She

Blue Eye~ White Dragon

She

She was under the leaf

the first time I looked,

ruby hair rippled marmalade,
face freckled with dragon dust

a dry splash that falls only

from far flying wings 

of the seeking, the speaking

amaranthine white dragons;

so I knew she was only as

real as I seemed, 

crossing from dawn,

not from here at all.

She came dancing the next time

over the moon, thru the curve double-

beaked like Pharoah's bent barque

on a sapient sea, chasing the sunmelt

thrown west to east

living forever, the breath of an indigo

backwards night spell, caped in

forgotten, slanting star-shadows

cast by the pale, pellucid white dragons.

She lived in the mirror
the last time I saw her, cloudy
behind me, her eyes like the light
that shines on Rán's Road.

Limpid as reeds' long sigh of the river,

she sang the night over in the

key of white dragons, the far flying song 

of journey unwinding, 

dazzling, 

disappearing

all

yet to come.

~January 2014.

posted for     real toads

 

Weekend Mini-Challenge: Three Birthdays in January

Kerry O'Connor celebrates the January birthdays of J.R.R.Tolkein, A.A. Milne, and Lewis Carrol with the theme 'Fantasy.' For full details, see link above. Apologies for once again leaving the Mini out of Mini-Challenge.

Process notes: Rán's Road refers to the Norse sea goddess Rán, and to a passage in the Prose Edda concerning the way the moon shines on the ocean so as to make a reflective path, so that it appears to be a road to the moon. (I have written about Rán's Road here, with relevant passages quoted.)

 Top Image: Blue Eye-White Dragon by Chavanun on photobucket

Bottom Image: Wall relief in court, temple of Edfu, Egypt, via wikimedia commons

Flat

Flat

When everything is flat and you've dropped it all,

even the silver talisman of his name

when the sky ore falls to vapor in a sulphur flame

unable to fetch from a void spanning ever to never

when the partridge turns blue and pulls out every feather

and too-bent trees hang shattered, broken in the godsway

when the faun sits invisible starving by the lost highway

lemur eyes watching time’s pegged sticks tune up his ribs

when every night wish is caught where no one forgives

strangled by day’s amber noose in unbroken fall

when every chair is placed with uncanny care, yet all

stand empty till the restless dead behind begin to crawl

you can only hide in a chicken-legged house of dreams, actualize

stars and dust, flesh and rust, make a snakeskin grimoire of sighs.

November 2011





Posted for   Magpie Tales  #91

Uncredited image provided by Magpie Tales
removed, 2/2012 apologies to artist
Footer image: Baba Yaga's house, by Ivan Bilibin
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Robber's Rest

Robber’s Rest

Into the scruboak woods

you drove us

down the vanishing ledge

cut into the side of the creekbank

along the red sandy rim

until the road began to narrow

and play out.

“Stop! Stop!” I yelled but you drove on,

till the truck slid down the hill on splayed

wheels, like a dog on ice whose legs

fly out from under it

down to the weedy bottom

as darkness fell on

no way back

You walked off, shadow long

over the sucking sand
to look for a place to fish

(because you don’t, among other
things, hunt any more;

when you came back from

Nam you said it was

the deer’s dead eye

made you put down the gun)

I wandered into the woods

hearing a singing

where no one was

came upon the outlaw hideout

abandoned, ramshackle

in the dusk, broken walls of

round pocked cauliflower teeth

glowing like white headstones

in the graveyard of love

where I finally found

a candle

and a bed.

September 2011

Image: Scruboaks at Sunset, by joy ann jones 5/26/2010

My New Dragon

The story in this poem concerns an imaginary digital kingdom far away where a grizzled hedgewitch rides a verbose airy dragon, and occasionally writes a blog.

My New Dragon

flies above the forest

his spine a swift reticulated run

of cloud croquet hoops,

his breath the flinty white

of ashen cinders in the grate,

flaring back behind him like a banner

of all that overcomes.

My New Dragon

fought the old all summer long,

all winter in a haze of snow and fire,

till victory was made in blurry battles

high where eyes of mortal could not peer

and now he mounts his watch above

in case his rival someday

comes back home.

His head is turned to follow

the disappearing backside of his foe.

His three-horned crest stands tall

and watchful, full
of secret raptor pleasures

bonebred in dragonkind.

Though rain patters grey

turning blue as it falls

like steel on the scales of

My New Dragon’s   

skin, his heart is light

And on his broad back of clouds and vapor

I go riding.

November 2010

Cloud dragon photo  by joy ann jones november, 2010 
A masterfully tweaked version by my modest technical consultant appears in the blog header.