Murmur Of Flight

 

 

 

 

Murmur Of Flight

There is a murmur in the roost.

There is a rumor in the mist

and a feather in the dust,

a drop, a stall before you fall

into the long flight away

far from the silver cage of the rain,

far from the river that spies on the moon,

far from the shudder when wings are torn

by ruby traps and diamond rats

who gnaw soft parts of dreams away.

There is a tremble at the lock;

there's an assembly under the wind,

a memory at doors the sparrows tend

whose lintels are stars and whose handles, hearts

turning to open the musical sky.

August 2023

originally written for In the Footsteps of Our Feathers

and posted for Open Link Weekend at

desperate poets

Images: Three Sparrows In A Rainstorm, ©Ohara Koson  Public Domain

Ornate Door in Fez, Morocco  via internet author unknown   Fair Use

Dream Of Wyverns

 

 

 

 

 

Dream Of Wyverns

 

 

 

The plane of grief is unrelieved

by fence or furrow, tree or cliff. It

stretches out a flight of new moons,

a river of crow's wings

hiding its eyes.

 

In the distance wyverns pace, their

asp-tongues a piercing, their growl-song sharp

as a whispering sting

poisoning dark.

 

To walk this plain

you must step over bones,

speak the language of ravens,

earn the kisses of crows

 

see the colors like bats

flat and profound

forever dependent on wavering sound

as it pours from the red well,

a bucket of misses splashing cold drown.

 

Everything here is

a secret of night. Black

angels drop like char on the snow

in peace as they fall

on the crow's nest below.

 

 

June 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #8 at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images are taken from the internet, artists unknown.  Fair Use 

Bluejay's Wing

 

 

 

 

Bluejay's Wing

 

 

The first time I saw the sea, its reaching miles

of life and emptiness that twinned,

I was a barefoot child who thought

herself a woman, made of light

and incapable of sin.

The sea is high again today

with a thrilling flush of wind.

 

By day I scan the amber sky and feel

its cheapjack promise scratched upon my skin.

By night I scout the evercoming storm

with my bareback diamond eye

and heart of tin.

The sea is loud again today

with a spoken word of wind.

 

I see now how a palette rich with sun

bleaches out as monotone, greyscaled and thin,

its broken colors robbed of breathing light

as bluejays pale away on cloudy days,

their feathers keeping all the blue within.

The sea runs high again today

with a humming requiem of wind.

I'll never see again the dazzled tide; 

my age is given to the prairie wind

but I won't believe I'll never see the sun,

or the mottled azure delicately brushed in

to point and praise a bluejay's cunning wing.

The sea is high again today

with a thrilling flush of wind.

 

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets Poetics:

Opening Sentences

 

 

 

Note: My opening sentence appears in the last two lines of the first and final stanzas, and is from Justine, by Lawrence Durrell, the first book in his Alexandria Quartet, which I count among my top ten early influences in writing. And some may sense here another early influence, Emily Dickinson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled, ©Zdzislaw Beksinski 

Wing of a Blue Roller, 1512, © Albrecht Durer

The Night Call

 

 

The Night Call

 

 

 

The woods are dark

and important with green, restless

with a pushing wind bruising the white

 petals of the moonflowers against

 

the walls of this house I never enter

that stands at the edge of the dream. I'm

not here to come in from the green dark alive

with a canticle of constellations and the wind strumming

 

 soft in the moon-colored strings of my hair but

sometimes I watch the wisp of a dead bishop

rigid in the doorway holding the lantern high

questioning the heretic hours, the faceless rain,

 

the expanse teeming with life between us

that answers in crickets and owl song

and the giving language of pines

he will never be able to speak.

 

None of these will tell the secret; that I'm here,

 that I'll never come in

to the house filled with traps,

whose convenience of hot and cold

 

running happiness has leaked

out in sickly anger, leaving that stink

of broken love that clings

to a dead wisp calling,

 

calling me back to black dreams

I'll never share again.

I'm already gone in the breathy night,

into the green dark, alive.

 

 February 2022

posted for earthweal's

Wild Mind

 

Photos © joyannjones 2-27-2014, manipulated

 

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

Age of Forfeit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Age of Forfeit

 

 

"..I deny the tastes and habits of the age.

 I am its punk debauche..A fierce lampoon

seeking to inherit what is necessary to forfeit.." 

~1959, Gregory Corso

 

 

 

Ten years old in '59

learning how to eat plastic

how to steal the eyes

of sorrow, how to watch the TV box

build the marshmallow engines of dreams;

learning how to flip forward and back,

an acrobat of lies, an appearance nun, bride-to-be of

Christ's money, of necrotic success, of tears

that can only come out at night.

