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

 

 

 

The Sway

 

 

 

 

 

The Sway

(A Love Poem}

 

 

So many years I dripped

your jade-clear love, my absinthe on

a melting sugar dream.

I knew the greenest green

that thrives above the ossuary

sprouting summer flowers made from bone.

Grey birds, their long legs trailing,

flew above the estuary. Water blue as

babies' eyes threw back the light of day

like knives to blind us as we rode upon the Sway.

 

You were born

to sit a wild-eyed horse in panic run

through the rainwater of a subsumed road,

to write the outlines of what never was

across the broken tips of Time's last rhyme,

to pick me like a lily in the dawn

then pass my velvet shadow to the moon,

gone like summer light that winks away

when caught in flagrant congress with the day,

like laughter floating out into the Sway.

 

So rock, sweet night, again tonight

as you have rocked so many times before

across the green expanse of yesterday.

You have a keener eye than bird of prey,

more melody beneath the fallen sun,

more teeth than any soft umbraculum

who tears the coral's painted skin away

and sucks its sweetness from the drying gore.

Rock before I wake and lose the way

just before I follow Love into the Sway.

 

 

 

 

May 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Umbraculum umbraculum, common name the umbrella slug, is a species of large sea snail or limpet, a marine gastropod mollusc ...found in tropical to warm temperate parts of the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, where it feeds on sponges...It has roughly 10,000 teeth in its mouth at any one time and will go through approximately 750,000 teeth during its lifetime of up to ten years..."~wikipedia  (I have used my recently renewed poetic license to substitute coral for sponges.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Green Fairy, artist unknown, via internet     Fair Use

Blue and Green Music, 1921 ©Georgia O'Keeffe        Public Domain

 

 

 

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

 

 

 

 

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 hot 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

except the ones 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;

there's a price to pay for being born wild.

I never whore for playthings or money

but three times it saved my life.

I never lie for the sake of loving,

only to play at being a wife.

I never was called to be a drunkard,

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

to drop the mask when I see it coming;

 

the black-lipped snarling

bitter end.

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Illicit Encounters

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wolves, © Andrew Wyeth

Head of Aphrodite, via Brittanica

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Light

 

 

 

Last Light

 

 

"All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born..." ~W. B. Yeats 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born

in the black and white,

a changed place still living what had been,

a winter child in a fossil's spring of

sun and shadow, war's unmercied clarity

and the trampled mud of peace,

 

its empty whiskey bottles

and gardens of shaded violets, deep

black soil, black thunderclouds, 

white winter sky, blackened medals,

white gauze veils packed away 

in crackled trunks.

 

Now I live my last in a red dirt country

where the heat-song of September changing

dips the fading wheat in ginger honey. Wind-weary

trees lace still-green leaves thru the soft

reaching fingers of clouds, holding tight

before their scarlet fall.

 

Earth is whispering her love words

in the rustle of sundried grass

and blackberries tumbling over with

thickets of banquets in seedy puzzles.

When I turn to face the setting citrine sun

it's you I call to the open door

 

to sit beside me in the shortening days

drunk with bees and crow-call,

rich with the gatherings of every flower.

Won't you come, beloved,

before January rimes the windows

with its deep blue loss. 

 

Come to the place 

where you can't be forgotten.

Bring your cinnamon september skin

and your wild silver-grass hair to these ruins,

and your campfire eyes,

alight in the night of dreams so far

 

beyond the black and white.

Lace your fingers with mine

as trees do with the sky,

separate and one

where the fire of what was

in the hope of what may never be

 

is the only light left

before the scarlet fall.

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for earthweal's

Lyre For A Changing Earth

 

 

 

 

 

With thanks to Brendan for the poetry of W.S Merwin and others which inspired this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: My mother with myself at 2 months of age, Evanston, Illinois March 7th, 1949 

House North of Nash, Oklahoma, 2022  photo © Terry Wassan   via internet   Fair Use

Century Song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Century Song

For a hundred years

it seems

I've waited here, wasted here,

full of parch and motion, a salty throat

from drinking too much ocean once

though it's been

no more than a lifetime

or a breath

held under a thousand passing thrones

of aqua-green

where I counted days as quicksilver fish,

as coral bones, marked each dagger flashed in

 mouths of sharks, each scale, each whale

singing to all her kin while I

I drowned alone.

 

For a century

it seems

I trod this water milling, to breathe the years I knew

still held the spark, 

the flowers' poppy dream, the moths unflamed,

the coyote's bark

longing for the moongleam

on your reaching arms.

 

For a century

or two

the heat is master; 

the dust that birthed you,

the sun that calls you on.

It blisters me as the freeze of aeons

boils a distant steam, until night's mantle

 

falls across the blaze, and in the end perhaps,

too many too-bright ghosts and burning days

earn me a last cool breeze

 

a breeze and a flashing of that dream

 

where you

come back for me.

 

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Waves, detail 1969 ©  Javier Torices    Fair Use

Study for the Spanish Dance, 1869  © John Singer Sargent   Fair Use

Zebras

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Zebras

(A 55)

 

Remember

when we were two

trout climbing Sahara sand,

two flamingos wading snow,

two zebras

grazing rock, stalked

by an avalanche of clocks

worse than any lion.

