Undocumented Mist

 Undocumented Mist

The night exhales a coolness

that seems foreign after the

hammering heat of the day,

an alien breath wetbacked across

a dangerous border,

speaking another tongue.

So age comes to me running crouched

across the river, buttons missing,

wearing her threadbaring gown,

breathing lines, bending flesh

to slope and flow at gravity's whim,

calling her wares from the rocktop of

a round calcite egg turned silvered stone, 

grit-pocked and bubbled with imperfections,

dirtied in the hard guttered smut of too many

days blown out, all the soft splattering away

from the sun's falling diamond drops.

She's hungry. She's tired as the hour after birth.

I look at last in her eyes, see only another night visitor,

an undocumented gypsy marched thru a hundred

dry gullies carrying her heavy pack, looking for work,

speaking the language of the cool breeze

that mists itself up from the fall

of a too bright day.

July 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Prompt: Whatever the Weather

Stu MacPherson is hosting today and has asked us to write a poem in which the weather figures in some way.

If you would like to hear a rather unprofessional reading of this poem by the author, who got tired of re-recording after many tries, click below:

undocumented mist by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Image: Day2: Night Sky, by Jeremy Zilar on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Chalkboard

Chalkboard

A lesson in stars,

night's orderly arithmetic

chalked on darkness,

shines on the tired skin

that covers me

once blank, babysoft 

then work calloused

life enscribed

roughened with  sun

now sueded soft again

erased blank as night sky

where nothing's written except

the chalkmarked numbers

of old dreams

the blue moon is  

tidily

brushing

away.

December 2011

An equation in 55 integers for Professor G-Man, to close out the last semester of 2011

Night at the Opera

Night at the Opera (buffa)

a dream sequence

The grand opera begins;

you approach with a smile,

a many wrinkled twinkle

from the plus size aisle.

Your voice and your ardor

flagrantly contest;

a woman's dry as a prune

before her ears get a rest.

In between acts, nothing

happens in this dream

so why do I wake up

always trying to scream?

December 2011

Posted for   Friday Flash 55  at the culturally acclaimed G-man's 

A pure fantasy in 55 words with no personal implications, having nothing to do with opera, men, marriage, getting old, weight gain or other nightmares, I assure you.  It's all a metaphor for...something. Poetic device. Really.

...or else it could be I just have weird dreams.

Image: Luigi LaBlanche as Don Pasquale

courtesy wikimedia commons.

Old

Old

When I was a girl
I raced my lines
            over the paper,
                                      words skipped

                                                           like stones across

                                                                       the aqua vita of the page

in a most provocative way.
Now, of course I'm old and
write quatrains that rhyme

or at the very least

free verse in numbered lines,

serious in an unserious world.

Old.

Oh there are benefits.
You can smile at many more things 
that over time 

have proved

to be ridiculous

like yourself.

You can go to the hiking 
trail in the park and 
walk backwards, waving

your arms like a windmill

and feel 

no embarrassment.

Or have your dinner
of buttered toast and 
lightly scrambled

eggs at four o'clock

because you can.

All is measuring out, so

that the hard part about

getting old isn’t the ache,
the dizzy, the suddenly 

       

exhausted 

moment standing in a void,

the knife breaking in the bone,

but the ceasing
to care about things

that once were important

such as being hip,

and what you

look like.

The new jokes don’t seem as reliable
as the old. The new people seem
a consciously constructed alien race

and the cold comes up

from the very bottom of you

the bottom of all being.

Warmth pools tiny in the center, shrinking;

the fingers are stiff with ice

for marrow

and the heart is just 

another abandoned thing

raddled with years and miles

the whole rusty as winter bones

the fox leaves for a child in spring to uncover 

with dreadful curiosity

jumping

                                         back

                           startling at a
                                                       sound;

a sharp crackle,

something in the air

the fire of laughter

the smell of smoke

the shadow of a melody

faint and distant 

as a falling star

then into the pocket with it 

and going on home

before the darkness falls.

October 2011

Posted For   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Process Notes: I haven't played around with lines like this for many years but over the last few weeks I've been reading poetry before bed from people who do and have been corrupted. Oh well.

aqua vita, or aqua vitae, Latin for 'water of life'  "..is an archaic name for a concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol. The term was in wide use during the Middle Ages, although its origin is undoubtedly much earlier having been used by Saint Patrick and his fellow monks to refer to both the alcohol and the waters of baptism..." ~wikipedia

Header image: Ghost Car in Big Bend, 
Big Bend National Park, Texas by joy ann jones, 1986