Advice From The Fortune Teller

 

 

 

Advice From The Fortune Teller

 

 

"Look up to jump," the gypsy calls.

"It's how you fly instead of fall.

It's a long way down, that last bump,

so fly your eyes like starlings brawl.

That's how you miss the awkward thump,"

the gypsy calls."Look up to jump."

She's jumped before. I try to trust

my heavy wings of wax and rust,

the sky my boat, the wind my oar,

my feathers eyes above earth's crust

cast floating up and sent to soar.

I try to trust. She's jumped before.

But then I see she smiles and smiles

at birds stitched high on cloudy miles

at knifing rocks that slice the sea,

carving waves like bladed turnstiles.

"Just look up and finally be free."

She smiles and smiles, but then I see.

February 2022

posted for dVerse Poets

Poetry Form: Sparrowlet

(for a complete description of this quirky little form, see above, where Grace is hosting)

Images ; The Fortune Tellar, 1933, © Brassai   Fair Use

Floating Woman, photomanipulation © Phillip Igumnov  Fair Use

Quadrille Of The Poppies

 

 

 

 

 

Quadrille Of The Poppies

 

 

In Mexico

you wrote me word by word

into the book of your hips.

We traded salt naked

 

lip to lip; your 

listening kiss

heard the colors come

as poppies and geraniums stirred

 

rustling from my earth,

turning their dark faces

towards yours,

opening. 

 

 

February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets:
Quadrille #146: Salt

using words from

Shay's Word List #14

Pablo Neruda

 

where I am hosting for Shay this week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Textile Bookbinding from The Netherlands, ca 1621  Fair Use 

Oriental Poppies, 1908, © Georgia O'Keefe    Fair Use

Eurydice

 

 

 

 

 

Eurydice

 

 

 

I was a god's nymph of the deep ravine,

a dancer in the dusk on dandelion greens

til listening to you I felt a dog's duress

that I in your spellsong's locket be possessed.

Under the purple awning of the night

whitened stars beat down in falling flight.

I felt yet didn't hear your naked voice.

I took and later rued an arrow's choice.

And when your always-wooing sleepless noise

drew the jackal out from the sour wood,

I tried to turn and run as best I could;

you played untouched as the snake saw me destroyed.

Even then you could not let me rest,

bright in poppy sleep in the dreaming earth

but played until your will outgrew my worth

and petals bloomed on the stone of Hades' breast.

But as you pulled me up the iron route

I saw my dandelion days were all undone,

and rejoiced in the malediction of your doubt,

freed at last where death and dreams are one.

 

 

 

 

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List #14

 Pablo Neruda

where I am hosting this week for Shay, who is taking the week off. Come join us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note; This poem has absolutely nothing to do with Neruda, but it is what the words on the list brought out. In the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is seduced by the legendary music of Orpheus and his harp and marries him. One day the minor god Aristaeus sees and pursues her. As she runs away, she is bitten by a viper and dies. Orpheus famously follows her to Hades' underworld, where his singing persuades the god to let her return to the earth. ".. the condition was attached that he must walk in front of her and not look back until both had reached the upper world. Soon he began to doubt that she was there, suspecting that Hades had deceived him. Just as he reached the portals of Hades..he turned around to gaze on her face, and because Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold, she vanished back into the Underworld...Several meanings for the name Eurydice have been proposed such as true judgement or profound judgement...In some accounts, she was instead called Agriope which means "savage face" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Orpheus and Eurydice, 1515,  relief by Peter Vischer the Younger Public Domain

Eurydice Bitten By The Viper, 1508, Titian  Public Domain

 

Apple Wine, Bitter Greens

 

 

 

 

 

Apple Wine, Bitter Greens

 

 

 

 

You gave me apple wine and bitter greens

a highwire hawk who'd learned to trick the sky,

a line of lakes where the white moon hid her gleams

in cups of apple wine and bitter greens,

in fantasies, daydreams and guillotines

til we were just a wildfire burning dry

drunk on apple wine and parched of green,

two highwire hawks who thought we'd tricked the sky.

