Dream Of Wyverns

 

 

 

 

 

Dream Of Wyverns

 

 

 

The plane of grief is unrelieved

by fence or furrow, tree or cliff. It

stretches out a flight of new moons,

a river of crow's wings

hiding its eyes.

 

In the distance wyverns pace, their

asp-tongues a piercing, their growl-song sharp

as a whispering sting

poisoning dark.

 

To walk this plain

you must step over bones,

speak the language of ravens,

earn the kisses of crows

 

see the colors like bats

flat and profound

forever dependent on wavering sound

as it pours from the red well,

a bucket of misses splashing cold drown.

 

Everything here is

a secret of night. Black

angels drop like char on the snow

in peace as they fall

on the crow's nest below.

 

 

June 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #8 at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images are taken from the internet, artists unknown.  Fair Use 

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

Known

Known

When you came,

airdancer mine,

I didn't know you.

In fact

I never knew you

til you'd gone on,

bending as I was

over endless unplanted earth

lifecrumbs scattered everywhere

scittering across waiting ground,

bricks of every color

walling me round.

I only caught 

a swirl of exploding atoms

watched you and your birds receding

tapdancing on wind.

That was when

I claimed you as

beloved,

because

 you promised nothing,

because 

you gave like a bramble

sweet in the thorn

so I could eat

that random life 

you carried,

ripened in killing frost.

~April 2017

Image: Landscape with Birds, 1940, ©Lucian Freud  Fair use via wikiart.org

To Waiting

To Waiting

All morning by the highway

I waited.

The day was a string with

the bead of you swinging

amber and whole at its end.

Dust lifted my hair;

dust was the way the wind

found its fingers

there where I dreamed the fall

of your hair over me--

a wave, a sigh, a landslide, 

the soft brown roots 

of not one tree

but a fern-tangled forest;

 I waited for this 

without caring how long,

alive as a vine that covers

a dying barn, as an apple tree

whose apples are flowers,

rose-white in clouds;

as the bud on the cane

hides the thorn in the rose

as the rose abides  

in the round hip I gave

to soften the ground

each time we'd wait

for breath to come back

from that place

in the dark where

the storm rides.

~June 2015

posted for    real toads

Sunday Mini-Challenge: Ode to the Quotidian

Karin Gustafson (ManicDDaily) offers us the example of the sublime Neruda and his odes to everyday things as a springboard, but as always leaves us some breathing room to slip in something else. This is something else, as I usually think of an ode as something a bit more full of  the blood sweat and tears of form than this--still, what could be more quotidian than waiting?

Image: Apple Tree, I , 1912,  by Gustav Klimt
Public domain via wikiart.org