Winter's Ship

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter's Ship

 (a 55)

 

 Oaks on the hillside

know wind's desire

fear nothing but fire

become ships in harbor

to ride the waves' wire.

 

In winter without color

midnights without number

sun  cold as axe-snarl

even passion must freeze

or build a way out.

Wind-eater, wave-runner

dragon-faced prowler

king's-welcome coffin;

last home like her first,

the earth roots remember.

 

 

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets Poetics:

Passions Stamped on Lifeless Things

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Historical Note: "The Gokstad ship is a 9th-century Viking ship found in a burial mound at Gokstad ..Vestfold, Norway It is the largest preserved Viking ship in Norway. It is also the largest Viking ship ever found...During the excavations, a human skeleton was found in a bed inside a timber-built burial chamber. The skeleton was that of a man aged approximately forty to fifty years old, of powerful build..; his identity is unknown. The bones of twelve horses, six dogs, and one peacock were found laid out around the man's body.." ~wikiedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Gokstadskipet, Vikingskipmuseet, Oslo, 2005, Karamell, shared under a Creative Commons License via wikimedia commons

Danish Winter Landscape, detail, 1838 © Johan Christian Dahl

The Day Before Gone

 

The Day Before Gone

 

It was the day before gone.
The strophe began on

 a sun weak with fever,

a sky of grey primer 

because plague hit the painters

 before they managed the blue. 

 

The tepid air was fragrant with 

malfeasance, but the dumbshow

never paused.

It was noon on the sea of shadows.

All through the potential zeros

bug-scudding over the whine-

dark waves ran a shiver, a dread,

the sodden fog of the sailor

at the rocks too busy with rum

 and scrimshaw to have bothered

with learning to swim.

 

The sirens and the kraken laughed

in antiphons, tatting the antistrophe

 from the rust-wire wreckage.

It was the hour before the reckoning

but the only text on the wall read

"It can't happen here."

Pulpits burned, preachers prowled

like panthers

among the singed dollar bills.

 

Locusts

ate the hedge funds. Vultures ate

the venture capitalists, and

politicians ate the vultures

til the darkness seethed 

with undigested bones.

Then finally

over the feeble,

failure-fumed pandemonium

Dawn came with her

exterminator's smile.

December 2021

posted for 

Shay's Word List

Images: Both Untitled, by Zdizlaw Beksinski, copyright held by The Histoical Musem in Sanok Poland

Fair Use

Fenrir

 

 

 

 

 

 Fenrir

 

 

"..from where will a sun come into the smooth heaven
when Fenrir has assailed this one?"~Vafþrúðnismál

 

I.

 

They say the basilisk

walks her own wasteland,

each green thing that springs

corrupted by her breath,

 

each life that starts

turned to stone as

she spies it, so that she lives 

with nothing all her days.

 

She knows the sphinx

has long since forgotten

all riddles but the one

whose answer is sand.

 

 

II.

 

The wolf at the door

puts his paw on the child's neck.

His breath smells of tiny lives, 

his eyes are round as the moon.

He waits with her for the Ragnarök

to devour the world, to swallow the gods

to bring a new sun

to the skies we defile

but while waiting he smiles

his dog-smile, his tongue soft on her cheek.

From deep in the shadows 

the basilisk regrets

 

the power of myth, and

 the child

waits to grow

and run with the wolf.

December 2021

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: In Norse myth,  ragnarök refers not only to a time when gods and men will fight against monsters and jotuns and be destroyed, but also to the world which will follow, where the earth is purified and gods, nature and man are given a second chance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Odin and Fenris, 1909 © Dorothy Hardy   Public Domain

Wolf and child, via The Sunday Muse  author unknown Fair Use

 

The First Crack

 

 

 

The First Crack

The first crack

always seems easy to mend,

an almost invisible fracture in

 an otherwise perfect thing; so, too,

 the first pock on the face of the moon.

Yet let a few years pass and her skin

is a ballgown of craters.

So I knew when the peacocks

cracked November with their

idiot's scream, when you spit the last

 blackberry from your stained lips, that the

 first bleach of sun on Rhea's hair

would turn your head, 

make you thirsty

for the black cup of ocean, the yellow

manes of lionesses blowing on the sand,

the kelp smell and the wind-draggled lillies,

leaving me alone in this Pharisee's garden

with nothing but a raddled moon

and the smugness of

peacocks.

November 2021

posted for Shay's

Word List

 

 

 

 

Rhea was a Titaness, a goddess, daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, the consort of Cronos and mother of Zeus, as well as grandmother of Persephone and Dionysus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lunar Craterr, 2015, ©Æstronomær shared under a Creative Commons License

Peacock Consorts, © Charles Tunnecliffe   Fair Use

 

Gratitude

 

 

 

Gratitude

is a kind of ash

that blows in volcano wind,

falling opal feather-scales hissed

off by fire-snakes that coil

their islands in the sea,

all we have left perhaps

of rocky miles of ore and gold

stacked heavy in earth's shadowbox

melting in pressured flux

spit out to lift a mountain

from the core. 

~November 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reposted from 2012 for Thanksgiving 2021

Open Link

at DVerse Poets 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving to All 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 55 serpent feathers for  the absent g-man; grateful always

 

Header Image: Mayon Volcano, Philippines, by Alan Flowers, on flick'r

Shared under a creative commons license

Footer Image: rendering of Yaxchilan Feathered Serpent Diety, byEl Commandante

public domain, via wikimedia commons 

 

Things That Stay Behind

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things That Stay Behind

(A 55)

 

 

Things that stay

behind memory's cold coals:

 

child's slipping skates

clipped with a key,

grandfather's rough-work hand

velvet on cottonpuff cheeks;

the margin of wild

the great lake stole from concrete,

that wish washed blue home where

only gulls screamed;

how suddenly it came, the frayed

squall of your kiss

at high water

washing childhood away.

 

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics: Ekphrasis, Fay Collins,

a talent taken too soon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sunset Squalls at Connemara, © Fay Collins  Fair Use

Vintage roller skates, Photo by Sam Figueroa via Flickr Creative Commons  Fair Use

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor 

"Nine tailors make a man." ~anon.

 

 

The night was dark-haired and delirious.

The cheeky moon clung precariously

to a crooked branch, a bibulous marquess

embracing a lamp post, ready

to strut a whole dancehall

for a cigarette and another chance.

It was the last act of a first edition.

Drying at the prompt, they walked on the

edge of a feather. She'd stopped feeling sorry;

her heart was a trespasser in Vienna,

silent at the soiree instead of begging to

strip to the skin pour épater les bourgeois.

 

He knew he was passing his prime,

going flabby at center, his bons mots

withering like December dahlias. He'd lost count

 of the hands that had picked his pocket, stroked

his celebrated champagne hair, each morning

  combed back unsteadily at the hotel

before the bitter waver in the mirror.

When the curtain came down

it was too weak to exist in more than

one dimension, but it knocked the play

into next week, and left behind its mournful bell

broken at the ninth tailor.

November 2021

posted for Fireblossom's word list at

Shay's Word Garden

epater les bourgeois: to shock or startle the coventional

  

Nine tailors: "As explained by John Shand in his 1936 Spectator article The Bellringers' Art, 'Nine Tailors' means the nine strokes which at the beginning of the toll for the dead announce..that a man is dead. A woman's death is announced with 'Six Tailors'. Hence the old saying ... '" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Human Parody, circa 1878 © Felicien Rops

The Hanged Man At The Bell,  1867, © Felicien Rops