Emmeline in Trefoils

 

birdsfoot trefoils

Emmeline by dawn light

borrows roses from your bed

Emmeline by moonlight

brings back petit fours instead.

Italy had its masters

who loved Emmeline with their oils

touched by God in Trinity

and Emmeline in trefoils.

Emmeline in summer

reads your letters until the fall

then she wades into the water

to the boatmen's barcarolle.

______

for Word Garden Word List--Tenderness. 

I have broken my own rule and only used 2 of the List words (Italy and summer.) I had used several others but they all ended up on the cutting room floor. I decided to keep and post the poem anyway because I think it speaks to the source material(s), which was my aim. 

This is the fourth of my Emmeline poems. The previous three:

Emmeline By Evening (2009)

Emmeline By Wolf-Light (2016)

Emmeline In November (2021)

Emily the Innocent

 

Our Lady of the Upstairs Apartment

tired saints sharing cushions on her couch

welcomes you with chocolate or a half mint

and her kiss at the corner of your mouth

The landlord carries rain in a bucket

collected from the cripples in the hall

no desert-born demon can obstruct it

if a judgment or her lashes start to fall

Our Lady of the Wooden Table Kitchen

serves you holy water in a little cup

and speaks to you in such a soothing diction

the bedtime tales the sofa boys made up

The weary stars lie down upon her rooftop

and she covers them with blankets made of smoke

In the morning they roll cigarettes and wonder

at the comforts as they slept she kindly spoke

Our Lady of the Upstairs Apartment

with her crosses made from cherry wood or teak

she laughs and calls you Emily the Innocent

and leaves you with her kiss upon your cheek.

Things She Would Tell You If She Could

 

Romeo, gosh, I'm sorry how things turned out,

and sorry I didn't die after all like you thought.

I'm old now, you wouldn't look twice at me 

but I miss you still, even so, most definitely.

You could find me tonight across from a cornfield

working the St. Lucy's Fall Festival and how would you feel

about that, babe? I wear a lumpy old overcoat

and sell tickets to teenagers so in love they almost float.

I get feeling sentimental and sad about everything

remembering how you said you were the All-Powerful Weather King

and could make the sun come out if I wished it,

or kiss me and kiss me again if I told you I missed it.

My goodness, Romeo, you don't know how often I still think of you,

like when I saw some crestfallen kid with wild hair walking through

the festival like he had something on his mind

and he seemed lonesome, like you, and quiet and kind.

It's almost midnight and the lights are going dim

so I've got to pack up and go home alone again.

I wish so hard that things had turned out different

and I'd say, "Romeo, oh Romeo," and you'd know what I meant.

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Tom Waits.

Music: Tom Waits "Blue Valentines"

Refraction

 does light lie?

do these leaves deceive? 

what is green 

but a word for a thing 

we see a certain way

inside our skulls where no green thing grows?

here is my yellow dress.

my yellow hair.

and yellow fields stretching flat and far.

inside, my reasons.

outside, the sheltering trees, 

our house in their lee.

also, your face, the flickering planets, and stars.

i want you, but i want the wind.

you say i deceive,

but what is wanting

but a word for a thing

for which there is really no word at all?

does light lie?

here is the yellow sunflower

and the yellow night-window

but they never

called themselves those things.

here is my silver ring and my yellow ticket--

i love your face, even though you don't believe

and wish me damned and dead because i go.

____________

for Sunday Muse #204

The Intermediary

I've left tea on the outside table

a baffle for whatever wanders the woods.

Lance-shaped willow leaves fall 

and alter the prescription, the drowse

of the day and the mind with confusing pall.

What lured these leaves from their mother-branch

to my poor care in the orphaned hour?

What strange embroidery can quicken them again

into their summer suits of pride and motion?

Autumn's alchemist brings gold, then lead.

Here is the potion, the breviary, the wine

fermented from pomegranates, swayed by tannins.

My faith is in teriac and the reading of leaves

in my baked clay mug and the struggling lungs

of my patients un-greening like harvested sheaves.

_________

for Sunday Muse #182. 

Warmth From Other Sources

Hidden in a bear's pelt
government bean counters discover
the weather thief.

Clocks being notoriously duplicitous,
they call in the air strike,
but the pilots, raw with romantic disappointments,
stay drunk on the tarmac.

Winter comes. 
Whole departments are deleted.
The bear sleeps.

And the weather thief?
She escapes to find
warmth from other sources. 
______

for my BFF's Friday 55. 

The Ghost of The Midway

The ghost of the midway
is weighted
like a milk bottle,
stacked
like a sucker's game,
but no one can see her
so it doesn't matter anyway.

One night in July,
she fell from the Ferris wheel--
jumped
or was pushed,
and might only have been sleeping--
dreaming--
except that her body,
like a corn dog wrapper,
blew away
while the rest of her stayed.

The ghost of the midway
cannot get a grip,
cannot tuck little useless gloves
in her sash as irony or accent.
You could trust her, 
you could tell her--
knock her over 
with a feather--
but she is gray and gone to embers,
a holiday no one remembers;

so if you reach for her hand, dreamy fool,
like last year's fair
it won't 
and can never
be there.
_____

for grapeling's word list. I used fall (fell), grip and glove(s).