Seedpod
All your cars had names. You could have
called me a knotted whip, waiting just
off the Sulphur exit for Argon to pull up,
her aqueous sides mottled with
Dallas dust.
When you showed, we were bleak as
strangers till we forgot how lame things lie.
Then, we'd never parted. Hand-fast laughing,
we brazened the blue hole's perilous beauty.
You picked me the seedpod of a water-lily,
catacomb of caves on
a stick
rattling full with brown-eyed pearls.
They watched me from a vase for twenty years.
The day was hot as rooftar in the pot,
the wet air a greasy mop
as we
deployed, Argon starting
with reluctance--all your cars
started with reluctance--
disapproving of me there
in her too small seat.
We drove and talked the sun
up the noon sky, down its back
in trickles of salt, sat on rocks
compliant as clouds
by Turner Falls,
talking by touch, by feel,
by nerve and luck,
words splashed
on dry fields
dust before and after,
your ribs under the blowing shirt
white as nightlights in the dusk.
Radium midnight in the tent;
I
didn't know how
I could ever let you go back.
I cursed
what made me fall like water,
what made me fall like water,
pour out suddenly yes forever,
cursed what made you fly so high,
the wind that fills the windsock and blows on.
And so, I never found that place again
a quarter mile from the Sulphur on-ramp
bright in the heat-breathing beauty of morning.
I spend instead my pale days waiting
empty
as the chair I've prepared
with your books and candlelight, empty as a
dry-rattle lily pod whose pearls
fall one by one on stone.
~May 2014
Process note: Turner Falls is a waterfall on Honey Creek in the Arbuckle
Mountains of south-central Oklahoma..With a height of 77 feet [it] is locally
considered Oklahoma's tallest waterfall...Turner Falls and the blue hole [directly beneath it] are
dangerous and have claimed people's lives every year. Only experienced swimmers
should swim there..~wikipedia
originally posted for real toads
Out of Standard: The Poem is a Curse
Isadora Gruye (The Nice Cage) asks us to write a poem involving a curse.
reposted and revised October 2023
for
where Brendan asks us: "For this challenge, write of DESPERATE BEAUTY. You can use one of Van
Gogh’s paintings as a starting point, or you may find all the required
colors in another painter or poet or from your personal palette. How
does a poem render the beautiful? What hues must it choir? How does
strangeness improve beauty? What are the limits of beauty? Where or when
does the desperation come in? And why is it alone infinite?
Images: Water Lily Seed Pod, Bobbye Wolfe via Pinterist
Windsock via google image search, author unknown.
Paul Gauguin's Armchair ©Vincent Van Gogh
Turner Falls, Oklahoma, via Wikipedia
