Interview at Poet's United

POETS UNITED

Writer, blogger and raconteur of all things Nature, not to mention one of my most longstanding and supportive readers, Sherry Blue Sky,  of Stardreaming, has done me the honor of interviewing me for the community poetry site Poets United. 

Normally I would be blushing modestly and leaving a link in the sidebar, but I wanted to give Sherry the shout out she deserves for this entry in her continuing work, the "Life of a Poet" series, an entertaining and professional read that provides the opportunity to get to know a wide array of online poets of all stripes and styles.

She's worked tirelessly for the last two weeks, asking the most interesting questions and encouraging me to plum the depths of my collection of dusty, ancient photographs and memories, and has assembled a piece which, as always, gets down into the real details of why and how an individual poet writes, and where s/he is coming from, and for sweetener, also has some nice pictures of the dogs and garden. I hope you'll stop by and read it at the link below, as well as check out the many prompts and features Poets United offers. They have one of the most extensive memberships in blogdom, and a blogroll that includes some of the best poets and writers online.

My pedestrian life story, made all sparkly by Sherry, is here:

Life of a Poet: Hedgewitch

Thanks so much, Sherry, for all the hard work, (and my dogs thank you for their shot at stardom as well.)You did a great job. And thanks to everyone at Poet's United for having me. Please feel free to wander through the digital Castle and explore all the dark hallways and cobwebbed dungeons. Just don't feed the gargoyles--they tend to get a bit cranky.
 

Mirror

Mirror

The soul within, smooth, reflective curve

glossy with the sheen of old smokes;

Something about the light, he said

There is a wild piece of it in the dark.

It winks in the corner of the mirror,

an absent flame, the memory of a flame

whiskered by the haze.

Reaching out to touch it you feel

first the illusion, then the fingertips finally

the smooth cold feel of the mirror

asking which is real.

It’s over, the light show,

Peace and love 

take your pick which is

only a curve reflecting forward,

which some piece of light

kindling the backward glancing eye

January 1988

slightly revised August 2011 

Image: Mirror in your eyes by ~h318 (Harshita) on deviantArt
Shared under a Creative Commons 3.0 No-Derivatives License

Tenement Blue

Tenement Blue

There’s not much room in a tenement blue

three room fourth floor walkup, but legs can run.

Cover's in the slum-dirty dystopian streetscape,

ghettoed too thick for the grab of garnet-nailed fingers

gifting purpleblack coins, too far to hear names.

Vacant as a rubbled building, feral as wind

she plays birds all day, thin arms flapping.

On the very next jump, she’ll go up,

a rising speck of sparrow in fields of sky,

not the drying embryo in a fractured brick egg.

High in her masted nest of broken glass

she chirps until the giant’s stick knocks her out,

drunk’s acidsweet breath flooding her lungs,

learning  the freeze, missing the center

as he pulls her harder than he has to

down to the big bed

where her mother is always blind

missing, nowhere, in three rooms

raptor eyes shut so all of the girl

can be invisible. 

Little bird isn’t minding

the neon patterned bed that wavers

in the windowlight; too small, tiny hands

no wings, just the falling to show

for cheeps hushed to silence. 
On the floor cotton feathers, yells

gone to whispers, rustling wind sounds

inchoate touchshadows all

in that hungry fishgrey belly of

a deaf ocean, of a ship rolling.

She boards up her eyes

against the day-blink, engine off,

charts lost, course unplotted

boxing the compass, drifting
from the thick tillering fingers,

pressed small as a diatom

taken in salt waves of

tenement blue.

June 2011

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at  dVerse Poets Pub

Day-blink – Moment at dawn where, from some point on the mast, a lookout can see above low lying mist which envelops the ship

Boxing the compass – To state all 32 points of the compass, starting at north, proceeding clockwise. Sometimes applied to a wind that is constantly shifting.

~Glossary of Nautical Terms, wikipedia

Thanks to Fireblossom, Anna Montgomery and Brian Miller for their help and encouragement in writing this poem.

Sea Change

Sea Change

I saw the sea

for the first time in

San Francisco

one of many first times.

It bewitched me to it.

I’d leave the sleepers

ride the buses, meet the gulls

at the beach for breakfast

or go with whoever had

a car or a microbus

to Point Reyes

all of us young as caterpillars

capering fools in butterfly motley

in another endless California day,

tidepools of life

myriad and interlocked

shafting back sun and illusion

wandering the rocks

dancing naked round a bonfire

with colored ribbons for eyes.

