The First Crack

 

 

 

The First Crack

The first crack

always seems easy to mend,

an almost invisible fracture in

 an otherwise perfect thing; so, too,

 the first pock on the face of the moon.

Yet let a few years pass and her skin

is a ballgown of craters.

So I knew when the peacocks

cracked November with their

idiot's scream, when you spit the last

 blackberry from your stained lips, that the

 first bleach of sun on Rhea's hair

would turn your head, 

make you thirsty

for the black cup of ocean, the yellow

manes of lionesses blowing on the sand,

the kelp smell and the wind-draggled lillies,

leaving me alone in this Pharisee's garden

with nothing but a raddled moon

and the smugness of

peacocks.

November 2021

posted for Shay's

Word List

 

 

 

 

Rhea was a Titaness, a goddess, daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, the consort of Cronos and mother of Zeus, as well as grandmother of Persephone and Dionysus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lunar Craterr, 2015, ©Æstronomær shared under a Creative Commons License

Peacock Consorts, © Charles Tunnecliffe   Fair Use

 

Gratitude

 

 

 

Gratitude

is a kind of ash

that blows in volcano wind,

falling opal feather-scales hissed

off by fire-snakes that coil

their islands in the sea,

all we have left perhaps

of rocky miles of ore and gold

stacked heavy in earth's shadowbox

melting in pressured flux

spit out to lift a mountain

from the core. 

~November 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reposted from 2012 for Thanksgiving 2021

Open Link

at DVerse Poets 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving to All 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 55 serpent feathers for  the absent g-man; grateful always

 

Header Image: Mayon Volcano, Philippines, by Alan Flowers, on flick'r

Shared under a creative commons license

Footer Image: rendering of Yaxchilan Feathered Serpent Diety, byEl Commandante

public domain, via wikimedia commons 

 

Things That Stay Behind

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things That Stay Behind

(A 55)

 

 

Things that stay

behind memory's cold coals:

 

child's slipping skates

clipped with a key,

grandfather's rough-work hand

velvet on cottonpuff cheeks;

the margin of wild

the great lake stole from concrete,

that wish washed blue home where

only gulls screamed;

how suddenly it came, the frayed

squall of your kiss

at high water

washing childhood away.

 

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics: Ekphrasis, Fay Collins,

a talent taken too soon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sunset Squalls at Connemara, © Fay Collins  Fair Use

Vintage roller skates, Photo by Sam Figueroa via Flickr Creative Commons  Fair Use

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor 

"Nine tailors make a man." ~anon.

 

 

The night was dark-haired and delirious.

The cheeky moon clung precariously

to a crooked branch, a bibulous marquess

embracing a lamp post, ready

to strut a whole dancehall

for a cigarette and another chance.

It was the last act of a first edition.

Drying at the prompt, they walked on the

edge of a feather. She'd stopped feeling sorry;

her heart was a trespasser in Vienna,

silent at the soiree instead of begging to

strip to the skin pour épater les bourgeois.

 

He knew he was passing his prime,

going flabby at center, his bons mots

withering like December dahlias. He'd lost count

 of the hands that had picked his pocket, stroked

his celebrated champagne hair, each morning

  combed back unsteadily at the hotel

before the bitter waver in the mirror.

When the curtain came down

it was too weak to exist in more than

one dimension, but it knocked the play

into next week, and left behind its mournful bell

broken at the ninth tailor.

November 2021

posted for Fireblossom's word list at

Shay's Word Garden

epater les bourgeois: to shock or startle the coventional

  

Nine tailors: "As explained by John Shand in his 1936 Spectator article The Bellringers' Art, 'Nine Tailors' means the nine strokes which at the beginning of the toll for the dead announce..that a man is dead. A woman's death is announced with 'Six Tailors'. Hence the old saying ... '" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Human Parody, circa 1878 © Felicien Rops

The Hanged Man At The Bell,  1867, © Felicien Rops

Empty

 

 

 

 

 "Hell is empty and all the Devils are here." ~William Shakespeare

 

Empty

(a 55)

 

The door to

the henhouse is

always unlocked

for inside there are

only wind eggs.

 

The Fall 

is a tryptich:

blackness, dead hearts,

disingenuous calculations. At

the apex

of chaos we have our

decumbiture, 

no thaumaturgy created

cures corrupted

senescence.

Don't

 turn the key

to lock in nothing; 

just open the door

for the foxes.

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On November 19th, 2021, Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, was acquitted of 5 counts of homicide for the August 25th 2020 murders of two men and the attempted murder of a third. The men were protesting the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, by a white police officer in Wisconsin. The jury ruled that Rittenhouse, who crossed state lines with an assault weapon to "protect property" not belonging to him, acted in self-defense.

