
The night horizon will slide us
to the harbor,
to the arms of sirens
who will sing us, exploding, 
through dust-hearts and lie-lips 
to the stuttering surprise
of creatures too perverted and vile 
to carry the note that we plot, on charts, 
like a poem slipped beneath the door of permanent astonishment.
________

for Kerry's word list and Izy's prompt for the last day of April.

Remains

The first thing they noticed was an earthquake; then the shape that the earthquake revealed.

A once-living thing,
like a bank president or jilted lover,
it had turned to stone and worn the same expression for lo these many millenia.

An expert from the university was dispatched,
along with a few dozen anonymous local sherpas who would be doing all the work.

The expert knelt, pupils dilating, and forgot to breathe.
"Is he going to propose to it?" wondered the sherpas.

Once, the thing's gut was filled with enough sweet summer grasses
to fill all the holes left by the earthquake, and then some.
Its tremendous scat was as big as the expert.
It knew a tropical sun and carried bizarre shrieking birds on its back.

Sometimes, when you are just trying to run a business,
or staying in bed willing yourself to die,
some know-it-all bastard comes along and tells you that you have to evolve, 

or pull yourself together for the children.
This is when aftershocks come in handy,
and rubble suits become these officious fucks,

who, in a thousand or a million more years will find your visage unchanged
and earthquakes as impotent as priests or Pollyannas. 
_________

for Day 16. 

NOT the "official video" btw. But still.

A Man

A man grew
up, out of the April Michigan ice
in my brown grave of a garden.

This man was never a child.
He never bounced some goddamned ball
or climbed into my lap for a story.

What I'm saying is, this man wasn't natural,
though he grew there
among the astonished screaming jays.

How can I sleep, knowing this shapeless bastard
is leaning upright out there,
moaning like the last lover on earth?

For now, the hard earth is his vice,
he stays half-born, entire,
fucking with my head, expecting some sick future.

Slashing rain and warmth as sudden and wrong
as a stranger in one's kitchen
will free him, he will roar the mud from his throat and tarnish my name on the dead medicine of his lips.

He will call, I will come, terrified and scalded,
to be touched and opened by him,
to weep in his arms, hissing damn you, darling, damn you."
_______

for day 13.

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.

Lightning Bugs In July Darkness

Lightning bugs in July darkness
make me think of your Indian hair by firelight.
It's like being hit in the head, these tiny stars--
this pleasant longing with a barb on its tail.

Air is a funny thing, especially at night.
Like you, it seems expansive while obscuring entire worlds.
I need wings to keep from falling, writing poems on foolscap
about you, and eyes that can't help but follow 

The foxfire there-and-gone glow of lightning bugs
In July darkness.
_____

for Wednesday Muse "Night Sounds." I see now that I have written about a night sight instead and hope to be pardoned this departure from clear instruction. 

The Cleric Crow

art by Toril Fisher

Crow, with your blackberry voice,
your hand-feet praying to grass blades
and sunflower stalks,

Come to my violin-framed bed of soft Gypsy songs.
Dolorous crow, in my elbow crook,
barter with corn kernels
for my robe spun from comb and tears.

Crow, with your harsh voice,
I must remember;
I cannot forget.
My skin hums with wings and stingers.
Your skin blooms with smoke and stars.

Crow, small priest of the northern window,
I have done so much
accumulating only to trinkets and sighs.

Take them, give them to the mourning dove.
I am useless but yours;
Distinguish me, by your bright vision, from pavement, 
from waste.

Crow, with your amorous voice
made from cat-tail and winding vine,
I must remember;
I cannot forget.
Make me your bauble,
give me to God
high in the branches of the swaying locust.
________
 
 linked HERE.
 

Pottery Of Ancient Cultures

In your eyes,

the pottery of ancient cultures.

From your smile,

sunspots

that leave vervet monkeys sitting, perplexed

At the breath-thinness of a peasant blouse

reclining between August stars 

and the skin of your shoulder. 

They find, in every stitch and design,

a catalog of figs, and vertigo.

They are drunk

on the ferment of your lazy accent.

At the Museum of Utilitarian Wonders,

I find

the pottery of ancient cultures.

A brochure contains the beginnings of nests

for birds who do not exist--

vervets who do not exist--

drunk under a sun hidden by clouds.

I clasp ancient ornaments onto your wrists,

your throat,

your ankle,

but your body is clouds.

You cannot accept these gifts, or anything else--

Just rain,

love,

colors,
reversed images,

that do not exist except in the singular attentions

of these useless lines.

_____

A Pose Of Monkeybones

This isn't just a pose of monkeybones--
no one made of flesh ever willed a fever down,
or talked sense when fingers curled just so to make the nightstorms roll.

You might think I'm made of straw and stone,
a long-skull girl with marrow-eyes in every broken bone
so close to heart and beat and breath--
Mercy tangled in my hair, out of reach except
for the loud-strike, rain-shriek
inside these abandoned bones--
woman, monkey, open sky that shakes and moans
until there's nothing left.
_______

for Camera FLASH.

Remember This

Remember this,
When dolls start speaking to you from the nest stuffed deep
inside your own throat.
Remember vanity,
as worked by hand in the lace hem of a tiny dress;
Remember never to seat a Gypsy next to a mark,
and to preside with grace, charm, and engraved silver service.

Listen to this,
she'll say, from between the feathers of birds hooked by wires
to dying Christmas trees in burning houses.
Listen to this--don't be a ninny and ignore this warning
when she chirps in your ear like broken glass--
Baccarat or Waterford.

Girls love cats, horses, dolls,
and attics filled with bird cages and unexploded ordnance.
Listen to the water fountain my ghost animates the flow of,
and line up your darlings along the window sills.
Seat the priest with the diplomat,
Arabian with alley cat,
and remember this, as the afternoon wears on:
I owe no explanations as to what birds think about dolls that talk,
and the girls who take them to bed
like said prayers.
______ 

Stupidity

We took vows,
two fools stepping off the cliff,
full of the soulful certainty that marks conquerors and mental patients.

Rome blessed us, I suppose,
just as it mocked Hannibal,
driving him to fits of genius and savagery.

When you haunt my dreams, I think about the elephants.
I know that um-thousand poor nobodies met their death in the mountains
just to satisfy one man's idee fixe.

I know that they had dreams, wives and children left behind,
empty bellies, infected feet, all the traveling gear of sufferers since time began,
but I lose sleep and peace only over the beasts they took with them.

We made a point, you and I,
not to mash the wedding cake in each other's faces as so many do.
We were as sweet as swans on a summer lake.

Elephants have eyelashes fit for shy nuns or reclining models.
They know low languages kept for themselves and their familiars,
and we know only dropped chances, blood, and stupidity.

Hannibal impaled and beheaded stragglers, complainers.
His own men's faces gaped from poles as warning to the rest to press on.
Was he any kinder to the elephants? 

We were undone by restless ghosts, of madness, and of remove.
Elephants truly do remember every beating, and every mercy,
every bone left behind, and every calf that lay still.

I loved you, and I love our son fiercely.
If I can't forgive you, it's because of the elephants and the insanity of snow and thin air.
Hannibal is dead. Rome still stands. 
Huge bones litter the Alps, with no heart mighty enough to find them, touch them, and mourn.
_______

for "An Elephantine Challenge" at Real Toads.