When You Love a Doomed Thing

 

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win. 

Friends say, can't you feel

the tremble, can't you see the lean?

but love is a bird that can only do as birds do

until the day it dies.

There is a fire and split inside me now

with no mercy--the ash bird eats my heart as I knew it would.

When you love a doomed thing

you know from the start that the wind will win.

In the House of Time and Mirrors

 

A woman I used to be got up out of her grave

trailing rose vines and the scent of men's cologne.

She swung the decades on a knotted ribbon

and said, "There you are, more wounded, more brave."

I replied that I am made of newspaper and moondust,

a castle composed of carnations and  wives' tales.

Meet my lover, incorporeal and not yet born--

she admires my home-baked bread and scent of must.

A woman I used to be gifted me a moue

useless and juvenile, then beat me with her 

limited beauty. "You are wise but ugly," she 

said, haughty and stupid, then looked away. 

A woman I used to be got up out of her grave

trailing rose vines and the scent of men's cologne.

I swung her head from an antique silver chain

and said, "Here you are, more wounded every day."

_________

A Divorce, 2001

 

I don't miss the arguments

or the madness,

the steady harsh hum of discord.

I don't miss hearing the dogs' toenails 

digging against the wood floor

as their sheltered world turned ugly.

I don't miss the eerie sound of

empty accusations

demanding confession of phantom sins.

I don't miss the sound of our son

begging you to stop smashing dishes

when I tried to escape to the bath.

I don't miss the slick drone of lawyers

or the jangle of keys to

homes changing hands. 

But when I sat down to eat

at the same table in a different kitchen

with the windows December-dark,

the silence wool-thick

and the opposite chair mute and empty,

I almost couldn't bear it--

almost couldn't face

the long wait for spring.

______

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

Note: my divorce set me free, but at the time it was awful. I don't think I've ever written about it quite so baldly before. 

Don't forget, the Word Garden Word List is still active through Sunday!

Music: Gordon Lightfoot if There's a Reason

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

Me, Looking At You, Looking Back

 

Here we are -- me,

looking at you

looking back.

You dip your head, do a little shuffle dance.

I get the question but you know the answer 

before my lips so much as flutter.

You are an odd blue-black, luminous by moonlight

but a cipher at noon, or so you pretend--

our story begun at the bitter end.

You lit and left, lit and left the hollow place in me,

inspecting, appraising, always returning.

You gave me baubles and trifles as rent.

I gave you blood where your sharp parts went.

Here is my dead-womb where you rode

and taught me to mark faces that hold no light.

Screaming helps too. I thought it might.

I am the house of glass, you the burnt wick.

You are the mother of every line I write,

your call the ink I use, fragrant and thick.

We are yin and yang at each other's back.

Me, looking at you

looking back.

______

for Desperate Poets "In The Footsteps Of Our Feathers"

Music: Beth Hart "Your Heart Is As Black As Night"

Phineas Gage's Satori

 

Phineas Gage was a working stiff who nonetheless

took great pride in his job, which was blowing things to Kingdom Come.

He reached age twenty-five, never having been depressed

or observably outre, but Poetry made a sudden entrance the day he forgot to run.

A mountain might be said to be the ultimate conservative,

a geological accountant or engineer, set in its strata, posture, and ways.

Along came Phineas with his Magic Wand, keen to make the Earth move,

but the Mountain objected and sent the steel phallus back through swain Gage.

"He's dead!" cried his crew aghast, but his vision was sharpened

by the implement through his eye, introduced to his mind in an instant.

Phineas sat up as if nothing were wrong and calmly opined

that he might need a physician for the crowbar suddenly extant. 

He died but only to who he had been before, well-respected,

industrious and measured. Over the weeks he spit bits of brain

onto foolscap as a sort of carmine ink and thus were his first poems invented.

Phineas found he could make them rhyme, sing, moan and rain.

Imagine now Phineas, drunk as an Irish pickpocket, grabbing at ladies

and spouting the most remarkable obscenities. Imagine him in the full vigor

of creative expression, novel thought, unfettered here-ness and the rabies

of Instant Genius blasting from every pore as if dynamited higher, bigger.

For a time, Phineas exalted, Phineas in bloom, Phineas transformed!

Then, through doctor's care and Normalcy's constant soporific embrace,

Phineas drifted from shining masterpiece to haiku to erasure poems

and became redacted from himself, dependable again, decorous, quite sane. 

_______

for desperatepoets "state of the art"

Notes: Phineas Gage was a railroad worker who loaded charges into rock faces where rail lines were to be built. He packed the charges well into the rock with a custom-made crowbar of which he was quite proud. One day the dynamite went off prematurely and sent the crowbar through his skull. Miraculously, he survived and was even sitting up calmly afterward, asking to be taken to a doctor. After a long and sometimes gruesome recovery, Phineas' personality is said to have changed dramatically, though he eventually returned to a more typical state. I have taken the liberty of making him a poet. A satori is a sudden awakening. 

Canada Heart

The chime of your kiss

Made me forget the chalk 

that marked the stitch-line

where madness

met easy charm.

I don't wear vanilla scent

anymore--it reminds me of

your flocked, bread-crumb skin

the braille I

got lost in.

Toronto has Billy Bishop Airport--

you can fly in,

fill a bag at the duty-free

then cab it

to Yonge Street.

We made love at the Double Tree

with a balcony

to waver on the edge of, after.

Oh, Canada--

Canada heart

is the half sweet, half bitter

half bustling,

half empty landscape where

missionaries say,

"I knew her."

That is where I found this poem, north of Yellowknife,

and south of solace not looked for anymore. 

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Music: Gordon Lightfoot Affair On 8th Avenue

A Season In Hell

Summer that year came with black wings

rising over green suburban trees

and found my blood-beat

like a smiling intruder delivering a shiv.

There is a horror of violation,

a new vocabulary of panic spoken

in chambers where

lions and phantoms trespass the flesh.

It gets dusky inside the mind,

The hiss of a projector spinning out a movie 

made of gin and dope,

actors who live in graves offering their gray stars.

The god-surgeon, numb expert bastard

taught his flunkies torture

and gave me a new face.

I crawled through a radio for fifteen years to slash his memory.

When you always feel wrong, the world is a camera

and your crime is breathing.

There is an underworld with bootleg cures, so you go,

a parade of the altered, weird strangers, sudden sisters

Who come out blinking, holding high 

the severed heads of devils, and unafraid of anything.

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Jim Morrison. 

I had major surgery when I was 16.  That summer, "Love Her Madly" and "Riders On The Storm", both by the Doors, were getting heavy play on the radio I had at the hospital. Jim Morrison died right around that time. 

My title is, of course, taken from Rimbaud, a favorite of Morrison's and of mine.

Gatwick

 

Gatwick's in league with the devil

'flight delayed", she'll see you grovel.

Things left in small rooms upstairs

she lets reanimate there

to suck your soul, sour your nerves

turn your heart as cold as hers.

Gatwick's in league with the devil

"flight delayed", she'll see you grovel.

_________

for Dverse Poetry Form: Octelle. 

artwork by Jacqueline Deleon

music: Nick Drake "Three Hours"

El Lobo Herido

 

Injury requires solitude

for the blood to slow.

Cold water soothes the throb

and so he walks the river bed.

His belly is empty as the sky

but turns over sickly,

his body's shock at violation.

Up, through the grasses, silently.

He will stay here, concealed

on his side, panting.

Licking the wound, resting

he will either heal or not--live or not--

the same as any other day he has known.

_________

for Sunday Muse #166.

The Blemish

In the morning, the blemish appears.

Haughty mountains, snow-topped, hard as weapons.

Brave explorers dying in a violent wind.

The blemish brings with it

divorce,

financial ruin,

the sniggering of false friends who ride in your ears.

Blemishes through history:

the canker of Robespierre.

the pimple of Marie Curie.

the cold sore of Trostsky, as he folds papers into bullets,

himself the hapless one,

sitting in a chair with an antimacassar,

a revised edition with limited press run.

On the thankless mountain side, Sir Edmund Hillary

examines a blemish with gloved hands,

his visage cracked across the cheek in a broken mirror.

The sherpa sniggers, riding in his ear.

Upon return, parades,

dinners,

divorce,

disaster.

The appearance of the blemish betokens the icy  marksman,

behind you there,

delivering the avalanche

dead center, mid-beat, shattering.

_______

Debutantes

It's like a telephone call from the bones,

a song that sings you, whether you love it or hate it,

persistent as a blow to the head.

While all this is going on, you must smile,

set the table properly, oyster fork to the far right.

Lay a linen napkin across the mocking lie.

Walk through the funhouse to your job, 

your marriage, the gibbet of your identifying papers.

Become an object of hilarity if you finally birth yourself.

In short, do anything but this, and then

cut a rug, or your wrists, when all other options expire.

We are the girls half gone by the time we start,

Brave, gorgeous, cursed, strangers even to ourselves.

Loves Me / Loves Me Not

 I must now consider, I suppose,
that I have failed again
to do the right thing,
to puzzle out what's expected of me.

I didn't make your bed
deep enough, it seems;
and it's like you said...
before your head full of leaves
and purple-ebony hand on the grass.
Will I always fail you?
or can I fix us, at last?

My mind is a little spider on the edge of a cup
filled with blue rain where in awful dreams I scramble, 
all eight legs feeling in the air. 
You rose, didn't you, to exchange our different slumbers?
You came to me, down the path, softly disintegrating
though my anguish never does.
I breathe for both of us the smoky air of loss.

I have fallen short again, like a sky never holding sun rise,
a pale after-image, watery, foul,
not worthy of this place where grackles strut like Aztec kings.
I have brought the orchid, and the lily
to place in your eyes to disguise my ugliness with lovely visions.
Forgive me for what I have done, and how I have failed.
I am barefoot, like a twin
and will wait here--the least I can do--
making of your rags and sinews my costume of chains and rings.
_______

For Get Listed at Real Toads. I have used all twenty words.

 

For Androcles

There is no pissed-off girl who came out of the cradle swinging.
We all lie there at first,
blue-eyed and trustful, waiting for the big milk payday.

There's no pissed-off woman like a disappointed woman,
and by the time you met me I was
past all concern, 
wearing the same old barbed-wire bathrobe from one noon to the next.

You wisely sent your envoy first,
someone sweet and old-friendy who would make me hesitate
and hold my tongue, wondering if I knew her from somewhere, or what.

Come with me, she said.
Bring your tongue, your thorny tongue,
but bring it sleeping, curled up and barely bleeding, at least for now.

She brought me to meet you and you were the one;
the one who took the thorn from my tongue,
the lion from my tongue,
and soothed it with the cold calm of your thrillingly assured blankness.

I did not forget. Did you think I would?
Months later, led into the arena of your careless lying bullshit,
I called bullshit for what it was, turned my back on you, but to this day

I am not the same pissed-off girl,
not angry in the same way,
not hungry in the same way,
and so I am grateful, as you should be, for having had the love of a lion

however briefly.
______

for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads. photo: Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil.