Goodbye

goodbye sweet singer and teller of truths

Babylon

Babylon

When the way is smooth

we trip on nothing

because we're made
 to kick things down.

When the belly's full

the brain cramps,

sells thought

for adrenaline.

Small griefs swell like seeds;

so the vein sprouts the needle,

the mountain's slick slope 
shakes its entropy, an avalanche

rumbling us down while

the summit recedes.

We forget

when living's too easy,

we make times get hard.

~February 2014.  revised November 2016

an old one revised, for Fireblossom Friday

Top: Aerial View of Capitol Hill, Public Domain  via wikimedia commons

Footer: Ruins of central Amarna, Egypt, the little temple of the Aton(Amarna Bâtiment du centre ville, zone du petit temple d'Aton)by Kurohito

Shared under a Creative Commons License  via wikimedai commons

Warrior

Warrior

The warrior walks

across the sky tonight

spinning the tale of resilience

twisting the tale of valor

wearing the worked hide of stars,

supple in battle yet

turning no blade;

marked for an early death

or a bloody age--

yet who would want to pass

through this night of sorrow and wrong

without a fight?

~Election Day, 2016

Image; reproduction of the Golden Horn of Gallehus, via wikimedia commons

Glass Alligators

Glass Alligators

Glass alligators

slide on their own bloat,

plagueships that float

over the muck

slurping it up, spitting it back;
it's so easy to break
if God finds the mistake
so they've learned how to make

their eyes look like toys'

too blank to annoy.

The glass alligators

stir their swizzlestick teeth

in a light liar's grin 

as they soft-lick your skin.   

(They just want to win.)

Their slick smoky sides
aren't built to hide
what's moving within:

the clockwork tossed salad

of death and money,

blood for oil, power-honey.

Their brittle scales ring

like a bad novel brings

out every cliche
on the side of a truck
to turn a quick buck,

and each soiled rotting page

bleeds the end of an age.

~Four days before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election

for grapeling, and my real friends at Real Toads

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Muddy Alligators, 1917   by John Singer Sargent
Public domain

Off The Shelf Resumes

Remembrance

by Sir Thomas Wyatt

 

 

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

    With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

    That now are wild, and do not remember

    That sometime they put themselves in danger

         To take bread at my hand; and now they range

         Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

    Twenty times better; but once, in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

    And she me caught in her arms long and small;

         Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,

         And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’

It was no dream: I lay broad waking:

    But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

    And I have leave to go of her goodness,

    And she also to use newfangleness.

         But since that I so kindly am served,

         I would fain know what she hath deserved.

 ~Sir Thomas Wyatt

def:  newfangleness: fickleness, infidelity




 Notes: When I began Verse Escape, six years ago now back in the heyday of blogging, I included a feature called Off The Shelf, where I shared the works of poets dead and living that in some manner spoke to me. Since at this point, my own output is so low, and the blog exists mostly for my own satisfaction (though my few kind readers are much appreciated) I've decided to once again do so, and the first entry in the reawakened series will be Remembrance,(also sometimes called by its first line, They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek) by Sir Thomas Wyatt.

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th-century English ambassador and lyrical poet in the court of Henry VIII. He was a great innovator in popularizing many classical poetic forms  into the English language, including the sonnet.  

[Per wikipedia: "A significant amount of his literary output consists of translations and imitations of sonnets by the Italian poet Petrarch; he also wrote sonnets of his own. He took subject matter from Petrarch's sonnets, but his rhyme schemes make a significant departure. ...Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee. This marks the beginnings of an exclusively "English" contribution to sonnet structure, that is three quatrains and a closing couplet. 

In addition to imitations of works by the classical writers Seneca and Horace, he experimented in stanza forms including the rondeau, epigrams, terza rima, ottava rima songs, satires and also with monorime, triplets with refrains, quatrains with different length of line and rhyme schemes, quatrains with codas, and the French forms of douzaine and treizaine. Wyatt introduced contemporaries to his poulter's measure form ...and is acknowledged a master of the iambic tetrameter.^" ]

Several of his poems, including the often anthologized  Whoso List To Hunt, are reputed to be about Anne Boleyn, with whom he was rumored to have had an affair. This sent him to the Tower during Anne's trial for adultery, though unlike her and five of her alleged lovers, he escaped execution and remained more or less in the King's favor, as much as anyone can be said to have done so.

Wyatt died in 1542 at the age of 39. His poetry remained unpublished during his lifetime.

