Blown Away

 

 

 

 

Blown Away

 

 

Come look

at what I salvaged

from the breakdown:

 

in this jar is Chicago

with its concrete throat

that tried so hard to swallow me

 

and here is Montana

mountain wild, spruce bending

to save me, painted

 

in five colors on my spurious tongue

that cracked ripe hearts

like nutshells in

the vise of logic. The rest

of what I had sailed in my witchboat,

to a quiet Viking funeral with

 

 no one watching--riddled

seeds, costumes and seven secrets

wrapped in your trinket kisses--

but I kept the beach

at Point Reyes, where the wind

clean off the ocean

is strong enough

to blow away

your life.

October 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (marina) © Zdzislaw Beksinksi   Fair Use

Point Reyes, California, Tomales Point Trail with Wild Radish, NPS/A. Kopshever   Fair Use

Kleopatra Fantasia

 

 

Kleopatra Fantasia 

 

 

 

 

Cleopatra rides the rails

but never the bus

a foreigner now 

as she was in Caesar's city,

workmen shifting her from station

to museum, crated like so many

cans of beans.

She is silent as sand,

stilled limbs leafed in gold, a

treasure always in transit though

black as bitumen now, cat eyes

blind in an empty skull,

everything drawn out

but her dry heart.

She was bread once

and a circus too, lithe

as a lotus stem snaking up

to lay its white flower

on the cheek of Lake Mareotis,

rippling like a pneuma of rain

through the changing houses of Ptah.

Her tongue danced to a dozen

languages. Her mind was a library

of betrayals, each volume a loss

to Alexander's insane epigoni.

Her future was scribed from
the Books of Breathing and

ambition's killing text:

 

Caesar's smooth hand 

and Antony's sparking eye,

a brief breath of kingdoms, twins

of the sun and moon, all a mirage-

shimmer bright as sanctuary

whose telos was only vast silence 

 

flowing from

the open mouth of an asp.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 and also linked at

earthweal for Open Link #139

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

epigone; plural noun: epigones; plural noun: epigoni

a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone...

 

Books of Breathing: late Egyptian funerary texts simplified from the Book of the Dead

 

Notes: Cleopatra does not ride rails or frequent museums, as her body has never been found, tho a tomb has recently been postulated north of her capitol city Alexandria at Abusir, near what was once Lake Mareotis (Mariout or Maryut in modern Arabic.)

In the Egyptian process of mummification, all internal organs were removed except the heart, which was considered the seat of thought and identity.

 

The Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt, of which Cleopatra was the last, were crowned by the High Priest of Ptah, (creator god who made the world through the power of speech) at his temple in Memphis. They were more Greek than Egyptian, descendants of a general of Alexander the Great after his conquest there, and Cleopatra was the first and only one to learn the Egyptian language. According to Plutarch, she was fluent as well in Greek, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, Median, Parthian, and Latin.

 

Cleopatra had four known children, including twins with Mark Antony, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.

 

The endless list of wars and civil wars which Cleopatra was directly involved in over the tumultuous course of her 39 years is too long to begin to reprise here, but you can read about them and what is known of her complex life in detail here on wikipedia

 

 

Images:A posthumous painted portrait of Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt from Roman Herculaneum, made during the 1st century AD source here 

A raised relief depiction of a woman dated to the early 1st century AD and thought to depict Cleopatra or Cleopatra Selene II, Queen of Mauretania, daughter of Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Mark Antony. source here

Last Light

 

 

 

Last Light

 

 

"All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born..." ~W. B. Yeats 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born

in the black and white,

a changed place still living what had been,

a winter child in a fossil's spring of

sun and shadow, war's unmercied clarity

and the trampled mud of peace,

 

its empty whiskey bottles

and gardens of shaded violets, deep

black soil, black thunderclouds, 

white winter sky, blackened medals,

white gauze veils packed away 

in crackled trunks.

 

Now I live my last in a red dirt country

where the heat-song of September changing

dips the fading wheat in ginger honey. Wind-weary

trees lace still-green leaves thru the soft

reaching fingers of clouds, holding tight

before their scarlet fall.

 

Earth is whispering her love words

in the rustle of sundried grass

and blackberries tumbling over with

thickets of banquets in seedy puzzles.

When I turn to face the setting citrine sun

it's you I call to the open door

 

to sit beside me in the shortening days

drunk with bees and crow-call,

rich with the gatherings of every flower.

Won't you come, beloved,

before January rimes the windows

with its deep blue loss. 

 

Come to the place 

where you can't be forgotten.

Bring your cinnamon september skin

and your wild silver-grass hair to these ruins,

and your campfire eyes,

alight in the night of dreams so far

 

beyond the black and white.

Lace your fingers with mine

as trees do with the sky,

separate and one

where the fire of what was

in the hope of what may never be

 

is the only light left

before the scarlet fall.

