Affinity

Affinity

Do the stars

call to each other

as you call to me

a restless wave

across infinite dark

spark to cellular spark?

Is it distance you see

measuring me

or disastrous proximity

the way light bends congruent lines

a star-egg prism'd warm

from eye to eye

before the breaking door,
the solar storm of crypted time?

Can those hunting specks
that dust the desert blue

in their shaken glass globe so

identically bright, so sweet/saltpeter sour,

in their cyclopean run

in the isolate absence of heat

dance the desolate dying of suns

knowing they'll never meet?

~July 2014

Optional Musical Accompaniment





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Kerry's Wednesday Challenge: Alienation in Outer Space
 Kerry O'Connor(Skylover, Skywriting) has brought David Bowie, post-modern alienation, what it means to listen, and outer space together for one of her always compelling challenges.

For some unknown reason, perhaps because this is Kerry's prompt and I know her love of forms, I had an impulse to rewrite this poem as a sonnet. As always in these free verse-to-form exercises, it's the same, only different. (Please don't feel, anyone, that you have to read both--just my over-achieving self-indulgence.)

Affinity

(sonnet)

Do stars so far call out one to another

the way your call to me crosses infinite dark,

small voice to voice pitched low, never uncovered,

restless wavering spark to cellular spark?

Is it distance that you see, measuring me

or the damage of diffracting proximity,

the way the light at dawn bends congruent lines

in colors breaking down the prism's door?

The ragged beat tapped out by contracting time

compels the specks that dust the ballroom floor

so identically bright, so sweet/saltpeter sour,

sparkling as their shaken glass globe's devoured,

to make that falling run in isolate absence of heat

and dance the dying of suns, knowing they'll never meet.

(July 2014)

Images: The Voice of The Blood, 1948, Rene Magritte

Time, by Wojciech Siudmak

Fair use via wikiart.org

Cotton

Cotton

You rolled me up to store

in a tender corner, cleaned linen-white

to wipe a glass delirium full

of Friday's crumpled cotton night.

Outside the walls grew red

with curious oleander,

sun's slow summer urge 

to break the blizzard's back,

still I spread soft,

your burden and your bundle,

your thinking pile of rags

that sometimes brayed

the shrill laugh of Coyote in moonlight's shade

striping blue my fabric face

so briskly shaken into folds

yet at your sudden touch, so smooth and plain.

When the snapping slice of scissors came

to cut the muslin muzzle and cotton chains,

I knew I'd never be that soft, that clean again.

~July 2014 

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Challenge: Play it Again

Margaret Bednar(Art Happens 365) has again chosen three Toads memes for us to revisit. I usually try to pick one I haven't done, but this time I went back to grapeling's first word list to borrow some inspiration. You can find my earlier poem for it here.

Image: Solarization, 1931, by Man Ray
Fair Use via wikiart.org

Fossil

Fossil

Worm to shell

shaft to womb

soul to soul

we lay so many times

that inside grew the outside

whorl by whorl.

Your script of touch

became a scroll

a star carved arabesque

upon the skin we layered

kiss by kiss,

stone flowers for

 the cover of our rest;

small, so small,

my love, the

fossil of that whole.

~July 2014

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Challenge: Words Count With Mama Zen

The ever-tersely-eloquent Mama Zen (another damn poetry blog) asks us to write something in sixty words or less inspired by images of minute fossilized animals under magnification. See more at the toads link above.

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image provided by Mama Zen