Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

Beneath a dead leaf my love lies hidden

with a rose pearl and a starling's feather

where the dark forest unties Her ribbons

 

where night rides as black as robber's leather

with a bagful of moon's most starving hours

in a forest where leaves are falling forever,

 

whose balefires paint meteoric showers,

whose pale sprites teach old lovers to dance

and sew up their wounds with threads of flowers.

 

For grape never saw the wine She decants,

a vintage that ripens with dissolution

aged in a song, sealed with ash and chance.

 

Under the starlight's silver infusion

asleep as a bee in the fading thunder,

 which is volition and which illusion

 

when all that's left of life is to wonder

or lift the leaf that love is under.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal

where I am pleased to host this week's challenge,

First Poems: Door to the Wilder Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fairy Dance, © Arthur Rackham    Public Domain

Spring Beauty © Andrew Wyeth         Fair Use

The Howl

 

 

 

The Howl

 

 

Deep into the night-abiding trees let free the howl

of my heart(that false doppelgänger, that unreliable narrator.)

Course it there, where darkness shakes down her hair,

fleet where the small hands of rain stroke my cheek

lightly,lightly, not so bitter as kisses, not so salt as tears,

til it comes to a stopping.

 

There's a fire panting to light up the hedgerows,

to make wilder things writhe from shadows bending,

those fetches the old gods make to beguile us dappling the void

the new ones provide, movement alone frantic with silence

save for crackle and spit and the skin drum's thud

that still beats in my wrist.

 

Each day dawns with feet cut off, limping,limping,

in the year-turning dark. Willow-wisps glow

in the grove of dancing,coming to draw the light

from the road, off to the flicker where worlds rub skins, 

to flames and fetches, to what's kindling now

where heartwood was riven, heat banked in

 

each unlit log is given to the season of time burning,

of leaves crumbling and forest dreaming the hand I'm holding, 

dreaming and singing in the sough where rain-wind 

ears the night. Can a child born to houses ever discern it

where all that runs in smoke and mist is changed

and confounded, rounded off without logic

 

to fire that howls in my skull

what it won't let me know;

it's my own fetch that's come

to dance in the hedgerow.

 

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #142

 

(and inspired by Brendan's Kindling in the Forest of Light and Shadow

Challenge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dancing Dryads, 1879, © Albert Pinkham Ryder  Public Domain

Wolves,(detail)  © Andrew Wyeth   Fair Use

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

 

 

 

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

(or, No Medicine For Melancholy)

Up on the hill where the blade never goes

skimpy clouds dangle like a phrase of bad prose,

with May Day's and Hallows' night stars locked in boxes,

up on the ghosts' hill with the little foxes

 

sits the old witch always stirring her pot

of bandages and sweet oils, scalding hot,

her dry smile a bleachmark on her tie-dyed skin;

she's only waiting for the crows to begin.

Give her a coin and she'll midwife next year

or recount the rest of your life for good beer

in her voice like a hatchet while her fingers stir

mockingbird's screech into kettle's blur.

What's in the cauldron you sainted crone?

"It's hope, she croons, the alphabet I own.

You can't live on it, though so many try,

but you can certainly die on it time after time

riding the Big Wheel on dandelion silk

sucking tobacco like the baby's milk,

drinking and thinking you'll go up and up

then crushed on the revolve like a styrofoam cup.

 

Before you learn what your body can do to you, you

think its a warm glass of wine poured out for you

but it soon cracks in the time-slip and shatters apart

like your broken heart, dear, your broken heart.

 

Before you see what hope does to the living

you think it's a wise thing, loving and healing,

not bitter and blinding, 

hiding the reminding 

of the shambling footsteps shuffling in back of you

of the behemoth ambling in one night for you

the only hope that turns out to be true:

he'll break all your bones, dear, and eat them, too."

 

But dreams can be merciful with their endings

whatever the bile-twisted gist of their sendings, 

for dawn took her words just as fast as she spoke 

and drowned them all in the lovesongs of crows.

October 2022

posted for Shay's

Word Garden Word List: Susie Clevinger,

a fine contemporary poet and friend

Note: I've taken a lot of liberties with the history of St. Walpurga, a medieval abbess known for Christianizing the heathen Franks, learned in healing, who was canonized for, among other things, the 'miraculous oil' that oozed out from her dead body, and whose saint's day was enthusiastically celebrated with bonfires for many years on May Day. Obviously, I have added All Hallows to her domain quite mendaciously. She was said to be the bane of evil spirits and witches, so I'm sure she is turning over in her grave at being combined with one here. Finally, apologies to the Rocky Horror Picture Show for stealing 'time-slip,' and thanks to Susie for the gift of her poetry all these years.