I loved the sea till I went there

with you in the pelting rain

deep into your silent labyrinth

at the far northern edge of west

close to the border, one of your many

forsaken homes, shuttered buildings

dirty piers, failing fishermen, mist wrapped

cold, salt mazed with melted iceshelf

mixing up sullen rolling breakers

poured bitter from a cloned infinity.

I should have paid attention then

to how the sea changed itself

in your presence. Instead I took your hand

turned my back, and now I live

where no wave will ever break

August 2011

Image: Storm Clouds on the Washington Coast, 

posted by roaddog52 on smugmug

Danse Macabre

Danse Macabre

It’s quiet in the lab; the outside sky

is Maya blue, impending prophecy ignored

by silent shadows ceaselessly pumping

black caustics into a dead beast’s heart.

Across the world more Hekate’s cauldroned

chaos soup is boiling in a row of cookfires

stretching to a cemeterial horizon, steaming,

roiling up the blistered bones of zombies’ dreams.

Somewhere these butchers' laboratories mate

precise, unholy at a viceblown intersect, palsied

cannibal hand of intent and scalding stew of storm,

centrifugalized to flense a fresh-flayed numen.

Where their crookblade cross comes down

the tiny cells explode, jet beads hot arterial splatter,

maroon buckshot birthing flying screams, monsters,

lost causes in the burning dead of shuttered night.

The beast jumps up, the blood of its tormentors

silversweet in a short unlife that mocks the gods;

cracking tarmack, the plague cart calls at every house,

as the briefly interrupted dance of death resumes.

August, 2011

Posted for  Poetics  at  dVerse Poets Pub

Todays host for the prompt is the inimitable Brian Miller, asking us to see what's really there, if we can stand it.

Image, detail from The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
1562, oil on panel

courtesy wikimedia commons

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Morning Coffee

Morning Coffee 

at the End of the Day

We sat in trance to watch the pale sun rise

drinking chicory coffee whitened with

each others’ scents and sighs,

writing poems in the curl of steam

above the cups, chalking on the skies

that spellbright starwild chase that burns the blood

and ends in darkness, quick release, exanimate mud.

“These still must be gobbled down,”

you said, so professorially weird,

grey as grey could be today

in your wooly suit and beard.

All was not as well as hoped, but much as feared,

for loving is the gate I can’t pass by

and being loved a knot I’ll never tie.

I’m not afraid to keep these mocha kisses,

or braid a supple rope of words

to belt a habit culled from misses,

but what are you, which ghost do I love now?

Even as I ask, the heart confesses:

You love the thing that always runs before,

the shadow come to howl at heaven’s door.

Yet still we drink our coffee here and sing,

those songs that suit our joint imagining;

all bits of you blown scattered across the years,

each artifact dug from bone and cleaned with tears;

the amber eyes, the brown, the sailor blue,

the crack of wise, the note that’s always true,

the bridge that builds itself from golden air,

while you sip, and morning softly greys your hair

from yellow, currant black, till nothing’s there.

August, 2011

Image: courtesy google image search
originating site

Friday Flash 55 ~ Giant Mistake

Giant Mistake,

 or

Hedgewitch’s 119^th Surreal Dream

Working in

the campaign kitchen,

you hand me the poster.

Make a copy you say

of the tired Giant,

clutching spear,

eyes wild,

fighting the tiny army

shackling his ankles

piercing his hairy thighs with

iron hawsers, holding him

furious at bay.

Running the copier,

I doubt
even a Giant

can live through this.

August 2011 

will be

Posted for   Friday Flash 55    at the  G-Man's

Yes, folks, another dream. Wish I could post the actual poster I 'saw' in it for you, but this old illustration will have to do. Not going to pretend I have it figured out, but my best guess is, things don't look so good for the country come next election.

Image: Trade card, advertising J. & P. Coats spool cotton, showing Lilliputians tying up Gulliver. 
color lithograph, circa 1875
source: wikimedia commons

 

Hedgerider's Lament Repost

This a repost for Form for All  at DVerse Poets Pub

The topic today is the sestina, and Matt Quinn of Poemblaze blog  is hosting. Thanks to him, and to Gay Cannon for bringing us the chance to explore a challenging but rewarding form.

Hedgerider's Lament~Part II can be found here
Hedgerider's Lament~Part III can be found here

The Hedgerider's Lament

Part I: Yule Sestina

It’s the time when amber green light soaks the sponge of mist,

dripping softly where worlds rub shoulders in vast night,

dreaming in the nest where brown eggs shift and crackle in the air,

where I’m looking, looking, hearing soundless bells in the blue.

