What I Did Instead

 

Swans came to me 

as they frequently have,

in flocks like nuns

and in nightmares

rising from lilies pressed

in the pages of a bible.

"You must forgive," they said,

"to turn dust to bread."

Wearing a black masquerade

mask, the nearest said,

"You will feel better." So I shot it

and immediately did. 

A crowd cursed me and called

me a devil. They kissed the swans,

held them like bouquets,

offering them to me like scripture.

Now, I carry a thorny rose in my teeth

and wrap the vines around the beaks

of every talking bird I meet. 

I eat my black bread with red jam,

my face a volcano, my heart a ringing forge.

_________

for desperatepoets "wrestling angels". 

image: unknown artist, found on Pinterest. 

Music: The Animals It's My Life

The Swan

 

I dreamed of the swan who made the night long

by dying on the shore of the hours

where you and I walked on storm-bent stalks

who mistook the gale for a shower

of sweet memories

that turned into these

orphans who talk and talk

of some lost song they learned from the dawn

that was filled with falling flocks.

I dreamed of the swan who kept your heart

beneath its wing for a year

until it left on the golden breath

of your conscripted volunteer

who saved you from

the things you'd done

that turned your fingers sharp

on the mandolin you used to win 

those you loved to death from the start.

________

for The Sunday Muse #249. 

Imprinted

 

A ten year old girl gave birth to a black swan,

a dead priest resurrected. 

The first living thing the swan saw

was a weasel, and it took up residence in a dusty burrow under the porch, 

    behind the broken latticework.

From there, it flew out at passersby

with a great explosion of feathers and hatred.

It liked to ride on the back of its father,

making declamations about the nature of love

     while depicting the hand of God in bird shit down its father's coat.

The swan was elevated to high position

and saw to it that the girl was punished in accordance

with Old Testament teaching. 

It was really a vulture, its father a demon,

     but it ate well, fathered a numberless flock, and was well-respected

by those who wore its symbol, carried its banner, and aped its empty fury.

__________________

for Sunday Muse # 226. 

Music: Jethro Tull "Song For Jeffrey"

The Willow & The Swans

 

I talk

about swans

in the obscuring haze of dawn.

My fear overhangs like a willow

thin-leafed,

stock-still

and trembling.

White swan,

black swan,

I mock you from a distance,

light myself afire to scare you

but I

betray myself

in brilliance.

I  bring

you bread,

my poems, my hair, my jewelry

despite myself, I reach for you

and feel

you flying

through me.

A trinet poem for Sunday Muse #186 "illusion"

Benediction

There is a bell in the tower by the lake of the swans

and a blind priest with his stick on the path.

What hymn can matter to these bickering birds?

What pew can comfort the bewildered dead?

The swans trick the dead to come into the lake

and fool the bell to fall from the rope. 

The priest is found on the bench in the dawn

his mouth filled with feathers as if they belonged.

__________

Love At Zero Or Twenty Atmospheres

We gave each other little sips of air,

enough to keep hearts beating, but

hypoxia made us believe it was love.

Your fallen eyelash black on the pillow

turned to a swan,

our future a loaf.

We called its hissing a song and danced

in the night of its wing, warm and blind.

Our marriage in space, though invalid, was dope ballet.

Now we have a cat, and the swan is dead.

I live in our cat's ear,

you on its tail,

composing music out of echos 

transforming motion into purpose,

all of it faux and yet it takes up every space,

Every thought,

every moment.

So we say, "Look at our cat, stuffed with swan,

his head tilting side to side at us,

isn't he absurd?"

He licks his lips and bats us together,

like dolls in the hands of a misfit girl

Laughing, screaming, friendless except for the stuff she can summon from her damaged and endless imagination.

________

for Sunday Muse 117. 

The Broken-Necked Swan

The swan with a broken neck

lies half-in, half-out of the water.

Yesterday, hissing, spread-winged,

she ran at a child who stumbled backward and fell.

The bird then returned, stately and gorgeous,

to its pond, calm and fine as Fourth of July morning.

A man wearing wet shoes sits silently nearby.

Someone has already called police.

_________

for my BFF's flash 55 party.

Swans At The Door, Complaining

Swans arrive at the door, complaining
that I stole the horizon.
The lake (they claim) has drained, 
and the plumbing bill is enormous.

"Do you think we can live in a desert?" 
they demand. "Where will the sun rise?
Have you, thief, considered that?"

Never before have I been shamed by swans.
Never have they appeared at my door en masse
with their troubling litigations.

I produce the horizon and brandish it
like nunchucks. Feathers fly. I am torn by beaks.
The sun loiters down on the corner, watching.

The swans persuade me to have the plumbers re-install the horizon. 
The sun ascends.
The swans disperse.
The lake is calm.
My door is sulky but will get over it.

Now for my next heist....
______

for post #100 at Sunday Muse.

The City Of Concrete Birds

In the city of concrete birds,

shoulders lately blessed by a lover's face

--an egg on her tongue, feathers in corona around her eyes--

bear risk as heavy as Sisyphus' tears.

In Paris, the paradise of concrete birds,

tablets are struck from the hands of poets in cafes.

Hats must be sturdy,

utility workers must brim in stadiums,

never resting.

Every morning, I leave you without leaving.

