Seedpod

 

 

 

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, 

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

desperate poets

 

 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

 

Brujeria

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brujeria

 

I don't know what fetch

was living in his hair

but there was always something

 

when it blew back in the hot breath

of the redtangled hills; new-hatched snakes perhaps

curling from the small broken shells of his words,

 

tendrilous avatars in those nights that hid

the color of blood so well;

or soft rain-threads each sweet as a sugarfall

 

on my open face as we made love,

for the medicine painting, not la brujeria,

skintalking the Healing Way.

 

Whatever it was, it

wasn't the mild dog in his eyes,

not fur, not a tail-wag.

 

It was syllogistic, sensate, restless;

hungry as a hopping flea.

whose tiny itch is only felt later.

Perhaps it even had Buddha nature,

or something else

 borrowed from Kali.

 

It was one of those things about him

that taught me to look away.

I saw only its soft brown habitat

as I slipped my fingers through

felt its satin dance

against my touch

but what lived there never left

like all the other things I tried to disappear.

I could feel them breathing

though they never made a sound

not even now when

they ghost him back to my dreams.

August 2023

posted for Odd Little Things

at desperate poets

 

Art nouveau lithograph poster 1903 ©Alphonse Mucha  Public Domain

Man with Long Hair, ©Odd Nedrum    Fair Use

 

Cat's Cradle

 

Cat's Cradle

 

 

All that summer you stalked me

with your tiger-flower eyes 

yellow as saffron,

ochre-flecked with 

an unknown pollen,

 

shining

blood-bright in

your weathered face,

and those few words you owned,

more rough than real.

Under the windy moon

light was as fickle and brief

as a glimpse of truth,

a falling star. Fish slid by

like lost ideas

 

dark as omens

beneath the emerald lake

that deepened the closer

I pushed towards shore,

their flat eyes swiveling back,

 

noodled to piscine

laughter;

they waited like me

for the hook

to pull them up.

 

We watched the sun

burn its last amber coal,

and gave back its mirage heat

to the night like the

pave-stones of Babylon,

 

all that jungle summer

when I closed my eyes to time.

May 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Noodling is fishing for catfish using one's bare hands, and is practiced primarily in the southern United States. The noodler places their hand inside a discovered catfish hole in order to catch the fish...the origin of the term is unknown." ~wikipedia

My compound words for the prompt were moonlight, starfish and sunburn. I also used an abundance of additional ones not carved to order, just for fun.

Images: Night, 1905 © Mikolojus Konstantinus Ciurlionis    Public Domain

Tigridia pavonia 'Aurea" (Tiger flower) photographer unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Apple Wine, Bitter Greens

 

 

 

 

 

Apple Wine, Bitter Greens

 

 

 

 

You gave me apple wine and bitter greens

a highwire hawk who'd learned to trick the sky,

a line of lakes where the white moon hid her gleams

in cups of apple wine and bitter greens,

in fantasies, daydreams and guillotines

til we were just a wildfire burning dry

drunk on apple wine and parched of green,

two highwire hawks who thought we'd tricked the sky.

 

 

 

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

 Shay's Word List #13

 

 

and 

 

 

 

dVerse Poets Poetics:

After St. Valentine has left the building

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Evening at Volga, 1888, ©Isaac Levitan    Public Domain

Courting Redtails, 2008 ©Gouldingken     via wikimedia commons     Fair Use

 

Red And Gold

 

 

 

 

 Red And Gold

I.

Under my feet bright bodies

of leaves, mast from the oak, crunch

of all the discards of summer, fire's coming

crackle; percussion accompaniment

to sweet smoke of raked heaps burning

where you stand smiling,

match in hand.

II.

Peridot green under amethyst clouds

the after-storm sun bent the grass back

with sudden heat, as you bent my bones

with one touch, onyx eyes

closing on summer's fire

while the last light left brushed the waterfall's

singing to red steam.

III.

Around my skin a white pelt of

frozen water, my remembering numbing as wind,

 howling hard as a cast-out wolf ten states

from its pack, too old to fight

too full not to cry,

 under a sharp sickle moon

that sees nothing at all.

IV.

Rolling wheels on warm red dirt

over the creek, around the bends where 

trees hide the climb, mask the descent,

 shaking their gravid buds in the rage of air

pushing me, pulling me,

past the point where words

could make me stop.

V.

Every season dies around me,

every leaf, every white-muzzled wolf

in my wilderness, each golden October

burning red under the match

til nothing is left but the journey

I reverse night

after night in my sleep.

October 2021

posted for Meet the Bar: Cadralor plus Nobel

at dVerse Poets

Images: Autumn Leaves, Lake George, NY, 1924 ©Georgia O'Keefe   Fair Use

Red Dirt Road After Spring Rain, author unknown, via internet.    Fair Use

 

The White House

 

 

 

 

The White House

 

 

Fall is sky

of milk and water, of

sand and blood, a field of ev'ry fruit

and folly, gathered around the slant white house that

rocked its boards like a boat and took in

the moon's footloose orphans.