The grass bends, the sparrows talk, and magic guards this place

as I edge myself along the walls of the razorleafed hedgerow.

I see them all, patient, living, bent to purpose in the hedgerow

waiting where the edges are sharp, or under the amber green mist.

Horehound lolls silver tongues, mint droops, amanita puts in place

red spotted chairs for sprites and roofs for toadlings. Shadow night

hides monkshood in its cobalt cap, telling me something fatally blue,

and ladyslippers wait for mousewomen where foxgloves dot the air.

My skull is a tangling rootball of hair and bone and air.

My skin is ambergreen bark against the razorleaves of the hedgerow.

My eyes are storm clouds flickering outwards, grey and blue.

My rabbit nose is twitching, pink in the dripping mist,

breathing in and out, sifting and shaking the smells from the night,

passing hands above the edges, feeling leaves for the right place.

I see a medicine fire drifting the air with grey, burning in the place

where a fallen piece of star has struck a match against hard air,

making sage smoke and sweetgrass smolder in the night,

like tobacco in the pipes of gnomes carousing in the hedgerow.

Other nights I lift a glass, beg them wash their beards in mist

but tonight I cannot stop to joke for the place is near, so cold and blue.

I can hear the worlds go sloshing in their shells, spinning in the blue

almost touching, noses pushing membranes towards the place

where the new year sleeps in the old year's arms, damp with mist

and the quick bear the dead upon their backs, howling thru air

sharp silenced by what dwells just past the hedgerow

because the time is not quite yet, though it nears in the shortening night.

                    

Day has sighed and gone, spent from matching itself to night

so perfectly. My hair jigs up in Tesla’s dance, jumping white & blue.

I feel them creeping, riding the top of the razored hedgerow

where it's thin as my skin. Now all but my hair is frozen in place.

Burnt tumbled smells, the soft horse muzzle of the night air

nudges them at me, while at last the steelsharp leaves begin to mist.

                         

Now I can see you blur and move, in mist waves of ribboned night.

I reach out to the air. There where the thorns have turned  blue

is the place I can pull you from your lost world, thru the hedgerow.

 ~December 2010

If this seems familiar it's because all three of these sestinas were originally

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

With thanks to Rabbit
The first of what will hopefully be four sestinas loosely based on the neopagan festival days of Yule, Candlemas, Beltane and Samhain.

Asteria

Asteria

All sun's length she sits

nested high in the world tree

alone, surrounded by

the howling, blue

painted greenwitch

oracle of the ward songs

in her iceglass

barelimb chapel

keeping vigil.

 

At night when the moon

hangs heavy and hunger

sings to the tides,

she flirts her feathers down to

probe the chambered nautilus

and fetch the glitterfish

called to her

rattling net hung

with bone charms.

She's felt his questions

pressing on her

all day so heavy

the singing

so heavy for something

made of air

the sword unsheathed 

so red cutting from

the southern ocean’s rim.

She can hear him reading

from the old gods’ psalter

feel the sigh as the pages

slip to almost dawn,

till he finds

the leaf forgotten,

the star fallen

just before

the world ends

and the kingfisher flies.

June 2011

revised August 2011 

Asteria was the name given, variously to: " the Titan of nocturnal oracles and falling stars," and mother of Hecate, "the ninth Amazon killed by Herakles when he came for Hippolyte's girdle,"  "one of the Danaids...who, with one exception, murdered their husbands on their wedding nights.." and "..one of the Alkyonides [who, after Herakles slew their father] along with her sisters...flung herself into the sea and was transformed into a kingfisher.."  ~wikipedia 

All in all, a name with plenty of room for poetic interpretation. 

Image: ireland's fangorn(Yew woodlands at the Killarney National Park, which is located beside the town of Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland,) by Justin Gaurav Murgai

Justin Gaurov Murgai's photostream

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Mother of Love

Mother of Love

By the dark moondrop pool
I walk my watch,

the sky strobing stormlight,

the heat failing, warped and wrapped

to a humid white cast

on the broken leg of darkness. I can't
wake up the feeling sleeping inside my skin;

hold the sky still for me, so I can see 

what's there, or not

through the chromatrope of the clouded moon

that shows my face of many colors shifting

bleaching to bone, fleshing to rose,

the gyre and thrum of the black bullroarer

pounding in my ears, and limitless nothing.

