The Cambion's Tale

Dear  Readers and Blogging Friends: I had intended to take this month off anyway, but after some setbacks in the lumbar department, it really looks like it may be some time before I am well enough to manage much here. Please bear with me as I mend, and eventually I'm sure I shall return. I will leave you with this little favorite of mine to chew on, and thanks, as always for everyone's concern and support. It means a great deal to me.

The Cambion's Tale

The north wind is in the wildwood

tonight, calling the last 

specklings of summer’s regret

from the moon-dripping trees,

fragmented friable tongues of 

henna and ochre milled to a dusty haze

that blots future and past, dead voices

rustling the song that calls me to you

my hell born babe, heart’s delight

soul’s inquistor.

Changeling and demiurge,

furred with frosted moss and mist

horned with bone, poised always 

to run; you regard me blinkless,

hermetic as a wild thing, gaze of

opals burning through the veil where

I pretend to be protected invisible

as Niniane, everlost instead

fate-tangled and resistless to 

the beckon of that blue unicorn eye.

So I come out of the night

for your lichen'd kiss, rain

cold, full of the taste of rust

yet sweeter than any vintage

pressed from the sun's full flaunt. We're

as fallen as Rome remembered, love,

all my smooth green weight leaning

on the colonnade of whispers

you pull from some pocket in
the heart’s shallow grave.

My breath is gone again;

you’ve whistled for it; lost

dog of my hollowed lungs it lopes,

at your heel, leashed 
with your brimstone binding

tighter than the chest that

knows the next gasp is last.

The night wind blows hellfire

around us where the idol burns

our fading sandalwood smoke

bolted with blood, spiced with loss.

O there’s nothing wrong with us

that reincarnation won’t cure.

~October 2011

revised, February 2016

cambion: According to the Malleus Maleficarum, the offspring of a human male and a succubus, or a human female and an incubus. Caliban and Merlin are both assigned this dubious distinction.

*The last two lines are extrapolated from an anonymous saying passed around in the 60's.

Image: Tamara and the Demon, by Mikhail Vrubel, watercolor, 1891

Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

Song Of The Willow Wisp

Song Of The Willow Wisp

The dancing lights are out tonight--

they took me from

my pillow.

They led me on when light was gone

to the root-nest of

the willow.

There in the snag where the dead weeds drag

and the live ones wrap

and capture

I caught my foot in wild willow root--

cold water made

the trap sure.

Now I dance all night with an icefire light

and take men from

their pillows

down to the stream where scream murders dream

in the root-nest of

the willows.

~October 2015 

 

Image: Illustration of Ignis Fatuus, author unknown
Public Domain

 

The Wizard's Gift

 

The Wizard's Gift

It came in a box.

Death wrapped in red foil

and silver ribbon

glowing with night's own light,

the dark knowing of its nature.

The wind brought her stiff broom

to sweep the air clean of brimstone stink

but you stood and laughed and reeked

in the midnight sun.

You wore those solemn robes

like stiff wings freshly feathered.

A pretense of hooded eyes cerulean blue 

shone tarry through the snarl of

each jetblack lash, yet under your

velvet calm was a constant rustling.

Anyone not spellbound in tranced oblivion

would see the barbed tailtip of your starved familiar

thrashing with a scorpion's steel sharp sting.

You held the ocean out in a crystal cup,

tiny hearts tied to the mast, a thousand ships

set sailing in the devil's brandyglass.

Windtossed I watched the mousemaid's fallen tear

grow the deepest pool in a black moon-strangled grove

where the winking fox set the crippled rabbit free

and one absent swipe rang the raven's dinner bell.

Down down went the chambered shell

to the scarlet aquifer;

you curved your fingered claws over my white hand 

until they twined

and flowed together as grains of sand

merge in a dune indistinguishable

and we pulled the fullness up

to our glittering husks from the butcher's well

to drink together the bloodred wine of hell.

~July 2012
edited, October 2015

(re)posted for    real toads

Tuesday Platform

If you'd like to hear the poem read by the author, click below:

Image: The Wizard, by Edward Burne-Jones

Public Domain, via Wikipaintings.org

The Retired Moonhanger

The Retired Moonhanger

I've unpacked the moon

from her nightboard box

so many times

I've worn out the ribbons

and hung her up

where she couldn't be missed

unless you were 

watching

TV.

After a time, however

things loosen. The moon falls.

That paper crackle under the boot

is the crumpled bonesnap of

last night's hopeful crescent,

broken like a shotgun

that has two black eyes for

what it scars 

but fires blind.

So I gave up being

a moon-hanger, years ago.

Now I'm retired--fallen

by the way 

some say-- too tired

to lift that heavy glow

or to reach a sky that high,

but I have gotten by

by being very good at

dodging bullets.

~October 2015

posted  for    real toads

Weekend Challenge

Images: Illegal Manufacture of Light, 1993, by Jacek Yerka

Little House with Flagpole, Georgia O'Keefe

Fair use via wikiart.org

The Eclipsed

The Eclipsed

"...But when the noon wax’d bright

Her hair grew thin and grey;

She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn

To swift decay and burn

Her fire away..."

~Christina Rossetti, The Goblin Market

When the great shadow passed

across the moon's face

it shaved her just a sliver

from the full. She looked

a breaching whale in blue forever,

a bleared bacchante
swaying down the hill
drenched in black delirium,
a smile upon her lips

and bloody fingertips.

I opened every window

to that changing light, lit 

the smudge of sage to guide
the wayward heart,

called your unquiet
spirit from its grave

and bid it from this dwelling to depart,

to take its cankering spit

its wailing shell

to a place where

death itself is made remote,

and instead of sheltering all

its killing cold, to

leave me alone with

just your candled ghost.

Now we rock together side by side,
peaceful as we never were in life,

old infants in moon's cradle
milk-quiet and close to sleep,
tucked within a mantling of earth-shadow

to wake upon that noonless day
when every trace of shadow falls away.

~October 2015

posted for 

Magaly Guerrero

Top Image: Metaphysical Interior With Sun Which Dies, 1971, by Giorgio de Chirico

Fair use via wikiart.org
Bottom: The Golden Head, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti public domain via wikiart.org

The Infernal Operator

The Infernal Operator

The incubus is having

another rough night;

a bitter bell keeps ringing

between his horns, foreign, 

off-tempo, pounding like

the gallop of a three-legged horse,

or the arrhythmic crash of cambered granite

tumbling from a fallen cathedral,

and to top it off

there's an angel in the fire,

feathers burning acrid, ashy black,

dialing, dialing the clouds, asking 

the great silence left when the clacking

rotary wheel cogs home: Where is the bird-winged host, 

my alabaster birth brothers, the holy
triune fatherspiritson
to pull me out?

The incubus knows the angel

has landed in the wrong fireplace for this,

yet still he wishes

it would happen, to see at last a miracle 

not born of tormented flesh,  

and also so the noise would stop,

the pale, luminous eyes cease following him

from window to window as

he tries frantically to let out the stink.

Doesn't it care, this minister of grace, that

the incessant ringing, the billowing smoke

of its rendered virtue, distract him 

from his greatest opus?

(50 Shades of Damnation,

to be published next spring.)

Why doesn't its everpresent

compassionate disaster master save it?

Instead it burns and burns

as the phone rings on unanswered,

sweetly smiling, staring at him 

as if the lines weren't down,

as if there was something

he could do.

~October 2015

posted for    real toads

Fireblossom Friday

(For my other poems in the incubus series, just hit the eponymous tag below.)

Images by Salvador Dali, Fair Use via wikart.org

Top:Debris of an Autobile Gives Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938

Lobster Telephone, 1938