Goat's Delight

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goat's Delight

 

 

 

The yellowed moon hangs low,

a pendant swung from night's cold neck,

blind platinum stare bent

blinkless on the baleful earth 

where simpering dawn is frozen in

pink slippers on the hill.

 

Last night the bloodglow of the sun

gave false fire to the anorexic trees,

scarlet-purpled sheets of light 

burning hope to killed music,

all that once was dancing

turned ash on a shifting wind.

 

Only the goat-woman is left,

the greyed-out girl

covered in indigo roadmaps traced

by her traveling heart, denim-fade eyes

croned to clouds, 

still raking coals ablaze

 

with the crooked stick of memory

wild in her wavering hand, feral

as a goat indiscriminately devouring 

all the broken cities of the years, 

following a random hunger

up to this winter hill 

 

where she sits remembering 

how to be free;

a prisoner on the edge

of her skinwalking escape.

 

 January 2026

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

linked to 

d'Verse Poets Pub Open Link  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images : Moonrise, 1884  ©Stanislaw Malinowski   Fair Use

Soulmates ©Kseizycolica    Fair Use 

 

 

Après La Révolution

 

 

 

 

Après La Révolution

 

 

After the revolution we

became the aristos.

 

I fell in love with a

prince of the butterscotch castle

but I could never get past

the guillotine in his head, the wolf

hissing in his flock of noise,

the glitter-ship in his bottle

waiting each day to sail him away.

 

All the devils of summer

came to our parties, flashing

their ruby eyes in the dark, stealing

my stockings, hiding the postman,

eating the silverware. I made a centerpiece

from applecores, black horns and tail-spikes

and called it art diabolique.

 

When the winter night

finally flapped its starstained carpet

over the horizon, its patterns worn

and indistinct as we were, all

the stardust beaten out of us, I knew

we wouldn't make it to the end,

or even to France.

 

La révolution est morte.

Vive la révolution.

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

Shay's Word List #17

Joni Mitchell

Images: Study for the Spanish Dance, 1879, © John Singer Sargent  Fair Use

Charlotte Corday, 1860,  ©Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry   Fair Use

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Winters at white dawn, before the first gaudy ransack of a

scold of jays, two crows come to her feeding cup.

They have no elfish hands to hold interwoven as otters 

do, to keep each other close on cold waters, but still

they float down on air as joint motif. Not one crow,

but two, for in any functional lexicon, the complete set

 

of meaningful units is not one. They eat a dozen peanuts

with the focus she applies eating her mistakes, but with

 

their own goblin squawk and savoring, a black-suited pair

laughing like undertakers on holiday, the charm of a child's

 

toys in their round eyes as they celebrate this meal,so much

more efficient than pecking through reticulated rubbish, so

 

much quicker than sieving crushed bladders or hearts tarry from

asphalt, than abrupt blare-interrupted flutters on the flat luck

 

of skunk or raccoon, where they must thrust their razor beaks 

like needles through black blood glitter, scrape hard bone

 

clean to sew lost life from ruined flesh to full feathers. They

are complete either way, but the woman has made it easier.

Two crows make their own zodiac, seven stars make Orion,

the time-twisted woman who sets out peanuts

 

makes a pageant in vapor, a blood-let of generosity,

a late arrival at sufficiency; for in any functional lexicon,

 

the complete set of meaningful units

is not one.

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Shay's Word List #11:

Ted Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem makes no attempt to capture  Hughes' style or Hughes' own vision of Crow and his journeys, that epic exploration of folk-tale and myth which rewards the reader's time with much more content and flourish than I could ever hope to muster. 

 

But when I think of Hughes, I think of Crow, and so, this poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: For those interested, here is some background on Hughes' collection of poems exploring Crow:

 

After his wife Sylvia Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote nothing for three years. Then he began a work which was finally published as Crow:from the Life and Songs of Crow. As stated by the Ted Hughes Society, it "holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre.  It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism..He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered...."

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Crows in Winter, © N.C. Wyeth   Fair Use

Detail from Crow's Song © Andrea Kowch  generously accessible at her website Andrea Kowch Studios Blog  where you can and should see the entire painting.    Fair Use

Quadrille Of The Star

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Star

 

 

I wrote this for you when

you were the star in my heart

to give back light for light

as we traveled time's tempest

bemused. 

