Stars

 When I was just an olive sparrow living rootless in Texas,

I met Kris Kristofferson and some hay-blond woman with a kind face. I asked Kris, "Are you going to Willie's picnic?' and in that train engine rumble of his he laughed and said, "Hell, I see Willie at his house!" I never saw Kris Kristofferson again after that, except once, last night, around 3 a.m., in a cemetery just off Woodward Avenue. I asked him, "Where's Rita?" He said, "Oh, I couldn't rightly say, but wherever she's at I expect she's singin' " We sat together on a marker for Howard Greenbriar, husband and father, our beers at our feet, brown glass sweating in the grass, their gold-and-yellow labels giving them the appearance of votive candles. Looking up, I said, "I can't see the stars." Kris told me, "That's the lights, babe. We're like belled cats lookin' for angels." It was bright when I woke up. I wondered what happened to the hay-blond woman with the kind face. Her hair wasn't dark like Rita's or mine or turning gray like Rita's or mine. A friend texted, asking if I was going to the Kristofferson show that night. I texted back "Hell, I see Kris at his house!" But the truth is, I haven't seen a star for a very long time.

_______________

The part about meeting Kris Kristofferson in the first part of this poem is true. Or maybe it was just some rando who looked and sounded exactly like him.

Song of a Tarnished Eidolon

 

I asked the locust leaves if they were lonely.

They replied,

We are restless.

An owl on a branch of the locust tree

wept silently.

I have looked in all directions.

At home, I found my future in a spoon's face,

and my melancholy in the strings of an oud.

I haunt myself.

Indigo is the night sky.

Indigo is the sleepless sea.

Nun-white bird,

I will meet you beneath the locust tree

wearing a veil of Point d'Esprit

and holding a torn carnation.

_____________

Laika

 

Looking up through the trees in my yard at night,

what does it matter that the stars we see are already dead?*

I look to God as my dog looks to me.

Still there? Good. Anything you want me to do?

Sometimes I think about Laika, the Russian space dog,

so happy (as I imagine) to be rescued from a pound,

given a job and a pack. Did she look to them

as my dog looks to me and I look to God?

They sent Laika into space though there were no sticks,

no fields, no soft bed, no pack to go with her.

She must have wondered where everyone went,

and been so bewildered and lonely.

Who's a good dog?  Oh, you were, Laika.

My own dog looks to me as I look up to God

in tears and asking, still there?  

----

*required line written by Amy Woolard

for Dverse Prosery--Amy Woolard, hosted by my friend Dora. I don't normally write prose anymore, but made an exception. 

Music: Tom Rosenthal It's OK

Let's Talk

 "Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars.

Out here, we is stoned, immaculate."  --Jim Morrison

Let's talk about the elephant in the room.

I'm not some sort of spokesperson for eternity.

Still, you keep popping up,

asking if anyone wishes to communicate,

then you wig out when I answer back.

Let's talk about how I got here. 

I was in the back seat of Daddy's Oldsmobile.

The baseball game was on. 

Then I was launching off from some crazy trapeze into...this place. 

No mom.

No dad.

Just another bauble in the costume jewelry box of the universe

shining brightly in the dark.

Now let's talk about you. 

You're miffed when I don't answer, but shit your pants when I do. 

I can't tell you where your dead Granny is.

I can't tell you if she's in glory or misery.

I can't tell you how much I'm starting to hate that silly planchette of yours.

So why did I answer in the first place?

Like Cole Porter says, It was just one of those things. 

Let's talk about not talking anymore.

Whatever you're asking about--it's not my clowns, not my circus.

I'm just a bit of incorporeal ash floating around in the ether.

I vant to be alone

and boy, am I.

At least, until you came along, like a chatty seatmate on an airplane.

You say hello--hello hello!--I dont know why you say hello, I say

Goodbye.

________

for Word Garden Word List--The Circus In Winter.

and

The Sunday Muse #255. 

Music: Pink Floyd Comfortably Numb

Russian Doll

You cannot, ever,
said the night around the sleeper 
in her empty fullness of dreams too real for remembering.

