Mudslide

 Mudslide

Your left face

honors your right face

but neither one tells the truth;

neither one

is really here to talk,

while I watch a sky

curdled by spirit swimmers

move closer, watch

their filmy fingers

stroke its crushing weight

into sundered cyclones, kneading

the mud-faced earth.

What strangler

has pulled back the plait

of your hair so

tight across your tangled

white throat? What butcher has

chopped the rich marble

from your cheeks and left

your face so naked and still?

Past and present, you say--
they rain wild in this drench

so an equivocal future
can slide

all the easier
away.

Trussed in cords of your loss,

deaf in drums of your voice,

I knew myself beaten;

but untied--
--O, yes, freed--
I hear too much.

I am my own silence 

floating;
death's latest convert,

looking on numb.

~May 2015

posted for     real toads

Weekend Mini-Challenge: John Donne

Karin Gustafson (ManicdDaily) offers this weekend's challenge, to write to the ringing of chimes, connect the dots of interconnection, or in some other way address Donne's telling lines about how no man is an island. This is what I got, a slap from the past, as it were. Despite the title, the mudslide mentioned is not a physical one.


We have storms heading in again this evening and my computer will be off, so I may be unable to respond or visit till, the weather gods willing, tomorrow.

Image: Sketch of Clouds with Colour Annotations, 1890, by Vincent Van Gogh. 

Public domain via wikiart.org

Off the Shelf Archive~May

As usual I've procrastinated insufferably on this feature, waiting till the absolute last day of the month to change out the Off the Shelf selection. Again I'm falling back on a poem I've lived with for the last few decades, one from Octavio Paz, called Beyond Love. I couldn't tell you how many times I've read this one in a dark midnight.  

You'll find it here, in the Off the Shelf archives for July.

And here is a biography of the man, in my opinion one of the great Spanish language poets of our time.

So without further ado, here's last month's selection for a final read before it enters the archives, an even older favorite of mine by John Donne, 

 A Valediction; Forbidding Mourning:

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun. 

~ by John Donne

Image: Carlysle Wall(The Lovers), 1853,  by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

Public Domain via wikipaintings.org 

Off the Shelf Archive~April

Now that the poem a day challenge for April is mercifully past, it's time to change out the Off the Shelf page. I've been wanting to do John Donne for a long time, and am too tired to go hunting for new and exciting poems, so I'm posting an old favorite, in my opinion, perhaps one of the three or four best love poems ever written, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. 

You'll find it here on the Off the Shelf  page.



Meanwhile, last month's Emily Dickinson selection is below for a final read:

Three Short Poems by Emily Dickinson

To Make A Prairie

 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—  
One clover, and a bee,  
And revery.  
The revery alone will do  
If bees are few.

Wild Nights – Wild Nights! 

Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee! 

 

The Heart Asks Pleasure First

The Heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;   

And then, to go to sleep;       

 And then, if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor,

The liberty to die.

  ~ all poems by Emily Dickinson

Image:Bumblebee on a Flower, by Adam Freidin, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License