 

 

 

wind egg: an unimpregnated, yolkless, or imperfect egg ...an egg with a soft noncalcareous shell

decumbiture:1 obsolete : confinement to a sickbed. 2a : the time of taking to one's bed from sickness. b : a horoscope of such a decumbiture.

thaumaturgy:: the performance of miracles

~Merriam Webster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Photo of Door, title and author unknown, Fair Use via Sunday Muse

The Fox: Fair Game, © Alexander Pope  Public Domain

Way(ra)s Of The Past

 

 

 

Way(ra)s Of The Past

 

 I.

 

There is a road, cold

as stark nightmare's mane, weaving

a winding-sheet memory

choke-tight, wringing the eyes

dry, smearing the heart, called the past.

 

II.

 

There is a tollway

never cheated by moonlight

never unwatched by day. Don't

squander your soul walking

down it; the past collects its debts.

 

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetry Form: The Wayra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Footsteps, 2016, © Joshua Philip Hart

Photograph of the Author, 1956, photographer unknown,  Public Domain

Abyssinia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abyssinia

 

 

She wanted out

before they came with

the Chicago overcoat,

but her luck was never aces,

like a filly four men own a leg of;

still her eyes. She had lamps like

two shots of fizz, a nightcap in themselves

and the bob she got to peeve her mother

she thought fit her like a laurel glove

when she left the farm behind her

when life began to wind her

like a two dollar watch.

She climbed the satin stairway 

to a sky of empty sockets just west

of Hooverville and the L.A.summer moon.

She bumped gums with the butter and egg man, 

the man who stepped on stars, another flicker

for his candle on the purple velvet couch. He cast 

her sixth behind Lugosi, the girl who screams

her heart out in a movie off the cob. He gave her eyes

a number in a book with a hundred others

who ran away from their mothers

to an apple filled with worms.

After Fatty took the Rappe,

before the Dahlia bloomed her ink smudge,

she hollered, "Abyssinia," kissed off

 the painted desert, hooked up

with the junior props boy, and threw the watch

away. They moved to North Dakota, and

she told her grandkids nothing

about being sixth behind Lugosi,

about cadillacs and canaries

about L.A. in January,

about the girl too many owned a leg of

or the man who stepped on stars.

November 2021

 

 posted for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse, whose theme today is

Illusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Abysinnia is '30's slang for "I'll be seeing you." A Chicago overcoat likewise for a coffin. To 'own a leg of' a horse is to be part of a syndicate which mutually invests in a racehorse for profit, bumping gums is to talk aimlessly or too much, especially about yourself. You can look up the rest of the slang I've used   here,   the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe scandal which rocked 1920's Hollywood  here,  and the notorious Los Angeles Black Dahlia murder case which sold so many newspapers  here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Mischa Barton posed as early film star Louise Brooks, via Sunday Muse  Fair Use

Still from the 1929 German film Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks and Fritz Kortner  Fair Use

 

Cabin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Cabin

 

 

 

The war was lost, the way

worse. I felt

the tired mare sigh

a heart-green path to

my old lover, the oldest lost

 and brown-eyed truth,

 a place to fold us

peel to apple,

bird to song.

 

I rearranged his

forest home as if

it were mine

 

and so it was

the old mare sighed.

 

 

 

 November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem has been edited since first posted.

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Illustration for "Vasilisa the Beautiful." 1900,  © Ivan Bilibin  Public Domain

Peasant Girl Near A Cabin, 1895, © Camille Corot   Public Domain

 

 

Dionysia

 

 

 

 

 

 Dionysia

 

 

In another century

I was a girl of a certain flavor

grown to twist and pruned to bear

a fruit never eaten, only pressed.

 

You were the satyr,

the goat-song in the convent, a

dovecote of vestals who cooed as you

taught them to break their glass vows.

 

At the bacchanal we all danced

indifferent to stares of the Keres. You stole

the god's thyrsos and wound it with lamb's ear,

soft and treacle sweet as your smile.

 

That cup that was

filled then to overflowing

is broken now, but too late, I think

for those who've already drunk.

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 and

earthweal's Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

thyrsos:  a staff or wand of fennel used in Hellenic ceremonies, espec. Dionysius ~wikipedia

Keres:  female death spirits who roamed freely during the yearly Athenian festival of  Anthestria .~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wine glasses, author unknown, via Sunday Muse  Fair Use

Marble relief of a maenad and two satyrs in a Bacchic procession. AD 100, British Museum Public Domain

Floaters

 

 

 

 

 

 

Floaters

 

 

 

My eyes have

made small islands in their sea

that float between me

and what I want to be there,

all desired clear

but now obscured,

invisible for what they are,

and never heard.

Palm trees instead of paragraphs,

not faces, forms, but homemade rafts

drifting across a wavy film, not words,

but blind reality.

 

 November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Meeting the Bar

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Clouds In Finland, 1908 © Konrad Kryzanowski,  Public Domain

Boat, c.1918 © Salvador Dali   Public Domain