Nothing's whispers, nothing clearer

than the cold sulfur witchfire

burning night’s garden down and 

down again.

Wind weaves and blows a wild vapor,

soft salmon hood thrown over moon
to cover that blood-speckled alabaster eye.
Wound in blue nocturne waiting
to hide again behind the yellow mask of dawn,

born to change, dying to rise 
from an easy tomb, laughing

at my everdying rose’s pretense,

who calls herself the mother of love.

August 2011

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Doors open every Tuesday 3:00 PM EST and close Wednesday midnight.  
No cover except a poem. Come join us.

Image: Roses by Night, by jelleprins on flick'r
jelleprins' photostream 
Shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License
 

Off the Shelf Archive ~August

Time to shove in a new selection for the Off the Shelf Page before the month is completely gone. I recently ordered several poetry collections on sale, to replace lost originals or read a few new authors. Among them was a slim and cheap volume of T.S. Eliot, one of the most influential and widely read poets of the 20th Century. I'm not going to bother giving his bio as I imagine anyone who writes or reads poetry knows his name and has been exposed to his work, which is not very voluminous. Nonetheless, sometimes a rereading of words absorbed years ago reveals something new and valuable, and so it was for me thumbing through this new book of old poems of Eliot's. I've selected a portion of the first of his lengthy Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) the work Eliot considered his best, and responsible for his 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature. 

You'll find it here, in the  Off The Shelf Archive for September 

And to make room for Eliot, below is the previous selection, two shorter poems by D.H. Lawrence. As always feel free to make comments on either selection here, as comments are disabled off the main page, and suggestions for next time are always welcome.

Two Short Poems by D.H. Lawrence

Won’t It Be Strange—?

Won’t it be strange, when the nurse brings the newborn

     infant

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish

     feet

made to smite the waters behind it?

or the round wild vivid eye of a wild goose staring

out of fathomless skies and seas?

or when it utters that undaunted little bird-cry

of one who will settle on ice-bergs, and honk across the

     Nile?—

And when the father says: This is none of mine!

Woman, where got you this little beast?—

will there be a whistle of wings in the air; and an icy

     draught?

will the singing of swans, high up, high up, invisible

break the drums of his ears

and leave him forever listening for the answer?

The Gods! The Gods!

People were bathing and posturing themselves on the

     beach

and all was dreary, great robot limbs, robot breasts

robot voices, robot even the gay umbrellas.

But a woman, shy and alone, was washing herself under

     a tap

and the glimmer of the presence of the gods was like

     lilies,

and like water-lilies.

by D.H. Lawrence

Image: Mother, by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida

1895, Oil on canvas

Sunday Snapshots

We had a gorgeous overcast and cool (for us) day here, especially for the tail end of a very scorpion-like stinging August, so I spent much of it trying to catch up on a few gardening chores. I don't have any poems to share today, so I thought I would post some of my very amateur shots of what's going on in the yard and garden at Castle Hedgewitch instead.

I'll start off with the tree damage we got the other night when I was bemoaning the power outages from the straightline winds of 70 mph that passed over us, thankfully doing not much more than blow a few shingles off the roof, and chew up this silver maple:

Below are a few shots of a morning glory that volunteered from seed. It's an old heirloom variety known as Grampa Ott, and is a bit more purply than shows in these. He's rambling all over my front bed this year, and the heat hasn't seemed to faze his antique ass. Two years ago when I gently nurtured him from a wee sprout tenderly started indoors in the depths of winter, he refused to do anything but get spider mites and die. I guess he's more a free bird sort of morning glory:

He's even rambling over the purslane in my container garden:

 

Finally, some of the cannas are starting to rebloom.They're a bit bedraggled from all the heat and an unfortunate lack of care due to my hatred of going outside when the temps replicate the seventh circle of hell, but they're taking no prisoners anyway. 

This one, Burning Ember,  is one of my favorites for it's almost surreal orange tones--and this is after I turned the saturation DOWN : 

If you're wondering what those long metal structures are in my neighbor's yard along the fence, they're her two loafing sheds for her horses, Pecos and Renegade, shown here helping with the mowing near the mimosa killed by this summer's heat:

These are some of the baby cows my mutt was chasing  on the property behind us. Mother is not in evidence today; she may have already become someone's dinner.

Those of you who are real photographers, thanks for bearing with me, as my gifts definitely do not extend in this direction. However, I hope everyone benefited from the wholesome exercise involved in getting out and communing with the garden, however vicarious. 

Regularly scheduled poetry programming will resume shortly.