Moon Fluff

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moon Fluff

 

(a 55)

 

 I found the moon last night

thrown down in a puddle,

kissing with clouds, a peppermint undone

fished from your pocket-fluff, 

sticky

but still sugarsweet, 

still shiny

with its two-toned jewel-jazz glaze

like that one clean note you'd hit

in your sax-fiasco blues,

tasting of 

lemon and light and

 cold

December 

rain

in the night. 

 

 

 

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Moon, 1929, © Salvador Dali     Fair Use

 

Things That Stay Behind

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things That Stay Behind

(A 55)

 

 

Things that stay

behind memory's cold coals:

 

child's slipping skates

clipped with a key,

grandfather's rough-work hand

velvet on cottonpuff cheeks;

the margin of wild

the great lake stole from concrete,

that wish washed blue home where

only gulls screamed;

how suddenly it came, the frayed

squall of your kiss

at high water

washing childhood away.

 

 

 

 

 

November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Poetics: Ekphrasis, Fay Collins,

a talent taken too soon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sunset Squalls at Connemara, © Fay Collins  Fair Use

Vintage roller skates, Photo by Sam Figueroa via Flickr Creative Commons  Fair Use

 

The Foresters

[SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE FOR THE FRIDAY 55]

The Foresters

We gathered wood for

a winter we'd never see;

not to keep others warm

but so each stiff tree's arm

yielding to the saw with a whistling sigh

would sketch a rune of twigs, a ghosted fire

to magic into being our desire.

We gathered fuel against a

north-blown frost, thin-sliver shavings

to take the match of want

to a bed of coals where we'd transmuted lie,

fuel for the flame as the flames rose high

from our wedding pyre,

ash on the smoke-rise snapping in the sky.

We tore that chainsaw through a scrub-oak sea, 

worked wedge and maul ignorant of what bleeds

at the quick mistake, at what would fall, 

gathering sticks

for a hearth we'd never be,

any more than the promise

of saw-dusted seed,

the marriage in the trees

dropped unburied in the broken green.

June 2017

A reboot of an oldie never blogged, 

 a twist on Monday's theme of culture and nature

posted for earthweal's Open Link

Images: The Wood Sawyers, 1850-52, by Jean-Francois Millet  manipulated    Public Domain

Landscape with Stump, 1892, by Ivan Shiskin      manipulated                       Public Domain

Friday 55 June 15 2018

Another midpoint in another month brings us once again to the 55, that meme originated by the one and only Galen Hayes in what has to be called the dim recesses of blog history, when so much was so different...except the rules, which remain the same: link your 55 words of prose or poetry, no more no less, in the comments below between Friday and Saturday at midnight, and I will be by to read.

My scrabbled together 55 this week:

Smell Of A Storm

You wear again

the smell of a storm,

fumes of a dream.

Your shadow stands in smoke,

gaming the dying sun to

light your cobra eyes.

I reach out

now as I did then

before summer nights

gave their souls to snow;

 this flash and bang

this show 

is all of you I'll ever know

~June 2018

Note, still having internet issues--bear with me if I take forever to get to your link. I am leaving comment moderation off so you can still read each other's if I am MIA.

Broken

 

Broken

They were married by the moon

on the Pyramid of the Sun,

best man from the Society of Jaguars,

for bridesmaid a flower boy

who loved her yellow hair,

who thought he spoke English,

words lava reefs cooling

in the Pacific of his Español.

They walked, a sun-specked

collection of curiosities, laughing 

along the Avenue of the Dead,

asked the moon, the sun, the stars,

the snarl of the watching Jaguars

for a child

but none came. Broke,

they went back to the States.

He threw the I Ching; the marriage

was annulled. In the neon-long after,

she lost the feel of his deer's eye

startling wild in the dark, the dazzled

pink walls, azure doors, stone streets 

and jade palms of Mexico

where her heart was emptied

on the altar of the Sun.

~May 2016

posted for   real toads

Weekend Challenge

 You can read about the setting of this story, Teotihuacan, Mexico,   here.

Image; by Saiko: Terracotta figures from Teotihuacan in the Louvre, via wikimedia commons

Manipulated.

Seedpod

Seedpod

All your cars had names. You could have

called me a knotted whip, waiting

off the Sulphur exit for Argon to pull up, 

blue-green sides mottled with Dallas dust.   

When you showed, we were

strangers till we forgot how

lame things went, laughing around

the farm pond in native tongues. 

You gave me the seedpod of a water-lily,

catacomb of caves on a stick

rattling full with brown-eyed pearls.

They watched me from a vase for twenty years.

 

The day was hot as rooftar in the pot,

the wet air a greasy mop

as we deployed, Argon starting

with reluctance--all your cars

started with reluctance--

disapproving of me there 

in her too small seat.

We drove and talked the sun 

up the noon sky, down its back 

in trickles of salt, sat on rocks 

that felt like clouds by Turner Falls,

talking by touch, by feel, 

by nerve and luck, 

words splashed on dry fields  

dust before and after,

your ribs under the blowing shirt

white as nightlights in the dusk.

Midnight in the tent 

I didn't know how I 

could ever let you go back.

I cursed

what made me fall like water, 

pour out suddenly yes forever, 

cursed what made you fly so high,

the wind that fills the windsock and blows on.

And so, I never found that place again

a quarter mile from the Sulphur on-ramp in the morning,

empty in a nameless car as a lily pod

whose pearls dropped in the mud.

~May 2014

posted for    real toads

Out of Standard: The Poem is a Curse

Isadora Gruye  (The Nice Cage) asks us to write a poem involving a curse. I think. That's what I did, anyway.

Images: Water Lily Seed Pod, Bobbye Wolfe

via Pinterist

Windsock via google image search, author unknown.