Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becalmed on a sea of smoke

a nowhere that could be anywhere

I made an indigo wind

to fill my sails.

 

"It's just enchantment, " you said,

"It's not personal." as

the voyage began

to tick down

 

kiss by kiss, bookmarks

in the wildness

floating your stopwatch eyes.

"Time's up!" you said,

and changed the rules.

I thought everything not experimental

was forbidden, but it seems heartbreak

will ruin a boat.

The shipwreck was easy,

but the distance to shore

was a bitch. Still

but still,

 

better to drown

than to straddle a broken bench

and bleed, bailing a sinking boat

with no bottom. 

April 2024

posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Boat of the Mermaid, ©Sabin Balasa via internet Fair Use

A Rocky Shore, Iona  ©Samuel Peploe, via internet    Fair Use

Fairy Tale Of The Moth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Fairy Tale Of The Moth

(a 55)

 

 

 

In the Amazon there's a moth
who lives by drinking the night-tears
of sleeping birds.

By day she's folded asleep
in deep green chambers where purple frogs
sweat pearls of poison.

If she dreams, it's only by accident.
At dawn the birds fly up, eyes
open for song, tears given

without intent or knowledge
as I give mine, silver life
to the mouths of memories.

 

March, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: Gorgone macarea is the moth referred to here, one of several species of Lepidoptera who pratice lachryphagy for survival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credits: Blue Morpho Butterfly, 1865 © Martin Johnson Heade 

Great Peacock Moth, 1889 © Vincent Van Gogh 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Music Of Birds And Lions

 

 

 

The Music of Birds and Lions

If I had to say something about it

I would just mention

the way your eyes

moved through me
like fever through a lion,

like the brown-soled boots

 

of a Victorian explorer

walking lightly

with ownership, a dominion

powered by steam

careful always to
keep an echo-

map of the outback

in beige buckram binding

firmly gripped in your mind,

 

referencing pages dogeared

recording the reasons

not to fall behind on

a dangerous journey;

or that your hands

were always sliding in

a slipstream of tasks, were

water, embracing stones smooth

in their blue satin beds,

leaving behind a geologic

 

Alexandrian library

of lithic messages, codes

in languages of a few extinct

species of birds, envoys and diplomats;

that your long fingers on the stops

were your flight feathers,

playing a recital at nightfall

of calling macaws that come to color

the shadow-fronds of sunset palms

with their bright rest;

 

but there's no need to

talk about what you stored
under my skin, or tattoos in birdsong

that can't be forgotten,

so I only strum the music of it

where the lions rise

in the mauve gauze of
the jungle dark.

~December 2014

(minor revisions, 2022)

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #144

(Nothing bubbling up from the cauldron this week, so posting another oldie, one originally written for Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads)

Images: The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Henri Rousseau

The Moment of Truth, 1892, Paul Gauguin

Public domain

Sunflower Summer

SCROLL DOWN FOR THE FRIDAY 55

Sunflower Summer

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done. 

~ William Blake

 

It was a sunflower summer

counting steps to the sun

as the heat ran away

after a bad opening night.

Monarchs and hummingbirds

trimmed the yellow-gold plates,

bright beads of Christmas glass.

Rabbits came to the back door

with tea and grass hats

asking the way to Wonderland

til everything went south

blind as salmon in time's reckless river.

I spoke crackling long distance

to the place where you'd been.

It was noncommittal, polite, quite

willing to take a message, yet

I never heard back,

though every sunflower

turned its gathering face to you

in that unmaking summer

of black rolling thunder

in the East, lightning crawling

in the navy blue clouds

towards

a red greed of fire, tree-torches smoking

 a banshee wind in the West.

The scorch of mankind

opened its heart to the storm

and the storm came inside

 like Jesus in a circus tent.
 

Still,

against autumn's flood

the sunflowers pack light

into rucksacks of seeds

for the traveler's journey

 to come.

 August 2020

posted for 

The Sunday Muse

and earthweal's Open Link,

(for Mondays theme of Storms and Rainbows)

Images: Sunflowers, artist unknown   Fair Use

The March Hare, © John Tenniel circa 1865  Fair Use

Guillotine Moon

Guillotine Moon

The moon cuts constant

even as her yellow face

sizzles off electric wind to

 spade-black void,

digging

 the dark day's shadows.

No wandering

in mist or star's orison

takes me far from loss.

No color seems to belong

to empty steam.  The last rain

bent my back like a bow,

mocking the horns of

her pale cipher smile; the moon

knows me better than you.

Our  mirror solitude

overflows with light,

her cratered face

the teacher, her absence a gift

of sapphire night, the pill of

her roundness a febrifuge

for folly's cache of nightmare. In

 this moon-blade guillotine

no one sees, I have placed

the eyeless head

of all my desires.

May/August 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly

challenge, Strange Worlds

Images: Moon and Trees, artist unknown     Fair Use

Memory, 1938, © Rene Magritte               Fair Use

Daisy

Daisy

Awakenings these latter days

seem sullen, straining for

a gone green music, unprepared as

the day that lumbers up,

tripping its way through a

zodiac of sticks like a clumsy thief,

 too old to run but still wanting to steal.

Hours revolve in a maelstrom

of ferns, once fresh for morning

now a parable of crackling

 brown loss drying back to some point

of unknown where its powdering tides will

drain down earth's fissures,

intimately gone; I'm just another

torn membrane losing the lie,

spinning down the dark drown.

Still I pull all the architecture

of my ruins--the folly, the narrows,

the knot garden, the rockery of

a thousand dead alpine desires--

forward to find

a station of cleared space

to stand in place for life's moment,

asking eyes shut, seed face

blind and upturned,

 sunflowered on my stem

for one last hot meal

of yellow light;

being a daisy,

being a dream.

April 2020

posted for Kerry's

Skylover Word List for April

Note: April as always is poetry month, and though I will be writing as much as I can, it most likely will not be a poem a day. Nonetheless, I will offer to those who are the Friday 55 each week for their use if so desired. So see you here on Friday if you need a meme.

Images: The Old Tower In The Fields, 1884 by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain
Still Life With Four Sunflowers, 1887, by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain