Eyes Of A Sailor

 

 

 

 

 

Eyes Of A Sailor

(a 55)

 

 My eyes grow rheumy

swimming in moonblur

but witnessing still

light's cut, color's fill,

shadow's indigo blot.

Light the blade, color the cloth,

blue shadow stitching together what's lost.

Old cells' ramparts

falling unfixed; 

wind pulls their dust,

time washes waves

over mitochondrial graves,

but memory sails its unsinkable boat

holding afloat

my far-sighted ghost.

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #129

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Boatman, and Boat of the Mermaid, © Sabin Balasa  Fair Use

Flambeau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flambeau

(a quadrille)

 

 

I don't want to write poems

fiddle while Rome's monde nouveau

becomes a flambeau.

They're a medicine-show elixir

a too-loose wrapping

on a fountaining vein.

 

But I have nothing else

as Arcadia burns

but this glittering salt

to seed rain

on a grassfire wind.

 

 

 July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Sacred Glimmers

 

 

 

and

 

 

 

dVerse Poets

Quadrille #156

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arcadia is a region in Greece, historically designated as the home of the god Pan, and synonymous with an unspoiled, pastoral wilderness. (Many towns across the world have been named after this spot, usually--tho not intentionally--ironically. I live not far from Arcadia, Oklahoma, a self-conscious tourist trap on Route 66 near an eponymous manmade lake. So far, it has not burned down.)

 

 

 

Images: Torch, 2008, © Wu Guanzhong    Fair Use

Media photo of grassfire, Beaver County, Oklahoma 2022   via internet  Fair Use

 

Century Song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Century Song

For a hundred years

it seems

I've waited here, wasted here,

full of parch and motion, a salty throat

from drinking too much ocean once

though it's been

no more than a lifetime

or a breath

held under a thousand passing thrones

of aqua-green

where I counted days as quicksilver fish,

as coral bones, marked each dagger flashed in

 mouths of sharks, each scale, each whale

singing to all her kin while I

I drowned alone.

 

For a century

it seems

I trod this water milling, to breathe the years I knew

still held the spark, 

the flowers' poppy dream, the moths unflamed,

the coyote's bark

longing for the moongleam

on your reaching arms.

 

For a century

or two

the heat is master; 

the dust that birthed you,

the sun that calls you on.

It blisters me as the freeze of aeons

boils a distant steam, until night's mantle

 

falls across the blaze, and in the end perhaps,

too many too-bright ghosts and burning days

earn me a last cool breeze

 

a breeze and a flashing of that dream

 

where you

come back for me.

 

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Waves, detail 1969 ©  Javier Torices    Fair Use

Study for the Spanish Dance, 1869  © John Singer Sargent   Fair Use

Heartbeat

 

 

Heartbeat

 

 

 

 

The earth is aching where I walk and never learn,

her broad abiding back riven and split

by the wedge of heat and maul-strikes of the sun;

she was never meant to look so desolate,

 

nor the sickle moon give up her soul to burn.

Sere ghosts of a dead storm blow like yellow leaves

to the grassfire hell-combustion at full day's cairn,

bellies swelled on dust and smoke until they heave.

 

But still I see young hawks on thermal towers,

hear the cricket scrape his withered legs and sing,

know it's a fool who digs a graveyard for the flowers

for life is the deathless husband of these things.

 

I am an iron weight that soon must drop;

earth is a heartbeat fire cannot stop.

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: Temperatures here in Oklahoma are expected to stay between 100 and 110 through July and into August. We haven't had extended extreme heat like this since 2012, and it was awful then.We pray the power grid holds, the A/C doesn't die and just huddle down and try to make it through the wildfires and heat exhaustion, but many parts of the world are seeing temperatures like these where they have never existed before and are unprepared for its force, enduring great hardship. I extend my sympathies. Take care as much as you can; it sucks, and it can kill.

 

 

 

 

 Images © joyannjones, july 2022

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

 

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

There is a burning that

makes the same smoke

from flower or flesh.

