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 

 

Century Song

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Century Song

For a hundred years

it seems

I've waited here, wasted here,

full of parch and motion, a salty throat

from drinking too much ocean once

though it's been

no more than a lifetime

or a breath

held under a thousand passing thrones

of aqua-green

where I counted days as quicksilver fish,

as coral bones, marked each dagger flashed in

 mouths of sharks, each scale, each whale

singing to all her kin while I

I drowned alone.

 

For a century

it seems

I trod this water milling, to breathe the years I knew

still held the spark, 

the flowers' poppy dream, the moths unflamed,

the coyote's bark

longing for the moongleam

on your reaching arms.

 

For a century

or two

the heat is master; 

the dust that birthed you,

the sun that calls you on.

It blisters me as the freeze of aeons

boils a distant steam, until night's mantle

 

falls across the blaze, and in the end perhaps,

too many too-bright ghosts and burning days

earn me a last cool breeze

 

a breeze and a flashing of that dream

 

where you

come back for me.

 

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Waves, detail 1969 ©  Javier Torices    Fair Use

Study for the Spanish Dance, 1869  © John Singer Sargent   Fair Use

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

I found you first in the green evening

a secret burn of elongated lines

sketched into the mural of bending pines

by wind's unseen ink, traveling the trail

on an old scent caught in the bracken;

then the adrenaline snap

of your head my way.

You called me from my campfire

to answer the brown beg in your eye,

to fall beneath you like aspen leaves

at your season's yellow turn,

as my own summer died around me.

Pulled like gut to the crescent bow

of the reckless huntress, I chased you

through evergreen shadow, along bone-clean

clattered rockfall, dry creeks where

only the musk smell of hope drew me on

past the deadfalls and I would guess at your way

by the arrowhead and adder's mouth rising

in your wake. Too many years you ran ahead

to pleasure a dozen others who never

saw your winter,

but often when the itch was unbearable in

the time-crack of April's acid sun, you

came to me in the clearing, to rub the felt

from your horns on my shoulder and moan

my name like a sacrifice

low and heavy as the white bull

of Poseidon knee deep in the

sacred wave before the knife.

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Green Fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Arrowhead (Sagittaria Latifolia) and the wild orchid known as green adder's mouth(Malaxis unifolia) are common North American wildflowers. Pardon the mixed metaphors of stag and bull which in time-honored fashion I ascribe to poetic license.You can read a quick synopsis of the myth of King Minos, his wife, the white bull sent him by Poseidon, its pursuit by Heracles and its eventual sacrifice by Theseus here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Pine Forest II, 1901, © Gustav Klimt  Public Domain

Head of a Stag, 1634, © Diego Velazquez     Public Domain

Zebras

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Zebras

(A 55)

 

Remember

when we were two

trout climbing Sahara sand,

two flamingos wading snow,

two zebras

grazing rock, stalked

by an avalanche of clocks

worse than any lion.

Remember

our nights stitched from

oak's blood and violins

torn from the big cat's teeth.

Come home again

before the door breaks,

before memory's last meal

is gone.

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

using words from

Shay's Word List #9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sleeping Zebra, 1959 © Carel Willink  Fair Use

Plant Archetecture, 1962 © Remedios Varo

Quadrille Of The Star

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Star

 

 

I wrote this for you when

you were the star in my heart

to give back light for light

as we traveled time's tempest

bemused. 

 

Who knew then

you were the last;

 last star before the sunrise,

last ghost spun

from the broken wheel

 

 

 

 

 January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets:

Quadrille

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Winter Night In The Mountains, © Harold Sohlberg  Fair Use

Paysage Orangeux, artist unknown, via internet    Fair Use

 

Blue Flame

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Blue Flame

I was the woman who

loved you hotter than a sun

hard as a granite gravestone

once,

but time has chosen to

braid me differently, tying years

into grey knots

behind which the crimson

of memory

coagulates and fails

making it seem as if there

is not, never was,

love as stubborn as a pebble in a shoe

piercing every step.

A parody of a woman

rolled in a circus tent, lurches like

a wheelbarrow when she walks,

from the pebble, from the weakness, from the void.

Her flesh sags like a

campfire marshmallow melting

on the stick.

Yet in the mirror gateway

my eyes avoid, sometimes a flash;

the high snow-swept cheekbones of that girl,

the sunburnt hair longer than winter,

the bell glass body moon-rounded, glowing

a blue flame within, feeling

your touch so

 

fluent in flourishes of stars;

 

 

 love as sharp as thirst

unquenchable.

