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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 

 

Cryptid

 

source

Cryptid

Was it your lover

you saw in the dream,

a spirit bear on fire,

or perhaps

the chupacabra, a steam

 given off/

absorbed  by

too-hot night?

Some cryptid regardless,

a cambion that comes

when eyelids fall down

before the stare of stars

dropped silent with a burn

from black sky

as morning turns to face you

cobra-hooded.

Fragments of him

of you

litter the lawn.

Meteorite dust

hangs in the air;

the smell of old longings

seeps from the roses

powdery as the skin's

 memory of a hand

that still feels,

of lips that know words

are the dark subsidence

 

down which you will tumble

to the place of live shadows

where two become one.

Posted for earthweal's

Open Link #141

~September 2014

 

 

 A little something for All Hallows, originally posted at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snapped

Snapped

Staring blinkless
through the image-hole,

what looks back at you now?

Before you left me

for the yielder's dark,

you braided vapor
into handcuffs, strung

me shackles in beaded
star-strings blue as lake ice

dripping symbols, medals,
seals and skulls, seven secrets

made from sickened pain
and spider's valor.
Your single eye
webbed the mayfly hours

from child's cotton wings to 

landing thud of
my woman's bleeding.

If I
could stick a pin
through the paper moment
numbed with poison,
the abdomen of

exactly when
you began to require

annotations for my
cloud to ground work,

I'd  know exactly

how you froze me
to my snapshot,

ciphered me down

to this subset of myself.
Will there be less of

these prickly pear tears
these gestures of negation
now

that we have no faces,

only hats floating light

while I wonder

if I can ever miss you 

without that forgiveness 

which will not come.

In your shutter's last squeak

I smile flattened: a mist rising up

from the wrong side of the lens.

February 2020

posted for

The Sunday Muse 

and
earthweal Open Link

Image: Author unknown, Fair Use

In Question

In Question

I am the woman

in the question

in the dream

that only dreams can answer

the promise

in the stem

before the bud

that only a rose remembers

the fragrance

of the jasmine

in the night

when darkness claims the flower.

I am the sun

that clouds encipher,

the star whose face

is cancelled;

only losing

rain and coming night

reveal my light.

I am the woman

in the question

in the dream.

~April 2017

Images by Odilon Redon, Public domain, manipulated:

The Breath which Leads All Beings is also in The Spheres (Le souffle qui conduit les êtres est aussi dans les sphères) 1882

Cup of Cognition~Child with Cup ( La Coupe du Devenir (L'Enfant a la Coupe)

Left

"Don't you leave me here

don't you leave me here

but if you  must go sweet baby,

leave a dime for beer."

Left

The first time I was left

I was unborn

before I knew to flip myself

and swim upstream

to shadow's
shifting shelter in the reeds.

Leaving after leaving

set the hook,
so many hands to pull

 the finished fish out of the drink.

All that's left:
a  silver glimmer and a stink

among the weeds.

~September 2016

posted for   real toads


Flash 55 Plus 

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Golden Fishes in a Dark Sea, 2006, © Twins Seven Seven

Fair use.