Ten years old in '59

the decade of glorious acquisition,

born from war and set to marinate in flag-juice,

to memorize the ABC's: Avarice, Bombast, Consumption

at all costs. Eat cake on your birthday. Ignore

the bleached bones of beauty floating

in your corn flakes, the ghost-children, your peers,

who howled as they died in the split atom's vomit.

Don't look at

the malice behind the service.

Don't go too far. Don't grow your hair

or wander in the ruins of compassion;

there's no money there. Don't ask why you're 

starving on plenty, little girl, little pawn. Learn

to iron a shirt, feed the baby, please your man, work

in the cafe, at the office, behind the 

dimestore counter selling blood-paste 

for lyrically lying lips

or you'll be the joke,

the reject, the outcast forever

running for your life.

 

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fifties photographs, courtesy of Soren Larsen, © Frank Larson   Fair Use

 

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 The buzz cut off in the flower's throat,

the crunch of green in the hornworm's jaw

gone, and that was the first silencing.

The roadrunner's raspy morning cough,

the thud and peep of the grey toad's hop

stopped, the second silencing.

The bagpipe gliss too high to hear

deep in the whales' wet meadowlands,

the third thing silenced.

Science sucked into apathy's muck,

sense and sanity duct-taped dead: 

the brutish silencing.

 

The white noise of fools, the grinder's carouse of greed

eating greed, the barker's pitch for fresh trash and blood

plays loudest where breathing is silenced.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Compound Word Verse

at dVerse Poets

and earthweal's

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

gliss: abrv, glissando, a glide from one pitch to another

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wing Of A Blue Roller, 1512, Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Untitled (Firetower) © Zdislas Beksinksi   Fair Use

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

(a sonnet)

 

 

 

 

What gift could the dead of the living want

if not to pour again the living's light,

that whiskey warming throats of dreams they haunt;

to sing, to laugh, to lose their drowning night.

My dead are old yet various and new,

the dancing sparks of a youth that ran away.

The love we had so tenuous and blue

flickers out the past and so transforms the clay;

but when you come you paralyze the soul

with heart-remembered cold like glacier melt;

a frozen thing so trapped by pure control

will feel the same negation we once felt.

Take back the miseries living in your eye.

Don't bring me where the sun forgets the sky.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  (with apologies to Poe and the entire 19th Century)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 a little something for All Hallows, at dVerse Poets

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Styx,  © Marius Lewandowski  Fair Use

Author and title unknown, via the internet.  Fair Use

 

 

The Luna Moth Dress

 

 

 

"...Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight.

Some are Born to sweet delight

Some are Born to endless Night..."

~ Augeries of Innocence, William Blake 

 

 

 

 The Luna Moth Dress

In my apple green dress

with my faceted eyes

black as the breeze

from hell's back door

I flutter around

where the blue shadows play,

where my velvet arms

drop the face of the light

deep in a focus

on one bright flame,

no last sweet sip

of the moonflower's wine.

My cheap insect mask

frightens the child.

Dogs bark as I walk

on the edges of bricks

but in my luna moth dress

soft eyebrows all feathers,

I know I'll soon fly on

the breath floating the sky,

welcome at last

in the green wood of life

one with the Fae, one

with the lark, a thing with 

a place, a peace, a time,

 

a laugh

full of giving past

the slow dance of moon,

free from this exile

in endless Night.

 

 

 

 

September 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link Night

at dVerse Poets 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Luna moths (Actias luna) live 7-10 days and are nocturnal. Adults have no functional mouthparts and live on energy stored as caterpillars.  

 

Images: Luna-moth © sunelixir   All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Luna Moth © Jessica Mahan   All Rights Reserved    Fair Use

 

Ghazal Of Saving

Ghazal Of Saving

In my dream I know that I can save

everyone, anything brave.

The heartburst stag, worlds between his horns,

 breathes again inside this spell-sung cave.

The locust green as bottleglass

fallen to a grave of ants still sings--

Fly up all wounded things,

into my hand the nave.

I can save you---I do save;

with this ink dropped sapphire wave

I  save your smile and so bewitch

death's slave and love you living--

Pulled spotless from the bloody ditch,

each cracked bird with bells of glass to ring.

Nothing dies here that can still be loved.

Dreamed joy rings each finger of the witch.

August 2020 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

and 

earthweal's

Open Link

Note: This is my attempt at a ghazal: " Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions,...[t]he ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets—and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet's signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet's own name or a derivation of its meaning." Obviously I have not completely followed these guidelines, especially relating to rhyme, but did include my name in various forms in the final couplet.

Images: Photo © Eugene Kozhevnikov Fair Use

Photo, artist unknown  Fair Use