Fall Of Night

Fall Of Night

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. 

~Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death

Open the last door

of the windowless room

to find the darkness.

Slender thrust of moonsword

through matted velvet musk

you are hollow as all the other

castings of Ouroboros

a black beam of my own sending,

shot scarlet with motes of self overlooked

by fevering dreams, the tart taste of

amanita on the tongue, red dotted white,

I put inside your gaping mouth.

The night knows as it closes

I am not a source of light

but the lens sent to break it.

Still you are so deathly

beautiful, cerise smile in the shiftspin

of the prism's red masque

throwing back mirror bright

all the carmine dazzle of darkness,

that I can’t look away from

the bloodshine in your eye; it

spills through the heart locked

heavy round my neck

drips in a tankard
skull white, ice cold
raised to the worms of your lips.

Look—you lift your arm--

you seem to call me

deeper into the ruins

just 

before the light

goes out.

February 2012

Posted for   Open Link Night   at dVerse Poets Pub 

I'm ghosting tonight at the pub, where the party will be free of darkness decay and malign influences, and only poetry will have dominion over all. 
Come join us. 
Link in will be live from 3:00pm Tuesday to Midnight Wednesday, EST.

Header Image: Relic, posted by practicalowl  on flickr

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Footer Image: Illustration from Masque of the Red Death, 1919, by Harry Clarke [Public domain], via wikimedia commons

Off the Shelf Archive~February

Barely making it before the end of the month, the Archivist frantically bestirs herself to change out last month's Seamus Heaney selection for something to give us a breath of madness and spring, from Lorca.

I never get a lot of readers or response to this feature, but I do get a lot of personal satisfaction from it, so I'm going to continue it, but without the tedious commentary on my part. From now on it will just be poems. In that spirit,  you will find Ghazel of Unforeseen Love, by Spanish surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca in the March

Off the Shelf Archives

and below is last month's Punishment, by Seamus Heaney, read by the author. As always, feel free to comment on either poem here, as comments are disabled off the main page.

Punishment

~by Seamus Heaney

Here is the text:

Punishment
by Seamus Heaney (1939-)

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

Mirage

Mirage

Can I trace it, that spider footed midnight kiss

that once walked its lips across my crying skin?

Is it hung head down in the cobweb spun across my

crumpled cheek; waiting still? starved rigid?

But no, it ran; I see its mark, staggering spider steps

through dry sand floating on the dust of desert years

at home in emptiness, a secret life uncurled after the

scirocco passes, charming away dead flesh from bone

not even a smell to hang in the drying frame of air.

Any little busy thing consuming convenient corpses

to white skull’s stare knows each precious drop preserves

savor and sweat for a  hankering life spent waiting

for the next foolish thing to drop, hamstrung by thirst

lost beyond finding, hallucinating deliverance

blinded by a lunatic sun that tilts the web's sweet spin

to catch an oasis kiss and in mirage to live again.

February 2012

Posted for  real toads

Sunday Challenge

featuring Ellen Wilson

Top Image: Web, by Ellen Wilson

Footer image: Blossom, by Ellen Wilson

of Ella's Edge, Used with permission. 

Feather From An Empty Hat

Feather From An Empty Hat

In the whirlwind

leaves in tumult turn

seasons change, chiseled from

an empty hat

hooping along the curb,

flown to drown in the sleety river

by snow’s hardliquor breath

huffing in staggers through the

winter grass cut before the storm

where dry brown leaves nest

a broken feather pulled
by djinns of the stuttering south,

homeless in the field.

The poem I wrote in my sleep

was huge

it moved the earth

it changed the world

it was a rock mountain

out of which I carved

clanging truth in heads of jackals,
ravens and goddesses

and wrote their conversations

verbatim etched in a brazen font

upon the golem’s brow

yet when I woke

in the blue crystal light

there were no words

on my pillow, only one

spent feather, ragged

from the cold.

