Empty House

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Empty House

 

 

 

The Parisienne within

sits gracefully bent at a small cafe not

three blocks from the Louvre.

The square is an old negative, each color

quenched in its reverse, as she sighs,

 

regards the croissant moon, a dangling puff pastry

pinned to a papier-mache sky some

rabid surrealist has daubed flat black, faintly

tinted by the violet blood of stars. She waits here

for her assignation: l'etranger dangereux

 

encountered by chance on le Metro. She savors again

the fragrance of strong dark tobacco

caught in his hair as they swayed far too close.

She waits many hours since her house is empty and

waiting seems better than that.

'And what is an empty house,' she muses

over her fifth vin de pays, 'but a cupped palm

dripping the bright constant stigmata of 

your own imperfections?' No amount of pancakes can

fill its hollow stomach. No birds will nest in

 

its unkindled chimney. There is only dust white

as milk, silence and dead flowers,

a dog that barks a heartbeat somewhere in the distance,

abandoned without music like the deserted cafe

the Parisienne has just left.

 

As the rackety clap of her stilettos

fades around the corner,

a tall shadow drifts over her table,

but there's only a thin thread of ghost-smoke

twining up from a stubbed-out Gauloise.

March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

WGWL 3/4/24 at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Music Of Birds And Lions

 

 

 

The Music of Birds and Lions

If I had to say something about it

I would just mention

the way your eyes

moved through me
like fever through a lion,

like the brown-soled boots

 

of a Victorian explorer

walking lightly

with ownership, a dominion

powered by steam

careful always to
keep an echo-

map of the outback

in beige buckram binding

firmly gripped in your mind,

 

referencing pages dogeared

recording the reasons

not to fall behind on

a dangerous journey;

or that your hands

were always sliding in

a slipstream of tasks, were

water, embracing stones smooth

in their blue satin beds,

leaving behind a geologic

 

Alexandrian library

of lithic messages, codes

in languages of a few extinct

species of birds, envoys and diplomats;

that your long fingers on the stops

were your flight feathers,

playing a recital at nightfall

of calling macaws that come to color

the shadow-fronds of sunset palms

with their bright rest;

 

but there's no need to

talk about what you stored
under my skin, or tattoos in birdsong

that can't be forgotten,

so I only strum the music of it

where the lions rise

in the mauve gauze of
the jungle dark.

~December 2014

(minor revisions, 2022)

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #144

(Nothing bubbling up from the cauldron this week, so posting another oldie, one originally written for Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads)

Images: The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Henri Rousseau

The Moment of Truth, 1892, Paul Gauguin

Public domain