Cactus Eye

Cactus Eye

The cactus eye is watering

watching, thinning,

its saving all in vain.

The needed day is now;
unindemnified, unsanctified

the indifferent sun will magnify,

will dry the drops of living

at its root,

and the bulge it held so long, life

parsed from long-fingered air, will shrivel

split the skin and spit the spines,

consume itself the nectar 

hidden in its wounds. The hungry dark

will fall like sharp-faced birds

and the cactus eye will close

at last dried blind.

~January 2015

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Weekend Challenge: The Poetry of David Huerta

Grace (Everyday Amazing) brings the work of the Mexican poet David Huerta to us for inspiration. Reading  the poems she shared, as well as some of those in her linked translation of Before Saying Any Of The Great Words, led me here, though I'm not sure how.

Images: The eye like a strange balloon goes to infinity, 1882 by Odilon Redon

Public domain via wikiart.com  I have slightly tinted this image.

Photo of the northern lights seen from space, author unknown.

For The Road

For The Road

He bought me a car

so I could drive it for him,

the Drunken Master, the Blind Buddha

high school wrestler with a karma

stronger than the Eight Immortals.

So I worked for my license,

drove my teacher (Eddie Sneath) to drink

with the stickshift stall and rollback of 

 San Francisco hills,

learned the caress and nudge of a tight clutch

the tap of foot/ hand glide/ accelerator slide,

but still, I always knew

it was easier

than learning to fly.

~January 2015

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Challenge: Road Trip!

Corey Rowley (Mexican Radio) asks us to travel back in time to our first ride.


Process Notes: 'Eddie Sneath" was an alias and alter ego of a friend. The car was a '64 VW microbus named Ruby, purchased by my first husband. (She had the white and turquoise paint job pictured above, so Ruby described her personality, not her color.)When I was put behind the wheel one foggy morning on Van Ness, I had never driven a car in my life, but I learned. 
The flying, that was harder.

Optional Pop-Psychedelic Musical Accompaniment

Images: Authors unknown. I have slightly manipulated both. 

Source.

Birthday Moonsong

Birthday Moonsong

Born  in the wolf moon,

at century's half-crack,

before the moving shadow box

before the singing pocket, the talking hand--

disjecta  membra of a war and peace,

nuclear snowflake crystaled in the cold aftermath,

fallout caught and whirled up

by black arms of concrete

into the sweet dance of chemical fog;

all around me

blackbirds falling

from the sky like almanacs

pages open to the gift of silent prophecy

and in the mirror, a white raven

solitary,
a meal, a target, a danger

to the flock, burning the eye like
a scarlet poppy

on a gravemound, or

a working girl unbuttoned

waking up hungover 

in the convent.

* * *

In the house

at the edge of the world,

with the wolf moon low in the west,

its yellow eye on the scattering stars,

its tongue longing

for the fat white hams of Venus,

the north wind sleets the window glass

bitter green, rattling the taste

of old snow and bad design; the wolf moon

the hunger moon,
stops to lap

pooled pink from blood-red Mars,

swells its belly 

with faltering stars, the small and weak
gnawing them out one by one as I hum

dusting the ape statuettes, the

flat smiles, perplexed still

that the empty chair

stays empty another winter, that

the bed made every morning

is unmade for one more night,

while the fire throws white shadows

where ghosts can fall like snow.

~January 2015

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Tuesday Open Link


Optional Musical Accompaniment










Process Notes: The term "Wolf Moon' is an adaptation by Colonial settlers from the name for January in the Algonquin tongue. White ravens carry a genetic mutation which prevents melatonin from accruing in their feathers. They are rare, and other ravens generally shun them.

Images:

Snowstorm, by Maurice de Vlaminck

May be protected by copyright. Fair use   via wikiart.org

The Snow Queen FliesThrough The Winter Night, by Edmund Dulac

May be protected by copyright. Fair use   via wikiart.org

Angelcake

Angelcake

In the too-bright color-kill light

across the brittle border

lies Cellophane Angel-land,  

 everyone 

sugar-free, fat-free, deliciously

plastic, without

awkward organs, hot

or cold running blood.

Lifting sacred brand names to the sky

they sigh,

dying in fracture-fall

from old spork wounds.

It's fragile in the land of cellophane angels

with too much nothing to be.

~January 2015

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Challenge: Flash 55 Plus

Kerry O'Connor (Skylover, Skywriting) remembers the incomparable Mr. Know-it-all, the G-man, Galen Lee Haynes, who left us last month, with his 55 meme continued, plus; or as she defines it: "Each month there will be something extra, an option to consider in your creative process. The one thing that will remain the same is the word count: 55 words no more, no less." This month's added element, appropriately for the man with the Harley, is a biker phrase from the 50's, 
'Man, you gotta go.' 
Might be a little of that in this, maybe.

Top image: High Noon, 1949, by Edward Hopper
May be protected by copyright. Fair use via wikiart.org

Footer: An Angel of The Last Judgement, 1911, by Wassily Kandinsky
Public domain

The Music of Birds and Lions

The Music of Birds and Lions

If I had to say something about it

I would just mention

the way your eyes

moved through me
like fever through a lion,

like the brown-soled boots

of a Victorian explorer

walking lightly

with ownership, a dominion

powered by steam

careful to always
keep an echo

map of the outback

in beige buckram binding

firmly gripped in your mind,

referencing page dogeared,

recording the reasons

not to fall behind on

a dangerous journey;

or that your hands

were always sliding in

a slipstream of tasks, were

water, embracing stones smooth

in their blue satin beds,

leaving behind a geologic

Alexandrian library

of lithic messages, codes;

languages of a few extinct

species of birds, envoys and diplomats;

that your long fingers on the stops

were your flight feathers,

playing a recital of calling macaws

that come at nightfall to color

shadow-fronds of sunset palms

with their rest;

but there's no need to

talk about what you stored
under my skin, or tattoos in birdsong

that can't be forgotten

so I only strum the music of it

where the lions rise

in the mauve gauze of
the jungle dark.

~December 2014

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The last Get Listed for 2014

Process note: I wrote this earlier in the month, when I was undrugged, and it already had several of Michael's words embedded in it. I put a few more in today as I tweaked it, using

 in one form or another music, few, grip, feather, steam, embrace, rise, fall, water, shadow, bed. 

Images: The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Henri Rousseau

The Moment of Truth, 1892, Paul Gauguin

Public domain via wikiart.org