I like all of his work, but this poem in particular.

Images: Sir Thomas Wyatt, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1535-37

Still Life With Animals, 1660, by Melchior d'Hondecoeter

Public Domain

Dead Woman's Crossing

Dead Woman's Crossing

a ghost story

When the moon was a witchboat small and tossing

in the fade-time where night can see day as her twin,

down the red-dirt highway to Dead Woman's Crossing

came the carnival rolling on a dustbowl wind.

They spindled the midway, freakshow and toss-ring,

before they spiked twenty ripe melons with gin

for Harvest Home in the dark of September,      

so the marks could do what they don't remember.

Then night seemed to give a coyote-moon cough

that shook her gold earrings, and Katie showed up

with her deathrattle tale of carnival past,

how she, the schoolmarm, met Fannie the Dove

how love like a cloudburst caught her at last 

on a September midway, bent moon above;     

a granite fist traded for a velvet hand

and a five dollar ring for her wedding band.

The Dove blew out of Texas like a broken branch            

running  from Jesus, Daddy Jim and the law.

When she hit Mrs. Hamm's Saloon and Hog Ranch

she knew she had almost no time left at all

but still more than Katie, hellbound for a ditch,

face pale through the water where the black crows caw.

Thru plugged ears the Dove hears the walking night moan,

thru shut eyes sees the bridge where Katie talks on.

The heat lightning flickered as midnight slammed shut,

Kate woke from a nightmare where she was the wheat

waiting dry in the dirt for the thresher's cut,

for the whiskey hard times in tangled sheets,

for one scar too many from a White Owl blunt

while the tumbleweeds wrote her name in the street.

She put on her bonnet, she packed up her grip,

met the Dove smiling with her child on her hip.

They posed stiff as strangers on the early train,

the nights and the men left behind in the dust.

They got off at Clinton in the quick July rain

with the last of the wheat burning red as rust.

When the moon was a witchboat sailing the plains,

as diamond eyes smiled into lily-white trust

in the carnival night, storm in the willow,

the teacher slept sweet with her red-haired pillow.

The next day at midday, two girls and a child      

left town in a buggy to laugh and laugh last.

Fannie screamed like a bobcat, the wind went wild;

Katie's man rode up through the tall sawgrass.

The Dove saw the buck-knife draw a cutthroat grin;

all she knew was to make the scared horse run fast

from the man who had Katie, all his, all dead,

while the Dove had poison and a red dirt bed.

When the moon's a hook, a witchboat, a sickle

when the last of the wheat stands brown in the ground

while Orion runs after Hecate the fickle

above the dwindling lights of a dying town,

the Dove does her dance to a penny whistle

and a dead woman calls her child with that sound.

Now every fall when the carnival tops the ridge

it rolls without stopping past Dead Woman's bridge.

~September 2014

 

 

This poem is written in the ottava rima form, with lines of eleven syllables. Or tries to be. It has been edited extensively.

Process notes: Dead Woman's Crossing, also called Dead Women Crossing, refers both to a small community by that name in Custer County, Oklahoma near Weatherford, and the nearby bridge over Deer Creek where the decapitated body of schoolteacher Katie De Witt James was found in August of 1905. The events (other than my imaginary carnival) described in this story are factual up to a point, with completely fictitious biographical details and explanations of my own invention. You can get the details (as far as actually known) of the unsolved murder of Katie De Witt James and the poisoning of Fannie Norton here in this wikipedia article.

 'Grip' is an archaic word for a small traveling bag. Prostitutes of that era were often referred to euphemistically as 'Soiled Doves,' a term also used to describe women who had lost their virginity, were free with their sexual favors or considered  loose morally. White Owl cigars, including 'blunts' are an inexpensive brand that has been made in the South since 1887. They have about the same place in cigar hierarchy as Swisher Sweets (once my own occasional brand.)

Fannie Norton did use the name 'Mrs Ham,' but the eponymous Saloon and Hog Ranch is a flight of my fancy taken loosely from the life of Calamity Jane, who in her youth is reputed to have been a working girl at the infamous Fort Laramie Three Mile Hog Ranch, a 19th century 'military brothel' and stage coach stop near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, also said, like Dead Woman's Crossing, to be haunted.

Images: Circus arriving in Seligman, Missouri, late 19th century
Public domain via wikimedia commons 
Dead Woman's Crossing, by Nathan Gunter on flick'r
Shared under a Creative Commons license