February 2012 

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Image: Guinea fowl feather 

By User:Ben_pcc (Some bird.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Leaves of Absence

Leaves of Absence

One comes

while another leaves.

One afternoon 

becomes

 a month of falling leaves.

The long job

of loving needs

a leave of falling months,

leave to go

 re-leaved,

tho leaving is grieving

gone is better so;

to leave

Love's little fat god

smirking,

 pleased to

take each sacrifice

and close his till,

scattering

dead leaves.

February 2012

55 falling leaves for    the G-Man

Photo: Pressed Leaves, by Petteri Sulonen on flick'r

Thanks, Petteri.

As well as sharing his photographic talents on flick'r, Petteri blogs eclectically at 

 Come to think of it,  an always interesting read.

Another Poem Written at Morning

Another Poem Written at Morning

for Wallace Stevens

We always were

as different as two things can possibly be

as far apart as a white bear on an ice floe

from a neon flamingo preening on one leg

or a thinking mouse in a live trap

from the distant hawk that stoops.

We always were

as close as two feathers nesting in

coralpink scales on that same flamingo, 

as mouse and thought, 

as the freeze of boreal ice

to the bear's shaman paw.

When all there was to read 
was ratscratch and pigeon droppings,

you'd already written for me

the encyclopedia of myself;

Go on through the darkness, you said

The waves fly back.

When my only drawing was child's

chalkdust, fumbling baroque intricacy into

crude streaks, you painted my adjectives in oils

with the extravagant precision of a Poussin,

carved from cloud within the sister, mother and

diviner lover, out of our own imperfections wrought.

Ever you were truer to me than any breathing man.

Even now in the room where the interior paramour 

lights the highest candle, begins the twilight music, 

I bend in the dance with your businessman's stone 

in its calico gypsy shirt and cobweb shoes,

still try to read your book of granite mossed

with shadows, sudden lightning burst over 

inkblack seas pounding meaning

in constant making and unmaking, 

whispers calling, fill the four corners of night

flutter your empty sleeves, 

it's the spirit that we seek,

 

ask often. No matter if answering is all reflection,

dimmer, poorer through prosthetic eyes;

let them shine and serve, let the wench's tongue wag,

if only in echoes softer than tumbled shells suspiring 

on a ghost beach, because you gave not killing order

but the idea of order 

that grew the garden that saved me

from the domination of black, sent

dreams of baboons and periwinkles,

put peacocks in the

heavy darkness of hemlock,

rejoiced in green curls.

February 2012

Reposted for Meeting the Bar: Literary Allusion   at dVerse Poets Pub
Victoria is hosting today and this poem seemed to fit her challenge to write an answer to another poem, as well as cite a literary influence.

 

 

Poem Written At Morning

  

by Wallace Stevens

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

Italicized words are quotations or titles from Stevens' poems.

this was originally posted for   real toads
where Kenia's challenge was to dialogue with a poem or poet.

Image: Diana and Endymion,  by Nicolas Poussin [Public domain], via wikimedia commons

Sanctuary

Sanctuary

It was the time of cold.

The water from the sky ran black as inky blood

and the tree in the dark storm was ripe for burning,

solitary acolyte in a serpentine ceremony of snow.

You kissed my summer dry palms

just before you ran to your winter white pack

far off along the indigo rim of night.

I heard the howling begin

without me. I pulled in the last syllable of stone,

stripping myself to bare words. A single step danced me 

from maenad to anchoress, peering through the squint

at your unconsecrated communion.

January 2011

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Having nothing ready for tonight, though a huge snarl of cantankerous works in progress, thought I would post an older poem that had limited exposure. This was originally submitted for a prompt (at the now defunct Big Tent Poetry) to utilize alliteration by choosing a letter, writing a word list, and using the ideas it generated for subject with a word from it for the title. Apologies to those who have already seen this.

Photo: © Copyright Colin Smith and licensed for reuse under  Creative Commons License.
Cell of the anchoress Christine Carpenter, 14th Century. Shere, Surrey, UK

Piquée

Piquée

There’s a little grey snake most cunningly faced,

curled up in cleaved breasts, well hidden in lace.

It’s only as long as a tailgunner’s song

only as thick as a Semtex stick

but it bites to the raw with a jaguar’s jaw

then tucks its head down and keeps drilling.

Sometimes it slithers outside on warm fingers

disarming observers with its plastic display.

Others the poison tongue drips out and lingers

soaks through the lace in a green disarray

to the sponge in the core

that echo'd reservoir

the little grey snake’s slowly filling.

February 2012



Posted for   real toads
Open Link Monday

Images: Photos of Femme Piquée par un Serpent (Woman Bitten by a Snake)
1847Auguste Clésinger (1814 -1883)Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France  by fmpgoh on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Desert Trip

 

 Desert Trip

Dust for dinner

in the day end bitter and

nothing to drink but a glass of sand.

Bare souled and dry mouthed

plodding shredboot through hoop

after hoop of unrolling heat, horizon

radiant with mirage mirror lures to

push me from the path

cut through the fantasia of quince colored

coral curled cactus. Behind me a torn trail

of shed skins, miles of peeled naked 

shins fondled by creosote shanks
corkscrewed and toothy, my airs 
leaking from memory holes

spined through raw scars, burnt lashed,

blinking blue coals under swollen lids.

Ahead a whirl of drab dirt devils

dance down a blind mountain's ashes 
to the parched hellfloor where I am not going.

Pooling improbable greenery shines

lush O surely too much a skirt of

turquoise and lemon on a stone doll

to be so stubbornly alive, brushing

jade shadows where the new dwelling sits

with no guards, no guards at all

except the length of hardscrabble slope

pulling world worn flesh
step by ebbing step to the

moon's seat, the hidden well

that holds all I can drink

before darkness so
tenderly falls.

February 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub 

Brian is hosting today, and has brought on board the expressive photography of Reena Walkling to get the word pump primed and flowing. Come join us. 
Link in is live till midnight Sunday.

Image: Photograph by Reena Walkling  (c) 2012

Used with permission

The Woodwife

The Woodwife

The woodwife fled

when none could see

and went where none

but she could go.

Green were her sleeves

in the howling snow, out

from the halls of Kingswinter

when no moon shone.

Ashen she was as the grey

before break of day

from living where no fire

could stay, or sun's ray pierce.

She’d come to learn

the celestial dance, practice

the arts with a man of air

for the time that never came.

She tired of the silken crucible,

cameos cut with  quicksilver scissors

and learned instead to laugh confetti

from chains of handfast paperdolls

tossing their snow as she ran, to fall

on dead hearths, blow for eternity 

round empty halls, behind the cursed

blind windows of Kingswinter.

.

February 2012

Posted for Meeting the Bar  at dVerse Poets Pub

Based on a dream. We all have our own heroes.

Image: Morgan le Fay, by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys 

[Public domain], via wikimedia commons

Night Light

Night Light

Luminous the globe

around my hope, a diamond

phosphorescent fish

that undulantly beams along

darkest ocean floor,

gleaming

or in meadowed night

a child’s eye

swimmy deer gaze

peering through the heart’s glass lantern

stuttering, fluttering, dancing,

burning the fitful wick

that lights my way to you,

whoever wherever

in this dark place

you are.

March 1990

55 eyeballs gleaming in the dark   for the G-Man

Note: This was one of the last dozen or so poems I wrote before stopping for ten years. I've revised it today a bit here and there, and cut a few words to get it to exactly 55. 

Image: Owl Flame, by Darkr, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

How Hansel Ate Gretel

It's Valentine's Day, that most commercially candy-coated of holidays, and the day when Love in all its sweetness is celebrated across the land--except, of course, at Castle Hedgewitch, where instead we have a twisted cautionary tale for hungry young lovers whose eyes may be bigger than their stomachs, and a retelling (with customary poetic license) of an old feral, er...faerie tale from the Brothers All-too Grimm.

