Carnivale

Carnivale

You said you'd give me the moon

on a piece of toast

or at least the sweet-hot peel

of her cinnamon skin.

You said you'd raise from the grave

my heart, the ghost

to fill with black-burnt warmth

that could begin

a beat to bring horned dancers from the trees

life to lift me lurching from my knees

a revenant in red

that's what you said

that night in the glimmering swell

before the Fall

but it was Carnivale.

~September 2014

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Sunday Mini-Challenge: Promises

Karin Gustafson (ManicDDaily)  asks us to think about the promise behind the chocolates, broken, or missed, kept or imaginary. This is just something that popped up in my head a few months back, and seems appropriate now, as Carnivale is winding down in Venice 

and it is about a promise, of sorts.

Photo by Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters

via google image search source

no copyright infringement intended

Love Letter

Love Letter

[From/To Self]

An hour choking at the compassionate basin

coughing up the vinegar of your indifference,

pen an ungainly stick insect that jolts and poses

on the leaf, leaving behind its pinprick holes

and black tar droppings.

Your saloonful of buffalo girls are

making a mud-wallow of your business--

broken bottles, shots at midnight, the clumsy winding

and unpicking of the bandage, the childish rush

to clean the wound,

needle threaded with a flame

to poke white hot into your swelling

bringing only tainted blood and no relief.

There's no hero dawdling home upon

a handy wine dark wave, no velveteen nurse

to blot the nightsweat from the page,

no diagnostician or connoisseur of blight

to assure you fatality is a condition

that with proper care and rest

may show improvement.

There's only one who loved you once

and whom you've since

taught better, and no one here at all

to read a letter
never mailed.

~January 2015, rev. February 2015

Process note: I have added the subtitle (from/to self) above to clarify the intent and the point of view, ie, the 'you' here is the writer.  I have reached the point where I am through with rewriting and editing this for now, and the poem still apparently doesn't make itself clear. Apologies, and at some point may revisit to do a better job.

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Kerry's Challenge: Is Love a Tender Thing?

Kerry O'Connor (Skylover) asks us to ponder some of the more obscure corners of this thing called love. Or even " to write to the theme: Love Thy Enemy or Love is The Enemy or Love, Despite Your Enemy." This is a poem about love and the inner enemy.

Image: A Lady Writing, 1665,  by Johannes Vermeer

Public domain via wikiart.org

The Estuary

The Estuary

A sestina

In the dream estuary mud is alive with flamingos' coral flow

their yellow toes buried in the face of the mirrored moon

beaks spooning up warm worms that turn on the ebb

of yesterday to bolts of storm-worked silver

among the reedy songs long rimed with salt

that paint a mime's blank white on the changing river.

Summers' weeds black-lace the ice-pock craters, edge in river,

stubbling down to staggered stems where nothing flows.

Still, here we basin weeds and snow together, sweet and salt

spiraled milky smooth, stranded in a sudden fall of moon;

the coming sea that floods each tarnished top with circled silver

cries before dying in our arms, a white-boned ebb.

We are also in that moment, alien and identical, an ebb's

shoulder from the places where we touched. In the tangled river

language of affinity and loss, you write your silver

runes upon my hair; we hear we've lost enough. We sift the flow

for comely bits of iron comedy, for relics of the servant's sinking moon

trapped in columned hours bleached and bleating in their pillory of salt.

I keep my eye on rock-torn shingle whitened by a sepulcher's salt

wound, you watch the blue horizon stretching from this pebbled ebb

to the birth-blood of a blind thing whelping her litters of moons,

dropped to drift aimlessly off on the tick of the restless river

that I have learned to welcome, flood and flow,

as my inconstant lover, servicing me with lenience and quicksilver.

In the dream estuary, wading a hundred thousand silver

roads that ache with snow, winding fingers through a century of salt

I measure each brackish heartbeat in your flow;

I feel you pulse my throat at my own life's ebb,

a meeting where the ocean loves the river,

a shattered, reshaped promise to the robber moon.

I hold you as the ash tree holds her vain-caged moon,

an empty outline far from rock reality's shot at silver,

yet full of light, a fuzzy gilding on the dimples of the river.

I forget the bitter glint of trickling salt,

the painted mime's black tear on this masque's ebb,

remember only what receives us dreaming as the estuary flows.

Between the weeds and snow, flow the moon and go;

the blend and ebb of silver sing together. Neither sweet nor

salt, sea nor river, yet two are one at last and changed forever.

~February 2015




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The Tuesday Platform

"estuary: that part of the mouth or lower course of a river in which the river's current meets the sea's tide." ~dictionary.com

Photo: Allegheny River, Winter
copyright Diana Lee Matisz 2015

Used with her generous permission. Thank you, Diana!

You can find more of Diana's exquisite work on her Instagram page, here, and more about her, with links to all her blogs and her Red Bubble store, on her About Me page.

Moonchild

Moonchild

In the moon and in the night

and in my secrets I was born.

Not in the morning rain, the blasting grey,

not  in the deadspace between the end of wars

and Endless War.

No, it was night, eternal night

tropical, of silent birds and gathering grasses,

that haloed round my denim figured cradle.

There I first heard the fireflies

scratching at the door,

there watched your fingers quicken

as ligaments of iguanas clack their claws

skittering cross a maze of key-coloured stones,

coaxing out the asymmetric dance--there,

when the moon was a melting blob

discarded from the candle-batch,

sinking as extravagant dawn

laughed another vow she couldn't keep,

lipsticked and wrapped
in purple-orange chemise,

undressed soon enough to naked slate

as night completes

its locust-rasp of snow and cloud

made insect brief.

Inside, the fire crackles a millennium after,

like fingers walking over a

brittle rustle of paper faces, quick-

covered by the mirror before another's 

wick-lit eye can truly see

who it is that holds them thrall

in shine and flicker, 

above a winter moon handmade to fall.

~February 2015 

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Challenge: Kumulipo

"The "Kumulipo" is an old Hawaiian prayer chant that poetically describes the creation of the world. The word literally means "beginning-in-deep-darkness." Here darkness doesn't connote gloom and evil. Rather, it's about the inscrutability of the embryonic state; the obscure chaos that reigns before germination." 

Image: the Snake Charmer, 1907, by Henri Rousseau

Public Domain via wikiart.org 

Pardon me for re-using this favorite image, but it was the one in my mind when this poem came through.

Alive

Alive

Night is only the medium for a memory;

a kiss, tasting of dust and natron
vanilla and orange

under a dream-sickled moon,

a McLuhanish massage

on the knot in psyche's neck,

hard as the driven bolts that hold
electrified skull to softening body,

or as the hollow calcined cavities

of the mummy who walks.

What love or hate could drag

that storm of bandages and bile

from its turquoise-eyed sarcophagus--

how fond the bonds of loss must fall

on an utterly lost thing,
messages for the reanimated

matter of this memory 

that walks the night on its own business,
 trailing smears of lightning,

 spice, and white unravelings, 
  

on slow parade in the glittering

 black pageant of Hell.

~February 2015

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The Tuesday Platform

Process notes:  Marshall McLuhan was a 20th century communications theory philosopher, predictor of the internet, and coiner of phrases such as  'the global village,' and 'the medium is the message,' the concept of which I have very loosely employed in this poem. Here is his wikpedia bio.

Images are of  (bottom) a poster for the 1932 film The Mummy,
and Boris Karloff, (top) in 1935's  Bride of Frankenstein
Public domain. via wikimedia commons. Manipulated.