Personal Myth, Extended

Personal Myth, Extended

(Part Two, for Beltane)

This is the house of enough and more

that cannot be written.
You enter as one blind never to leave,
fingers finding sense from stucco

feeling out that every lover

wears one face under the beaked masks

that make ravens turn to doves, 
touching love's tumbling fall

to dancebraid Mayday's flower ribbons

in a wildfire burning over the wall

whose back the fool straddles

nailed in mid jump

to a cross of forgiveness

fresh split as any poppy

by the desire of the bee

first to ravage, then drawn to reverie.

Under the lintel I’ve buried 
the bones of the ogre

made an urn from his cyclops skull, 
one burred hole for drainage

and in it planted rowan to mistress the door

of the room where the moon makes up

the wide galleon bed we favor 
till the narrow one arrives, where the back 
is never turned, where the sound of no,

not now is never heard

where there is only blent music, 
sonata of surrender settling
pianissimo from burnt umber dark,

played on tortoiseshells of spine, primed

in murmurous pantomime.

No one else is left to pay us 

any mind, or listen over locusts' skythrown hum
even the woman who presently
will bring us tea on the balcony,

where I'll fold myself in your hand

and hold your cry in my palm
talisman and tribute to this night.
The rising sun melts storms we leave behind

bulwarked in a house of smoke
far from that tempest place
where each day is a feeding wave

that eats away another set of cells,

each softer, more chalk-white than the last
sucked off the gnawed self's skin

till bitten lips give up their skullthin grin.

Instead we sip the rosehip cup 
with heartbeats pink as leaping salmon,

thoughts quick as seals         

below winter's creeping ice, and
gaze into eyes that have no bottom

here in the last gold morning 
before the wrong century tries to define

us flat as the grapes of a sour wine.

April 2012 
 revisions, May 1st

Posted for  OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Again apologies for the long and rambling nature of this piece, and a nod to Emily Dickinson for the last lines of the first stanza. This is still a far from finished poem or even series, but I thought this part of it fit the spirit of the pagan holiday of Beltane, which falls today on the First of May. 

Header Image: The Blind Man of Toledo, 1906, by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida 

Public domain, via wikimedia commons

Footer Image: Two Lovers, 1888, fragment, by Vincent Van Gogh

Public domain, via wikimedia commons

Mayday

Mayday

Trees thrash in the clammy wind

and the sky looks bruised, off-color, splashed with

the unsettled and unwelcome afterbirth of the behemoth

that pulled the houses down, rolled the cars like dice,

and tore the child from the huddle in the tub,

untangled her from shelter 

of mother and brother,

sent her flying

to ride the whirlwind

off to Oz

or a drainage ditch.

Her mother sobs

off camera, the EMSA crew, the sheriffs

seem heavy with guilt as if their

uniforms and equipment should have

prevented the sorrow,

held back with their will, 
a vest, and a waved flashlight

the grinding windcircled debris

that ate the trees and the heart

of this place.

Does the child still fly

crying forever for her lost

bed, the safe arms, the world before

the blast or is she circling higher and higher

seeing the stars fold like origami

over the far land of the blessed,

putting her scattered laughter

into the wind?

May 2011

Mayday:May·day
–noun the international radiotelephone distress signal, used by ships and aircraft.
Origin: 1925–30;  < French  ( venez ) m'aider  (come) help me dictionary.com

This poem is based on an actual incident which occurred during the outbreak of tornadoes in the Midwest and South on May 22-25, 2011, but I have altered details. On this weekend set aside to remember the dead of our wars, sympathy goes out to the families and individuals across the heartland who will be burying their dead from these events in the coming days and who will still suffer for many more days and years from the devastation they never saw coming.

Photo courtesy of kfor.com, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma