Lilacs And Ashes

 

1. ‘The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.’- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dent Dutton, 1955

I brought you lilacs and ashes

wrapped in paper milled from early mornings and blind starlings.

On the paper were written a million words

that when translated sickened and when spoken disappeared.

I touched you and grew old but was reborn in the lilacs.

You gave me caramels and sickrooms,

wide verandas where ghosts sang madrigals with sisters of the moon.

You gave me the world's most beautiful door but kept the key.

Your skin was sweet on my tongue, but my tongue became a road to nowhere.

In the ditches there were lilacs, on the hillsides, marigolds.

I wrote you a million poems and grew leaner with each stanza.

You said, "Come in! Come in!" from a dark hall that narrowed into nothing. 

Such was our love. Such was the starling with its injuries,

hiding in the lilac ditch. Such was the silent book,

the radiant rose, the bright marigolds on the coffin of time.

The moon makes me remember and I cannot forgive

its ruined face

so pale

so luminous

so sorrowful

like a Japanese lantern at the canceled wedding of joy and misery.

_________

for Dverse Poetics, hosted by Linda Lyberg. 

Spraying For Aphids

A fondness for tomatoes is just more lies.

The leaves are ugly,

the stems weak, sagging like a tubercular outcast waiting for her next beating.

And "love apples"? 

Poets are dreamy defectives who should be drowned like cats at the earliest convenience. 

No.

I kill aphids because they are so smug.

They crawl around on their stupid stalks,

fat with sap,

experts on everything except what is that big brick thing with the patio,

what are seasons?

and what garden, what planet?

Aphids have never felt any ache and rush

at the sight of you, undressing.

They do not run into traffic like some inevitable idiot,

talking nonsense to the gorgeous grille that will kill them.

They do not bury their dogs or their children.

No aphid feels unable to contain the moment's misery,

and they don't--wise vermin--hope next time will be different.

And so, stupidly unwilling to bring myself to burn

these poems, 

these pretties, 

these pictures from a shoebox kept like guilty dope in a drawer,

I spray for aphids instead.

I watch them fall, from the noxious cloud,

never having felt or thought about anything at all.

The same heart-drop that wrecked me

at certain suitcases and closing doors overtakes me now as the aphids die.

I realize I haven't changed them,

just stopped their motion.

There will be so many mocking Beefsteaks and Early Girls to give away,

almost begging,

as if they held all my mistakes and desires in their dumb meaty red hearts.

I will clutch the arms of near strangers, piping

"Take one! Take them all!" 

A pathetic madwoman for whom "no" has become an expectation, a way of life, a savagery,

like the gardening so many of us take up.

_________

for Sunday Muse where Chrissa presides, faithful dog at her side.

Juniper Berries

Use juniper berries to season blackbirds.
For best results, 
serve them in the middle of the night--
wake your guests from their claustrophobic nightmares
with the ringing of small bells.
Offer relishes, garnishes,
cold water from a cistern,
and, if necessary,
warm illumination from shattered lantern glass and kerosene.

None of this will make you miss her any less.
None of this will make you forget how her long black hair felt
wrapped around your fingers or
trailing slowly across your breasts.
It is too much to ask of a juniper berry to restore sweet skin
where you are now nothing more than ropey white waste from old burns.

However, when you withdraw from the panic-scented chambers 
where your offered dish has been refused,
you may then feel free to retire.
Go moan into a backwards wind,
imagining feathers the color of her hair.
Capitulate to a nest of new misery
and an egg to enter
like time,
like regret,
like a hard beak-shell that will presently vomit you,
caroling poetry,
into Hell.
_______

in the time of the eclipse

in the time of the eclipse,
when you wore skin made from shadows,
i wrote down your every breath
and saved them on the sanctuary of my tongue.

i spoke you to the morning glory blooms
so that your sadness would be beautiful, and temporary.
i spoke you into willow bark
and kept my fever in another language, privately.

in the time of my wicker bones,
in that year when i broke and burned,
dispersing myself and then coming home
to my new name,

i was sure of your constancy.
i need more eyes, so i can see the reason why you weren't.
a gift of pain makes it easy to find my heart--
it is that badly balanced wing, in the center of me, spread in foolish display.

in the time of the eclipse,
i saw a double shadow that i imagined might be us.
now, you are more beautiful than ever,
but not mine, and lost to the language of those darker days.