Song of a Tarnished Eidolon

 

I asked the locust leaves if they were lonely.

They replied,

We are restless.

An owl on a branch of the locust tree

wept silently.

I have looked in all directions.

At home, I found my future in a spoon's face,

and my melancholy in the strings of an oud.

I haunt myself.

Indigo is the night sky.

Indigo is the sleepless sea.

Nun-white bird,

I will meet you beneath the locust tree

wearing a veil of Point d'Esprit

and holding a torn carnation.

_____________

The Water Dove

 

I kissed the dove

who made her nest

in the lonely pool at the bottom of my heart.

Little water-dove

sweet creature, feathered mother,

when I breathe, you flutter, shift, and sigh.

I kissed the foxes

whose meal was lately

in the henhouse where all rain is born.

Little hidden ones

with your silent black feet,

when I cry, you peer out from moonlit memory.

I kissed the gamesman

in the old pink cottage

because he was there, and silent, like God.

I was the little nanny

in the graveyard singing

to the doves, and foxes, and gamesman

peering back at me from the lonely pool 

of moonlit memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--Life After Life. 

Music: Rodrigo Adagio 

Palomas Perdidas

"How different it all was from what you'd planned." --F Scott Fitzgerald

 Here's the thing about love--

you can't finesse it for long once it's

worn away

                      like a river stone,

lost in the mail,

the ring gone down the trap.

Oh, you're right, it doesn't stay

cinema big-screen hothouse bloomed

the way it

                   starts out,

all fever-fine experiments in joy.

Just because you get lucid in the drowse of time,

doesn't mean call the hearse,

cut the roses,

ask the waiter for something mild and bland

like some blue hair breakdown of the heart.

No.

When we reduced, though, in the long shadow of years

to a shorthand slang for what used to be

a poem written

                                 with the soul-vase of our bodies,

we became pilots in a sky without any gardens below.

I'm sorry, you know? I envy the old dog still loved,

still a sunrise in someone's eyes,

or to be the one with a candescent heart as fine

as old art,

                    stars forever swirling over lamplit groves.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Our Man In Havana

Palomas Perdidas "Lost Doves"

Music: Concrete Blonde Mexican Moon