Verse/Us

 

Verse I loved you like window glass loves morning light. Cats envied me my easy silence and singularity of heart. Perverse If I found you dying by the roadside, my eyes would be as blank as china plates and my silence entire. Verse I wrote a bloom of poems for you an origami of your face, your voice, your scent. My love reshaped into rows of you, riots of you, and every shape of you. Perverse Pearls before swine is strange jewelry. A thing is worth what it's worth to the one who receives it, so receive my scorn, my bitter spade, and these branches broken. Verse Look, the moon, your twin and avatar. I blazed for you, and shed light with every loving gesture which you reflected back, quarter-strength, and only in the dark.

A Cautionary Tale For Young Gardeners

 

There was a seed lying on the ground.

She picked it up when nobody was around.

She turned it over, lifted to the light.

It turned her fingers an upsetting sickly white.

"Little seed,

(she said)

Imma plant ya in the yard.

Imma plant ya

(she said)

where the ground is wicked hard."

Next day--

a big, black, dangerous-looking vine.

it say,

"Feed me skittering bugs and water me with wine.

Sleep with me at night

until you start to lose your sight.

Whisper me your mind

until you've gone all white-eyed blind.'

What happened to Dakota?

She went outside without a coat-a.

Found a seed from a devil weed

and down the wicked Styx she float-a. 

______

for What's Going On? -- "seed"

Music: Grace Potter & the Nocturnals White Rabbit

Margin Notes from Charles Dickens' Teacher

 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

A nice beginning, Charles, but perhaps a little bit undecided? You want a good strong direction to your opening. Try to choose one or the other and build on it!

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness

Please refer to my first remark!

It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

Very nice, Charles, but when you read this to the class today, you pronounced "epoch" as "e-poach." The correct pronunciation rhymes with "luck." It was wonderful, though, to see you come out of your shell! :-)

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness

Unless you are referring to titles or proper names, capitals are not needed here. 

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

Don't forget that setting is crucial, Charles. What season is it? Do not confuse your reader!

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us

Charles... I can see that you're trying very hard on this assignment. Good for you! However, and once again, you want to be more definite here!

We were all going direct to Heaven,

Oh Charles. Religion is such a touchy subject and in class we want always to be as inclusive as possible. How about "direct to Des Moines" instead?

we were all going direct the other way--

Good, Charles, good! Everyone loves a travel story!

in short, the period was so far like the present period

We'll cover punctuation next week-- periods, commas and so forth. Just stay with your narrative--you can always go back and edit these things later, after we've covered that material. 

that some of its noisiest authorities insist on being received, for good or for evil,

Never let your writing lapse into moral ambiguity, Charles. While it's true that the AP English class will be studying "Les Miserables", here we want to stick to basics. Remember, you can't be The Polar Express until you've mastered being The Little Engine That Could! 

in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

This last sentence seems muddled to me, Charles. Did you mean "degree" as an indicator of the season, as brought up in your earlier line?  Moreover, all comparisons should best be accomplished by means of simile and metaphor, not by flat statement. 

Charles, don't be discouraged. We all err! You've made a fine beginning here, and with work and patience (and listening in class instead of drawing stick figure soldiers doing battle on the side of the page!) I believe that you can achieve a mastery of basic writing skills! Keep at it. I very much look forward to helping you to learn and improve as the school year continues! 

C+

_____________

for Diving Into Margins over at Dverse, with Queen Cool Dora.

Music: 10,000 Maniacs You Happy Puppet

 

Despite, and Still (for J.)

 

I said to the trees

                                                --the birch, the pear, the maple--

"How can my heart be anything but an empty cup

Now that your leaves have all fallen

   like the handsome musician from Heaven

   or funeral cards from the hands of old women?"

"Look at you," replied the trees. 

                                                                                     "We have spun you

from the loom of our beauty and the cruelty of our silence.

Just as you did in summer, you stand looking

   as Jason did in the grove, when our fleece was 

   golden in autumn and stolen away in November."

I stayed for a long time,

                                                               so long that the snow 

became hands on my shoulders like a mother's or a healer's.

The sky is as gray as cold water, the trees' bones

  stand right to left like verses across a page,

   antique, dignified, turned to benevolent mentors.

_____________________________

for Dverse Poetics "Despite & Still" where Dora is hosting.

Music: Fleetwood Mac Bare Trees

And Judith Durham All My Trials

Motto

 

This is the hospital

where the nicked-up blown-up bastards show up.

We give them ice cream 

and a priest.

There is a river

down the middle.  We launch ourselves into the current

and it is unclear

who is drowning, who saving.

It's a system of gradations, and if you don't die in Emergency,

why then, we come into your room with cake and streamers.

Presto! You're ambulatory, then outpatient, then nurse, doctor,

surgeon, administrator, president emeritus, cutting ribbons

instead of flesh.

See one, do one, teach one is the motto. See the staggering

son of a gun falling to the floor with wounds beyond telling.

We lift him as if we were angels.

Yesterday, we were lifted.

Tomorrow, who knows?

Nothing stops the flow of the river or the flow of patients.

We are Boatmen, and Mermaids, reaching, 

saving, being saved. We are heroes of the

Carousel Horse Cavalry, coming over the 

hill, with bugle and blood pressure cuff,

dizzy with purpose, maybe dying, learning as we go. 

________

for Desperate Poets We Can Be (SUPER) Heroes. 

Music: Brass Band of Battle Creek Song of the Volga Boatmen

The City Inside My Head

 

The city inside my head

keeps its Sweet Face down

like a Japanese fan in the hand 

of a dead woman whose ghost

dances in air, 

untethered.

