Personal Myth, Extended

Personal Myth, Extended

(Part Two, for Beltane)

This is the house of enough and more

that cannot be written.
You enter as one blind never to leave,
fingers finding sense from stucco

feeling out that every lover

wears one face under the beaked masks

that make ravens turn to doves, 
touching love's tumbling fall

to dancebraid Mayday's flower ribbons

in a wildfire burning over the wall

whose back the fool straddles

nailed in mid jump

to a cross of forgiveness

fresh split as any poppy

by the desire of the bee

first to ravage, then drawn to reverie.

Under the lintel I’ve buried 
the bones of the ogre

made an urn from his cyclops skull, 
one burred hole for drainage

and in it planted rowan to mistress the door

of the room where the moon makes up

the wide galleon bed we favor 
till the narrow one arrives, where the back 
is never turned, where the sound of no,

not now is never heard

where there is only blent music, 
sonata of surrender settling
pianissimo from burnt umber dark,

played on tortoiseshells of spine, primed

in murmurous pantomime.

No one else is left to pay us 

any mind, or listen over locusts' skythrown hum
even the woman who presently
will bring us tea on the balcony,

where I'll fold myself in your hand

and hold your cry in my palm
talisman and tribute to this night.
The rising sun melts storms we leave behind

bulwarked in a house of smoke
far from that tempest place
where each day is a feeding wave

that eats away another set of cells,

each softer, more chalk-white than the last
sucked off the gnawed self's skin

till bitten lips give up their skullthin grin.

Instead we sip the rosehip cup 
with heartbeats pink as leaping salmon,

thoughts quick as seals         

below winter's creeping ice, and
gaze into eyes that have no bottom

here in the last gold morning 
before the wrong century tries to define

us flat as the grapes of a sour wine.

April 2012 
 revisions, May 1st

Posted for  OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Again apologies for the long and rambling nature of this piece, and a nod to Emily Dickinson for the last lines of the first stanza. This is still a far from finished poem or even series, but I thought this part of it fit the spirit of the pagan holiday of Beltane, which falls today on the First of May. 

Header Image: The Blind Man of Toledo, 1906, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 

Public domain, via wikimedia commons

Footer Image: Two Lovers, 1888, fragment, by Vincent Van Gogh

Public domain, via wikimedia commons

Personal Myth, Part One

Personal Myth

 Part One

The house is white. The poppy is red, growing

crooked up through a crack in time, red as

my new skirts, bright where the whitewashed wall drips 

light from the morning’s basting,

gripping the cliff like a child where it walks

swung between adult hands of sea and sky

above the gibber laments of gulls

where the heart has bricked itself a dream

and the still soul rises in smoke

from the terracotta belly 

of the fire god on the piazza

burning his ruddy mandate, 

midnight to opalescent midnight.

The moon is bright enough to write

saga, storm or singing, but holding the pen

in my love lax hands is an effort 

too great so I sit murmuring

my devotions while the careful lips of night

move celestially in response, 

and your white shoulder 

mirrors a cup of moon 

too sweet to drink.There in blue shadow

I feel what is too thin to see

through the window of the room 

rounded plum as an eggshell

painted acrylic on white, electric

with all the roses of Persephone,

flirting from every table.

The green hand of a potted dryad taps taps

alabaster skin seven times and seven again,

to crack the womb’s door where

the worlds are kicking to be born.

Open one turquoise eye; you'll see 

the woman with a naked face

in a crowd of ten thousand veils

bell in the valley, wave on the sea

harvest of  fog and forgotten seed 

pierced by Merlin's pointed staff, 
one red poppy

on the mistletoe shaft 

growing full-leafed 
through my breast.

April 2012

Posted for   Open Link Night   at dVerse Poets Pub

Joe Hesch has the apron on at the pub tonight, folks, and he's holding the doors open to all comers. Come join us. Link in is live till tomorrow midnight.

The myth part of this personal myth is only partially exposed here, because this excerpted draft is Part One of a much longer poem,( the result of answering the question, what would you like to have if you could have anything?) which I am mercifully sparing my longsuffering readers tonight. I don't think this will be the final form, and the rest is not even this ready and may never be, but thanks all, for struggling this far with me anyway.

Header Image: The Crystal Ball, by John William Waterhouse, public domain

Footer Image: The Red Poppy, by Odilon Redon, public domain

both via wikipaintings.org