Tears Of The Moon

 

 

 

Tears Of The Moon

"La mar no tiene naranjas, ni Sevilla tiene amor..."

(The sea has no oranges, nor Seville any love...)

from Adelina de Paseo, by Federico Garcia Lorca

I.

The sea is made

from the tears of the moon.

They fall like meteorites

to build the splash of azure rivers.

They fall like rocks

the air has set on fire in

a coliseum of dust, an iron mist

burning with the blue taste of salt.

The sea is cold, incalculable

as the heart of my beloved,

changeful, infinite, self-satisfied

and blind. This is why

the moon cries. She knows she lays

her silver face for nothing

across the drenched toss of the

erasing waves. The sea

is too busy,

tonight, and every night.

II.

The sea has far to travel

to kiss the dun lips of Spain, to fondle 

Gibraltar like a primitive doll,

to curl the sand under

on the Costa del Sol,

guitaring sweet lovesongs

to women with eyes like summer figs

who walk with the chiming of rice in the wind

whose hips round as oranges

call night after night

for the men who don't come; nuns

of blue rivers, learning to understand

the tears of the moon

that drip from the lids of

an extinguished rock, while on the

ruined plains of a waterless country

an old woman reads Lorca at midnight,

with the tears of the moon on her cheeks.

~January 2020

originally posted for earthweal

Open Link

 

 

 

 

reposted for Desperate Crossings at

desperate poets

Images: Orange Trees on the Road to Seville, 1903 © Joaquin Sorolla Public Domain

The Font, 1930 © Salvador Dali Public Domain

Beach With Absence of Yellow

 

 

 

 

 

Beach With Absence Of Yellow

 

 

 

 

Because

you were gone

the sun was a gin-soaked gypsy

in a yellow dress

going inevitably down

down where sticky darkness

wants to go, sliding from

the mouths

 

of ruined sailors

whose pleasures led them to the overflow,

drowned down gold-bright waves, row on row,

to wash up sorry scarecrows

on the shore, back-stabbed and 

broken to the empty land once more.

Because

everything is gone,

the morning sun is sober as a cat,

bored and batting at the palm-leaf's knees.

The sailor's flattened hat is

shredded on an unpersuaded breeze

that only wants to quit

 

and all along the boulevard

cigarette butts still roll,

the mirrors lie,

the telephones ring.

 

 

March 2023

 

 

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Word List: Randy Newman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Venus and the Sailor, 1935 ©Salvador Dali 

Vegetal Puppets, 1938 ©Remedios Varo

 

 

 

 

Bluejay's Wing

 

 

 

 

Bluejay's Wing

 

 

The first time I saw the sea, its reaching miles

of life and emptiness that twinned,

I was a barefoot child who thought

herself a woman, made of light

and incapable of sin.

The sea is high again today

with a thrilling flush of wind.

 

By day I scan the amber sky and feel

its cheapjack promise scratched upon my skin.

By night I scout the evercoming storm

with my bareback diamond eye

and heart of tin.

The sea is loud again today

with a spoken word of wind.

 

I see now how a palette rich with sun

bleaches out as monotone, greyscaled and thin,

its broken colors robbed of breathing light

as bluejays pale away on cloudy days,

their feathers keeping all the blue within.

The sea runs high again today

with a humming requiem of wind.

I'll never see again the dazzled tide; 

my age is given to the prairie wind

but I won't believe I'll never see the sun,

or the mottled azure delicately brushed in

to point and praise a bluejay's cunning wing.

The sea is high again today

with a thrilling flush of wind.

 

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets Poetics:

Opening Sentences

 

 

 

Note: My opening sentence appears in the last two lines of the first and final stanzas, and is from Justine, by Lawrence Durrell, the first book in his Alexandria Quartet, which I count among my top ten early influences in writing. And some may sense here another early influence, Emily Dickinson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled, ©Zdzislaw Beksinski 

Wing of a Blue Roller, 1512, © Albrecht Durer

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

 

 

Home With The Diatoms

 

 

When I was a child

before sleep we prayed

for love to be shown, for safety to stay,

starved children in Korea to be saved.

Then the light would go off.

I'd put my real bed

of conches and nautilus twists

under the toss of the night's waves.

