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 

 

The Secret

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Secret

 

No one told the owls

still they flew all night through

the moon-radiant snow, claws

cold as promises, to my white crib.

 

We cannot save you, they said.

We can only know you. Bald

blind medusas with all

their snakes hidden

 

behind their lips

will raise you.

All around you

will be

the petty pecking 

of bitter-braided bitches who

never caught a mouse.

 

Who, who, said the owls

will you be then, the dove

who tastes of midnight

 

or the bear who

sleeps the cold away

until the honey flows?

 

 

April 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Wordlist 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Owl at Window, Artist unknown, via internet  Fair Use

Black Magic, 1934, ©Rene Magritte   Fair Use

The Bear, ©Michael Sowa     Fair Use

 

Kleopatra Fantasia

 

 

Kleopatra Fantasia 

 

 

 

 

Cleopatra rides the rails

but never the bus

a foreigner now 

as she was in Caesar's city,

workmen shifting her from station

to museum, crated like so many

cans of beans.

She is silent as sand,

stilled limbs leafed in gold, a

treasure always in transit though

black as bitumen now, cat eyes

blind in an empty skull,

everything drawn out

but her dry heart.

She was bread once

and a circus too, lithe

as a lotus stem snaking up

to lay its white flower

on the cheek of Lake Mareotis,

rippling like a pneuma of rain

through the changing houses of Ptah.

Her tongue danced to a dozen

languages. Her mind was a library

of betrayals, each volume a loss

to Alexander's insane epigoni.

Her future was scribed from
the Books of Breathing and

ambition's killing text:

 

Caesar's smooth hand 

and Antony's sparking eye,

a brief breath of kingdoms, twins

of the sun and moon, all a mirage-

shimmer bright as sanctuary

whose telos was only vast silence 

 

flowing from

the open mouth of an asp.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 and also linked at

earthweal for Open Link #139

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

epigone; plural noun: epigones; plural noun: epigoni

a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone...

 

Books of Breathing: late Egyptian funerary texts simplified from the Book of the Dead

 

Notes: Cleopatra does not ride rails or frequent museums, as her body has never been found, tho a tomb has recently been postulated north of her capitol city Alexandria at Abusir, near what was once Lake Mareotis (Mariout or Maryut in modern Arabic.)

In the Egyptian process of mummification, all internal organs were removed except the heart, which was considered the seat of thought and identity.

 

The Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt, of which Cleopatra was the last, were crowned by the High Priest of Ptah, (creator god who made the world through the power of speech) at his temple in Memphis. They were more Greek than Egyptian, descendants of a general of Alexander the Great after his conquest there, and Cleopatra was the first and only one to learn the Egyptian language. According to Plutarch, she was fluent as well in Greek, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, Median, Parthian, and Latin.

 

Cleopatra had four known children, including twins with Mark Antony, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.

 

The endless list of wars and civil wars which Cleopatra was directly involved in over the tumultuous course of her 39 years is too long to begin to reprise here, but you can read about them and what is known of her complex life in detail here on wikipedia

 

 

Images:A posthumous painted portrait of Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt from Roman Herculaneum, made during the 1st century AD source here 

A raised relief depiction of a woman dated to the early 1st century AD and thought to depict Cleopatra or Cleopatra Selene II, Queen of Mauretania, daughter of Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Mark Antony. source here

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

 

Quadrille Of The Poppies

 

 

 

 

 

Quadrille Of The Poppies

 

 

In Mexico

you wrote me word by word

into the book of your hips.

We traded salt naked

 

lip to lip; your 

listening kiss

heard the colors come

as poppies and geraniums stirred

 

rustling from my earth,

turning their dark faces

towards yours,

opening. 

 

 

February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets:
Quadrille #146: Salt

using words from

Shay's Word List #14

Pablo Neruda

 

where I am hosting for Shay this week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Textile Bookbinding from The Netherlands, ca 1621  Fair Use 

Oriental Poppies, 1908, © Georgia O'Keefe    Fair Use

Ghost In Mirrorlight

Ghost In Mirrorlight

The moon poured only ghosts of mirrorlight

but thick and rich as the cream of your summer skin

that blinked pale against the cooling coffee-black night

when the wind was just a comfortable autumn beast,

shaggy with the flurry of falling leaves

and not the winter-bitter glistening back of sleet.

You had no cold love, served without a sauce

nor lukewarm, listening merciless as drought, only

a love that never thinks of loss

to  give to me, and all of it was mine,

the kisses on each inch, the ones that traced

each rise of breath, each shadow in my eye,

from the first that falls upon the cornerstone

to the last

that travels inward to the bone.

My inheritance of teeth, my broken stars

you covered in the heart's deep underground

where I discovered that escape erases scars,

that a lifelong thirst required only tea

made too hot and fragrant for regret,

which you and luck had kindly brought for me

in a tortoiseshell cup

some child had left behind

when love was a shrine.

 March 2020

posted for Kerry's 

March Word List Challenge 

Images: Teatro de Sombras,As Cinco Estações, (Shadow Theater, Five Stages) 1976 ©Lourdes Castro    Fair Use

The Terre-Cuite Tea Set, 1910 ©Childe Hassam   Public Domain

Clocking Out

Clocking Out

2:07 pm in the 1932

over the flattest bridge

in the arrondissement, flyblown

with grey men in black hats,

where I hadn't been born

just to die but

many

many who had

were getting ready

after a glass of Pernod, of absinthe,

after another gasper.

I punched in

for the

salvage, for the

love-making bedded

in mustard-gas linen

with souls of dead boys precison-worked

behind lively eyes, 

(mais pas les généraux, 

or insects in black hats.) My

sequins bright as

the flash

of rat's eyes in trenches,
feathers to fly
my velvet cloche helm v.
the midnight sword wind
off the Somme, the sweep,
the stench. It
was only a dance
beneath the clock
of statues, of bones, a few seconds
excused
from hundred-year plagues

sent by that god who gives nothing
a  defense--jamais de la vie!--
not even the bee

except for
the sting that kills it.

~June 2018

for Kerry's camera

Another one without much editing--thanks to Kerry for the photographic nudge.



Image: Clock of the Académie Française, Paris
Andre Kertesz (1932)