Mask of Aphrodite (Repost)

 

 

 

Wolves, © Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

"There is no cure for love other than marriage." 

~Irish proverb 

 

 

Love's an old wolf who howls when she pleases,

her black lips drawn back in mock of a grin.

She's made me her meat for chancers and losers,

to open the locks and let anyone in.

 

Her yellow teeth are blunted with winters

but her fevers burn bright as melted brass.

Her eyes are flat-white as Attic marble

rolling behind Aphrodite's mask.

Her promises drift like leaves in October.

Her vows of fidelity make the stones laugh.

There's never been one she ever was true to,

only the lucky who died too fast.

Since I was that child who was used as a woman

since I was that woman who thinks like a child

I've run with her pack. The crows find my dinner,

set the price we pay for being born wild.

I've never whored for playthings or money

but three times three it saved my life.

I've never lied for the sake of loving,

only to play at being a wife.

I never was called to be a drunkard,

but ever I've been every drunkard's best friend;

and I drop the mask when I see it coming,

 

the black-lipped snarling

bitter end.

September 2023

Lightly edited for repostng

July 2026 

 

 

 

Head of Aphrodite, via Brittanica

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

There was deep night asleep behind your eyes

black as the moon's turned face that lives

cold and dead behind her shine

but still like her, you smiled the sky.

 

Our vices were soft clinging things

pink and innocent as a child's clean hands

petulantly pulling at the dolls of our virtues,

lead angels falling on their sparrow wings.

 

We drove to Texas for the secret stones

but we only found the hardrock end.

The Gulf rains erased our cartoon faces,

the sharks circled in and ate our bones.

 

When the ambulance came you stood alone

with no can-opener for all the tulips you'd canned,

peeled like an orange to your soft sweet core,

while I cried a pool in the sand's sucking bowl

 

for the sky to come down

in your smile and make us whole.

 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

and

 

 

D'Verse Poet's Pub

Opening Lines

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Tulips in a Milk Carton, 1989 ©Paul Wonner   Fair Use

Sharks, ©Utagawa Kuniyoshi    Public Domain

 

The Spot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spot

 

 

The black spot came on a sunny day.

It was small but full as a school for ants

each one learning to swarm, to eat, to

serve the next. Where will I go when they

finish with me, in autumn rain when

I fall like a leaf

from the tree of my life.

 

All my souls will be flying on the wind,

a storm of stories ahead of the wavering night.

I trace with a crow's feather the map

they travel on my skin 

the winding and the blowing away. Which

dark bird dropped it, what ink has dripped it

on time's page, the black spot that came

 

on a sunny day

and will not go away. 

March 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for the Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Ants, © Dunja Zubak  via internet   Fair Use

Crows in flight, via internet author unknown    Fair Use

Inflection

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inflection

 

 We drew the breaths 

of butterflies in high June,

beings never still

whose feet are small

as whimpers in our sleep,

light as the gauze of

a first-hour dream

until it falls,

a blood-splashing guillotine.

Butterflies

know nothing of blood

except the blood of flowers and that

is what we sipped, flitting from one to

the next because life must

spread or be stilled;

we never thought we

could ever be stilled

for we had no thoughts,

so new, so insubstantial

and ingenuous were we, certainly

not one that whispered

"Here is the starry inflection of

Love's extinction event," as we deep-

drank our liquor from the meadows

drying beneath us, even as the vapor

of your breath closing to me

dried on my lips

 

in a sigh, tenuous and bright

as wind-floated pollen,

your mouth soon withdrawn

to suckle the next flower's mouth

until flowers and memory and all their savor

 too were gone.

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Tipped at

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled(Landscape With Butterflies) 1956 ©Salvador Dali

Butterflies ©Odilon Redon

 

Abyssinia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abyssinia

 

 

She wanted out

before they came with

the Chicago overcoat,

but her luck was never aces,

like a filly four men own a leg of;

still her eyes. She had lamps like

two shots of fizz, a nightcap in themselves

and the bob she got to peeve her mother

she thought fit her like a laurel glove

when she left the farm behind her

when life began to wind her

like a two dollar watch.

