Empty House

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Empty House

 

 

 

The Parisienne within

sits gracefully bent at a small cafe not

three blocks from the Louvre.

The square is an old negative, each color

quenched in its reverse, as she sighs,

 

regards the croissant moon, a dangling puff pastry

pinned to a papier-mache sky some

rabid surrealist has daubed flat black, faintly

tinted by the violet blood of stars. She waits here

for her assignation: l'etranger dangereux

 

encountered by chance on le Metro. She savors again

the fragrance of strong dark tobacco

caught in his hair as they swayed far too close.

She waits many hours since her house is empty and

waiting seems better than that.

'And what is an empty house,' she muses

over her fifth vin de pays, 'but a cupped palm

dripping the bright constant stigmata of 

your own imperfections?' No amount of pancakes can

fill its hollow stomach. No birds will nest in

 

its unkindled chimney. There is only dust white

as milk, silence and dead flowers,

a dog that barks a heartbeat somewhere in the distance,

abandoned without music like the deserted cafe

the Parisienne has just left.

 

As the rackety clap of her stilettos

fades around the corner,

a tall shadow drifts over her table,

but there's only a thin thread of ghost-smoke

twining up from a stubbed-out Gauloise.

March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for 

WGWL 3/4/24 at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Burned House

Cosmos 'Sonata White'

The Burned House

When I wasn’t looking, the house burned down,

that tall one on the cliff’s edge that sucked in smoke

and died. It was full of mirrored rooms, that house

I used to own, each one a tank where dreamfish swam in fire,

where light flickered up on scales of copper-gold, now white

lumps of half-burned bone, refleshed with sudden coats of ash.

How were those rooms so full of light transformed to ash?

to flecks scraped from scorched love letters skittering down

the drive, black ink on blue paper burned feathery white?

Our words undressed became a script of smoke,

banded envelopes a fuel for chemical fire

that when my head was turned burned down the house.

Blackened beams, obscene leg-stumps of house       

frame possibilities negated. Nothing made of ash

can be reused. I sift the morsels left uneaten by the fire

that swallowed up the core, the spit-out shingles flying down

in flaps of flame, exhaling heat while carcinogenic smoke      

escaped from window-mouths on wings of restless white.

When it happened I was working soil for the Sonata Whites

but purity failed; so fire’s finger drew a circle round the house:

C. sulphureus instead, petals solar bright, tangerine smoke

drifting against the threshold wild alive, drawing flame from ash,

from rich dead dreamfish char piled in drifts of down;

now where white rebelled I fill my hand with redgold fire.

So I come to the doorway drawn by memory's fire       

to rake through dulled nails and teeth of white

half-melted days, look for the last inhabitants down

beneath the rotten timbers. The ghost-house

trembles, gives up its bones and sleeps in ash.

I pick and fuss at ruins, only to fill my bag with smoke:

photographs once rainbow stained to sepia, smoke-

colored faces turned to relics, eyeholes eaten black by fire

unreal as fingerbones of non-existent saints, grey as ash

and as unlikely to reignite; silver-colored trinkets faded white,

misshapen in the reflux of the firehose, lockets that housed

twists of burn-clipped hair lost in love's long down.

My insurance covers none of this disaster-whitened ash,

a total loss except for cosmos smoke, gold-warm as any fire,
embers at the doorway of the wild that can’t burn down.

 

C. sulphureus

~originally written September 2011, 
ruthlessly revised






 for Brendan's Doors

 Forgive the repost, but my time is not my own these days...

Cosmos is a perennial or half-hardy annual in the aster family, native to Mexico, Arizona, Florida and the southern U.S. down into Central and South America. It grows in both wild and cultivated form. It is heat and drought tolerant and reseeds itself so freely some forms, including C. sulphureus, are considered a weed in some places. Cosmos bipinnatus 'Sonata White" is a pure white hybrid form, bred for the cut flower trade.

Photo: Cosmos bipinnatus "Sonata White" by Julie Anne Workman, Forde Abbey, Somerset, UK
courtesy wikipedia Par Julie Anne Workman (Travail personnel) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Cosmos sulphureus 'Bright Lights' author unknow via internet. Fair use

News Of The Whirled

 News Of The Whirled

It's all pix

elated into mess, crackled

digital distortion, tonight's

broadcast. The set's

failing.

A hunger, a shadow,

black furred blur

of flesh and age

mouths at the edge

never still except the lull

of false hope

its only cunning.

It's all so neat

so cancelled and concluded

here at the ending

and yet occluded

dispossessed;

the ordered home so long

invaded--

 a house

redecorated

by earthquakes.

~May 2017

 posted for Brendan's News

Images: Stardust, 1993, © Peter Alexander. Fair use via wikiart.otg

The House of Ill Fame, by Heironymous Bosch, circa 1500. Public domain.

House On The Hill

Image (c)  Erik Johansson

House on the Hill

I’ve built a  fine house on top of my head, grey

dormer windows, tall stories, preaching chimneys,

heavy boards of years across the door. 

It’s easier now, not going in and out,

and I needed a way to keep out the dead.

