St. Walpurga's Nightmare

 

 

 

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

(or, No Medicine For Melancholy)

Up on the hill where the blade never goes

skimpy clouds dangle like a phrase of bad prose,

with May Day's and Hallows' night stars locked in boxes,

up on the ghosts' hill with the little foxes

 

sits the old witch always stirring her pot

of bandages and sweet oils, scalding hot,

her dry smile a bleachmark on her tie-dyed skin;

she's only waiting for the crows to begin.

Give her a coin and she'll midwife next year

or recount the rest of your life for good beer

in her voice like a hatchet while her fingers stir

mockingbird's screech into kettle's blur.

What's in the cauldron you sainted crone?

"It's hope, she croons, the alphabet I own.

You can't live on it, though so many try,

but you can certainly die on it time after time

riding the Big Wheel on dandelion silk

sucking tobacco like the baby's milk,

drinking and thinking you'll go up and up

then crushed on the revolve like a styrofoam cup.

 

Before you learn what your body can do to you, you

think its a warm glass of wine poured out for you

but it soon cracks in the time-slip and shatters apart

like your broken heart, dear, your broken heart.

 

Before you see what hope does to the living

you think it's a wise thing, loving and healing,

not bitter and blinding, 

hiding the reminding 

of the shambling footsteps shuffling in back of you

of the behemoth ambling in one night for you

the only hope that turns out to be true:

he'll break all your bones, dear, and eat them, too."

 

But dreams can be merciful with their endings

whatever the bile-twisted gist of their sendings, 

for dawn took her words just as fast as she spoke 

and drowned them all in the lovesongs of crows.

October 2022

posted for Shay's

Word Garden Word List: Susie Clevinger,

a fine contemporary poet and friend

Note: I've taken a lot of liberties with the history of St. Walpurga, a medieval abbess known for Christianizing the heathen Franks, learned in healing, who was canonized for, among other things, the 'miraculous oil' that oozed out from her dead body, and whose saint's day was enthusiastically celebrated with bonfires for many years on May Day. Obviously, I have added All Hallows to her domain quite mendaciously. She was said to be the bane of evil spirits and witches, so I'm sure she is turning over in her grave at being combined with one here. Finally, apologies to the Rocky Horror Picture Show for stealing 'time-slip,' and thanks to Susie for the gift of her poetry all these years.

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht, 1923, © Heinrich Kley

Antlers with Crows, author unknown, via internet

Odin's Mead

 

 

 Odin's Mead

 I am not a jewel

fashioned for your collection

nor the paint-pot

for your ever-moving lips,

not the fertility

to your futility

not assumed erudition

to your chosen perdition.

I am not meant for

your wound of a mouth

bleeding hate-kindling for fire-hags

flaming sweet summer-country, 

not the heart-stake

vitriol will make,

not victory to be claimed

in a war too dirty to name.

 

I'm only the last

taste in the drinking horn

of some bright thing Other

a soft-foot step and fleet hand

pouring drunken snow

brewed by Ones who go

on spirit bones far stronger

but here walk free no longer.

 

I am only the bite

of the berry

dropping seeds from the bramble,

a tart taste in a season

of falling farewells,

a sapphire flicker

brief in the blue mirror,

 a gesturing ghost's fever

behind you forever;

 

a thrum too low to be clear

that only the silenced can hear. 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Kindling From The Forest Of Light And Shadow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: I've recounted this myth before, but briefly to recap, in Norse mythology, the Poetic Mead or Mead of Poetry is a magical beverage made from the murdered body of a being created from the gods' spit which sealed the truce of the Aesir-Vanir war, and was stolen from the  jötnar guarding it by Odin in eagle form, who spits it out into sacred  golden vessels for those chosen by the gods. Whoever drinks from these is given the gifts of poetry and knowledge, and is transformed into a skald and scholar. Odin also releases some of the mead in his droppings as he flies. This anyone can drink, and is called 'the rhymester's share." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: One of the golden horns of Gallehus, public domain

"The Gotlandic image stone Hammars (III). It is held to depict Odin in his eagle fetch (note the eagle's beard), Gunnlöð (holding the mead of poetry) and Suttungr." public domain 

 

Cryptid

 

source

Cryptid

Was it your lover

you saw in the dream,

a spirit bear on fire,

or perhaps

the chupacabra, a steam

 given off/

absorbed  by

too-hot night?

Some cryptid regardless,

a cambion that comes

when eyelids fall down

before the stare of stars

dropped silent with a burn

from black sky

as morning turns to face you

cobra-hooded.

Fragments of him

of you

litter the lawn.

Meteorite dust

hangs in the air;

the smell of old longings

seeps from the roses

powdery as the skin's

 memory of a hand

that still feels,

of lips that know words

are the dark subsidence

 

down which you will tumble

to the place of live shadows

where two become one.

Posted for earthweal's

Open Link #141

~September 2014

 

 

 A little something for All Hallows, originally posted at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Briar Maid

 

 

 

 

 

 The Briar Maid

 

When I slip off this

rumpled dress and slide

down the gullet of time;

when I go, and it won't be long

no matter how long;

I want what they take

from the oven to lie

at the tangleroot feet of

the Briar Maid.

 

She is faceless, fierce, ever

green as her puncture-vine cloak

drawing blood at the touch;

though I pull her strangling hands

from oak and hackberry,

with her thorns she circles sanctuary.

Whatever is left that lives knows

she marks the line

past which Time may not go.

She stands guard, 

through cyclone wind,

drought, wildfire and freeze,

for grey squirrels' trees,

for greybrown birds 

fed fat on sunflower, blackberry

acorn and mulberry,for

peanut thieves, my blue bickering jays

and black satin crows;

 

box turtle and

blister-beetle know,

roving armadillo, red-tail hawk, butterfly

in his last piece of sky, prairie

grass and the snakes that swim it,

rat and king, garden, garter

and copper-headed,

each thing secure in its

small life to come and go.

 

 

All that really matters of her

holds safe underground

as will I, ash-soul in place,

faceless, fierce

to feed and to become 

with her in season

ward and warden of that space

that was my land, that was my heart,

that is the last try

for all that's been loved

too hard, too long,

too strong

to die.

October 2022

posted for earthweal's

Poetry of Becoming

For those who want to know her better, my original 2013 poem about The Briar Girl is here.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos © joyannjones

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