 

Who knew then

you were the last;

 last star before the sunrise,

last ghost spun

from the broken wheel

 

 

 

 

 January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets:

Quadrille

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Winter Night In The Mountains, © Harold Sohlberg  Fair Use

Paysage Orangeux, artist unknown, via internet    Fair Use

 

Oh Stars

Oh Stars

Faint sunshine

speckles the frosted

piles of slag

like colonnades of crumbling

carbon dust that line

the missing mile.
The great steel drag,

the rusting teeth and feral smile

have carved the lime

we delvers bring

to all our latter works

of cancelled spring.

The bites of life

we take regurgitate

some foolish tinsel'd

fail of poisoned joy

while in the east the

crescent shrinks to silver

sparks, night hangs the

spinning seethe of stars

our blind eyes block;

our smallness and our deathtoys mocked

by a brooding hatch of dark

and limitless shock.

Oh stars--gods'

eyes that laser out 

our fool's disguise;

what an underworld we make to hide our lies.

What curses can you break to turn us wise

when you come laughing 

on the wail of a newborn wind

so the wide green world can fill its graves

and breathe again?

~February 2020 

posted for  A Skylover's Word List by Kerry O'Connor

and for earthweal's 

Renewal

The images above are ©AP/Charlie Riedel, from this article: 

The Oklahoma town that produced most of WWI’s bullets is now a poison graveyard

"The chalky hills were a kind of town gathering point. The people of Picher, Oklahoma regularly picnicked there and rode bikes. Sometimes they carted the dust away and mixed it with cement to fill their driveways. Some parents added it to their children’s sand boxes. When a breeze picked up, it whipped clouds of the fine sediment through the air....For almost a century, town residents had no idea the dust was poison...

Around the turn of the 20th century, miners discovered Picher’s subsurface stores of lead and zinc. As America entered World War I, demand soared for lead to make ammunition, and Picher became one of the biggest hubs in the region’s tri-state mining district, an area between southeast Kansas to southwest Missouri. Roughly 75 percent of the American bullets and bombshells used in the two World Wars were made from this area’s metals; half came from Picher alone. At its height in the 1920s — when the town’s population reached about 19,000—227 mills were processing 10 million pounds of ore per day.

Miners carved into the earth underneath Picher. The lead and zinc ore they hauled out had to be separated from the limestone and dolomite rock that surrounded it. And the remains were piled into chat mountains around town, some 300 feet high. By the time mining ceased in the late 1960s, there were 30 piles totaling 178 million tons. The local school was built in the shadow of the hills, and the high school track team trained on them....
...in 2011, the federal government sold the massively toxic waste region, known as the Tar Creek Superfund site, back to the Quapaw Indian tribe, which had been forcibly removed from their ancestral Arkansas home and relocated to northeast Oklahoma in 1818. In 2017, the EPA granted the Quapaw $4.9 million in cleanup assistance..."

Picher is an uninhabited ghost town today. Millions have been spent to clean it up, but only time and the planet itself may have the power to do that.

Star Bright

Star Bright

A little star

blown on a crinkled wind

comes to the Deadhouse.

It pushes open a window

darts a beam

between cobweb cities

and empty night.

The Dead and the

Apprentice Dead,

mummified

mute, are of course

indifferent but

the ragged prisoner,

the Almost Dead,

lifts her darkened eyes

and suddenly

begins to breathe

 in the swelling rhythm

of the living firmament.

~November 2019

Personal Note: For those who may not have heard yet, my husband passed into the solar wind on October 18th, after months of quietly enduring as much pain and indignity as a human being can suffer. I think of him as released, and of the rest of my life as totally unknowable, but at least the wild dark-eyed muse seems to be back, vague in the shadows, teasing me with her throaty whisper.








Image: Untitled, by Zladislaw Beksinksi

Friday 55 March 16 2018

Another Friday finds us gathered to offer thanks to the memory of the G-man and his meme, and to try our hands at assembling our own models of relative verbal brevity in 55 words of prose or poetry, no more, no less. No rules except the word count, and a link to your effort in the comments below between Friday and Sunday morning. I look forward as always to seeing what creations your craft and imagination can supply.

My 55 for this week:

Cracks

Midnight's blue altar splayed

with a sacrifice of stars,

wind that tells secrets

to a storm darkened moon,

silence knocking with whispers,

blackbirds' questions at dawn

sharp marked on the sky;

all the weight, all the light draped

on the scream of a back

and in the shadow that passes,

the first of the cracks...

~March 2018

Note: I am having intermittent connection problems, so bear with me if I am mysteriously absent.

Images: Blackbirds,  ©joyannjones 2013

Erecthion with caryatids, Athens, Greece, via internet author unknown  Fair use   Manipulated