How Hansel Ate Gretel

Looking back, as I make off into mothering trees

I see your trail wind under their stooping knees,

snake of cherry heartbits beneath the moon

and know it for what it is, your pheromone croon

baiting the sweet biological trap up on the heath

where every heedless sacrifice drops its spore.

See your sisters all come running to hide from death

and instead become your food supply, nothing more.

Your candy call draws the lost ones, wild to eat 

the gingerbread house with sugar hands and feet.

Each famished girlchild sucks at white icing's sweet

slick, swallows glazing and dreams the full child's dream

inside the cage made to plump her up as the oven heats.

With luck, the last one's fallen bones gnawed clean

make a silent deceit to a blind eye’s need for meat,

pinched to test what's forever incomplete.

Still, gingerbread girls will always let you start

those hungry cannibal gulps that crumble the heart

but what surprises is the discipline you show

sparing some of the half-baked morseled dough

(bitten off, those cookie legs can’t run like flesh)

to pull and scatter speck by speck as you refresh

that trail that tells the strays just where to go.

O we all need to eat, so I don’t mind the meal 

or being dessert that's thoroughly lost in the woods,

nor the  sandpaper licks I took so I could feel.

It’s the marker you make of every spit-stained crumb

to bait your sweet-breathed trap for damaged goods

that freezes all I have that’s still not numb.

February 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Note: I've significantly altered this old tale to suit my  fancy, put it into a  valentiny rhyme scheme and fictionalized first-person form, removed the stereotypes of the wicked cannibal witch-hag and evil stepmother and made poor innocent Hansel, who was the original victim, the villain of the piece. That's what happens when you let feminazi witches rewrite the history books.

Image: Late 19th century illustration  of Hansel und Gretel, by Carl Offterdinger, photo by Harke [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 

Repose

Repose

It is in changing that things find repose.

~Heraclitus

Between this breath and another

is that atoms' dance that abides forever

intrinsic parity, growing in declension

and likewise myself constant in tension

now new now dying change and remain

endlessly negated perpetually created

ocean sunned, a steam of water meeting flame.

Restless blue remakes the river drop by drop;

time's dry file rasps on vanity's hide

as friction cooks the soul to snakes of smoke.

All things set free their savor in a smolder

of the sum to nothing, intangible but plain;

we're brought to know each essence

by the brazier and the flame.

Rosehips and lemon wet on my lips

only kindle the dancing blaze, a salamander

that cleans itself with coals, whose breath turns anything

to a wild wisped arabesque of incense,

the airgrace  and deathgift of fire the same

from a  pinched wick as from a burning slum,

all rising from the identical artist’s flame.

So these lips, only tasted now by time, kissed

only by citrus, salt and hips of roses,

exhale their essence; between this breath

and another, spirit dies and comes again

as it did before the world moved on and does

once more, sweet as any smoke of mutable flame

that finds repose in what is born to change.

February 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Charles Miller of Metanoetic Poetics  is hosting at the pub tonight, and his theme is the exploration of philosophy through poetry. Come join us. Link in is live till Sunday Midnight.

"If all existing things were smoke, it is by smell that we would distinguish them."

You can find these and more of the words of Heraclitus which influenced this poem here at wikisource.

Image: Heraclitus, Detail of Rafaello Santi's "The School of Athens" (1510)

by Raphael [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Wayfarers' Tale

 Wayfarers' Tale

The Watcher and the Wanderer

and the Wayward Child

walked hand in hand across the Moor

in the midnight wild.

The moon was only a distant eye

that looked the other way.

The Moor was only a frying pan

that cooked the heather grey.

The Watcher kept her eyeless watch,

the Wanderer went astray,

the Child thought it saw another child

and ran after it to play.

Night grew long and the cats all wept,

till there was nothing left

but the empty path across the Moor

and the watch the Watcher kept.

February 2012

Posted for    real toads

Prompt: Photography of TALON

Image: Photo by TALON

Used with permission.

