Revenant

In honor of the forthcoming holiday, my all time favorite, Halloween, I'm reposting the third post I ever made at Verse Escape. It's one of my old poems, unrevised from 1991, the last year in which I wrote poetry before starting this blog, which turns one year old on the 16th of this month. (This was also the first post I submitted to One Shot Wednesday at the Old One Stop Poetry.)

Revenant

The cool breath of the dead sighs down the hall.

It peels my soul like an old potato,

thick slices of skin and soft woody flesh

dropping in a spiral on the kitchen table of this

tired life.

A speaking shadow stands at the door,

an empty replicant.

A grey curse hangs over him

like the sullenness of unshed rain

blowing past a withering crop.

Huddled in the closed grave of my bed

I compose my bones in paleolithic repose

with dry flowers, an awl of horn,

a broken string of red beads 

       drifted with earth,

waiting for the ending of that next birth.

O I hear you out there,

rapping, knocking, calling

with a mute vibration

begging to come in and have me.

O yes I answered last time and see

See me now.

Roll the rock and stop the door.

Put the holy symbol round my neck.

Only keep

    the shadow

                  out.

March 1991

Illustration: The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones  (1861-1926)
Philip Burne-Jones [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
 

Dark Matter

Dark Matter

Love so long my intimate,

my reasonable master

now buffets me with alien force.

Each day a new division

slits my mind, anisotropic splits,

tangled strands, green kindling I leave

to be idly picked apart by your hands,

your hands that dread all work

and all possessing.

Yet I let gravity pull me to

the lightless prison at your heart,

cosmic dust of sin and spin,

a wobbling globe starry with relief 

in your human smile upon me,

your hair the wind lifts, your eager dismay

to absorb me quick as now becomes past,

futureless, floating on the knife-edge

of cold molecular storm

born to be parted in a moment

of repulsive expansion and galaxy shift,

giving up our brief blue light

as darkness births its worlds.

March 1991

revised September, 2011

This copyrighted image was originally used to illustrate the poem and is worth a view:
Dark Matter in a Lamda CMD Universe, 

simulation by Dave Bock, National Center for Computing Simulations

U.of Illinois Champagne-Urbana

Coming and Going

Coming and Going

Brown eyes full of gold.

that wink like a bird’s in wholehearted wariness,

rapid as a bird’s heartbeat

as you tip up your head to laugh

like a man upends his bottle
  for the last swallow.

We sat in the bar and you talked,

Canada and Molson’s cool on your lips,

my hands sweaty under the table in case

something I said might give it all away.

No part of you was safe

that day.

Like Doolittle’s magical beast

half of you is always coming toward me

and half of you is going away.

You can’t be told how much I want

or the coming half will become an ass,

merge into its mirror self and disappear.

I can’t say

 that I want

your voice in my ear so low

not even the mosquitoes can hear it,

your body a fever melting me to the bed,

memories burnt to ash

by your laser eyes.

A thousand birds may be chattering in my heart,

flowers may spring from your palm,

but I can’t say:

Love me again before it’s too late.

Instead I wait

to see whether you are

coming or going

today.

July 1991

Image: Molson Export Ale, Case,
By Molson Coors Brewing Company (Molson Coors Brewing Company) 
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], 
wikimedia commons

From the Blue House

From the Blue House

At the door of the blue house you stand, where

the worm of truth eats away at the succulent rot

in the heart’s hollow, incising the chamber

from which it will be born again

one with the matter that fed its form

changing it into beauty dry and alive and flying.

The questions of fear that paint the windows
blood scarlet, red and burning the night,

are  met with full response, silenced in your look.

The loss and gain I think I balance

like enormous worlds

scamper off lightly like the bobbing asses of baboons

over the improbably purple grass

and the sun prepares to undress himself from the night sky.

For you, I give that blue Van Gogh night,

a unicorn and a tree, an eclipse and

black summer storms that follow the herds,

dust in your coffee, but no more no more

blood on your hands. Instead soft cries of brides 
in your ears and sleep that floats on your breast.

For me, an owl who is a songbird

wide eyes soaking in the light

wild cry tearing through the night,

a hunter of the darkness blown into the light

thrown into the air already flying.

For you and I, streetlights and a yellow moon,

a gold spoon and a crystal cup

conversations covered up by the songs from the bar

and the soldiers and the sailors leaving, kicking up sand.

Pictures breathing, animals sighing, colored lights

burning all night long.

Someday but not now, somewhere but not here--

some way I know, 
but not how--

I can’t say only if.

But knowing is all and enough.

True is what stands alone.

March 1991, revised and expanded, February 2011

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry



Image: Haunted Granary, by Sean McCormick

Used with permission.

Arrow's Flight

The Arrow Shot, by Claudio Mufarrege

Arrow’s Flight

There is no singularity in this distress.

Winter babies know it as well as the scorched grass of summer,

which hangs its seed on the wind even in death.

I am arched  between two tunnels

mirroring forward or back to two separate worlds

poised for escape, unable to choose,

suspended till you are done with me.

It isn’t a choice I made, to love you,

to collect you, remember you part by part

and thought by thought,

to be always studying the lessons of your cells,

your everbrown eyes, cold and dark as frozen earth,

hot as a barn in July.

I don’t call you with a willed voice, or scheme, or plot,

but rather with the response of a recurring frequency,

or the pull of a particularly unwanted truth.

Truth, after all, is the master, come suddenly,

standing in the doorway with eyes of stone alight,

stronger than food or rain.

Love is only the servant, cleaning the soul,

who beheads the bird in the heart’s kitchen

or makes it fly surprisingly

like a paper bird thrown for a child.

You say it can be taken back, what’s been given,

but it’s living in your bones. It sees from your eyes

and twists in the curls on your chest.

And you are in me the same

like the wine is in the grape.

It is my same stubbornness you show me

as you turn to follow your own shadow,

as you fly like an arrow in the night from me,

as my hand lets go the bowstring,

as my own refusal to be known denies me.

These are things that can be named

but they are still not things that can be changed.

It can only be said that perhaps tomorrow will swallow them,

when all my molecules untie, spinning like dust motes in the light,

these pieces and atoms of you will blow like seed in the wind.

August 1991, revised, December 2010

Posted for One Shoot Sunday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Image: The Arrow Shot, by Claudio Mufarrege
Used with permission.

Chaos Theory

Chaos Theory

 You 

are human.

A hot light caught in flesh

bound to the necessity of choice,

given cloudy human eyes

and told to make life.

There is no happy

refusing.

The imperative is toward order

so that every fleck

and piece

party to this planet

can cohere in purpose.

Undone it bends the back,

with the weight of chaos

too heavy to fight,

only visible

as a glowing lie 

that slides

quick or slow

towards an extinction

where

the intent to kill

meets the need to die.

You,

you chose long ago.

You know the force that swings 

the hangman’s rope,

the grave that grows the flowers we become.

 You know

the rot that must be cut within the rose

You even know 

how clean to keep the blade,

    every potion to hold back decay, every weapon against waste,

every fire that burns in the winter of the heart.

The need to die

called your name and you refused,

because you know these things

without words.

because your answer

was to live.

April 1991

Also posted at One Stop Poetry   for OneShotWednesday

Lacebark Elm,  photo © joy ann jones 11/8/10