Samarkand

 

A man wearing only a sodden overcoat and one dress shoe

led a seasick stallion by a rope along the beach

slowly, so slowly

like their ship that descended the ghostly green.

He said to me, "No kiss of yours can replace deck and cabin,

keel and hold. No woman is as precious as the next breath."

Sadly, so sadly

he wandered away, wearing only one earring and a felt hat. 

I was, then, a Multilingual Sister of the Silent Bell

and led the abandoned animal through our courtyard

carefully, so carefully

so as not to disturb the stillness with the thunder of his heart.

Wearing only a sundress and carrying one rope sandal,

I know now that summer pavers are warmer than a drowning man.

Slowly, sadly, carefully,

I flowed that day like water from the stone of Samarkand.

______________

for Word Garden Word List--Keith Reid.

Music: Chantel Chamberland Temptation

Bio

All she wanted was 

pretty horses with feather plumes,

standing balanced on their backs

as they circle the moon.

All she wanted was

Christmas morning and fruit on a plate,

candied stollen sliced and served,

rising early to start sleeping late. 

Now, visit her where

cornball Napoleons roam the rooms

spouting blather in poetry's place

while staff cup the pills and count the spoons.

______

for Word Garden Word List--Ferlighetti. 

21

When she was arrested, she was wearing her baker boy hat

with the love poem tucked behind the inner band.

She had her backpack, her phrase book,

her connections and her suburban background.

Oh say can you see her falling like a shot bird, blood on the golden feathers?

She came to skate and got the slew foot boot,

a thump on the back and a smirking salutation.

By the dawn's early light I had thought her the world's most beautiful marvel

as she slept and her skin invited my kiss like a host catching the swaying guest.

I thought her a brown Sahara where it rains every afternoon

and the sun is stupid with lazy contentment.

She did business in cafes and book stores, where so proudly we hailed

the baristas and glasses-girls who chose the books we couldn't read.

From a distance she looked like a mistake, a wrong detail in a genius watercolor,

a runaway from another time, heads together with some local joker.

Time thickens when you get bad news. 

It's like a heart attack that takes all week.

I wrote her a poem as she slept, and the poem had a silver tongue.

It was something about Morr0ccan markets and calling peacocks,

an opium dream I cooked up stone cold sober except for woozy desire.

I tucked it in the inner band of her baker boy hat, folded with origami care.

I thought she would find it later, a swami love-joke to make her happy,

never knowing I would leave the country alone from a cold airport

by the twilight's last gleaming, the departures flipping over like a folded hand.

________

for qbit's excellent Akhmatova word list. 

The Drowsing Moon

 

"Take the ribbon from your hair

shake it loose and let it fall"

--Kris Kristofferson

The moon drowses now, in her compartment

made of asters on a train to the sea

and she seeks in her dream the department

of missent lilies, mislaid carelessly.

Her petition is dancing so sweetly

that the gods search their memories for tears

to stitch where her silver crescent appears.

The moon is blemished now, by dawn and time

and the train master calls for her sorrow

to be served as gin with a wedge of lime

and then forwarded on to tomorrow

where what they can't buy, the asters borrow

a mixing of winds as a bandage to bind

her with thread of forgetting, serpentined.

_____

for Tuesday Poetics: Fay Collins

art by Fay Collins

this poem is a rhyme royal