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

 

 

 

Hunter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Hunter

 

The heart is hunting alone and lean

after the things she thinks she has seen;

 

after meat on the doe not the sweetgrass sea

wind-combed in waves to wild-braided streams;

 

after the caterpillar's cuts and devours

not the greenstem-road to wings that it follows.

Her running breath catches at all the wrong times

at the taste of the dove, not the air it can climb.

The heart is hunting and so cannot fly

for that most alive is the thing which must die

 

too heavy to carry

too sought to let lie.

 

But when the hunt falters, breath evens and slows.

When the hunter suddenly unstrings her bow

what was looked for is seen in a stillness of light;

 shining like tears in the last hour of night.

 

 

 

 July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Wild Stillness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Hunter, artist unknown, via internet   Fair Use

Woman in Grass, © Fosco Maraini, via internet Fair Use