Ruins

Ruins

"...I have let time pass, which..helps more than reasoning.”

~Queen Elizabeth I

I.

I wake in the night

thinking of ruins;

not the makers

but their leavings: fort,

church, graveyard,

house, each

with no tomorrow of its own, yet

a casket full

of glass for magpies,

scroungers' stones,

writers' plots,

lovers' verses, shadow beds

for weary ghosts

and so must be content

to watch the walls fall down.

 

II.

These rainy ruins

where ravens ride wrinkled sky

where nightfall black-backs silver-mirror moons

however weak you are,

you can stroll forever, 

muscular past for a walking-stick,

hearing a hundred private jokes

the ghosts still tell/will tell

to you or the next one

for nothing's

as constant as a ghost

or more hopeful

than a ruin.

~December 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two old 55's, reposted for 

 earthweal's Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Image: Carpathian castle ruins, author unknown, via internet. Fair use.

 

 

 

The Wandering Eye

The Wandering Eye

I made you

from a map, a hawk and a flower.

I thought you

clockwork-canny, full of power,

a road-veined eye for

spying the highway hours;

a bird, a map,

a flower meant to be

a fragrance and a passage 

 seeking sea.

But so far away

you flew there could never be

a coming back

despite the lies, despite the slick pretense,

so to see you now

as a morph'd and piddling glance

on a burning

globe of constant transience

is only another

blink of blight and fear.

You tell me this

is the you who's real and clear;

fine words from one

who's broken every mirror. 

August 2020, 

(with fragments from March 2014)

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images:Still Life with Spherical Mirror, 1934 © M.C. Escher   Fair Use
footer, artist and title unknown,  Fair Use

Haunt's Road

Haunt's Road

You resurrect

on the long road rolling,

with your homeless soul a

prairie schooner full of dull copper

 blood and moonshine, nightmares wild in 

the harness, their snaffled tongues slipping

into dreams with a slow-steeped poison, 

changing sun to eclipse, good to bad, 

alive to dead in a bone-shaking shock,

down along the wheel ruts

 where the wagons 

used to pass.

By 4:00 a.m. 

you're in the house.

The sound of your last rasping

 breaths liquid with suffering still

floating your medicine show, barking

on the mattress-midway the subtle

vibration of your restless shifts,

 a moan and a gasp on the empty

 crater of our bed, hawking

a snake-oil brewed 

for love, or

death.

I put 

your ashes 

out on the hill by

 the dog who loved us

so you may leave

 this haunt's road,

this dead-end.

 Run with 

her 

beloved, 

painless, free,

 green in cloudy  forest,

prairie wind to wrap

you in a place of

 naked stars.

If you 

knew who I am

you'd never
have come.

 August 2020

posted for

The Sunday Muse

*This poem has been edited since publishing

Images via internet, artists unknown     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

Guillotine Moon

Guillotine Moon

The moon cuts constant

even as her yellow face

sizzles off electric wind to

 spade-black void,

digging

 the dark day's shadows.

No wandering

in mist or star's orison

takes me far from loss.

No color seems to belong

to empty steam.  The last rain

bent my back like a bow,

mocking the horns of

her pale cipher smile; the moon

knows me better than you.

Our  mirror solitude

overflows with light,

her cratered face

the teacher, her absence a gift

of sapphire night, the pill of

her roundness a febrifuge

for folly's cache of nightmare. In

 this moon-blade guillotine

no one sees, I have placed

the eyeless head

of all my desires.

May/August 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly

challenge, Strange Worlds

Images: Moon and Trees, artist unknown     Fair Use

Memory, 1938, © Rene Magritte               Fair Use

A Talk with Tyto alba

A Talk with Tyto alba

To the garden overwatered

by my tears

the Barn Owl came one night.

He sat on a branch,

swiveling his round-windowed head

to ask me why

I cried.

“Are you lonely

here, in this place

you built yourself? Do the wolves

draw in at evening,

slipping their howls in the papery sigh

of free wind I sail?”

I looked in his eyes

globed as peaches, golden

lamps pulling light

from dark.
I shook my head.

“Then is it the stone

you can't drop, the ugly one

held so hard on your lungs,

heavy with years,

sharp with fear

of  tomorrow?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t cry for what I’ve lost,

for what I am or what will be.

 I cry for what I’ve broken

and what has broken me.”

“But that's all three,”

said the owl
leaving me there

with a shrug of his wing, 

smooth as music on the air,

chasing his soft

personal rustlings

in the grass.

June 2011

An old poem, repurposed for 
The Sunday Muse

Image: Lechuza (Tyto alba) by macha.cl posted on flick'r