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for earthweal's

Lyre For A Changing Earth

 

 

 

 

 

With thanks to Brendan for the poetry of W.S Merwin and others which inspired this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: My mother with myself at 2 months of age, Evanston, Illinois March 7th, 1949 

House North of Nash, Oklahoma, 2022  photo © Terry Wassan   via internet   Fair Use

Fairy Tale

 

 

 Fairy Tale

Princess Moonzumi and Prince Heart-of-Ash

were betrothed as children through a looking glass.

She never knew him. He never saw her,

just a shadow that moved in the mirror's blur.

Prince Heart-of-Ash learned bard song and sword,

to jest with a blade and kill with a word.

Princess Moonzumi went out every day

to dance with the Sidhe where the dogwoggles play

 

down in the mud, up in the scud,

around the green tree that sheds no blood.

She knew every fae in the wild dark wood

and they taught her to fear the evil in good.

 

Princess Moonzumi and Prince Heart-of-Ash

were married in autumn when the east winds thrash

as the leaves fell like fire on earth's mirror-face,

and they loved each other for a year and a day.

 

Then Prince Heart-of-Ash took his sharp bright blade

down to the wood where the dogwoggles played.

The princess died like a mouse in the leaves

for a lie in the heart only ash could believe.

 

 

September 2022

posted for earthweal's

Ekphrasis Earth

 

 

 

and 

 

 

 

dVerse Poets'

Poetics: The Good and the Evil

Sidhe/SHē/noun, plural noun: Sidhe: the fairy people of Irish folklore, said to live beneath the hills and often identified as the remnant of the ancient Tuatha Dé Danann.

Note: I wrote the seed of this poem while running a fever a few weeks ago, but the prompts shaped it to final form. Apologies if I have stretched the boundaries a bit on what was requested.

 

 

Images: Mammal in Leaves, author unknown, courtesy of earthweal   Fair Use

They went hand in hand in the country that smells of appleblossoms and honey,  © Arthur Rackham, Irish Fairy Tales

 Fair Use

The Scarecrow's Sister

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Scarecrow's Sister

(a 55)

 

 

The scarecrow's sister

feels the breath of November

scans the valentine of Winter

sees her brother surrender

his Eden again to Martinmas weather,

mocked in a cornfield

crestfallen with crows.

Tho his overcoat's empty

as her sentimental replay

of Romeo reborn,

she knows Spring will raise him

high on his stick

alive in the corn.

September, 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and

earthweal's 

Open Link # 137

Images: In The Fields, Evening  © Jules Breton circa 1900   Public Domain

Pumpkinhead--Self Portrait © Jamie Wyeth, 1972  Fair Use

Lonely As A Dream

 

 

 

 

 

Lonely As A Dream

 

"Everything's a dream when you're alone."

~Wes Craven

 

 

If

you come through the door 

you see at once it's an old woman's house

smelling of apples, eucalyptus

and yellow books rhyming by size.

Nothing is new.

 

Incense

burns in the bedroom

for the sake of a man's memory

smoking and braiding in soft light

that slips through heavy drapes

like a thief. There is silence.

 

Peace

is there, and emptiness.

The ghost has learned to

keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to

the woman who gambles with words

in the hunger before dawn. 

She's

 the laugh no one hears

at  the midnight carnival,

the road no one takes

winding back on itself, the sprout 

light's pulled too thin, too tall

in its mirror, shadow.

Besides 

the dream, she knows only 

a sky flat with heat

that eats birds and rain,

a plague without cure

that stretches its dead skin

to infinity.

But 

everything passes. To all things come

this tension of maximums

just before the breaking

and the letting go.

 

 

 September 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and earthweal's

Open Link #134

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Doorway © Suzanne Moxhay, All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Dangerous Laisons, 1926,  © Rene Magritte  Fair Use

 

 

The Feather Seed

 

 

 

 

 The Feather Seed

(a 55)

There was a feather;

it grew from my eye until

it was my eye.

There was a word.

It grew from my quill until

it was a wing.

There was a seed;

it grew from the soil of

every word decaying, until

it was a tree where 

quilled birds sang

like candles in the dark.

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

The Sunday Muse

hosted by Carrie Thackery Van Horn

and 

 

 

Sherry Marr's 

Rewilding challenge at earthweal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At The Hospital

 

 

 

 

 At The Hospital

 

 

Pendants of light

reflections reversed

bent on slick white tile

random voices

in chained rooms

living out their untold

fortunes. Are fortunes told

or are they read,

written in a book of days

all numbered

not visible except

through curving crystal?

Or are they droned

the same tune every time

inside the skull,

mortality's earworms?

I am indifferent.

The gypsy broke my cup;

my tea leaves spilled.

 

 

 

 

circa 2019, rev. March 2022 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #131

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sun In An Empty Room, 1963, © Edward Hopper   Fair Use

The Fortune Teller, 1933, © Brassai            Fair Use