Wither

 

 

 

 

 

 Wither

 

 

 

I feel an ending

traveling through my bones.

It stops for gas

just short of my liver,

looks for some diversion

 

a roadside attraction

 

as it spreads a cloth

under an infested juniper,

making a picnic of fingernails

and rheum, mumbling,

"Damn the bagworms."

How long time seems

 

in this heat-strangled house

carpentered by a coffinmaker sun,

with no appetite for increasing,

no single cell willing

to grow and not die.

 

We gracelessly surrender

 

to the wither

of merciless azure. Even the land,

with its skin drawn taut

as a snake's winding sheet

drying in August's crinkled moult,

 

knows when to quit.

 

The newborn rain comes,

leaves flush and spin;

when this red shambled summer

finds its cold-spangled grave,

 someone will laugh

up a pumpkin-spiced sleeve

 

under feckless wild stars

 

while the goldenrod blooms and my ending

takes a short vacation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Summer's End

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Gas, 1940 ©Edward Hopper      Fair Use

Native Oklahoma Goldenrod, via okprairie on Pinterest  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

 

 

Flambeau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flambeau

(a quadrille)

 

 

I don't want to write poems

fiddle while Rome's monde nouveau

becomes a flambeau.

They're a medicine-show elixir

a too-loose wrapping

on a fountaining vein.

 

But I have nothing else

as Arcadia burns

but this glittering salt

to seed rain

on a grassfire wind.

 

 

 July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Sacred Glimmers

 

 

 

and

 

 

 

dVerse Poets

Quadrille #156

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arcadia is a region in Greece, historically designated as the home of the god Pan, and synonymous with an unspoiled, pastoral wilderness. (Many towns across the world have been named after this spot, usually--tho not intentionally--ironically. I live not far from Arcadia, Oklahoma, a self-conscious tourist trap on Route 66 near an eponymous manmade lake. So far, it has not burned down.)

 

 

 

Images: Torch, 2008, © Wu Guanzhong    Fair Use

Media photo of grassfire, Beaver County, Oklahoma 2022   via internet  Fair Use

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

 

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

There is a burning that

makes the same smoke

from flower or flesh.

 

Air is dead.

Sound will not carry.

Words will not form

 

on a tongue blackened by 

summer's brass palm, for weeks

held radiant over earth's dry mouth.

Heat is a cloud-killer, builder

of invincible domes in steelmelt

sky. Dust catches fire.

 

Only the insect machines

still rattle. Yet every morning

in the stillborn dawn

 

there is a gasp of birdsong,

begging and faint, staccato, sharp,

freezingly sweet. 

 

In fever dreams

I gasp along, for every note,

for any word, for a charm

 

to make this yield

of burning tongues

sing out

 

in oldest music, 

wilder words,

the sparking chant

 

that death-heat kills even itself,

that someday it might

still be worth the parch

of trying to keep living.

July 2022

posted for earthweal

Wild Language

Images: Dead Woman's Crossing, Oklahoma  by Nathan Gunter   Fair Use

L'oiseau blue,© Marc Chagall 1968     Fair Use

Storm Rocket

Storm Rocket

The big storm comes, rattles

the latch of night, batters twilight

with its troll voice and god hands,

throws soil from a thousand raped fields

at my face, dry earth's stripped debris,

melted smell of dirt-charged void

electric as the ghost of your lips in the dark.

I'd wear it like a rocket, follow it, fly with it

to that other land where wheat sings to

the living earth, lightning is a dreamer's

 dance and storms sigh down

a cobweb of emerald rain;

but seventy years of hot wind

have made me small as dust,

a pygmy trapped in

this unbreakable

walnut-shell

of pain.

May 2020

posted for The Sunday Muse

Images: Sky in Saskatchewan, author unknown, via internet  Fair Use

Rocket, by Brad Phillips   Fair Use

Homeless Warrior

 

Homeless Warrior

Born refugee in a gypsy's flight

to mismatch love for wherever I might be:

flowers in the pavement, lakes behind brick,

gnomes at a cotillion, cobalt sea spilling

in dunes at the sun's yellow forge

til my heart was rolled flat

to cut out round moons

with a steelsilver punch

so light passes through me

without shadow or reflection.

If tears fall, it's a petaldrop

of old flowers passing, of dust devils, gliding

unimpeded and small through

the moon-shaped holes

where the red warrior glow

of an eon's earth blood is

just a waver in that dark

where the sword falls to rust

and time takes the trowel

from the gardener's hand

whose broken her legs, her back and her heart.

The bowl wants its dust

the wind wants its wildfire

and what I might want is their last desire,

but the heat of the fight, the miles in the eye, 

the pilgrims of roses proclaim what they form--

warcries, or lovesongs still riding the storm.

February 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge

Solastalgia

Images: Trafficking in Human Beings, 1894, by Joaquin Sorolla Public Doman

Joan of Arc kisses the sword of liberation, 1863, by Dante Garbriel Rossetti, Public Domain manipulated.

Badlands

Badlands

I went to sleep

in the cotton rows

child's hands raw,

belly empty as

my mother's brown eyes

 that hot day she left me

alone by the river mud's soft folded stink.

I cracked my lids

in the hard nitre'd bed where

time cries out loud in the torture of change,

where rain becomes air

on dry roserock hills, deep in the gulch

where the snake promised water

and had nothing but dust

visions without sight,

day without night. I was small as

the sand when I rose up again

on the last thermal's wings,

on the story of gulls, on the wild windy

ballad the dark singer sang

to the tide in my bones.

January 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge,

 Water

Process note: I've tried to present here the transition from the presence of water, to its absence. The bottom photo is of natural geologic erosion in the Borrego Badlands of California, and the top, work in the cotton fields possibly in Oklahoma(?) around the turn of the century.* This poem tries to bridge the gap between, for what are fields now may in the future become the desert landscape, moonlike and barren, that the climate has made of the badlands, which extend over much of the western part of the US, from New Mexico to California.

Header Image, *Picking cotton, author, location and date unknown, from an Oklahoma heritage FB site, public domain (the people on this site discussed their memories of grandparents or parents hand-working the cotton fields in Oklahoma as children. Oklahoma still grows cotton and was the fourth largest producer in the US, according to this 2017 report. )

Footer Image: Borrego Badlands, California USA, author unknown, Fair Use.