The Mirandacoot

The Mirandacoot

I do not like

this silvery-cold tree,

its tatterdy leaves,

its strangledy shoots,

said the long-tailed mirandacoot.

Its raggedy babies

come in armies and hordes

like All Hallows' ghosts on a graveyard sward;

it has no fruit,

mumbled the bat-eared mirandacoot

So she bared her teeth

to gnaw it down. but a bluefaced

jay abruptly turned clown near

a very important squirrel town, with

a nodding wren on each bent root--

'Oh, let it stay,' said the mirandacoot.

The mirandacoot

is a mythical beast

with four sharp teeth,

with cobweb fur

and spider feet.

She haunts my cellar

shaking her fist,

drawing  her charms

all over  the wall

(up which, need I add,

she knows how to crawl.)

She knows the nine herbs

Odin grew from the dragon.

She knows what Thor's goats

pulled around in their wagon,

but she won't ever tell

what she heard from Hel.

I don't go below

where she lives in her corner,

but I can feel her at night

guarding the border.

~July 2015

"Her name's Miranda. She's a Rudolph Valentino fan/ and she doesn't claim to understand/...she bakes brownies for the boys/in the band.." ~Phil Ochs

Just some fun.  

Image: Sign For A School Of Monsters, 1968, by Max Ernst.

Fair use via wikiart.org

Dept. of Since You Asked

Brendan, over at Oran's Well in his exhaustive tribute post to psychologist James Hillman yesterday, well worth a read, included some photos of his bookshelves and journals, and issued a challenge to play I Showed you Mine Now You Show Me Yours--so, who can resist posting the minutiae of one's life on the internets? Not me, that's for sure.

NOTE: You can CLICK the pics for a larger size where titles are clearer, and a slideshow view.

I'll start off with the notebooks. This is a poem written unusually for me in longhand, from 1987 (I blogged it here, revised.)

This one is typed, before the advent of word processing software in my life, where my poems get written these days (it's here if you want to read it):

And here's a characteristic entry--an unmailed love letter:

Now for the real fun, the books:

Above, The Crimson and the Blue Fairy Book, Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, etc. Below, titles faint between Vanity Fair and Jude the Obscure we have Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:

No one can fault my eclecticism here--the big blue book is a Robert Louis Stevenson anthology, the small black one is H. Rider Haggard, the other black one the Dalai Lama(Art of Happiness)Mary Renault at the end with Mask of Apollo, interspersed with biographies of Neil Young and Janis Joplin:

More Poetry and Stuff (yes, Stevens is there, his name is red and illegible)also all my new myth books, Armstrong's the Great Transformation, The Master and Margarita, and Dubliners:

The dining room overflow, mostly cookbooks:

My beloved Hort books:

I have many many more shelves left which I could post, but it would be wrong, so last of all, my workroom, where I compose and decompose, and sit with my crickets while I converse with you all.The shelf to the right of the printer contains my game collection, all the way to the floor:

This was a lot of silly fun, so thanks, Brendan for provoking it. I do think that books are an integral reflection of who a person is. I'm very interested to see if anyone else takes up the gauntlet. I can think of several of my bloggy friends whose collections I'd love to lay eyes on--(Mark, Ruth, Fireblossom, Anna, I'm looking at you.) and anyone else who thinks it would be fun, feel free to link up your pride and joy in the comments should you do a similar post.

Corrected poetry shelf, with a refresh on Ansel Adams--Native American petroglyphs this time:

The Cat in the Well~A Halloween Fantasia

It's here at last! The Big Day at Castle Hedgewitch: Halloween, All Hallows, All Souls Day, The Day of the Dead, whatever you care to call it, my favorite holiday. To commemorate it, I've written a nice cozy horror poem. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

The Cat in the Well

My name is not Odin (I forget my name) but I’ve lived

in the well for a mad moon’s making, alone with the roots

the deep water oozing and lapping the bones’ sweet arch

that lifts my home, my tumulus a wet black mouth, alone

till the cat fell. My dying was long, my strength nearly gone

till the cat fell, till the cat came down the well.

