The Silver Song

 

 

 

 

 The Silver Song

(a 55)

I don't remember when

the Black Fear came; it seems

it's always been here, a broken

rotted smell under the floor,

invisible but disruptive

as catching on fire.

Bright-piercing in the night-oak,

a bird too small to see

sings quicksilver notes.

 

Which more unexpected,

that it sings at all,

or that I hearing it

rejoice?

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom's Desperately Different (the unexpected)

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (Blurred Figure) ©Zdzisław Beksiński   Fair Use

Blue Tit, ©Karl Martens  Fair Use

 

Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned to live

for very little

to accept what shows however small

however inadequate

to sit with it in friendship

but there is still

 

something else.

There's a light I crave

that shapes mountains and willows,

a radiant mind flaring each morning open

though it paints its gold on all alike:

the long claw of the

 

promising horizon-smile,

the stiffness that

came into your arms

as you held me, the

little dark murderer's bird

who pecks the grains away.

 

It's still that light

sifting bees' wings

across sage to kindle the flowers,

lambent as slanting love itself

in earth's witchwild eyes as she holds

in her unprisoned prism'd heart

 

even us;

 

even our coarse

demanding

insatiable selves

she will teach the one word:

 

enough.

 

 

 

 

 July 2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for desperate desires

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Cottonwoods III 1944, ©Georgia O'Keefe, 

The Thief 1996 ©Jamie Wyeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Day Before Gone

 

The Day Before Gone

 

It was the day before gone.
The strophe began on

 a sun weak with fever,

a sky of grey primer 

because plague hit the painters

 before they managed the blue. 

 

The tepid air was fragrant with 

malfeasance, but the dumbshow

never paused.

It was noon on the sea of shadows.

All through the potential zeros

bug-scudding over the whine-

dark waves ran a shiver, a dread,

the sodden fog of the sailor

at the rocks too busy with rum

 and scrimshaw to have bothered

with learning to swim.

 

The sirens and the kraken laughed

in antiphons, tatting the antistrophe

 from the rust-wire wreckage.

It was the hour before the reckoning

but the only text on the wall read

"It can't happen here."

Pulpits burned, preachers prowled

like panthers

among the singed dollar bills.

 

Locusts

ate the hedge funds. Vultures ate

the venture capitalists, and

politicians ate the vultures

til the darkness seethed 

with undigested bones.

Then finally

over the feeble,

failure-fumed pandemonium

Dawn came with her

exterminator's smile.

December 2021

posted for 

Shay's Word List

Images: Both Untitled, by Zdizlaw Beksinski, copyright held by The Histoical Musem in Sanok Poland

Fair Use

The First Crack

 

 

 

The First Crack

The first crack

always seems easy to mend,

an almost invisible fracture in

 an otherwise perfect thing; so, too,

 the first pock on the face of the moon.

Yet let a few years pass and her skin

is a ballgown of craters.

So I knew when the peacocks

cracked November with their

idiot's scream, when you spit the last

 blackberry from your stained lips, that the

 first bleach of sun on Rhea's hair

would turn your head, 

make you thirsty

for the black cup of ocean, the yellow

manes of lionesses blowing on the sand,

the kelp smell and the wind-draggled lillies,

leaving me alone in this Pharisee's garden

with nothing but a raddled moon

and the smugness of

peacocks.

November 2021

posted for Shay's

Word List

 

 

 

 

Rhea was a Titaness, a goddess, daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus, the consort of Cronos and mother of Zeus, as well as grandmother of Persephone and Dionysus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lunar Craterr, 2015, ©Æstronomær shared under a Creative Commons License

Peacock Consorts, © Charles Tunnecliffe   Fair Use

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor 

"Nine tailors make a man." ~anon.

 

 

The night was dark-haired and delirious.

The cheeky moon clung precariously

to a crooked branch, a bibulous marquess

embracing a lamp post, ready

to strut a whole dancehall

for a cigarette and another chance.

It was the last act of a first edition.

Drying at the prompt, they walked on the

edge of a feather. She'd stopped feeling sorry;

her heart was a trespasser in Vienna,

silent at the soiree instead of begging to

strip to the skin pour épater les bourgeois.

 

He knew he was passing his prime,

going flabby at center, his bons mots

withering like December dahlias. He'd lost count

 of the hands that had picked his pocket, stroked

his celebrated champagne hair, each morning

  combed back unsteadily at the hotel

before the bitter waver in the mirror.

When the curtain came down

it was too weak to exist in more than

one dimension, but it knocked the play

into next week, and left behind its mournful bell

broken at the ninth tailor.

November 2021

posted for Fireblossom's word list at

Shay's Word Garden

epater les bourgeois: to shock or startle the coventional

  

Nine tailors: "As explained by John Shand in his 1936 Spectator article The Bellringers' Art, 'Nine Tailors' means the nine strokes which at the beginning of the toll for the dead announce..that a man is dead. A woman's death is announced with 'Six Tailors'. Hence the old saying ... '" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Human Parody, circa 1878 © Felicien Rops

The Hanged Man At The Bell,  1867, © Felicien Rops

The Departing

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Departing

 

 

They met in meadowsweet and rue

when the moon began to sicken

when her breath began to thicken

when the golden note was stricken

from the songbird-ingenue.

 

The melancholy flies

buzzed the compass that was broken

ate the opium, her token

for a malady unspoken,

her copper curse of cries,

her pomegranate skies.

 

He held her hand again

though the remedy was shattered,

though all was lost that mattered,

tho someone's blood still splattered

as the now replaced the then

and the hand let go the pen.

 

All in white she'll be

when they walk to their last wedding,

when they meet what they've been dreading.

When last lustre becomes a leaden

shroud above the sea, there'll be

 only he.

 

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a second effort for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

Note: This poem was written with the aid of a word list I culled from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:

 

compass

lustre

pomegranate

shroud

rue

remedy

malady

melancholy

copper

opium eater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image via Sunday Muse, attribution unknown, Fair Use

Snake Smoke

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snake Smoke

 

 

An eye is a window,

a window an eye.

I can't tell you any more

so don't ask me.

 

A promise is a lie,

a lie is a promise;

curling smoke from my pipe,

a snake climbing air.

 

Chaos the white bride

for a bridegroom of money,

worst man holds the ring.

Priest eats the flower girl.

 

A promise is a lie,

a lie is a promise;

snake smoke from my pipe,

a garotte made of air.

 

A marriage is a funeral, 

a funeral a marriage.

I can't talk now

I'm late for the wedding.

September 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Yes, it's a cigar, not a pipe. Poetic license.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wind From The Sea, © Andrew Wyeth, 1947  Fair Use

Photo of Lakeith Stanfield, author unknown via internet 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

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