Mask of Aphrodite (Repost)

 

 

 

Wolves, © Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

"There is no cure for love other than marriage." 

~Irish proverb 

 

 

Love's an old wolf who howls when she pleases,

her black lips drawn back in mock of a grin.

She's made me her meat for chancers and losers,

to open the locks and let anyone in.

 

Her yellow teeth are blunted with winters

but her fevers burn bright as melted brass.

Her eyes are flat-white as Attic marble

rolling behind Aphrodite's mask.

Her promises drift like leaves in October.

Her vows of fidelity make the stones laugh.

There's never been one she ever was true to,

only the lucky who died too fast.

Since I was that child who was used as a woman

since I was that woman who thinks like a child

I've run with her pack. The crows find my dinner,

set the price we pay for being born wild.

I've never whored for playthings or money

but three times three it saved my life.

I've never lied for the sake of loving,

only to play at being a wife.

I never was called to be a drunkard,

but ever I've been every drunkard's best friend;

and I drop the mask when I see it coming,

 

the black-lipped snarling

bitter end.

September 2023

Lightly edited for repostng

July 2026 

 

 

 

Head of Aphrodite, via Brittanica

 

 

 

Goat's Delight

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goat's Delight

 

 

 

The yellowed moon hangs low,

a pendant swung from night's cold neck,

blind platinum stare bent

blinkless on the baleful earth 

where simpering dawn is frozen in

pink slippers on the hill.

 

Last night the bloodglow of the sun

gave false fire to the anorexic trees,

scarlet-purpled sheets of light 

burning hope to killed music,

all that once was dancing

turned ash on a shifting wind.

 

Only the goat-woman is left,

the greyed-out girl

covered in indigo roadmaps traced

by her traveling heart, denim-fade eyes

croned to clouds, 

still raking coals ablaze

 

with the crooked stick of memory

wild in her wavering hand, feral

as a goat indiscriminately devouring 

all the broken cities of the years, 

following a random hunger

up to this winter hill 

 

where she sits remembering 

how to be free;

a prisoner on the edge

of her skinwalking escape.

 

 January 2026

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

linked to 

d'Verse Poets Pub Open Link  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images : Moonrise, 1884  ©Stanislaw Malinowski   Fair Use

Soulmates ©Kseizycolica    Fair Use 

 

 

Today

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today

(a 55)

 

 

Today is an old day,

leaking

the passed night's rain,

 

almost with its dawn already

yesterday,

faded replicant of another supplicant.

 

I'd throw it away, used-up as

a broken comb, a flared match

fired once to light something gone,

 

except

the birds

greet it with such celebration

 

singing

their soft explosions

above the autumn seeds. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 September 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Girl Combing Her Hair, 1892 © Edfward Munch   Fair Use

Three Tree Sparrows In A Rain Shower  © Ohara Kosun    Public Domain 

Tiger In The Abstract

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Tiger In The Abstract

 ( a 55)

 

 

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

~unknown, attr Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiger walks a crumbling flow

stippled with blood, scratching scree.

 

Wind is crying in the dead-branched tree

tears of a fatal innocence

while the lamp of moon burns low. 

 

Soft sharp paws in avalanches

are pacing out his pestilence;

rocks fall like raindrop lances

in fragrant inundations,

 

dry waves of murder-dances

upon the crushed carnations. 

 

 

 

July 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Fifty Abstract Paintings..Three Lenins..Head Of Royal Bengal Tiger,  1963, © Salvador Dali Fair Use

Carnations, 1891, © Joaquin Sorolla  Fair Use 

 

Parabola

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parabola

 

 I've clerked all my life 

in the Ministry of the Moon,

a fixed point on her long ellipse,

recording her perigees, her apogees,

her slow apotheoses,

while she lays

 

her lean silver arms across

the back of my chair, penciling in 

corrections on my sedulous tallies

of tides the heart has taken in

given out, or given up.

These are not erasable

 

but sometimes she

strikes out a line

changes my totals

with her flickering hand,

all in pencil, all by moonlight remote

and hard as hammers;

 

but the sun is her bright clown, only

on fire to fill her midnight eye,

so who am I

not to dance along?

 

 

 

 

last day of June, 2025 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Aurora vortex, author unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Dark Dancers, ©Gina Jacob     Fair Use 

 

 

The Sway

 

 

 

 

 

The Sway

(A Love Poem}

 

 

So many years I dripped

your jade-clear love, my absinthe on

a melting sugar dream.

I knew the greenest green

that thrives above the ossuary

sprouting summer flowers made from bone.

Grey birds, their long legs trailing,

flew above the estuary. Water blue as

babies' eyes threw back the light of day

like knives to blind us as we rode upon the Sway.

 

You were born

to sit a wild-eyed horse in panic run

through the rainwater of a subsumed road,

to write the outlines of what never was

across the broken tips of Time's last rhyme,

to pick me like a lily in the dawn

then pass my velvet shadow to the moon,

gone like summer light that winks away

when caught in flagrant congress with the day,

like laughter floating out into the Sway.

 

So rock, sweet night, again tonight

as you have rocked so many times before

across the green expanse of yesterday.

You have a keener eye than bird of prey,

more melody beneath the fallen sun,

more teeth than any soft umbraculum

who tears the coral's painted skin away

and sucks its sweetness from the drying gore.

Rock before I wake and lose the way

just before I follow Love into the Sway.

 

 

 

 

May 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Umbraculum umbraculum, common name the umbrella slug, is a species of large sea snail or limpet, a marine gastropod mollusc ...found in tropical to warm temperate parts of the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, where it feeds on sponges...It has roughly 10,000 teeth in its mouth at any one time and will go through approximately 750,000 teeth during its lifetime of up to ten years..."~wikipedia  (I have used my recently renewed poetic license to substitute coral for sponges.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Green Fairy, artist unknown, via internet     Fair Use

Blue and Green Music, 1921 ©Georgia O'Keeffe        Public Domain

 

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

There was deep night asleep behind your eyes

black as the moon's turned face that lives

cold and dead behind her shine

but still like her, you smiled the sky.

 

Our vices were soft clinging things

pink and innocent as a child's clean hands

petulantly pulling at the dolls of our virtues,

lead angels falling on their sparrow wings.

 

We drove to Texas for the secret stones

but we only found the hardrock end.

The Gulf rains erased our cartoon faces,

the sharks circled in and ate our bones.

 

When the ambulance came you stood alone

with no can-opener for all the tulips you'd canned,

peeled like an orange to your soft sweet core,

while I cried a pool in the sand's sucking bowl

 

for the sky to come down

in your smile and make us whole.

 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

and

 

 

D'Verse Poet's Pub

Opening Lines

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Tulips in a Milk Carton, 1989 ©Paul Wonner   Fair Use

Sharks, ©Utagawa Kuniyoshi    Public Domain

 

Ballad Of The Earwig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ballad Of The Earwig

(a 55)

 

He was the earwig come up through the drain,

she the rosebud ruined in rain,

 

she the actress losing her looks,

he, strutting hero of unreadable books;

 

they a brainstorm dying in rage,

they, two monkeys shaking a cage.

 

I am the pony who runs with the storm,

you, blue fire that burns without warmth. 

 

 

April 2025 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Earwig, metal sculpture, artist unknown. via internet   Fair Use

Blue Fire Wallpaper, artist unknown, via internet,   Fair Use