Sea Shanty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sea Shanty

 

 

Once I thought I had pain for my oceanliner, but

it was a clipper ship, a visitor skimming

the shallows of easy tears, creaking

in every board its promise of moonlight drowning

the dark-kissing sea in silver flakes,

of fools' journey's-end a Crusoe'd sort of shipwreck

where everything needed is salvageable,

of undiscovered places to find but never know.

But that of course was not pain.

Pain is an ocean

without any ship, flowerless and vast,

no islands of palms and coconuts

no brown eyes dancing

from the landward side of the reef

to blunt

the sharp-split wreckage of spars and bones,

no Man Friday

to carry my white man's burden for me,

to feed me 

on conch meat and keep me alive

with all the driftwood exotica of empire.

 

There is only

the cold that pierces too deep

before it numbs, the struggling silence

 

that floats the water

that slides through my hands

and the

 

constant 

unbearable fear

of breathing it in.

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sea Spray, 1908, pen & ink watercolor, ©Harold Sohlberg   Fair Use

Untitled, ©Zdzislaw Beksinki      Fair Use

 

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

 

The Howl

 

 

 

The Howl

 

 

Deep into the night-abiding trees let free the howl

of my heart(that false doppelgänger, that unreliable narrator.)

Course it there, where darkness shakes down her hair,

fleet where the small hands of rain stroke my cheek

lightly,lightly, not so bitter as kisses, not so salt as tears,

til it comes to a stopping.

 

There's a fire panting to light up the hedgerows,

to make wilder things writhe from shadows bending,

those fetches the old gods make to beguile us dappling the void

the new ones provide, movement alone frantic with silence

save for crackle and spit and the skin drum's thud

that still beats in my wrist.

 

Each day dawns with feet cut off, limping,limping,

in the year-turning dark. Willow-wisps glow

in the grove of dancing,coming to draw the light

from the road, off to the flicker where worlds rub skins, 

to flames and fetches, to what's kindling now

where heartwood was riven, heat banked in

 

each unlit log is given to the season of time burning,

of leaves crumbling and forest dreaming the hand I'm holding, 

dreaming and singing in the sough where rain-wind 

ears the night. Can a child born to houses ever discern it

where all that runs in smoke and mist is changed

and confounded, rounded off without logic

 

to fire that howls in my skull

what it won't let me know;

it's my own fetch that's come

to dance in the hedgerow.

 

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #142

 

(and inspired by Brendan's Kindling in the Forest of Light and Shadow

Challenge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dancing Dryads, 1879, © Albert Pinkham Ryder  Public Domain

Wolves,(detail)  © Andrew Wyeth   Fair Use

Eurydice

 

 

 

 

 

Eurydice

 

 

 

I was a god's nymph of the deep ravine,

a dancer in the dusk on dandelion greens

til listening to you I felt a dog's duress

that I in your spellsong's locket be possessed.

Under the purple awning of the night

whitened stars beat down in falling flight.

I felt yet didn't hear your naked voice.

I took and later rued an arrow's choice.

And when your always-wooing sleepless noise

drew the jackal out from the sour wood,

I tried to turn and run as best I could;

you played untouched as the snake saw me destroyed.

Even then you could not let me rest,

bright in poppy sleep in the dreaming earth

but played until your will outgrew my worth

and petals bloomed on the stone of Hades' breast.

But as you pulled me up the iron route

I saw my dandelion days were all undone,

and rejoiced in the malediction of your doubt,

freed at last where death and dreams are one.

 

 

 

 

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List #14

 Pablo Neruda

where I am hosting this week for Shay, who is taking the week off. Come join us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note; This poem has absolutely nothing to do with Neruda, but it is what the words on the list brought out. In the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is seduced by the legendary music of Orpheus and his harp and marries him. One day the minor god Aristaeus sees and pursues her. As she runs away, she is bitten by a viper and dies. Orpheus famously follows her to Hades' underworld, where his singing persuades the god to let her return to the earth. ".. the condition was attached that he must walk in front of her and not look back until both had reached the upper world. Soon he began to doubt that she was there, suspecting that Hades had deceived him. Just as he reached the portals of Hades..he turned around to gaze on her face, and because Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold, she vanished back into the Underworld...Several meanings for the name Eurydice have been proposed such as true judgement or profound judgement...In some accounts, she was instead called Agriope which means "savage face" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Orpheus and Eurydice, 1515,  relief by Peter Vischer the Younger Public Domain

Eurydice Bitten By The Viper, 1508, Titian  Public Domain

 

The Night Dancers

 

 

The Night Dancers

 (a 55)

 

The song dreaming night

  is a film over the world

hiding a thousand dancers

painted with

the blood of the moon.

 

They hum

as they spin, but

I never hear them speak.

Dawn's claw-hammer

beats them to dust

 

leaving a flicker

of chamomile and orange,

 ghost breath of a

performance

seen best

 

through

mist-green glass.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Blond Nude With Orange,Blue Couch, 1925 © John French Sloan   Fair Use

Glasses, author unknown, via Sunday Muse   Fair Use 

Red Smoking Mirror

 

 

 

 

Red Smoking Mirror

 

 

 I.

 

That was a hell of a poem, that one.

Some captive of war, some harem

woman, spilled her guts to you

flayed away all her hide

to bare nerve.

You

picked it up and wore it

just like mine, our wrists flapping,

bloody faces making masks

for yours, cut lips singing

all your 

butcher's songs.

 

II.

It's plain I said, I need to make a pyre

of all these undead fears and burn them out.

Oh no, you said, there's never enough fire.

Make garments of your fears' flayed skins and shout,

for loving's a red coal beneath your feet

and being loved a poem you can't complete.

But I turned off that voodoo child advice

when I saw you line them up like bowling pins

for your mumbled brujeria to hypnotize.

I left; now all my words are my own sins,

 

spells of blood are broken for a price,

with ravensong in dreams and peace the prize.

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Poetics

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

brujeria: (Spanish) witchcraft, sorcery, black magic

 

Process Note:" In Aztec mythology and religion, Xipe Totec [pictured at top] or ... Xipetotec  ("Our Lord the Flayed One") was a life-death-rebirth deity..[the god] was also known by various other names, including Tlatlauhca, Tlatlauhqui [or]Tezcatlipoca ("Red Smoking Mirror")... [he] is represented wearing flayed human skin, usually with the flayed skin of the hands falling loose from the wrists...Various methods of human sacrifice were used to honour this god. The flayed skins were often taken from sacrificial victims who had their hearts cut out..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

Image:Xipe Totec as depicted in the Codex Borgia, shown holding a bloody weapon and wearing flayed human skin as a suit.  via wikipedia    Fair Use