She climbed the satin stairway 

to a sky of empty sockets just west

of Hooverville and the L.A.summer moon.

She bumped gums with the butter and egg man, 

the man who stepped on stars, another flicker

for his candle on the purple velvet couch. He cast 

her sixth behind Lugosi, the girl who screams

her heart out in a movie off the cob. He gave her eyes

a number in a book with a hundred others

who ran away from their mothers

to an apple filled with worms.

After Fatty took the Rappe,

before the Dahlia bloomed her ink smudge,

she hollered, "Abyssinia," kissed off

 the painted desert, hooked up

with the junior props boy, and threw the watch

away. They moved to North Dakota, and

she told her grandkids nothing

about being sixth behind Lugosi,

about cadillacs and canaries

about L.A. in January,

about the girl too many owned a leg of

or the man who stepped on stars.

November 2021

 

 posted for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse, whose theme today is

Illusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Abysinnia is '30's slang for "I'll be seeing you." A Chicago overcoat likewise for a coffin. To 'own a leg of' a horse is to be part of a syndicate which mutually invests in a racehorse for profit, bumping gums is to talk aimlessly or too much, especially about yourself. You can look up the rest of the slang I've used   here,   the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal which rocked 1920's Hollywood  here,  and the notorious Los Angeles Black Dahlia murder case which sold so many newspapers  here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Mischa Barton posed as early film star Louise Brooks, via Sunday Muse  Fair Use

Still from the 1929 German film Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks and Fritz Kortner  Fair Use

 

Fire of Imaginary Origin

Fire of Imaginary Origin

We lit a bonfire

of lies on the earth

where we burned

not vanities

but sanities,

not tree parts

but peace, hearts,

flesh and bone,

blood and stone;

and whatever we learned

as planets were turned

we watched

fall to ash, and were glad that it burned.

Winter Solstice

December, 2019

It is with sadness and great gratitude that I post to Marian's Imagine prompt at the vanishing

Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Image: The Ladder of Fire, © Rene Magrite, 1939. Fair Use

Image of fire, author unknown, via internet. Fair Use

Sea Trash

Sea Trash

You've never known you carried

that force

which breaks the idea's skin

with no time for

an aftertaste

neither regret

nor understanding;

that you made love

 a leaf lightly spinning

already dead but flying

laughing to be

no longer itself

only something falling

into the old gods' wide arms;

that the moment they were born

your words were

my  million separate siblings

fluttering, full from eating light

then put to fire's smoking

neither regret

nor understanding

for something changed and burning:

a life you never saw

that broke the brown wren's shell.

And now

sweet noise and dust-light sparkles

sea trash in the soft salt tide

of heartsblood oceans,

bobbing from here

to gone.

 April 2019

for my dear friend Shay's final Fireblossom Friday, where she asks us to "write about love for someone who does not know you love them."

at real toads

Images: both Untitled, by Zladislav Beksinksi via internet. Fair Use.

Sprite

Sprite

Once 

you were

close to me as flesh to bones

light to day

moon to dream

flies to honey.

Not really you, was it

that amber heart

glittered across my dark,

that voice, that breath

offering perplexing comfort

but just a sprite of you

ungrasped like a child's balloon

sent out to sail to

disappointing freedom--a popped prop,

bright red scraps, then dead-forgot

forever

yet here I stay

bud-eyes to the sky

immutable twisted root

hosting the symbiotic 

froth of fungi, the frozen nymphs,

underground and secretly

altering, 

or

flailing out a tendril, celebrating a twig,

rediscovering my wedding

of  worms, finalized at last

after a long engagement.

Old balloons still may sail 

on paper;

I stay here 

everspent but evergreen.

~April 2018

for Magaly's  Thirteen

the 13 words: 

flesh bones alter amber paper flies frozen breath voice comfort perplex memory rediscover

Image: The eye like a balloon sails to infinity, 1898, Odilon Redon      

Public Domain