Regal on the seafloor

shells poked their bubbling heads

up out of snow-sand. Aquarelle fins and

gold-grey eye-globes blinked around me,

all greeted with a princess flip

of my green-scaled tail.

Reclined with coelacanths,

eyes blueing in my head,

all my mother-cut hair grown

long as a squid's arm,

I waited to swim into sleep,

watching the shadows of

far-above gulls mottle the green ceiling,

alone yet blanketed in

life watching over me, drowsing

to the epochs' stereopticon flash.

When we met in the deluge

you called in a lost language

for that nightspell to rise, to link us,

to sink us completely

in diatoms, wave after wave,

kissing underwater, not afraid to breathe

not afraid to drown, kelp-hair

in the undertow fanned and fluttered

summoned by a sea-fire of peace

to make ashes of fear.

 

March 2022

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:

Shelter

Process note: "..Diatoms are unicellular [microalgae]: they occur either as solitary cells or in colonies, which can take the shape of ribbons, fans, zigzags, or stars..Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year,  take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Bright Liquid, © Edmond Dulac    Fair Use

Pink Shell With Sea Weed, 1937  © Georgia O'Keefe    Fair Use

The Wandering Eye

The Wandering Eye

I made you

from a map, a hawk and a flower.

I thought you

clockwork-canny, full of power,

a road-veined eye for

spying the highway hours;

a bird, a map,

a flower meant to be

a fragrance and a passage 

 seeking sea.

But so far away

you flew there could never be

a coming back

despite the lies, despite the slick pretense,

so to see you now

as a morph'd and piddling glance

on a burning

globe of constant transience

is only another

blink of blight and fear.

You tell me this

is the you who's real and clear;

fine words from one

who's broken every mirror. 

August 2020, 

(with fragments from March 2014)

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images:Still Life with Spherical Mirror, 1934 © M.C. Escher   Fair Use
footer, artist and title unknown,  Fair Use

Tears Of The Moon

Tears Of The Moon

"La mar no tiene naranjas, ni Sevilla tiene amor..."

(The sea has no oranges, nor Seville any love...)

from Adelina de Paseo, by Federico Garcia Lorca

I.

The sea is made

from the tears of the moon.

They fall like meteorites

to build the splash of azure rivers.

They fall like rocks

the air has set on fire in

a coliseum of dust, an iron mist

burning with the blue taste of salt.

The sea is cold, incalculable

as the heart of my beloved,

changeful, infinite, self-satisfied

and blind. This is why

the moon cries. She knows she lays

her silver face for nothing

across the drenched toss of the

erasing waves. The sea

is too busy,

tonight, and every night.

II.

The sea has far to travel

to kiss the dun lips of Spain, to fondle 

Gibraltar like a primitive doll,

to curl the sand under

on the Costa del Sol,

guitaring sweet lovesongs

to women with eyes like summer figs

who walk with the chiming of rice in the wind

whose hips round as oranges

call night after night

for the men who don't come; nuns

of blue rivers, learning to understand

the tears of the moon

that drip from the lids of

an extinguished rock, while on the

ruined plains of a waterless country

an old woman reads Lorca at midnight,

with the tears of the moon on her cheeks.

~January 2020

posted for earthweal

Open Link

Images: Orange Trees on the Road to Seville, 1903 © Joaquin Sorolla Public Domain

The Font, 1930 © Salvador Dali Public Domain

 

Friday 55 March 30 2018

Another Friday, another 55 words to chronicle the long march, the wild hunt, the dance of the living and dead. We come to remember a man who had more to give than take from the world of blogging, Galen Hayes, and to explore the meme he brought us as the world turns around us in its ceaseless change. There are no rules, no social obligations, except to write 55 words of prose or poetry--no more, no less, and link them in the comments below between Friday and Sunday morning for myself and others to read. Comment moderation is once again on to discourage the trolls, so please be patient.

I dreamed I smelled the sea this week...

Seascape, 3 AM

Landlocked I dream

of the wind that

comes ten-thousand miles

without one human breath,

wind that throws

its sleepless

seasmell in my face,

singing louder than

the giant's roar

of broken time.

 Free as wolves

before the hunter's shot,

alone with the one I've loved

but never had;

my seaweed dreams

blow this life

away.

~March 2018

Optional Instrumental Accompaniment

Image: Seascape, 1879, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir    Public Domain