Donostia

 

Teacher says that every time a bell rings

she is awakened in the night and lies there

remembering the bay at San Sebastian.

The stars in the sky there are local,

drifting up from modest houses in Loiola.

They are as close as cats on a sill

and are able to both warm and wound.

Teacher says that when her heart beats,

she cannot sleep, recalling the day of drums--

the Tamborrada, and the clouds that gathered

in search of their pilfered thunder.

During the Aste Nagusia, or Big Week.

La Concha Bay is home to stilt walkers wearing

huge papier mâché heads. The calm waters

are like mothers who knew these giants as babies.

Teacher says that there was a man there,

or a woman, or an enchantment she cannot describe.

Perhaps all three, a trinity born of sangria, celebration,

and one bell beneath the drumbeat, a ringing bird.

On these recent nights, far from the Basque country,

she is startled by her doppelganger lying awake beside her.

The lesson she cannot teach is that neither knew of the other,

though the invitation was always there, a tongue in the bell,

Like an arrow in the flesh of a saint or an invitation 

to La Concha Bay, and the days to be lived beyond it.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--The Book of the Dead. 

 

Music: Mary Hopkin Those Were the Days

 

The Memory Place

 

This is the memory place, the preserve

of hollow wallpaper grandmothers,

stale gingerbread eyes balanced on

straw shoulders, fragile as a dream.

In this place, maple-leaf red and long

as love letters, her hair revives again.

The swing rope rewinds itself and 

her feet are steady on the knot. 

This is the place where what once was

soaks the air like a diary left on a porch rail. 

Everything is musty, throats close, eyes water

until I take my place, brittle, superannuated,

a carousel horse with painted eyes, spinning.

Two New Poems

 THE MERMAID'S CALLING CARD

The winter blinks its eyes coquettish

then faints as all dreams do at last--

I've saved you flower, fin, and fetish--

all you had to do was ask.

_______

PHINEAS, BACK FROM THE WAR

Phineas comes back from the war

carrying a blood-rain cloud in a folded handkerchief. 

The only things he will eat anymore

are fresh-caught birds and escargot--

one slows his speech,

the other is anesthetic. 

Phineas wears glasses with smoked lenses

and declares it dusk at all times of day.

I bring him his infant child--

he shakes its hand and turns away.

Later, his medals appear

in the crib, like ribboned toys.

Fetch

 And now comes my fetch in the mist by the slough

unnoticed by the sheep who eat the bursting sloes.

An unwelcome messenger, my double pale and blue,

to snap the stem that holds my soul and reap what doesn't rot.

I'm an altered, repetitious hag, with just the grave for new,

my breakfast made of river stones and set on plates of ice.

The horse may shed its harness, the ship may shed its crew.

I likewise shed this life entire, and no more question pose,

then--like the laurel root--decay, dissolving where it grew.

_______

for Word Garden Word List #19 (at The Sunday Muse.) 

this poem is a "Magic 9" poem, with rhyme scheme aba cad aba, or "abracadabra" minus the two r's. 

when laurel grows in a swampy area, or "slough", the roots will rot. 

Arabesque

I am the spine of a book, pages open on either side.

I am steel rails down a valley that two greening hills divide.

I am the corpus callosum, of two minds in every thought.

Am I sleeping or here wakeful, one eye open, one eye not?

I am the nest with two birds calling, both the same but different still,

I disperse myself in potions, both the doctor and the ill.

I am the worm who grew two wings, one of blue and one of gold,

Meeting in the middle when in flight and when in fold.

_______

for Sunday Muse #161. This had three stanzas but I liked it better with just the two.

Smoov

Hey Smoov,

talking out both sides of your mouth,

tell HER, she's got the rabbit ears for ya;

me, I'm deaf, don't waste your breath. 

All night, she toss and turn if you don't call;

me, I dance all night,

kick the phone right off the wall.

Smoov, you think I'm stupid?

Think you not made of glass, I can't see through ya?

Save your bullshit tap dance for HER,

she hear ya but can't see a damn thing.

She the sweet child, 

I'm the stone bitch.

Everywhere I go, she got to follow me,

crying the blues over you.

She's in my ear,

under my skin,

out to double every losing bet.

Tell HER whatever made-up fairy story you got.

Tell HER how it's gonna be different from now on.

Tell HER, you whiney-ass pencil-dick motherfucker.

Tell HER, not me,

Cos she's the one who loves you.

_____

 for The Sunday Muse #5

Coquette

I made a thing from weeds and bark
and called the thing I made--a heart.
I wrapped it 'round with wire and twine
and crossed it, kept it--called it mine.

Love my heart, love it much
despite the rot and wasps and such
and when you're done--I'll love you back
to see what nightmares come from that.
_______

for Rommy's challenge at Toads.

 
 

2 Reasons

There are two reasons why I love you,
one why I don't.

1. The things you say. You're a silver-tongued devil, such a testament talker.

2. The sight of you spills me, inside of myself. I overbalance, warmly.

And the other?

1. Someone killed us both, but we got up again, hipsway walkers--

One proud, one guilty.
_______ 

A flash 55 for the cauldron of the fearsome and powerfully magical Hedgewitch at Real Toads.

MIDWEST-4-2313

The woman who wouldn't stop talking
caused the telephone to kill itself.
For weeks after that, the operator stalked the talking woman,
fantasizing about pushing her in front of a train or a bus,
and the disturbing glee she would feel--
the drug rush of wonderful silence.

Day after day, the operator imagined scenes of accident,
murder,
the stupid woman strangled with her own tongue.

However, a repairman began paying attention to the operator.
He brought her movie tickets and hard candies;
he admired her to no end, and rarely spoke.
After months of quiet dinners and good manners at the cinema,
he tried something. She let him.

In the intimacy of afterwards, she began to confide in him.
She told him that ivy was her favorite plant, crows her favorite bird.
Further, she confessed her hatred of the talking woman to him,
and how she had been following her and planning cold-blooded murder.
He said nothing, and she loved him for it.

Unfortunately, the repairman never came by for her again.
Her number disappeared from every directory in the city,
and moving men came to take her bed away to the lunatic asylum.
With no place to sleep, and no man to confide in, she began to pace,
muttering to herself all night. 

Desperate and cracking, she appeared late one evening at the talking woman's door.
"May I use the phone?"
The woman only gaped at her, finally saying simply, "It's dead,"
but that should have been obvious, given the repair truck at the curb,
parked there for so long that ivy had begun to wind itself possessively around the axles.
______

Dialed up for Magpie #274

Comanche Lily

 

Where you've touched her,
she has left herself--
stepped outside herself--
double-deviled, smoke-boned,
back for more.

She kisses you,
but watches from some broody shadow--
she is the dark leaf beneath the bright bloom--
poppy-strong, moon-hearted,
and all yours.

(isn't she?)
________