Cottage On The Shore

 

Perhaps we are emotional gypsies

though our bodies become a sailor's cottage on the shore.

The heart, like a child, gets lost in reveries

and though it beats in stationary stasis evermore

it remembers warm July, desire, petrichor.

Let me sleep that I might dream and feel again the wagon's motion,

a scarecrow slinging duffel over shoulder, on to ocean.

_____

This is a rhyme royal. 

for Word Garden Word List--Randy Newman and Sunday Muse #251.

Music: Judy Collins Farwell To Tarwathie

Die Reise

Does it burn, dear, does it trouble you
to see these dropped stitches letting the wind in?
Walls disappear even as they shelter,
hollow as bird bones or violins
stacked each upon each like the worst regrets
of ghosts bewildered, emigrating
with dust of memory gilding frayed keepsakes
as we hold each other, advancing, disintegrating.
_________

the opening line is by Kerry O'Connor, used by permission as part of the mini-challenge at Real Toads, where she presides.

image: one of the lost suitcases of Willard Asylum

Blue Child In Motion

 "Blue...songs are like tattoos / you know, I've been to sea before" --Joni Mitchell "Blue"

When I was a child, I learned
that not much falls from a blue sky.
Bored by the blandly pretty and never satisfied,
I waited on storms like rescuers.

When I was a child I tossed
my minnow-thoughts to gulls I alone could see. 
By the cold waters of Lake Superior one summer,
I listened for my native tongue from every shell.

Later, I'm not sure I saw myself or my spouses at all
through the bottle glass I blew with every word.
From inside whales and outside of any map,
I did find saving grace in my own restless nature.

Now, it comes to me with the red sky at night,
that the Argo and the Dutchman fly
with my childhood gulls, and if I seem melancholy or far away,
it is because I am, and have always been

this blue child in motion on the electric air of my imaginings.
__________

for The Sunday Muse #61.

Wind

The wind is blowing

(I have skin, like anybody else.)

The sky is moving

(I have one face, the sky has many.)

I live,

I die.

(Sun, rain, crickets touch my skin.)

 The wind hurries on.