Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where The Mad King Disposes

 

 

 

Asleep as far as Night's pen clerks

its long lined lists, where nothing we know is king,

a winter king who never works;

 

still there I see what the mad fool chooses,

veiled and warped with the sharpest taking.

The blue snow seems full of the light it loses

 

forming your face from the flat candle flame,

blowing your form in the billowing drapes,

come back from the dead with a stranger's name.

 

Asleep is a far land laked lucid and deep,

iced out by the ghosts of too many fades.

Where's the sun's blood to break my sleep,

where's the warm substance the shadow makes? 

 

 

 

 

 

~August, 2024

posted for WGWord List

Image from La Chute de la Maison Usher, 1928   Public Domain

 

 

 

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 

 

Lonely As A Dream

 

 

 

 

 

Lonely As A Dream

 

"Everything's a dream when you're alone."

~Wes Craven

 

 

If

you come through the door 

you see at once it's an old woman's house

smelling of apples, eucalyptus

and yellow books rhyming by size.

Nothing is new.

 

Incense

burns in the bedroom

for the sake of a man's memory

smoking and braiding in soft light

that slips through heavy drapes

like a thief. There is silence.

 

Peace

is there, and emptiness.

The ghost has learned to

keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to

the woman who gambles with words

in the hunger before dawn. 

She's

 the laugh no one hears

at  the midnight carnival,

the road no one takes

winding back on itself, the sprout 

light's pulled too thin, too tall

in its mirror, shadow.

Besides 

the dream, she knows only 

a sky flat with heat

that eats birds and rain,

a plague without cure

that stretches its dead skin

to infinity.

But 

everything passes. To all things come

this tension of maximums

just before the breaking

and the letting go.

 

 

 September 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and earthweal's

Open Link #134

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Doorway © Suzanne Moxhay, All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Dangerous Laisons, 1926,  © Rene Magritte  Fair Use

 

 

Green Summer Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green Summer Country

 

 

"The sea turned to plain land, the snow on the mountain disappeared. In my eyes thousands of years fade like dust yet my heart is as before...I thought I had forgotten, but I remember everything" ~unknown, from the Mandarin

 

 I walk there in dreams,

the old summer country,

nave of a worship

where ice dies to green fire,

where we tended the world tree

whose roots wrap around

the well of the word;

where we bound the Great Wolf

with the trust of a god

made one-handed,

in the time when the mistletoe

was too young to swear oaths.

I walk there now, with

snow spirits warmed

in green shadow,

where the deer

sigh and surrender

to the arrow and its prayer,

where the Great Serpent gentled

belts the water around the wide land,

waves married to shore.

 

Where to eat is to be blessed

to love is to be whole

to suffer is to gain wisdom,

where bees make our wine,

where every leaf

hides the saga of a king.

My feet

wander lost, my throat blisters

when I wake to the Serpent unloosed,

the sea spoiled and untied,

the Wolf's bite tearing the snow 

from the mountains. My eyes

hold the dust of a thousand years

yet my heart

is the same.

I thought I had forgotten this;

I've forgotten nothing.

June 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Dreaming In Green hosted by Sherry Marr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: The poem references figures from Norse mythology; Ygdrasil, Fenris,Jormungandr,Tyr, the story of Baldur. The transcribed quote at the header I heard last night while watching a serialized Chinese television drama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Glenn, 1936, ©Maxfield Parrish  Public Domain

Jormangand, the World Serpent © Aleski Briclot  via internet Fair Use

 

Soup Kitchen

 

 

 

 Soup Kitchen

After the blizzard

it was warm in the kitchen

where the angel-witch cooked.

 

All the survivors

crawled in from the avalanche:

the lost girls, bent heroines,

 

peacocks and choirboys,

pulled along by the wine

to canned soup and oranges,

 

looking for the revolution

that was always stillborn.

He was just another strategy

 

there in the churn

of dream-debris bobbing, plaintive

as old violins; scooped, angular,

 

scuffed but still thrumming.

His sorrows tempted me

but when I touched him

 

he growled

like a sore dog.

Finally the angel-witch

 

took him to Phoenix 

and we were all stuck

with her snow and tomato soup.

March 2022

some nonsense for Shay's Word List #18:

Leonard Cohen

Note: My favorite song of Cohen's is the first I ever heard, Suzanne, released in '67. It was a part of this time I chose to write about, in particular, the blizzard of 1967, which I spent marooned in my best friend's apartment with J.J Cale's , the Doors' and Cohen's music, and a crowd of assorted misfits. 

 

Some notes on the actual event: 

 

"The Chicago blizzard of 1967 struck northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana on January 26–27, 1967, with a record-setting 23 inches ..snow fall in Chicago and its suburbs before the storm abated the next morning. As of January 2022, it remains the greatest snowfall in one storm in Chicago history..

