Earthbound Fish

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earthbound Fish

 

 

It wants to fly

it does

or at least swim

but melancholy never made 

a path to waves or sky

any more than 

Escher's tessellations made

a living

school of fish. They only made

wallpaper

or a fish-dance of replicated cells

that might be somehow the

mute components

of a self-eating brain.

 

It needs wings

that want to be brushes,

that will refresh the distempered

canvas from black

to floating clouds.

Feathers are only clouds, after all,

air things clipped and pressed

into Icarus-wax, 

so why not?

But the paint is caked and dry,

feather-breaking,

and the staggered beating

 like an old heart

that stumbles itself into silence.

Meanwhile ten thousand starlings

live in their moving mosaic, 

a matrix of cloud,

a canvas

of pure flight

from earthdark to light;

 

it wants it wants

 so much

to fly.

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fish wallpaper by M.C. Escher, courtesy of  Etoffe

Starling murmuration over Scotland, no attribution given. Via internet  Fair Use 

The Silver Song

 

 

 

 

 The Silver Song

(a 55)

I don't remember when

the Black Fear came; it seems

it's always been here, a broken

rotted smell under the floor,

invisible but disruptive

as catching on fire.

Bright-piercing in the night-oak,

a bird too small to see

sings quicksilver notes.

 

Which more unexpected,

that it sings at all,

or that I hearing it

rejoice?

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom's Desperately Different (the unexpected)

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (Blurred Figure) ©Zdzisław Beksiński   Fair Use

Blue Tit, ©Karl Martens  Fair Use

 

Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned to live

for very little

to accept what shows however small

however inadequate

to sit with it in friendship

but there is still

 

something else.

There's a light I crave

that shapes mountains and willows,

a radiant mind flaring each morning open

though it paints its gold on all alike:

the long claw of the

 

promising horizon-smile,

the stiffness that

came into your arms

as you held me, the

little dark murderer's bird

who pecks the grains away.

 

It's still that light

sifting bees' wings

across sage to kindle the flowers,

lambent as slanting love itself

in earth's witchwild eyes as she holds

in her unprisoned prism'd heart

 

even us;

 

even our coarse

demanding

insatiable selves

she will teach the one word:

 

enough.

 

 

 

 

 July 2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for desperate desires

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Cottonwoods III 1944, ©Georgia O'Keefe, 

The Thief 1996 ©Jamie Wyeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Child As A Postcard

 

 

 

 

The Child As A Postcard

 

 

To the passing postcard written in

the massing uncolored sky, posed

in the medium of ice and flesh surely

my child-self seemed the response,

scribbled head high to the bare lilacs,

a winter blackbird lost in a fragrance

dancing to cold.

 

While the wind was witching, while it was

twitching my skirts, and its white book

came clattering down with the frost on every

page, while the sky snowed down with the pomp

and swagger of a drunken policeman, did the

heft then of my grandfather's arms know me

for myself as I determined,

as everything I determined 

thereafter came to be? Song or catastrophe,

the wide smile of the chimera, or its

diamond mask, the bright white light

of a lilac breaking bare in the snow while

I watched time plow its path

across my life;

not a moon-fair there, not a star to be seen

dropped from the basket of a lover's dream, 

only a stillness of snow haunting the hour

of papier-mache in a maundering dazzle.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List # 10

Wallace Stevens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: I have not tried to emulate Stevens' style. That is far above my pay grade. But I have tried to infuse the poem with some of his moods and fancies as I interpret them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image:Snow Effect: Winter In The Suburbs, © George Seurat

Public Domain. I have manipulated this image.

Hues

 

 

Hues

 

 

 He was just 

 

one of too many

born black for the factory

taught to make salt

 

into roses and clocks, just

a sole to spare the parade marshal's foot,

a board for the floor, another pot

 

of coffee for the landlord

but there was something

he got from the moon; that weary

 

knife-smile, a jones for books and

bitter truth, a taste of jazz

in his blood, and so

he became instead

the blister on the heel, the knot

in the plank, the spider in the cream,

the argument for faces.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

Shay's Word List: Langston Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The photo above is a snapshot of Hughes with his good friend and fellow activist, Louise Thompson Patterson, both thorns in the side of contemporary white/status quo culture as members of the Communist Party and prime movers in the Harlem Renaissance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Shoemaker,  1945, © Jacob Lawrence   Fair Use

Louise Thompson and Langston Hughes, shipboard, circa 1915-1925  Public Domain