Odin was a god, (so I heard before this spell) death gave him back,
yet a well took him in, his eye for a drink from the frost giant’s blood

below the world tree. I am not he, but a shrunken spriggan,

devil’s daughter, giants’ kin hung here stranded in small skin

to guard what I can't spend, when the faith gave way gave out gave in.

Even the dark forgets my names, forgets my games,

even the dark, till the one I played at with the fallen cat.

Because when the cat fell the light (so remote, so far above) blazed

sudden and sure it could end the dead dream that crawls

through my veins of a land where we once loomed large long gone,

because of that I let him live, alone of them all. He took my hands,

he took my tongue, he gave his eyes, I loth to stop what he’d begun.

He took my tongue the cat that fell, the cat that came down the well.

So we climbed mossy walls (my cat tail lashing) dank with the muck

of an ancient thralling, slippery with uneaten grief, treasure slid wry,

each stone a stele for a life thrown away, each drop in the bucket red

until we came to the rim, and his amber eyes set in mine

began to shine, began to glow so all should know

the spirit cat was up from the well, with many another tale to tell;

the spirit cat that fell, the cat that came up from the well.

October 26,2011

The folks at Real Toads are playing Halloween here.

I've mingled (or perhaps mangled) several different archetypes here:

Odin, god of war, poetry,prophecy and magic in Norse myth traded his eye for a drink from Mimir's well, where the ancient wisdom of the frost giants was said to flow up from beneath the world tree Yygdrasil from the primordial void of Chaos.

A spriggan is a mostly malevolent spirit from Cornish folklore, generally found guarding treasure in burial mounds or the like, believed to be small ghosts of an earlier race of giants.

Cats, of course, were thought to be malignant, and often said to be familiars of witches or demons in medieval belief. Other cultures, such as the Ancient Egyptians, have held them sacred, and believed they possessed various magical qualities.

Special thanks to my son for the video he sent, which set me off on this particular trip, and to Brendan, for his input on the one-eyed god of the hanged.

Sunday Snapshots

We had a gorgeous overcast and cool (for us) day here, especially for the tail end of a very scorpion-like stinging August, so I spent much of it trying to catch up on a few gardening chores. I don't have any poems to share today, so I thought I would post some of my very amateur shots of what's going on in the yard and garden at Castle Hedgewitch instead.

I'll start off with the tree damage we got the other night when I was bemoaning the power outages from the straightline winds of 70 mph that passed over us, thankfully doing not much more than blow a few shingles off the roof, and chew up this silver maple:

Below are a few shots of a morning glory that volunteered from seed. It's an old heirloom variety known as Grampa Ott, and is a bit more purply than shows in these. He's rambling all over my front bed this year, and the heat hasn't seemed to faze his antique ass. Two years ago when I gently nurtured him from a wee sprout tenderly started indoors in the depths of winter, he refused to do anything but get spider mites and die. I guess he's more a free bird sort of morning glory:

He's even rambling over the purslane in my container garden:

 

Finally, some of the cannas are starting to rebloom.They're a bit bedraggled from all the heat and an unfortunate lack of care due to my hatred of going outside when the temps replicate the seventh circle of hell, but they're taking no prisoners anyway. 

This one, Burning Ember,  is one of my favorites for it's almost surreal orange tones--and this is after I turned the saturation DOWN : 

If you're wondering what those long metal structures are in my neighbor's yard along the fence, they're her two loafing sheds for her horses, Pecos and Renegade, shown here helping with the mowing near the mimosa killed by this summer's heat:

These are some of the baby cows my mutt was chasing  on the property behind us. Mother is not in evidence today; she may have already become someone's dinner.

Those of you who are real photographers, thanks for bearing with me, as my gifts definitely do not extend in this direction. However, I hope everyone benefited from the wholesome exercise involved in getting out and communing with the garden, however vicarious. 

Regularly scheduled poetry programming will resume shortly.