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 

Elemental

 

I thought that you would be like water

in summer

even if the lake lay

beyond the brambles.

On a road trip, the heat mirage oases

seem nearer

like objects in the mirror

where I first saw you.

In summer,

birds bathe in the dog dish I set out--

they fly without rising

in that finite sky.

Your dark hair seemed to flow and called me

like a siren

whose face is obscured

like her every word.

I still set out that dog dish for the winter birds

in their need.

Mornings I set it steaming

only to find it frozen by afternoon.

There are things that flow, comforting things

already changing.

I remember your reticence and kick the bowl of ice

coming free, ungiving, falling hard and only once.

_________

for What's Going On--"what cold is"

Music: Julian Lennon Ruby Tuesday

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.

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

Naive Art

 The black cat with the golden eyes

hides in the garden

with the broken-necked tulips

in the Spring.

The tulips

in their pink headscarves

will never raise their gaze again--

only their arms

to the blank blue sky.

The black cat with the steady gaze

hides in the garden

fascinated with the dun-colored mourning dove

on the gray sill.

The mourning dove

watches for the speckled hawk

beneath the yellow sun

of April.

Lorca-Hemingway

 

Lorca-Hemingway is a fixture at the cafe.

His blood consists of La Marseillaise and dove-moons.

It pounds through his body like a glorious parade.

When I see him, I walk with back bent backwards,

slinking like a cartoon cat,

short of breath, tail-talking, stupid, exalted, way obvious.

Hand him your copy, he'll sign it in terse bluebirds.

He is his own hotel room, there's always

some blowsy blonde on the bed, quietly detonating.

Young men line up near his table, as if there were a war

or a desperate national need for Gypsy violins.

A waiter serves orange suns from embossed tin trays.

I paint Lorca-Hemingway's skin with brandy cologne,

so that all bullets turn away and take trains to Barcelona.

I send myself as a telegram into his latest masterpiece:

I am a peony petal inside a bud stop

you are a man and a girl and a secretary bird stop

angels inside you carry death and glory in little satchels stop

Now I conceal Lorca-Hemingway inside me like a trick lighter.

No one in the cafe can find him, but in the nick of time

Brett Ashley smiles with a cigarette in her lips and 

I flame!

Oh yes,

I flame.

_________

for The Sunday Muse #191, where I am hosting one last time.