Remember

our nights stitched from

oak's blood and violins

torn from the big cat's teeth.

Come home again

before the door breaks,

before memory's last meal

is gone.

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

using words from

Shay's Word List #9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sleeping Zebra, 1959 © Carel Willink  Fair Use

Plant Archetecture, 1962 © Remedios Varo

Things That Stay Behind

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things That Stay Behind

(A 55)

 

 

Things that stay

behind memory's cold coals:

 

child's slipping skates

clipped with a key,

grandfather's rough-work hand

velvet on cottonpuff cheeks;

the margin of wild

the great lake stole from concrete,

that wish washed blue home where

only gulls screamed;

how suddenly it came, the frayed

squall of your kiss

at high water

washing childhood away.

 

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics: Ekphrasis, Fay Collins,

a talent taken too soon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sunset Squalls at Connemara, © Fay Collins  Fair Use

Vintage roller skates, Photo by Sam Figueroa via Flickr Creative Commons  Fair Use

 

Labyrinth

 

 

 Labyrinth

 

I played in the field of the minotaur's horn.

The rose trees stretched for twenty miles.

His black eye blinked

my slow heart's beat. I danced all day where

the elephant's hip burned blue in the shade,

where I glimpsed the escape the animals made

before the age had been born.

 

The green grey moor 

was soft as a sponge 

on my cheeks where tears

disappeared in the mist.

I wondered if we'd ever kissed

in the halls behind the labyrinth's door

where the beasts blew their breath on the shadow play.

I saw them come at the end of the day

with all to give and nothing to say. 

Their souls each put in a hazelnut

that sank in ripples of earth's wet heart

covered in time from fire and flood,

from our hands that pull the world apart,

that turn his field from grass to chalk

where roses blow for twenty miles

and the animals at last

have begun to talk.

August 2021

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Minotaur Caressing A Sleeping Woman, 1933, © Pablo Picasso  Fair Use

Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937 © Salvador Dali  Fair Use

End Times Redux

 

 

 

 

End Times Redux

 

 

There's always been

only one end

to a skull run against

a wall of stone,

always a single truth against

 an outnumbering of fools,

 

always ears stopped to

the pulse-drum beating fear,

the microphone vomiting

all the glory lies. Reason's light

is not blown out no matter

how many choose to sit in darkness.

It's always been coming again,

this over-heat in the system;

where the sovereign goes mad

bashing skulls

in Punch and Judy shows,

stuffed with his own sawdust failures.

 

Our love is the ink with which

over and over

we scrawl these wartime sagas,

the spilled blood 

from which the Resistance

 always rises.

 

 

 

November 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

                              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for the inimitable Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: top, author unknown, via internet, Fair Use

Bottom: image 1:Ditto;Allegedly the last picture of Adolf Hitler before he committed suicide. Hitler (right) and his adjutant Julius Schaub looking at the ruins of the Reich chancellery, April 28, 1945.

Image 2: Trump returning to White House after election projected for Biden. ©AP Fair Use

Friday Flash 55 for May 2020

Welcome all to this month's edition of the Friday 55. 

 The rules are unchanged; write a poem, piece of prose poetry or flash fiction on any subject, in exactly 55 words, no more, no less. Paste your link in the comments section, and I will be by to read what you have come up with.

The prompt will be live

from Thursday at midnight to Sunday at 4 PM.

~*~

Here's my 55:

Black Dog


The moon stopped talking

when you came

walking through catastrophes,

black dog that wouldn't mind

at your heel.

You couldn't stay;

I never stayed myself.

They thought they knew our best

but best's a savor
saved

for shot-silk touch

the war of wills

the game without rules;

reserved 

for those who meet breathing

and leave singing.

May 2020

Images: The Dog, 1819,  © Francisco Goya    Public Domain

Self portrait with a Black Dog, 1841,  © Gustave Corbet (manipulated) Public Domain

Friday 55 October 20 2017

Welcome, all, to the Friday journey, where we tip a hat to that great host of infinite possibilities now passed on, Galen Hayes, and build our own word-ships for sailing the seas of confusion, with 55 verbal planks of poetry or prose, no more no less, linked in the comments below. The rules remain the same, in that there are no rules, no strings and no obligations. Maybe you feel like playing this week, maybe you are otherwise occupied. Maybe you feel like commenting and visiting and maybe you hate it. None of that is important, except that you write when you are ready, because this is simply a writing exercise---for craft, fellowship and fun. As always, comment moderation is on to keep things real, and the prompt remains live from Friday through Sunday.

And so let's begin...

Leadlight

These words,

these broken bits of

stained glass, stained

as summer's love;

cinnabar, gold, sky cerulean;

fractured light that slants

notice of the

dead end of the year.

Faces are flown 

from the high window

 (unconsecrated now)

 their smiles

a scattered puzzle;
these October words

fall like
frostburned angels,

only good

for whispering to ghosts.

~October 2017

Note: Leadlight or leaded lights, are windows made from small sections of glass supported in lead frames, a generic term now often extended to all stained glass work, though earlier used only for simpler window or domestic casement art.  ~wikipedia

Image via internet search. Manipulated. Fair use.