The Potato Selkie

 

"...I am a man upon the land

I am a silkie on the sea
And when I'm far and far frae land
My home, it is in Sule Skerrie.."

The Silkie Song, Joan Baez

The Potato Selkie

 

 

 

He came frying to earth

on a feather not feather,

a float of an idea soft

as a potato, begging for form.

I put him to age

in a metal-bound cask to see

what he might eventually be;

something playful

and deadly as vodka,

or a poor-mind's pierogi

 to be gnoshed then spat

like sawdust-wurst. I sunk the cask

beneath a wave (New Wave, they say) 

and soon saw a man upon dry land

who dreamed of a selkie on the sea,

a million miles from Sule Skerrie

With a slick-metal sheen, he

sang to me in a lilt and croon

like potato mash, shapeshifting

 animus to idiot maximus.

In his strangle, only heat and dead air

still and dry, a trembling reflection

a shimmer of no-light, a clockwork cry

as he grabbed for my pen

with his fish-breath mouth,

jumped in the sea

and drowned

again.

 

 

June 2023

posted for Poetry Slam at The Singularity Corral

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top Image: The Hand, ©Salvador Dali 1930   Fair Use

Ai generated image sadly failing to be a selkie of any kind but at least forlorn about it.

January House

January House

Fierce-As-Red-Hair and Fly-As-A-Fox

from the liminal's edge came to pick the locks

dressed in their frills

for thrills and kills

they opened the door

and live here still.

Fly-As-A-Fox and Fierce-As-Red-Hair

can spin windershins and dance on green air

with nightshade brows

and bones of mouse

they climbed the steps of

the January house.

Fly and Fierce have a skull that sings

have pleated blue smocks and onyx rings

on the balcony standing with little sharp things

that gleam by moon's eye

where you cannot pass by

unless you dance

 with Fierce and Fly.

Don't splash through the mud where the lily nods.

Don't go to a church where you don't know the gods.

There's no time to pray

and the blood has its way

when Fierce and Fly

come out to play.

June 2020

 posted for

 The Sunday Muse

 Note: The flowering plant below the girls in this picture is agapanthus, or Lily of the Nile, native to South Africa. It is not a lily, and not from the Nile tho it does like a warm climate and a moist soil.

Image: color (not colorized) photograph from 1908, author unknown, manipulated

 

Phantom Viewing

Phantom Viewing

a decastich

You see me but you don't want to feel me.

I should be the print of an Old Master, full of demanding

perspective, or views from a cabin window:

something pretty

and easy to leave.

But perhaps there's a wolf in the clearing,

a skull in the lady's silk-folded lap,

and what's that barely noticed

in the corner of the prosecutor's photo,

so bright a red behind the blowing yellow leaves?

 ~October 2015

posted for      real toads

Weekend Mini-Challenge

Images: Briarmaid, © joyannjones 2013

Unknown Female Portrait, by Julius Leblanc Stewart, public domain via wikiart.org