 

 

 

September 2021 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images via internet, authors unknown    Fair Use

 

 

Vessel

Vessel

When the moon

is winking

like the Grey Sisters’ eye

passed from housetop

to housetop, glassy bright

and wide as a fawn’s,

I feel your touch;

wind in the night

cool on fever’s summer.

Your kisses taste of a rain

that breaks the drought,

your look slips over skin

wet and terra cotta slick

as the clay on the wheel.

Run your potter's hand

across my back,

reshape my days, my nights

with a maker's fingers
then fire me 
where the blaze

burns morning white.

Paint my curving sides with a

bard’s young colors: jet and gold,

blue as the wandering sky,

jade, yellow, crimson

with every flower;

then take me to the well

where thirst is quenched.

September 2011, mildly revised February 2020

re-posted for earthweal's 

Open Link

(Scroll down one for the Friday 55)

The Graeae: old women", "grey ones", "grey sisters", or "grey witches"; alternatively spelled Graiai (Γραῖαι), Graiae, Graii), were three sisters who shared one eye and one tooth among them. They are one of several trios of archaic goddesses in Greek mythology.....~wikipedia






Header Image: Explore #360, ©  slokaa Fair Use

Moon Moth

Moon Moth

I made my home

on a broken world

that I found in the space

between breaths,

golden dark as your eyes

long ago 

fireflies, quenched moons

yellow with light in

the river mist.

Time crawled out

on my veins

like an inchworm and hung,

a floating cocoon

spun from brown autumn's dust.

One dream

in a decade kept a blind sun's vigil

on the soft shape within, and

time's opalescent shell

pledged a constancy malleable

to the formless thing

growing her wings.

All this while

I wandered as a wind

in the tree of bound hours, 

up and down, warm

 in your scent of basil and chai

til the years at last

became harder

than miles

til the earth became still

till the flowers sighed,

waiting for time

to fall or fly.

~February 2020

posted for earthweal's challenge

A Clockwork Green 

Brendan asks us to look at time, the natural world, and many other things this week, out of which I chose : "What happened to time? Spin the clockfaces crazily and get a feel for a present both timesick and solastalgic."

Images: Moth Wing ©Amelia Fletcher   Fair Use

The Lonely Cedar, 1907 ©Tivadar Koszta Csontvary   Public Domain

Sweetener

Sweetener

I.

I put you in my tea

tannic with memories;

stirred, they go down smoother

sipping on your ways.

Put on my plate you make

an evergreen presentation,

dressed in rue and fired clay,

so haute cuisine, salad of baby greens

tossed in hope and fear, before

the soup of dreams.

II.

I put you on the moon

sitting where she bends

your cloven feet a-dangle in 

their blurred and slippery stars.

You ease Orion’s belt, give cloudy listening blinks;

I whisper in your thunder covered ear until

you put me in the storm

flying with wings of rain 

where cold front meets the warm.

III.

I put you in my heart

little shop of horrors

cobweb seeded, only one

flyblown object on display but not

for sale. Pressed against the glass

your firefly face winks in the indigo night

where ribboned time slips tight in a lover's knot

and tea is sweet as your blue sky mouth my love, 

sweeter than floating memories dead in the pot.

March 2012

an old favorite, in Kerry's triptych form, 

 reposted for 

Fireblossom's Poetic Imagery 

Image: Tea Time, © Ellen Wilson of Ella's Edge

The Dead Tongues

 The Dead Tongues

Alive in a dead language
we once met,

shades of a time displaced

reeling together, blind face

to face of sweet lies,

bilingual brocade

illuminations our brand,

blacked out at dawn 

when wishes fade; 

only sunsets blaze on

in fantasyland.

It's a dry coupling

mind to mind, lust

lubricated by lyrics,

lips rubbed raw by rhyme;

lovers' knots 

in the flesh

lovers' blood

in the mines

lovers' cries

in the fade, hungry

as gulls on the tide.

A fine fate for bards

to empty this chalice

abysmally shimmered,

diseased by a fool's bite,

irrationally filled

as it drains through the sockets:

skull of a thought 

soul of a heart

heart of a will

alive in a dead language

where skin shifts like sand,

where once I spoke whirlwinds

to rest in your hand.

~February 2017

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Jörmungandr "(aka: the Midgard Serpent, son of Loki, and nemesis of Thor) knot piece..late 2014. The Old Norse text is a binding spell...translated using the website The Vikings of Bjornstaad. It says: "Mighty Jörmungandr, terrible serpent beneath the sea, beast that encircles Midgard, I bind thee. In no way will your rage become my own, so thus I vow until at last I rest." Pencil and Micron on white paper. Copyright: -Jenks" source