 

The snow fell continuously in Chicago and surrounding areas from 5:02 am on Thursday, January 26 until 10:10 am Friday .. sources estimate [between] 20,000 - 50,000 cars and 800-1,100 buses [were]stranded...Gusts of 48 to 53 miles per hour..caused large snowdrifts..[and]..the blizzard closed both Midway Airport and O'Hare Airport. Ten-foot drifts covered the runways at Midway. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered city workers to clear city streets around the clock..the city was virtually shut down and area schools were closed.^"~wikipedia 

Images: Cars stranded at Oakwood entrance to Lakeshore Drive, manipulated, Fair Use

Volkswagon Beetle stuck in snowdrift at Stockton and Diversey, manipulated,  Fair Use

Both photos © the Chicago Tribune historical photos, January, 1967

 

Crows In The Snow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crows In The Snow

 

 

In the cold, in the silenced sun,

the eye reaches out

against the blind blizzard

for the heart of the rose.

 

In the fall of a dark feather

petals unfold

shed stark on the snow

in a blackness of crows.

 

Everything glittering

 comes to their eyes

as a clamor that heals;

gold light on the ice,

 

 

black feathers for blood ink,

 rosebuds from their beaks--

all dropped at my feet,

these bones in disguise.

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Animal Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Living antlers, artist unknown, via internet     Fair Use

Raven Steals The Sun, © Aaron Purcell     Fair Use

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.

Winter's Relic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Winter's Relic

Winter is on the steps

and in my hair. She croons

as she starves sparrows

rocks pigeons dead in the cradle.

Spare me her holy patience

her frost palimpsest on the window

her holiday coffins.

Feed me instead

on figs and sangria

scarlet under a firecracker sky

rippling with heat and Spanish moons.

 

Throw me on a bed white with

linen, not this nullity of snow that

 melts away beneath my fever.

Let me have something

besides these starving cats

under my skin, hear something besides the blues

they blow like a train-whistle from

 the feral saxophones of their  throats.

But if I open my eyes,

I see reflected only winter's relic;

a twist of shadow in the blizzard,

trying to hold back the wind,

while around me the plague

doctors work, looking for

blood from the stoned, and

the Fearless Captain stands at the door

overseeing our dispossession.

 

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Shay's Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Looking southwest from Five Barrows under Snow, ©James Ravellius Fair Use

The Snow Queen Flies through the Winter Skies, © Edmond Dulac   Public Domain 

Friday 55 Holiday Edition 2020

 

 

 Welcome all, to the final Flash Fiction prompt of 2020, a Holiday Edition of the Friday 55. This year has been a slog, and it's not over yet, but the time has come to acknowledge it will not last forever, and in fact is in its last throes of weirdness and upheaval as we speak. Whether your mood is celebratory, contemplative or still an utter roil of feelings, you're invited to write it all out here, in 55 words, no more no less, on any subject that strikes your fancy.

 

I will leave the page open for contributions til December 31st at midnight since this is a busy time for all, even in isolation. 

 

Post the link to your 55 in the comments below, and I will be by to mark the passing of this Hell Year with you.

Brighter Days Ahead.

 

 

~ *~

 

My 55, such as it is:

 

 

 

 

 

 Supplication To The Old Year

Jack Frost, Jack Frost

crack the wind

for what we've lost.

Kiss the tree,

break the wood.

Show us all that's gone for good.

 

Toss the cow over

the mad moon's head.

Put stars on her horns

in the land of the dead.

 

Numb my hand, burn my ear;

then keep your promise and disappear.

 

 

 

 

 

December 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Vintage Victorian Christmas Card, circa 1890  Fair Use

Illustration for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, © Edmond Dulac  Fair Use

Cow and Moon, © Alex Colville    via intyernet   Fair Use

 

 

Snow Blind

 

 

 

 "If it's peace you find in dying, when dying time is here,
just bundle up my coffin cause it's cold way down there,
I hear that's it's cold way down there, yeah, crazy cold way down there.."

~Laura Nyro, When I Die

 

 

Snow Blind

 

I sit remembering

when we were dragons,

our mating flight in October's

bloodbright sky, 

another country

that rush of scales and fire.

 

Or when you saw me first,

moth with green-eyed wings

on a factory rafter. You knew

 among the nymphs

I was a spriggan

twisted wry but quick and hot,

that on the mountain with the goats

I climbed the highest

to be alone, krampus-girl

too full to eat the darkness.

 

So come, wind of the north.

Blow this west-wind fever from me

with your ice-eyes and cheap bargains.

Mound the cold grey snow

upon this bed, shabby

goblin sheets to numb my sores,

 

rime my lids 

 snow blind, give me

shadow glow, hallucinations, lunatic

visions, his

living face candle-lit,

smiling

at me:

the glass dragon,

the dust-moth dry with

death's-head wings,

broken as easily 

as a candy heart.

 

 

December 2020

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spriggan: "a legendary creature from Cornish faery lore...said to be found at old ruins, cairns, and barrows guarding buried treasure. Although small, they were usually considered to be the ghosts of giants..notorious for their unpleasant dispositions...~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: photo of Laura Nyro via internet   Fair Use

Moth Wing © Amelia Fletcher    Fair Use