Running By Winterlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running by Winterlight

Midnight called me up from my rifled bed

where I’d searched in vain for sleep’s last hiding place.

I went out to look at the fraying brindled clouds

taped to the far ice moon, and the Hunter's sword

once Freya’s distaff weaving the raveled world.

And I knew beyond my doubts your soul ran free

parkoured from star to star canopied above me.

I saw the aching dumbshow of what’s past, 
a flickering stereopticon of days 
each one still a sharpness of blinding glass

stuck in time’s deep gut, the bleeding pass of 
a dance above oblivion’s shifting cracks.

Light of my heart, you make a fine traceur;

one slip's enough to kill, yet you endure. 

Clouds cry ice, sweep in the shaking void

with its black mouth wide, its bone-white lich’s grin.

I’ve made myself so small, so fine a dust

plaited baleen could never seine me out,

just lose me where the cell-shed seeds sprout green. 

What's lost flies out and floats on seven winds.

What’s left puts down its root to live again.

February 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #9

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes: Parkour...is a training method which focuses on rational movement [where] the focus is to move around obstacles with speed and efficiency...to move through the..environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs.~wikipedia

The last lines of the first stanza refer to the constellation of Orion, a Hunter in Greek mythology whose belt of three stars holds the Orion nebula, representing the point of Orion's sword, and in Norse mythology, the distaff (a spinning tool) of Freya, goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war and death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Man From Planet X, ©Edgar Ulmar   Fair Use

Orion Mosaic, ©Derrick Lim Photography courtesy NASA   Fair Use 

 

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Winters at white dawn, before the first gaudy ransack of a

scold of jays, two crows come to her feeding cup.

They have no elfish hands to hold interwoven as otters 

do, to keep each other close on cold waters, but still

they float down on air as joint motif. Not one crow,

but two, for in any functional lexicon, the complete set

 

of meaningful units is not one. They eat a dozen peanuts

with the focus she applies eating her mistakes, but with

 

their own goblin squawk and savoring, a black-suited pair

laughing like undertakers on holiday, the charm of a child's

 

toys in their round eyes as they celebrate this meal,so much

more efficient than pecking through reticulated rubbish, so

 

much quicker than sieving crushed bladders or hearts tarry from

asphalt, than abrupt blare-interrupted flutters on the flat luck

 

of skunk or raccoon, where they must thrust their razor beaks 

like needles through black blood glitter, scrape hard bone

 

clean to sew lost life from ruined flesh to full feathers. They

are complete either way, but the woman has made it easier.

Two crows make their own zodiac, seven stars make Orion,

the time-twisted woman who sets out peanuts

 

makes a pageant in vapor, a blood-let of generosity,

a late arrival at sufficiency; for in any functional lexicon,

 

the complete set of meaningful units

is not one.

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Shay's Word List #11:

Ted Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem makes no attempt to capture  Hughes' style or Hughes' own vision of Crow and his journeys, that epic exploration of folk-tale and myth which rewards the reader's time with much more content and flourish than I could ever hope to muster. 

 

But when I think of Hughes, I think of Crow, and so, this poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: For those interested, here is some background on Hughes' collection of poems exploring Crow:

 

After his wife Sylvia Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote nothing for three years. Then he began a work which was finally published as Crow:from the Life and Songs of Crow. As stated by the Ted Hughes Society, it "holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre.  It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism..He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered...."

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Crows in Winter, © N.C. Wyeth   Fair Use

Detail from Crow's Song © Andrea Kowch  generously accessible at her website Andrea Kowch Studios Blog  where you can and should see the entire painting.    Fair Use

The Night Dancers

 

 

The Night Dancers

 (a 55)

 

The song dreaming night

  is a film over the world

hiding a thousand dancers

painted with

the blood of the moon.

 

They hum

as they spin, but

I never hear them speak.

Dawn's claw-hammer

beats them to dust

 

leaving a flicker

of chamomile and orange,

 ghost breath of a

performance

seen best

 

through

mist-green glass.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Blond Nude With Orange,Blue Couch, 1925 © John French Sloan   Fair Use

Glasses, author unknown, via Sunday Muse   Fair Use 

Sun Kiss

 

Sun Kiss

 

The sun was on me

that day. 

It came

 

through the bars

selfless as my

grandmother's kiss;

 

 clover mead light,

sweet on the lips

of winter's dead dream.

I turned my back

on the itching of buses.

I forgot 

 

the black lilies

spearing frozen worlds, 

nova'd stars.

 

Promises overflowed

the bottles of my eyes.

For a moment

 

I even tasted

the blackberry vintage

of you

 

decanted before me,

then dust

once again.

May 2021

 

 

posted for  Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

Images: Photo, artist unknown Fair Use

Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun, 1889, © Vincent Van Gogh  Fair Use

The Choice

The Choice

Will you come

to me from

the vault of Echo,

 even whose music is a rattle

of nonsense, or from

the folded hills of Titans' silence,

where the field is taken by

a random coup of indiscriminate stars

and night rides naked, protected

by her black birds?

~November 2015

posted for     real toads

Weekend Mini-Challenge: Eye Of The Beholder

Images:
Top: Night, 1917, by Albert Bloch, Fair use via wikiart.org
Footer: Night, 1880, by Gustave Moreau, Public domain via wikart.org

Affinity

Affinity

Do the stars

call to each other

as you call to me

a restless wave

across infinite dark

spark to cellular spark?

Is it distance you see

measuring me

or disastrous proximity

the way light bends congruent lines

a star-egg prism'd warm

from eye to eye

before the breaking door,
the solar storm of crypted time?

Can those hunting specks
that dust the desert blue

in their shaken glass globe so

identically bright, so sweet/saltpeter sour,

in their cyclopean run

in the isolate absence of heat

dance the desolate dying of suns

knowing they'll never meet?

~July 2014

Optional Musical Accompaniment





posted for    real toads

Kerry's Wednesday Challenge: Alienation in Outer Space
 Kerry O'Connor(Skylover, Skywriting) has brought David Bowie, post-modern alienation, what it means to listen, and outer space together for one of her always compelling challenges.

For some unknown reason, perhaps because this is Kerry's prompt and I know her love of forms, I had an impulse to rewrite this poem as a sonnet. As always in these free verse-to-form exercises, it's the same, only different. (Please don't feel, anyone, that you have to read both--just my over-achieving self-indulgence.)

Affinity

(sonnet)

Do stars so far call out one to another

the way your call to me crosses infinite dark,

small voice to voice pitched low, never uncovered,

restless wavering spark to cellular spark?

Is it distance that you see, measuring me

or the damage of diffracting proximity,

the way the light at dawn bends congruent lines

in colors breaking down the prism's door?

The ragged beat tapped out by contracting time

compels the specks that dust the ballroom floor

so identically bright, so sweet/saltpeter sour,

sparkling as their shaken glass globe's devoured,

to make that falling run in isolate absence of heat

and dance the dying of suns, knowing they'll never meet.

(July 2014)

Images: The Voice of The Blood, 1948, Rene Magritte

Time, by Wojciech Siudmak

Fair use via wikiart.org