The time it's taken you'd never guess, to 

trim my ears into topiary frogs, meticulous sentinels here

by the door, crouched comical, listening and green

on the hair I’ve mowed smooth as a fog. Totems

well placed can help keep out the dead.

Of course, my eyes still stay outside, blind ovals in

the wild blow of storm, hit by each unseen coldslap surprise,

while inside my house, white incense smoke takes 

the sweetened song of a bird in a cage from attic

to hall, to ward the doors that keep out the dead.

There's the child in her room, lining treasures up.

See her bone beads of grace in a plastic cup gleam

rich red in an eyeglow turned in, flicker 

and spark giving light where there is

neither fire nor candle to keep out the dead.

She wears my mist necklace of disappearing jewels

clothes of umber leaves, shoes from old squirrel tracks

left on the lawn, paints my face with the scent 

of rosemary rubbed on the dark skin of dawn,

come climbing up over the living and dead.

And the view is good from the slanting roof,

laid on the summit of my growth, looking out

where my own eyes ever go, beyond my topiary ear

to the walled horizon of clouds and fear

the dead must cross to get to here.

~May 2011

A little Octoberish music from the past, which I was inspired to dig out of mothballs by a post at Oran's Well. I haven't revised it much.

The artist for the image at top, Revelation Fields, is Swedish photographer Erik Johansson. All rights belong to him. His website of amazing art is here, and his print store, here

The Empty Quarter

The Empty Quarter

In the dry slaughterhouse

of time imperative,

where blood disappears
before it stains the dune's
granular face, change has let

a fragment of me live

without your empty kiss

inhabited by insistent teeth,

your cold clay lips' crumble,

uncomfortable with truth,

your eyes that claim

no color of their own,

dead leaves on the green

and formless sea adrift,

always traveling away.

Change has let me live

here in its hot and proper suburb,

on the dunes that sting and shift,

where you loved me once

as much as you could love

before you thought

you'd found out what I am, where

in the sliding sand the sentence began;

the jailor's bored withdrawing bit by bit

of all on which a prisoner might live;

however skilled the hand, cruelty is

yet another loss, worrying bones 

and flesh, spitting out

the dirty artifacts of

fallacy and reality. 

So keep your empty kiss

to gnaw yourself to sleep.

Brush off the fossil bones of the extinct,

reconstruct exhibits of your conceit, 

so large and dead.

Where I have gone, where I

have still to go, no shows are held,

no knife can bite, and change has let me live

where I will never need again

the dwelling of your caress.

~May 2015

posted for     real toads

Get Listed: Pablo Neruda

The viceroy of vocabulary, grapeling (it could be that) delves for this month's word gold into the incomparable poetry of one of the finest original poets of the 20th (or any) century, Chile's Pablo Neruda. See the link for the words listed, all of which I have used here in this feeble attempt to touch a little of Neruda's duende, (not autobiographically especially.)

Process note: The Rub' al Khali or Empty Quarter is the second-largest sand desert in the world, encompassing most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. ~wikipedia







Images: The Gift, 1921,  and Rayograph--The Kiss, 1922, by Man Ray
Fair Use via wikiart.org

The Leech

Lisa Gordon Photography

The Leech

After I died

they brought me here

or did I come here to die?

It's  hard to keep clear.

Still here

I am, a captured thing,

put in a white room where

they'd forgotten to bind me tightly. I

remember how close you came

that first time,

before I taught you better.

I think that was when I fell

in love with you. Your eyes

seemed to know the

difficulty of being a woman

without learning

to love pain, to see the locked attic,

the dead children,

my husband's fat red

face, my portion neatly totted up

behind the impatient

pig-pink eye, the closed fist

so different from your

smooth gloved hands, your

apothecary's fingers;  I can feel them

stirring mercury and poppies under

my skin, your leeches my sweet babes,

their bright mouths suckling out 

a stream of sins, your needles-full of delirium,

lighting flares in my eyes with alchemist's fire.

You called it medicine, I called it

paradise, 

or hell

as if I could know any more

the dissolving glaciers of days turned

into icewater sweat

collecting in my skull's hollows,

the snow of years

transmuted  to liquid

birthing  a belly of wildflowers

in  frozen-over fissures

now closing to a treatment

beyond all knowing

in a spring that never was.

~April 2014

found on the internet

posted for     real toads

Interpretations with Margaret: Willard Asylum

This time in her Artistic Interpretations feature at IGWRT, Margaret Bednar (Art Happens 365) has introduced us to the Willard Asylum(operational 1869-1995) the photography of Lisa Gordon, who toured it and captured many striking images, including the one at the top of this post, and also the "Willard Suitcase" project of Jon Crispin, which sounds and looks absolutely fascinating, though it was not in play in this poem. For full details of the challenge, visit the toads link above.

Process notes: The use of leeches during the active time period of Willard Asylum is anachronous and used purely as a poetic device. 'Leech' is also an archaic term for a physician.

Top Image: Photo of Strap at Willard Asylum, copyright Lisa Gordon Photography

Used with permission