I wear a dress of twigs and string,

perpetuating the world;

my bones double helixed

 from Billie Holiday records and plaster,

I am a nest for concrete birds.

We must be careful, as we promenade.

The Luftwaffe are old leaves blowing,

but when we think of each other,

what to say,

how much to lie,

which tender sensibilities to spare,

Waiters in doorways open their lips to birth air raid sirens.

The concrete birds select our skulls,

without pity or malice

 landing in our destruction like swans in summer,

at home there,

symbols of love lifted by our obliteration.

_______

for Kerry's "Camera FLASH!"

 

In A Strange City

In a strange city,
where the local language sounds like gravel poured from a wine glass,
I found her selling tiny blue swans made from azurite.

Her swans were unexpectedly soft,
but she warned me that their blue would fade
with heat and time.

One eye was hidden behind her hair,
making her partial to half moons and split natures.
A caged bird faced away from her on its perch, singing to the public square.

She told me she was a Habsburg, and partial to carriages;
did I happen to have one?
No. I told her I was the Swan Police, and she must come with me.

When she laughed, it was the same,
exactly the same,
as a woman in New York, or Bucharest, or any other place where Gypsies are.

No dealer in antiquities ever touched a vase, or a sculpture
more tenderly than she touched my breasts, that evening in her two-room upstairs flat.
No occupying army ever met less resistance. 

Later, on my back and insensible, I had just the strength to take her hand 
and move it from its craftsmanship to my face, where her fingers left a sweet shine;
she laughed again, this time as rare as a royal.

I had to leave in the morning, of course,
but I packed the swans carefully, like sleeping babies,
more beautiful and less blue than even the day before.

_________

the city pictured at top is Prague, Czech Republic 

The Swans

I made a sundial out of a wine glass and a Ouija board.
then waited for the light to rise.
It did, like a lion's head--
lazy,
arrogant,
full of a violent promise.

It was too bright, the smile of a lover who lies.
I knew then,
even without looking at the lake,
that the swans were back
and that I
had, somehow,
summoned them.

Swans, your natural collaborators--
one moment serene, and the next, stabbing at things,
as you do with your brushes and cotton balls
when you're angry.
You are the swan-mother,
and they follow you
like cirrus clouds behind a blue sky.

The glass falls from the table,
its bones exploding as if it had the bends.
Then, of course, the Ouija turns,
saying NO
and YES
at random, toying with me
the way the swans do with sunlight.

Finally,
there is the ring without a finger,
spinning gracefully on its golden edge,
making that silly, dull, cardboard-voiced sound
on the Ouija where it says, quite clearly,
GOODBYE.
______

Liar Bird

It looks peaceful enough,
But you know the trouble I've had with swans.

The water looks sleepy, if malarial
And the clouds drape themselves, laundered white and blameless
Over her placid face
In reflection.

One mustn't flinch
At tea.
One mustn't let things slither from one's sockets
While perched stiffly at sofa's edge
Discussing the weather.

I was a mother once myself
For a few minutes.
It was long enough for my heart to slip, like ink from a pen,
Scratched by another hand onto a page I can never retrieve.

Do you see my child
Rolling up from nightmares to bob, gray and sloughing,
Choked in the crook of the swan's white nanny-wing?

I do,
And I cannot bear it.

But let's walk down by the pond just the same.
You can ask me if I'm cold,
While winding yourself nervously in a cardigan.
We can chatter,
And flit across the surface like jesus bugs.

It looks peaceful enough,
This going on with things;
But each solstice,
When I elude the upstanding rotten knot of those who love me,
I am found naked--
Bloody from breasts to thighs,
Snapping the bones of the liar bird
Who stepped up on the bank to preen.
_______

photograph by Margaret Bednar.  

for Real Toads photo challenge. 

The Ballad Of The Black Swan

I called the swans,
but they were lazy from being loved by the Winter.
They lay everywhere,
wings spread and still across the dull world
like protective mothers doting over an indifferent, implacable child.

From that day, I hated the swans.

In my emptiness, I prayed that Goddess would send me a weapon;
stupid with cold, at first I thought it was the night that had turned my dreams black,
but it was your arriving kiss,
and I fell in love with Fire.

As a sign of my devotion to you,
I grew my red hair long, to my waist,
overnight.
The violence of your love sent my name into hiding,
but the delight of your rough endearments
made the sun rise,
crimson and punishing,
out of the screams I offered you like candy.

That day, I went to murder the swans' darling.

There are glass children, and there are wooden children.
The glass children I recognize as our own, My Love.
You made me pour out
the grating, useless sand of my desert past--
it was your bright, sudden kiss
that made our babies beautiful,
reflecting the white and silver
like they were born to it.

The swans' child was wooden,
a more clever and wicked devil than I had counted on.
My Love, My Love,
what could I do?
When I stood over her, her many mothers melted away,
--the cowards!--
leaving her alone and at my mercy.
She stirred.
She met my hand, the hand that has loved you,
with a bouquet of burning flowers.
She placed them on her mothers' graves.
She placed them in my hair.
She placed them everywhere, all the way up to our secret aerie.

My hard sweetheart,
do not hate me, your Black Swan. I am the creature who will be devoted to you forever.
And, my adored one,
do not hate this child;
she bears my true name, and I have brought her home to stay.
_____

linked to Kenia's Wednesday Challenge