 

 

 

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

 Shay's Word List #13

 

 

and 

 

 

 

dVerse Poets Poetics:

After St. Valentine has left the building

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Evening at Volga, 1888, ©Isaac Levitan    Public Domain

Courting Redtails, 2008 ©Gouldingken     via wikimedia commons     Fair Use

 

Lincoln Frees The Owls

 

 

 Lincoln Frees The Owls

Your father had

a cloud of blackbirds,

your mother a wake

of buzzards. You

 

were more ambitious.

You wanted Athena's owls,

or else to play Lincoln. You

had the bones for it, and you

 

bought the hat, but feathers

stuck in your throat

when you began to speak

about emancipation.

 

The owls never complained

about the long hours

you made them be still

on your lap, the skinny mice

 

you gave them. (It was

unfortunate about the butterflies,

but an owl has to eat.)

In the end we left you, 

 

the owls and I, in front of

the Ford Theater where later

we would all find out

what it means to be really free.

February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

the Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Night Call

 

 

The Night Call

 

 

 

The woods are dark

and important with green, restless

with a pushing wind bruising the white

 petals of the moonflowers against

 

the walls of this house I never enter

that stands at the edge of the dream. I'm

not here to come in from the green dark alive

with a canticle of constellations and the wind strumming

 

 soft in the moon-colored strings of my hair but

sometimes I watch the wisp of a dead bishop

rigid in the doorway holding the lantern high

questioning the heretic hours, the faceless rain,

 

the expanse teeming with life between us

that answers in crickets and owl song

and the giving language of pines

he will never be able to speak.

 

None of these will tell the secret; that I'm here,

 that I'll never come in

to the house filled with traps,

whose convenience of hot and cold

 

running happiness has leaked

out in sickly anger, leaving that stink

of broken love that clings

to a dead wisp calling,

 

calling me back to black dreams

I'll never share again.

I'm already gone in the breathy night,

into the green dark, alive.

 

 February 2022

posted for earthweal's

Wild Mind

 

Photos © joyannjones 2-27-2014, manipulated

 

Pumpkins, Hornets and Dinosaurs

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Trance

 

There he was, drunk as Baudelaire

and twice as fishy when

he unbuttoned the pearled rain from

my shoulders. I'd eaten stars

for dinner, so I didn't care

if it was a trance. 

That night

we were happy as pumpkins.

 

 

 

 

 

Archeology In The Dark

After millions of years, archeologists

found the dinosaurs

playing poker and spinning poems

in the tar. "We never knew we were lost,"

said the dinosaurs, "but thanks

anyway."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Funeral At The Old House

The old house was full of hornets that morning.

Hornets cooked the breakfast( ham and eggs

and mealworms.) Hornets washed the dishes

and went out for funeral groceries.

Hornets paid the bills and mailed them

with the correct postage. They mean well

but they sting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Lucky

 

I keep wondering how

I got shut in with Frankenstein

and the old blind man

who ceaselessly 

lights candles while Frankenstein

smokes all his cigars.

Just lucky, I guess.

 

 

February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Shay's Word List #12

Richard Brautigan 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bonus: My favorite poem by Brautigan:

 

 

 

 

" Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind

and we turn gracefully in the medieval garden of their roaring blossoms.

Oh, I want to turn.

Oh, I am turning.

Oh, I have turned.

Thank you."

 

 

~from Rommel Drives Deeper Into Egypt, by Richard Brautigan 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:Pumpkinhead Self-Portrait, 1972, © Jamie Wyeth  Fair Use

Illustration of dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous.© Jorge Gonzalez Fair Use

Vielles Maisons, 1920 © Helene Guinepied    Fair Use

Still from Bride of Frankenstein, 1935, Universal Pictures  Public Domain

Roses and Beetle, 1890, © Vincent Van Gogh   Public Domain   

Axe, Maul And Wedge

 

 

Axe, Maul And Wedge

 

When you first brought me to the farm, you taught me how to

turn wood into fire. 'To part firewood fiber from fiber, to

 make it small,' you'd say,'you think you need an axe. 

An axe is sharp and  showy; an axe has blade

and bite and swings like the

pendulum of god, but

 

 what you really need to split the wood is a wedge.'You

smiled your wisdom-imparting smile, 'after all a

wedge was the first machine.' Where the

axe falters, beaten, the maul with blow

 after blow pushes the wedge deep

between the weave of atoms

til wood breaks,

 

 forced away from itself, no longer looking like anything

that was once alive, dryads' home, birds' harbor,

just kindling meat. And then is the time for

the axe, flying abrupt and wild as

 a silver moon of cyclone through

 the dry strings of bark and

 heartwood.