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht, 1923, © Heinrich Kley

Antlers with Crows, author unknown, via internet

Odin's Mead

 

 

 Odin's Mead

 I am not a jewel

fashioned for your collection

nor the paint-pot

for your ever-moving lips,

not the fertility

to your futility

not assumed erudition

to your chosen perdition.

I am not meant for

your wound of a mouth

bleeding hate-kindling for fire-hags

flaming sweet summer-country, 

not the heart-stake

vitriol will make,

not victory to be claimed

in a war too dirty to name.

 

I'm only the last

taste in the drinking horn

of some bright thing Other

a soft-foot step and fleet hand

pouring drunken snow

brewed by Ones who go

on spirit bones far stronger

but here walk free no longer.

 

I am only the bite

of the berry

dropping seeds from the bramble,

a tart taste in a season

of falling farewells,

a sapphire flicker

brief in the blue mirror,

 a gesturing ghost's fever

behind you forever;

 

a thrum too low to be clear

that only the silenced can hear. 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Kindling From The Forest Of Light And Shadow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: I've recounted this myth before, but briefly to recap, in Norse mythology, the Poetic Mead or Mead of Poetry is a magical beverage made from the murdered body of a being created from the gods' spit which sealed the truce of the Aesir-Vanir war, and was stolen from the  jötnar guarding it by Odin in eagle form, who spits it out into sacred  golden vessels for those chosen by the gods. Whoever drinks from these is given the gifts of poetry and knowledge, and is transformed into a skald and scholar. Odin also releases some of the mead in his droppings as he flies. This anyone can drink, and is called 'the rhymester's share." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: One of the golden horns of Gallehus, public domain

"The Gotlandic image stone Hammars (III). It is held to depict Odin in his eagle fetch (note the eagle's beard), Gunnlöð (holding the mead of poetry) and Suttungr." public domain 

 

Cryptid

 

source

Cryptid

Was it your lover

you saw in the dream,

a spirit bear on fire,

or perhaps

the chupacabra, a steam

 given off/

absorbed  by

too-hot night?

Some cryptid regardless,

a cambion that comes

when eyelids fall down

before the stare of stars

dropped silent with a burn

from black sky

as morning turns to face you

cobra-hooded.

Fragments of him

of you

litter the lawn.

Meteorite dust

hangs in the air;

the smell of old longings

seeps from the roses

powdery as the skin's

 memory of a hand

that still feels,

of lips that know words

are the dark subsidence

 

down which you will tumble

to the place of live shadows

where two become one.

Posted for earthweal's

Open Link #141

~September 2014

 

 

 A little something for All Hallows, originally posted at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Briar Maid

 

 

 

 

 

 The Briar Maid

 

When I slip off this

rumpled dress and slide

down the gullet of time;

when I go, and it won't be long

no matter how long;

I want what they take

from the oven to lie

at the tangleroot feet of

the Briar Maid.

 

She is faceless, fierce, ever

green as her puncture-vine cloak

drawing blood at the touch;

though I pull her strangling hands

from oak and hackberry,

with her thorns she circles sanctuary.

Whatever is left that lives knows

she marks the line

past which Time may not go.

She stands guard, 

through cyclone wind,

drought, wildfire and freeze,

for grey squirrels' trees,

for greybrown birds 

fed fat on sunflower, blackberry

acorn and mulberry,for

peanut thieves, my blue bickering jays

and black satin crows;

 

box turtle and

blister-beetle know,

roving armadillo, red-tail hawk, butterfly

in his last piece of sky, prairie

grass and the snakes that swim it,

rat and king, garden, garter

and copper-headed,

each thing secure in its

small life to come and go.

 

 

All that really matters of her

holds safe underground

as will I, ash-soul in place,

faceless, fierce

to feed and to become 

with her in season

ward and warden of that space

that was my land, that was my heart,

that is the last try

for all that's been loved

too hard, too long,

too strong

to die.

October 2022

posted for earthweal's

Poetry of Becoming

For those who want to know her better, my original 2013 poem about The Briar Girl is here.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos © joyannjones