Ghosts of All Hallows

Ghosts of All Hallows

This night puts two specters

always beside me: the

white wavering hand

of an ectoplasmic man
reaching up its rebirth

from the past's still river

and the red-trimmed ghost flint
of knife sharp December.

First one will cut me

then the other dismember,
making their wailing

promises for breaking, insisting

to midnight how real, how strong

how mine their congealing,

my self-propelled hex-helix
to annex the fetch of a feeling
or the sterile slipping steel

of each coward surrender.

How I remember--you didn't mind the knife

if it was in your hand.

I didn't mind the blood

so long as it was mine;
now it shines, the pale smile of the drowned

as if murder makes a healer not a butcher.

Oh it may; still it's time
to switch off the sound,
kill the moon,
cut to black this double feature
so both erase except for what
is left behind them in the mirror---

no lie is ever dearer
than the one you tell yourself.

~October 2014

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Challenge: FireblossomFriday
 from Shay at the Word Garden:  Hallowe'en.

Three Hands, Two With Knives, Study, 1884,Vincent Van Gogh
Public domain via wikiart.org

The Song

The Song

There's a song that's made

from the end of night,

a fold in the black

where I tack paper stars,

(stiff silver, crumpled points

pushed into soft velvet ) a music

shaped like sails in the wind

sewn with mind's needle 

and air's cloud-thread, 

that pulls me ahead.

It burns the candlelight

behind my carved eyes

where I sit on the steps

on October's last night;

without that flame, mere holes in a shell, 

without that match, a hallowed-out

system of shrink and loss, 

seeds stolen, 

fire-roasted, split open

unsown.

There's a song

my love makes,

a whisper of nocturne

that names the night,

a numen in flight

that outlasts the hours, 

and mine
the cold hand on the harp 

of winter that waits,

its inchworm comfort

the nature of flowers.

~October 2014

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Challenge: Nightingale

Susie Clevenger(Confessions of a Laundry Goddess) adroitly avoiding the ubiquity of Hallowe'en, gives us the theme of that full-throated night bird, the nightingale, to explore in writing. I hope she forgives the slight intrusion of the season here.

Images: Night, 1953, by Marc Chagall May be protected by copyright.

Fair use via wikiart.org

Winterseeds,  ©joyannjones 2013

Wormhole

Wormhole

The tree came to the feeding
in eddies of dreamdark
night thunder and wind
discussing the storm
blowing up from the south
and the blood of the age.

I was an eavesdropper

a spy in the heartwood

of the wide-running world tree,

a hatchling consuming
its blind spiral highway

from root to the crown,

my corpus a conduit for

time's succulent cambium,

green life pushed through me,

brown years my droppings.

I twisted my wormhole

from mud to the stars,

felt myself swelling
at the opening

with the turning inside me,
skin twitched over half-wings

as I poked my pale head out,
lightning burned into

the thousand sharp mirrors

of my faceted eyes--

but I saw what I saw

just before

the black beak

plucked me out.

~October 2014

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Open Link Monday

The Angel Oak (Quercus virginiana) John's Island, South Carolina, 
by Scott Campbell, via wikimedia commons 
Shared under a Creative Commons License

Footer: The Thief, 1996, by Jamie Wyeth

Fair use via wikiart.org

The Myrðaling

The Myrðaling
A Ghost Story

Cold across the portal

through the shadow of the veil

the child shivers at me

wild-walking the mirk.

She's thin as she'd never been

when she lay as she was left,
tiny feet kicking in a stiff skin wrap,
taller too than when her kicking stopped

alone in the bramble where the light broke

as the snow wound blue

around her like smoke.

Now she can walk miles

through the night from the black

back corners of the winter before

and after all things
for she's passed the rock door;

on the slaughtering shadow

that splits the soft loam

she blows like a seed that won't be sown

but must be milled instead
on the stone of years

with a river of bones.

She opens her mouth

and sings like the plague

for a name of her own

to give her a grave.

Take mine I say--it's all I have

for a night sister here in the dying year,
where we've gone too far

to turn around, where too soon
we eat the bread of the dead,
where spirit can weigh
as heavy as flesh when the veil falls away.

Then the moon-twin came out of her lost disguise;

I saw the child smile, and close her eyes.

~October 2014

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Challenge: Get Listed with Grapeling
Grapeling (It Could Be That) hosts a very seasonal prompt, and asks us to include at least three words from a sinister list he has provided to tell a campfire-worthy ghost story. For the list, follow the link to real toads above.

Process notes: In Scandanavian folklore, a myrðaling, (from Old Norse, 'myrða,' murder) or more properly, myling, was the ghost of a child killed by its mother in infancy, usually  the child of an unmarried woman, or of a poor family unable to provide for it, abandoned in some unfrequented place and forced to walk the earth seeking burial. The myling might appear and reveal the acts of its killer in a song, or call out for a name, when the hearer could save the spirit by saying "take mine' so that it might then rest in consecrated ground, (as in this poem) or it might vengefully possess the living, jumping on their backs and forcing the victim to carry them to a graveyard, growing heavier with each step. You can read more in this wikipedia article.

Image: The Strawberry Girl, 1777, by Joshua Reynolds

Public domain via wikiart.org

I have manipulated this image.

Undine

Undine

 You the Stranger, more myself than my own breath

inhaled, than my dwindling dry hours.

You, a tale less true than even this ring's mark

circling my finger with flowers...

Rivers are mud and dust

here where I make my change,

in a land beloved because I must

in a place where I've given up

my rippled scales. There are no ships here,

none cross these waves

of wind-woven grain, no willow mask

on Rhea's face, no watchlight shines

except on fleets of stars exiled across

the cobalt water sky that planes in alt

between your closing eyes and mine.

Far and far and farther yet this trip,

on traitor winds with phantom sails, leagues long;

you always knew exactly what I am.

I've  known from our first hour

what must come next; you've always hoped

so blindly you were wrong.

Still, here we watch landfallen and bespelled

pale lightning striking on a dreamer's sea,

made from years and crucibled in salt.

We see them go, handfast on our brief brink---

the promises, the light, the air of day, 

the restless dead that are too light to sink.

 ~October 2014

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Challenge: Poetic Marble

Margaret Bednar (Art Happens 365) offers us some of her photos of marble sculpture from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and suggests that we allow its statuary to inspire us--I have picked a different photo, not hers,  from their collection, of Undine, by Chauncey Bradley Ives.

in alt:  in the octave beginning with the second G above middle C <ranging up to E in alt> ~Merriam Webster Online Dictionary

Process Notes: Undine is both an alchemical term of Paracelsus for the spirits of water, and a figure out of folklore similar to Melusine, about whom I have written before, the water sprite who gave up her mermaid form for a human one on the condition her mortal lover never look upon her in her bath (when she was in her true form)which, of course, he eventually did. Rhea was a Cretan aspect of the goddess Cybele, mother of the gods, an earth goddess associated with an ecstatic cult similar to those of  Dionysus, and usually pictured with a lion to either side of her. 

Image: Undine, by Chauncey Bradley Ives, circa 1880-84 Smithsonian American Art Museum

Photo by Caroline Lena Becker, public domain via wikimedia commons
Undine, 1896, by Henri Fantin-Latour, public domain via wikiart.org