 

Air is dead.

Sound will not carry.

Words will not form

 

on a tongue blackened by 

summer's brass palm, for weeks

held radiant over earth's dry mouth.

Heat is a cloud-killer, builder

of invincible domes in steelmelt

sky. Dust catches fire.

 

Only the insect machines

still rattle. Yet every morning

in the stillborn dawn

 

there is a gasp of birdsong,

begging and faint, staccato, sharp,

freezingly sweet. 

 

In fever dreams

I gasp along, for every note,

for any word, for a charm

 

to make this yield

of burning tongues

sing out

 

in oldest music, 

wilder words,

the sparking chant

 

that death-heat kills even itself,

that someday it might

still be worth the parch

of trying to keep living.

July 2022

posted for earthweal

Wild Language

Images: Dead Woman's Crossing, Oklahoma  by Nathan Gunter   Fair Use

L'oiseau blue,© Marc Chagall 1968     Fair Use

Hunter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Hunter

 

The heart is hunting alone and lean

after the things she thinks she has seen;

 

after meat on the doe not the sweetgrass sea

wind-combed in waves to wild-braided streams;

 

after the caterpillar's cuts and devours

not the greenstem-road to wings that it follows.

Her running breath catches at all the wrong times

at the taste of the dove, not the air it can climb.

The heart is hunting and so cannot fly

for that most alive is the thing which must die

 

too heavy to carry

too sought to let lie.

 

But when the hunt falters, breath evens and slows.

When the hunter suddenly unstrings her bow

what was looked for is seen in a stillness of light;

 shining like tears in the last hour of night.

 

 

 

 July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Wild Stillness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Hunter, artist unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Woman in Grass, © Fosco Maraini, via internet Fair Use

Crow Call

 

 

 

 

Crow Call

(a 55)

 

We always wear black

the crows and I,

call our skies

with a half-born crack,

shadow nests where our treasures lie,

 eat skeleton suppers with glass-star eyes.

 

Never look back.

Never look back

 

at bones we've picked

bleaching dry,

at red we've beaked

with black tails high,

dead in the darkwood

with summer's sigh.

June 2022

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poet's Pub

Open Link

Images: Satellite 2014 ©Bryan Holland, via internet, Fair Use

Antlers, author unknown, via internet, Fair Use

 

Green Summer Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green Summer Country

 

 

"The sea turned to plain land, the snow on the mountain disappeared. In my eyes thousands of years fade like dust yet my heart is as before...I thought I had forgotten, but I remember everything" ~unknown, from the Mandarin

 

 I walk there in dreams,

the old summer country,

nave of a worship

where ice dies to green fire,

where we tended the world tree

whose roots wrap around

the well of the word;

where we bound the Great Wolf

with the trust of a god

made one-handed,

in the time when the mistletoe

was too young to swear oaths.

I walk there now, with

snow spirits warmed

in green shadow,

where the deer

sigh and surrender

to the arrow and its prayer,

where the Great Serpent gentled

belts the water around the wide land,

waves married to shore.

 

Where to eat is to be blessed

to love is to be whole

to suffer is to gain wisdom,

where bees make our wine,

where every leaf

hides the saga of a king.

My feet

wander lost, my throat blisters

when I wake to the Serpent unloosed,

the sea spoiled and untied,

the Wolf's bite tearing the snow 

from the mountains. My eyes

hold the dust of a thousand years

yet my heart

is the same.

I thought I had forgotten this;

I've forgotten nothing.

June 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Dreaming In Green hosted by Sherry Marr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: The poem references figures from Norse mythology; Ygdrasil, Fenris,Jormungandr,Tyr, the story of Baldur. The transcribed quote at the header I heard last night while watching a serialized Chinese television drama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Glenn, 1936, ©Maxfield Parrish  Public Domain

Jormangand, the World Serpent © Aleski Briclot  via internet Fair Use