I am an ocean on the edge of a nightmare,

a horse gone headlong,

an unseen hand hanging up the cruisers,

mid-air,

sirens sounding like Stratocasters,

wah-wah pedals at patrolmen's feet. 

In the after-time, when you had gone,

the tall grass afternoons went on and on.

There was a yellow butterfly and a glass of gin,

and a thorn in the soft place where you had been.

The nights were cool, the stars were cold,

and together we turned slowly old

on a blue and green revolving ball

until love was dust, then nothing at all.

The city inside my head

keeps its Sweet Face down

like a Japanese fan in the hand

of a busker's monkey whose chattering forms

these poems, this after-time,

this image of the sun behind closed eyes 

hidden and 

glittering.

________

for Sunday Muse #168. Thanks to Hedge for telling me how to ditch the double spacing. Apologies for the varying type size in this. I can't fix it. 

Here

Here

is the place where starlings gather thick as macchiato,

singing expressivo in the morning, bedlam fortissimo at sunset.

Here

is where the old gather silent, still as a reverie,

rallentando until dawn, then second-souled,

blue-eyed, demanding life again, vivace.

Here

discard heavy indigo, the ultramarine of too many days,

dissolve into a new chromatic scale, alive with starlings,

expressing without thinking, dolce, 

glissando,

Here.

______

for The Sunday Muse #150.

Dharma Baby

With milk stirred into my tomato soup, I was wild as a landscaped yard,
worldly as a tabby kitten.
Still, venomous lies thorned my pulse with the odd fist thrown in for punctuation.

Staying corner-quiet as the vacuum slammed the baseboards a room away,
I searched for a kind of touch on the bottom book shelves.
As soon as I could, I went feral, a lonesome library hider ghosting the book store, on my way to a gifting high of pages and substances,
a bad apple for a sick teacher.

Kerouac and other people's cars, coolers of beer,
paperbacks on the back seat, center lines snaking by,
these were my caduceus and my catechism.
I ate Vonnegut,
drank Brautigan,
shot up Burroughs,
fucked Ferlinghetti but not my road companions.

My boozy keepers kept me from a thousand mistakes.
Off all summer from their classrooms, 
they had no wives to explain shit to, 
just me in the hungover mornings, useless and funny as a three-legged cat.

I almost died.
Wrote some tripe in blood and got it published.
Joined a book club and the human race,
married wrong, raised a child,
kept my books like holy relics, poetry bones on which I learned to stand and stumble and survive.

I built a new heart out of sentences,
slept with other women,
changed my name, went too far but did it sober.
"Why do you keep these old books?"
Because they are life rafts,
holy texts,
soul food,
lovers who never leave.
They are me and I am them, a bad crowd lit with halos.

You can go if you want,
I am beyond injury anymore.
The nurses here make bedding from chapbooks,
whisper soft as pages turning,
are immortal,
and know my name.

4/18/2020
________________

for the Sunday Muse #104 where I am hosting.

Youth & Age

I met a woman with hands made of ice,
she said you're burning 
with fever, 
poor thing.
She gave me a bible, some old wedding rice
and a bell
too tarnished
to ring.

She said, child, you come like a saint with a gun
to bless me
or kill me
with cures.
I stood there and called up the moon with my prayers,
fed it honey,
then gave it
to her.

Don't give me your pity, it's you who need mine
said this woman who cracked 
when she smiled.
Then the moon called me back and erased all I'd done
and the woman said
don't you see,
child?
The woman said
don't you see,
child?
_____

for Sunday Muse #94.

La Famiglia

Mom would have done well as an underworld figure,
sticking the steel into some poor bastard
then doing the perp walk holding a Le Creuset enameled cast iron skillet in front of her face.

There is something to be said for always seething with petty resentments--
it keeps a girl from going lazy,
idling away the hours wandering the arboreal colonnade
with a peach in one hand and a bible in the other.

Better  to brood under a starved star and crescent moon
bad-tempered as a sick camel,
rooting out infidels from the shadows and making them bow to the east.
After all, what's family for?

Then again, we all have our foolish hour and faint notion,
stumbling along in silver slippers,
carrying the quilled bowling ball handed us by our elders and betters.

Mom, she never believed for one minute in butterball sunshine and rock candy mountains.
She harbored a crow scrabbling just beneath her heart,
telling her quite sensibly to kill that child and kill it quick,
just like she learned at her own mother's knee.

Grandma wore ice boots,
Grandpa had no tongue and a nail through his eye.
Into the world they sent their girl to birth a scapegoat upon an altar
built from fear and silence,
the perfect place to start a family of her own.
______

for Sunday Muse #93, using the word list below for Skylover Word List.

Image at top is Ruby Cruz as teenage Annie Wilkes in "Castelrock." 

And finally, some music to read poetry by.

angel for brick birds

i'm an angel for brick birds,
and a healer for the crack-toothed cats who catch them.
i'm a tall-shelf girl with the boardinghouse reach,
fetching orphans each a blanket and an anthem.

i stitch long blue feathers for my brick birds' backs,
and dog star tails when they fan them.
my oven bakes the bricks til they're light as morning mist,
then the ashes circle sun and moon in tandem.

i'm a weekday angel
whistling for the wrong,
the bruised, the broken,
the disowned in the dawn;

i mix a sweet healing balm,
turn the jar into a song,
roll it out into the street
and then i'm gone.
________

written for Magpie Tales #196, and dedicated to Kelli and Joy, who both like it when I rhyme.