The white house 

grew a child;

it seemed safe there by the

warm muddy lake,rough beach of red dirt,

trees bent over brown water by the weight of locusts'

spell chanting out the night, the old gods'

didgeridoo. There were

always dogs

 

in the yard,

toys on the floor, music

in the hall, food in the kitchen, bells

of laughter rung on blue sheets, your bright virgin eyes

umber as winter oak, wild as wine,

alight in the white house.

Now the child

 

is grown, you

are gone, and nothing is

safe. The white house, drifting in its trees

by the clouded lake, is a slow rocking boat un-

manned but full; October's hand turns wind

 to firelight for moon's

last orphan.

September 2021

 

 

posted for 

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: This poem is written in the triquain form, consisting  of seven line stanzas with lines of 3,6,9,12,9,6,and 3 syllables respectively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Old house, author unknown, via Sunday Muse  Fair Use

Autumn Day circa 1986,  © joyannjones 

 

Ghost In Mirrorlight

Ghost In Mirrorlight

The moon poured only ghosts of mirrorlight

but thick and rich as the cream of your summer skin

that blinked pale against the cooling coffee-black night

when the wind was just a comfortable autumn beast,

shaggy with the flurry of falling leaves

and not the winter-bitter glistening back of sleet.

You had no cold love, served without a sauce

nor lukewarm, listening merciless as drought, only

a love that never thinks of loss

to  give to me, and all of it was mine,

the kisses on each inch, the ones that traced

each rise of breath, each shadow in my eye,

from the first that falls upon the cornerstone

to the last

that travels inward to the bone.

My inheritance of teeth, my broken stars

you covered in the heart's deep underground

where I discovered that escape erases scars,

that a lifelong thirst required only tea

made too hot and fragrant for regret,

which you and luck had kindly brought for me

in a tortoiseshell cup

some child had left behind

when love was a shrine.

 March 2020

posted for Kerry's 

March Word List Challenge 

Images: Teatro de Sombras,As Cinco Estações, (Shadow Theater, Five Stages) 1976 ©Lourdes Castro    Fair Use

The Terre-Cuite Tea Set, 1910 ©Childe Hassam   Public Domain

Blue Norther

Blue Norther

If I saw you now

blue-sudden as a Norther

borrowed cherokee hair gone snowy

wolfhound jaw locked against

the puzzle in your buckshot eyes

would it be as it was, hard with

love and leaving,

full of the boy who wasn't ours,

of jaguar ghosts, bankrupt sacrifice;

an emptying out, a fumbled
 passing on?

~April 2013
reposted January 2020

55 sharply falling degrees, once for the g-man,
and once more for
 earthweal Open Link

Process notes:  BLUE NORTHER:    Refers to a swift-moving cold frontal passage in the southern Great Plains, marked by a dark, blue-black sky with strong wintery winds from the northwest or north and temperatures that may drop 20°F to 30°F in a few minutes. ~weather.com





Image:Storm Front by Vicious Kitten on the now obsolete flick'r  Fair Use

Friday 55 November 17 2017

Welcome again to the Friday 55, where we remember the host who never failed to find the right word to elevate the weekend to a shared pleasure, Galen Hayes, and continue the tradition of writing flash fiction, prose or poetry, in exactly 55 words. If you have been inspired to craft an artifact of such dimensions this week, please leave a link in the comments, and I will be by to enjoy the result, as soon as I can. The prompt will remain open as usual, from Friday til Sunday evening, but comment moderation remains off, as I will be not always online.

I'll start the parade with this...

 You

You 

came to take me back 

where words can't follow,

to a turtle of a land

head drawn in,

full of secret life

that hides its eyes;

you

brought me

gasping in a dream

to see the patchwork creature 

sewn from thee and me

so long dead

suddenly alive

who I still want to be.

 ~November 2017

 

Sunday morning note: Ending things a little early this week, but the 55 will return next Friday.

Images: Turtle, author unknown, via internet. Fair use.

Turtle, © Luc Tuymans,  all rights reserved. Fair use.

Flannel Perfume

Flannel Perfume

Some weeks after

you left me, panhandling

into the chile parched Mexican dust,

I unwrinkled your shirt

from the closet floor,

accused its clumsy plaid

white for weddings,

red for the factory moon,

black for lies.

It defended itself

with your incense--

old glue, old books, fresh blood.

Too much of you came to testify,

sandalwood hair hung long, flying

brows, the sawblade of

your crosscut smile

rusty but sharp enough.

I could smell the verdict

blowing off on the

highway's blistered back

windy-wild and away, 

feel the unsteady fall

of petal-pink walls, 

each day's rubbled brick 

lichened over in patchouli shadows,

hanging stale in the cell of

a convict's years to come. 

~March 2017

Note: this poem has been edited since originally posted.

for Susie's Perfume    at real toads

Images: Red flannel plaid, manipulated, via the internet
The Roses Of Heliogabalus, 1888, Detail,  by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Public domain via wikiart.org