Jasmine Rain

Jasmine Rain

The front rolls in as I’m

drinking the jasmine

from your silver eyes.

Hearts and clouds kaleidoscope,

revolve, shine, shred

to murk; storm

falls, petals tattoo

waves of night white 
with hurtsweet fragrance.

Bruised away are all

the broken things

that can't outlast

the big blow;

but 

every storm ends

even 

jasmine rain.

February 2012

55 torn petals for the  G-man

Image: Stratocumulus by Darkr, on flick'r
Shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Non-Commercial License

Repost~Spring and the Fool

Spring and The Fool

Spring loves a fool,

throwing her sticky caltrop

 blossoms under his dancing toes,

laughing with him as the cold white

blood of January turns blue,

brims the river

and slides his fool’s shack

off the bank.

Spring cares for a fool,

washing his winter soiled

questions of living, tumbling them

in her dryer to be folded away

neat as a fallen leaf sorted back

into earth,

sucking him up her pressure hose

for a lark, blowing him out the nozzle

or percolating him down from his cloud

as he juggles hail in the wild storm,

morning coffee for the

first grasshoppers.

Even this spring

hot as any summer

where the flatbread plains crisp

under her sudden yellow eye; where running

before the distant blur of the moon the south wind

exhales with the used heat

of dragon breath.

Spring loves a fool

as the fool loves the dance.

 Blistered feet soon summerheal,

distrained harvests soon reseed.

Thrice denied before dawn,

the sun’s judas kiss burning

on his cheek, still he sheds his skin

and dons his pointy hat

one more time.

June 2011

I'm reposting this for Kerry's Wednesday Challenge at real toads, which is to explore the idea of Magical Realism, making connection with things through their unseen and mysterious attributes.  Thanks, Kerry, for letting me dig this one out of the cellars of Castle Hedgewitch.

Running by Winterlight

Running by Winterlight

Midnight called me up from my rifled bed

where I’d searched in vain for sleep’s last hiding place.

I went out to look at the fraying brindled clouds

taped to the far ice moon, and the Hunter's sword

once Freya’s distaff weaving the ravelled world.

And I knew beyond my doubt your soul ran free

parkoured from star to star canopied above me.

I saw the aching dumbshow of what’s past, 
a flickering stereopticon of days 
each one still a sharpness of blinding glass

stuck in time’s deep gut the bleeding pass of 
a dance above oblivion’s shifting cracks.

Light of my heart, you make a fine traceur;

one slip's enough to kill, yet you endure. 

Clouds cry ice, sweep in the shaking void

with its black mouth wide, its bone white lich’s grin.

I’ve made myself so small, so fine a dust

that plaited baleen will never seine me out,

just lose me where the cell-shed seeds sprout green. 

What's lost flies out and floats on seven winds.

What’s left puts down its root to live again.

February 2012



Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
Brian Miller is our host tonight. Come join us at the Pub for a night of poetry sharing lasting through Wednesday at midnight.

Process notes: Parkour...is a training method which focuses on rational movement [where] the focus is to move around obstacles with speed and efficiency...to move through the..environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs.~wikipedia

The last lines of the first stanza refer to the constellation of Orion, a Hunter in Greek mythology whose belt of three stars holds the Orion nebula, representing the point of Orion's sword, and in Norse mythology, the distaff (a spinning tool) of Freya, goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war and death.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

The Wall

The Wall

Behind the green mountains

is a green towered wall

around the green center

of a thousand sprouting dreams

sown in an unseason of

crepitant hollows, dry

depredation, where

sleep is

defenestrated

and shattered below

in shards that grow

a yeast of redolent fantasies

piercing their way out

each with a flower

of bright loss nodding swaying

releasing dancing airsprites to

put Dorothy to sleep

in an opium dream

till twilight’s brighter wife

glares down and scorches

the slime from the stars

and the wall

jumps on its own back 

leaping

taller and taller, 

greener than green.

February 2012

 Posted for    real toads

Image: Photo by Richard Schear, provided by the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads