In August

 In August, the clouds are one-winged birds

collected in a shadow box by boastful head-injured dwarf gods.

They skitter, describing ceaseless circles

as the dwarf gods goad them to fly as they long to.

Storms are the tempers of the shadow box birds.

In August, old men dream of young women 

and young women find themselves shriveled and standing on hard clay.

Everyone is given a shovel and a stethoscope

to listen for thalidomide demons in love with the shadow box birds.

Cicadas amplify the grinding of maddened demons.

In August, weather pattern doctors urge 

tarot card mothers to sleep with bellies full of shadow box birds.

demon doulas with asters in their teeth

sicken gravity with odd fevers and the whole world sways.

Crickets are half birds in the ears of gods, still able to sing, ice pick righteous.

________

for Dverse Poetics "August" hosted by Sanaa Rizvi.

Mykonos

 Sugar plum, fairy

who kindly took me in,

you looked like one of those

white buildings on Mykonos

clean as a tide

in an open shirt.

Me, just a ragamuffin then, but

you treated me like turquoise and silver,

a small sparkling thing.

I loved your love of Gato Barbieri

and the notion

that I was worth the introduction.

Sugar pea, you knew me better

than I knew myself,

didn't you?

That soothing shade of Greek blue is called

Ambiguous,

and it's lovely, like early morning

or an offered hand

in a pearly cuff.

______

for Dverse Poetics "double dipper." 

I used Sugar Plum. 

Blue Train

 

Come on, we're taking the blue train.

You've tried crack, Coke, Eckankar and cans of spinach,

but all you get is dry sex with stick men

who babble all night about can't-miss ground floors in clown shoes you must be this dead to wear. 

Come down the gone escalator to the blue train.

Do a swan dive into a crystal bowl of beautiful doubletalk

and meet us inside the celestial suitcase,

lost between Rome and Bangkok but returned in the ice cream morning

to the hotel squirreled away in the pocket your spontaneous anthem.

Come in, we're just leaving to catch the blue train.

It's the overdose you can't find in stores, the big bass beat

the blood makes in your ears each time you dive off an ordinary Wednesday.

Nurse is here in case you faint, Electric Jimmy is here in case you don't.

Get into this, get right, get straight, get after it,

get in loser,

we're taking the humdingity third-rail high-speed no refunds blue train.

________

for The Sunday Muse #220. 

Isla de los Fantasmas

 

On the Isla de los Fantasmas, the keeper's wife

spends dawn searching out exhausted birds on the pebbled beach.

She comes to them as if she were light itself

and believes herself to be light itself

but she is as broken as they are.

Realizing this, and wishing to compensate her for her kindness,

they transfer to her their laments, worn around her heart

like dolmens of sound. Within each one, she dies.

With each dawn, each bird, each song, she dies.

The wind is the keeper's wife singing.

It is not the currents of sky or water that exhaust the birds.

It is the endless impassivity of the surface they cannot bear.

Their wings are the pages of hymnals

their bodies are the bindings of hymnals

that can only close at last on the Isla de los Fantasmas.

The keeper's task is to keep the enormous eye of the light

emptying itself out at the water, and the weary birds.

The light comes to them as if it were the keeper's wife,

and believes itself to be the keeper's wife,

but she is down on the pebbled beach, in her dolmen, singing.

_________

for Sunday Muse #219. 

Isla de los Fantasmas = Island of the Ghosts

a dolmen is a table-shaped tomb made of large flat stones

Poet

 

Loving you is like dreaming I am made of water

and then trying to run within myself.

I hallucinate a sun that rises in you refracting,

while the real one grows dull and tired turning grass to hay.

I compose ridiculous letters on bird feathers about the sky and its desires

with dust ink and lead bindings, to be read in the dark.

Nonetheless, all the brilliance with which you rule me, all the fascination you wield

is just a trick of reflection and depends upon this whim I dress up as magic

like a rabbit out of a hat, a thing that seems like a better thing, grand, ordinary, pure trickery.

____________

for Linda Lyberg's Poetics: Breakfast At Tiffany's. I used the following quote:

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.” 

― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

Common Fence

 

Some kind of poison, like a wounding word

has found the vines on the common fence.

My neighbor, fond of bottles,

goes around spraying when he's sober enough--

whole years go by when he's not.

I love the vines, the green view, their wild blind reaching.

They have more faith than a cleric,

more will than any new arrival with a nickel.

The vines are sick and brown on the neighbor's side,

thick and green on mine, and yet,

at the tips of the sick stems healthy tendrils have appeared.

Each morning I go out with my dog to check the vines.

I move slowly. Sleep is an old love whose face is a memory.

The seasons come and go, one dog is followed by a new one.

I worry for the vines, though they seem to be immortal.

The neighbor is the third there's been on that side.

My dog is the seventh of seven and may be a charmed soul.

I can't remember when the vines first appeared, or how the sun

got so high. Ten years go by in an afternoon.

I'm tired and call my dog to go inside. He follows me instantly,

with no thought for the vines, and no doubt at all

that he should follow me. I could cry for loving him so.

_________

for Sunday Muse #217.

A Spilling of Ephemera

 

My life spilled out and spread.

The glass lay on its side like a drunk or a sleeper.

"I await my dream lover," it said, and I called the police. 

One cop turned out to be the Right One and they jumped the nightstick the next day.

"I can't even get arrested in this town," I bitch to my spilled life.

It never says anything back.

I try staring it down but all I see is my reflection and every time it's a draw.

Art for art's sake, just like in the movies. Me in the role of me.

I plunge into my spilled life like a mermaid,

wearing it like a scaly tail. I sing to sailors and to other mermaids

such lovely songs that end in ruin. I am a chest bobbing on the surface,

a promise I can never keep to you or to myself, 

a bright reflection in a dazzled eye, 

a quicksilver tease of things rich with remove, 

a luminous dying and deathless ephemera.

___________

for Sunday Muse #216