No. Never,
say mouths of faces looking in
from beyond a smoked glass.
She cannot touch them, they are too far.
She cannot be touched, she is further yet.

Here is a heart you cannot have.
Here is a fist you can.
Here is laughter with you, but foreign.
Here is laughter at you, that uses your real name.

You can die, we can kill you,
say those holding roses at the wrong door.
You can die, you can suicide,
say the voices without bodies to your body with its lock.

I am a Russian doll,
says the girl inside the woman inside the skin.
Walk out any time you like, say the mute ghosts.
You are a disgrace, 
say the holy, standing blind in filthy mirrors.
You are mine, says the workman
bloody with her wounds, reaching his hand
at the edge of a precipice.

You are known,
say the stranger in the desert 
and the woman waiting.
You are more than this husk of flesh,
says the silent angel 
on this bare dirt path a breath away from union.
________

for Sunday Muse #106.

Agua

They search for water with their fat fingers
but would settle for water vapor, thin as faint praise
from a black-dress mother with her big back turned.

Visors are a view of the future,
misshapen fish-eye suns,
blank faces reducing enormous fires to cold coins.

Stumbling weightless vagabonds 
stab pennants into wastelands and wear our emblem,
the sprinting antelope carcass
multiplied like useless inflated money 
for buying phantoms from vacuums where skulls sing anthems

To agua that mummies crave and parade in dreams,
life sustained but life so desiccated it dissolves
for waste and want of agua.
_____

for Earthweal--"water."

Poetry Reading

In my open shoulder bag,
the second dream
from my third night with you.
It is wrapped in satin taken
from the step of a tomcat on the sill in the dark.

That night,
clocks were lit and lined my book shelf like roosting dawn.
I was a caravan crossing your skin,
wearing borrowed Moroccan prayers
and dizzy as a thief after a chase.
I have grown my hair long, since then,
yet still it contains only certain birds, rising suns, water cups--
never the Saint Creolan medal you wore every day
when we were together. 

In my open shoulder bag,
there are patchouli leaves and musk.
I will read them to seventeen people from a small stage,
and describe in dunes what I felt that night--
our third, and the second dream I had
while resting in your arms; a baked curve of horizon
with heat lines rising 
like waterbirds taking flight 
from each glorious thorn of our entwined mirage.
______

for Karin's "April Second" prompt at Toads.

Nuns

The nuns kept birds
and, by necessity,
kept it from the diocese. 

The nuns kept chaste,
but kept birds against the loneliness
because symbolic husbands never come home.

I live in the nuns' quarters,
now renovated with appliances and art on the walls,
but still silent at sundown.

I know what a calling is,
and for that I am as quaint as a rare sparrow.
Is there even such a thing?

Mornings, I think about you,
but I keep it to myself; only my body knows the lie
I tell, by my silence, my hymn unsung.

My love, you are a birdkeeper.
You've sent me a picture, and your face is the air;
before I can think, my arms open,

knowing more by instinct than any censure can deny.
_______

for Real Toads birds challenge
 

I Have Eaten Stars

 “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

I have eaten stars
but they brought their own gravity with them--
their own geography with them--
and now they unbalance me, so that I lurch and roll as I fall.

On the surface of the sun, 
everyone is blind and everything is done gingerly--
every effort undertaken temporarily--
taking a million generations just to create a gesture that is gone in an instant.

Uncross your fingers and kiss me.
Meteors remember, but are too thick and stupid to talk--
language eludes them and they are as celibate as nuns.
I would forsake all liturgy if you would only be God's recollection and bless me.

I have eaten stars
but their light is checkerboarded inside my skin--
their light diffuses until I am dizzy and that is when
I lie and tell you I was home all day,

wrote nothing and

sold your name for a song.
_____ 

for Kerry at Real Toads.

  

Medea, NASA Wife

Death is the ultimate gravity.
Astronauts understand this, and live forever,
but weep as they work, knowing they can never go home again.

What friend, what doctor,
can comfort the deathless in their solitary endlessness?
What aspect of research, 
what nourishing knowledge
could ever make their exile bearable?

Look! In the sky!
Nothing. 
Woman, you cannot touch them; there is nothing so remote as a departing spouse,
sure of everything and saying so,
all the while

fearing the fire of re-entry
and the facing of wives and waves which once welcomed, and now destroy.
______

for get listed with grapeling at real toads.

Love Poem w/ Wolves

wolves
understand how your body
can sustain their body,
but wolves
have no restraint.

wolves
--these wolves, my wolves--
are as lonely as a motherless girl.
wolves can sing,
and by singing,
become smoke around the moon.

wolves
take my heart and leave moonbeat:
you, you, you.
i never trespass,
and i am a fool.
______

for flash 55 at Toads.

Panda

China is so big, such a giant on the map and in physical space,
that a person might fall in love with someone,
go all stupid over someone,
and never see them again, disappearing into the crowd
in a port city
on a bicycle,
ringing the little bell and vanishing.

Pandas eat bamboo shoots, 
so poor in nutrition that they must consume mightily to survive.
They don't know how remarkable they are, they never see a mirror;
they just eat and crap and sleep and have no idea how loved they are
all over the world.

You are twenty miles down the road, 
but I am feeling equators and great walls.
Come back, I'll boil you all the rice you want,
and when I speak it can be in those little characters.

I have a shovel,
and I am digging digging digging.
I am hoping to hit bicycle tire.
I am hoping a big black paw will reach up for me, and pull me through,
or that I'll hear your truck,
the door, your bag hitting the entryway tile.

Opium's for suckers, your face is the only high I need,
so catch the first thing smoking and I will
cancel my expedition, put the kibosh on the dig.
I love you. Don't you know?
Or are you a panda, adorable and clueless,
wandering the bamboo forest 
when I've got something better in mind?
_______

for Hannah's prompt at Real Toads.

Constellation In Glass

I said, "I have the sea inside a glass flower vase.
I have the stars on a necklace string, leather and light."

You said, "Oh, for the blue behind the moon;
the rain that never rains enough--
the silence--the ivory key--the night."

The etched leaves on the face of the flower vase
tell about your fingers on my skin.

And the necklace? Its silver clasp 
opens only once--releasing 
the lonely orderly stars...again.
_______

 

Landscapers

The neighbor's lawn crew arrives, and I realize--
I am here by mistake.

I must certainly be a shadow of a more substantial me--
wearing ten pounds of clothing in the summer time,
out walking where these houses will be.

All you noisy fuckers on your riding mowers,
you are not yet here;
you are not yet born.

Other Me watches her language,
buries her babies,
scorches the muffins, drops a stitch.

For her it is not so long ago that locusts crawled these stalks of grass.
Out on the fields where this burb will rise,
the wildflowers, the pumpkin vines, the snows will pass.

A devil with a leaf blower crosses himself near the property line.
He has heard about the spirit next door--
that misplaced ghost haunting a restless future--mine.
________

Red-Haired Jane

Red haired jane
smells like fresh cut grass
and the black behind the moon;

if you're on your way to red haired jane,
come soon
come soon.

Red haired jane 
knows every nested branch
and how beds and plans get disarranged;

red haired jane knows leaving light and calling jay,
then the rain.
then the rain.

 

 

From The Mouths Of Crows

From the mouths of crows came a second sun,
pinned to the sky by a minor bureaucrat filled with holy half-light.
Marie Antoinette stepped out of a suitcase and asked, where is the other one?
The first one, and why is the jug painted blue and the sky painted white?

Did I say crows? They were not crows.
They were emblems made of ash, blowing themselves into new glass.
This is the kind of mistake I've been making, wearing the wrong clothes,
and going around selling blank subscriptions, riding on an ass.

I wept because there were pear blossoms.
I wept because it rained and a splintered bench curled green stems from itself.
Crows memorized my face, for reasons of their own.

Under a second sun, a second spring,
false, crafty, from which I hid in the shadows between ivy leaves.
A city worker collected blood from the pavement. I heard a cardinal sing.
See the light in bands, refracted. See how the night, resurrected, weaves.

I wept because wandering dogs were removed by ordinance.
I wept because they had blessed my cold sleep with their simple comfort.
In the morning, the crows in their kindness gave me back my face,

then flew away
forming circles
like smoke rings.
______