 

And when it came time for the

 splitting of us, you might say

you were the maul, she

was the wedge and I

the gaudy axe

 

attacking the last

tough fragments

of what we

 were

 

to provide for

the next

 fire.

 

 

 

February 2022

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images: Wedge, by user Shakespeare, public domain via wikimedai commons Fair Use

Photo of axe via Sunday Muse Fair Use

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

I found you first in the green evening

a secret burn of elongated lines

sketched into the mural of bending pines

by wind's unseen ink, traveling the trail

on an old scent caught in the bracken;

then the adrenaline snap

of your head my way.

You called me from my campfire

to answer the brown beg in your eye,

to fall beneath you like aspen leaves

at your season's yellow turn,

as my own summer died around me.

Pulled like gut to the crescent bow

of the reckless huntress, I chased you

through evergreen shadow, along bone-clean

clattered rockfall, dry creeks where

only the musk smell of hope drew me on

past the deadfalls and I would guess at your way

by the arrowhead and adder's mouth rising

in your wake. Too many years you ran ahead

to pleasure a dozen others who never

saw your winter,

but often when the itch was unbearable in

the time-crack of April's acid sun, you

came to me in the clearing, to rub the felt

from your horns on my shoulder and moan

my name like a sacrifice

low and heavy as the white bull

of Poseidon knee deep in the

sacred wave before the knife.

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Green Fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Arrowhead (Sagittaria Latifolia) and the wild orchid known as green adder's mouth(Malaxis unifolia) are common North American wildflowers. Pardon the mixed metaphors of stag and bull which in time-honored fashion I ascribe to poetic license.You can read a quick synopsis of the myth of King Minos, his wife, the white bull sent him by Poseidon, its pursuit by Heracles and its eventual sacrifice by Theseus here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Pine Forest II, 1901, © Gustav Klimt  Public Domain

Head of a Stag, 1634, © Diego Velazquez     Public Domain

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Winters at white dawn, before the first gaudy ransack of a

scold of jays, two crows come to her feeding cup.

They have no elfish hands to hold interwoven as otters 

do, to keep each other close on cold waters, but still

they float down on air as joint motif. Not one crow,

but two, for in any functional lexicon, the complete set

 

of meaningful units is not one. They eat a dozen peanuts

with the focus she applies eating her mistakes, but with

 

their own goblin squawk and savoring, a black-suited pair

laughing like undertakers on holiday, the charm of a child's

 

toys in their round eyes as they celebrate this meal,so much

more efficient than pecking through reticulated rubbish, so

 

much quicker than sieving crushed bladders or hearts tarry from

asphalt, than abrupt blare-interrupted flutters on the flat luck

 

of skunk or raccoon, where they must thrust their razor beaks 

like needles through black blood glitter, scrape hard bone

 

clean to sew lost life from ruined flesh to full feathers. They

are complete either way, but the woman has made it easier.

Two crows make their own zodiac, seven stars make Orion,

the time-twisted woman who sets out peanuts

 

makes a pageant in vapor, a blood-let of generosity,

a late arrival at sufficiency; for in any functional lexicon,

 

the complete set of meaningful units

is not one.

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Shay's Word List #11:

Ted Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem makes no attempt to capture  Hughes' style or Hughes' own vision of Crow and his journeys, that epic exploration of folk-tale and myth which rewards the reader's time with much more content and flourish than I could ever hope to muster. 

 

But when I think of Hughes, I think of Crow, and so, this poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: For those interested, here is some background on Hughes' collection of poems exploring Crow:

 

After his wife Sylvia Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote nothing for three years. Then he began a work which was finally published as Crow:from the Life and Songs of Crow. As stated by the Ted Hughes Society, it "holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre.  It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism..He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered...."

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Crows in Winter, © N.C. Wyeth   Fair Use

Detail from Crow's Song © Andrea Kowch  generously accessible at her website Andrea Kowch Studios Blog  where you can and should see the entire painting.    Fair Use