A Turn At The Asylum

A Turn At The Asylum

I was looking for the

miracle office when I

walked through the unlocked door to see

no trace of a sign, just

Monica at the front desk offering a full

line of cosmetics, lipsticks in drawers

red pink and black,

each shade sheathed, chicly

discontinued.

From the walls gazed the founders

benevolent and plump, framed

in pince nez and patents,

spats and Van Dykes. No strait jackets here,

just the soft pavane smoothing

the sensitive system of Dr Tarr

and professional stars

and a ceiling of doctoral feathers.

And there I found you,

the last thing I expected,

thick and hot and immediately tangled

between my legs when the warder

walked in, unaware of course for his secret

success was a modest mind, 

and kind.

While the cashier was distracted, 

divvying up the day's

proceeds,(bales of hay and clockwork bears

and a chiaroscuro Tintoretto) we slipped like smoke

out to the veranda, covered safe 

in the polka dot patter of

St John Stockworth Sinclair, whose plans

were about to quite soon

reach surprisingly lush fruition.

You found us a dry corner

on the freshly hosed concrete

and blew up yellow as a daffodil

our rubber bed of air

and the love we made there

was enormous, a theatre of smiles

and soft screams, for the whole point

of the miracle office is that

everyone gets their own dreams.

 ~April 2016

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Challenge:Turns of the Tale

Images:
The Grounds Of The Asylum, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh

The Madhouse, (Detail) 1814, Francisco Goya

Public domain

Seal Of The Second Millenium

"My wish is to see you, O lord of persea trees! 

May your throat take the north wind, that you may give fullness without eating and drunkenness without drinking...Pleasant is the utterance of your name: it is like the taste of life...

"Come back to us, O lord of continuity. You were here before anything had come into being, and you will be here when all is gone. 

As you caused me to see the darkness that is yours to give, make light for me so that I can see you ."

 ~Prayer of Neferneferuaten,

from the tomb of the lay priest Pahweh 

 Seal Of The Second Millennium

Ten windings round

and a blob of clay

pressed

with the shape of the soulbird

to hold it fast,

prayed over by white taper priests,

wicks of their arms slick with greased perfume

flickering in the chant heavy smoke

while behind the last door

the king waits in his shell

for journey's beginning

from below the rock hill

to the high back of Nut and the night's

soft descent, 

a chariot of gold to adorn

the road of her flesh, 

a team of ghost horses

to outrun the stars. Such

a journey once started

knows no end.

But for the seal breaker

the foul breath of Set,

the jackal eye before muzzle's gape,

diseased as the mummy's black bones.

Ten twists of the cord

and a last look through the dark

at the golden light

not meant to be owned. Life eternal;

the king that desired it, the priests

that implored it, the sun that

promised it,

someone else will yet have it.

The Nile kept back her gift

for ten dead years

one for each twist, and so

the new god was killed 

while the old gods laughed.

The doors of my second life

were sealed as a shrine

with the soulbird kissed upon my brow.

No more will my face 

be as the disc of the Aten;

the deep river of the necropolis

brings the last inundation.

~April 2016

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Challenge: In The Remains

Process notes:

The top photo by Harry Burton (source) is of the funerary seal on the fifth shrine of  the tomb of Tutankhamen before it was broken by Howard Carter and his team in 1923, untouched since the pharoah was entombed, three thousand two hundred years previously.

Second photo: "A relief of a royal couple in the Amarna style; figures have variously been attributed as Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Smenkhkare and Meritaten(Neferneferuaten), or Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamun..“ via wikimedia commons

Third photo: The pharaoh Akhenaten and his family adoring the Aten, second from the left is Meritaten who was the daughter of Akhenaten. via wikimedia commons

Nut was the Egyptian goddess of the sky and the cosmos.She was often shown as a woman with her back arched above the earth. Aten was the sun god, especially as worshiped by the pharoah Akhenaten at Amarna.  For a short history of the Amarna period chronology and events loosely incorporated in this poem, see this wikipedia link.

The Golden Grey Age

The Golden Grey Age

When water loved air

pitched low pitched black

in a graphite blur

we only walked

where the footing was good

where we knew where we were.

When the mist showed her teeth

after licking our cheeks

while frogs sang like birds

and bugs trilled like frogs,

we went round the soft spots,

we stayed on the rock

we knew, borrowed from time

with the night and the day

handfast gloved in grey.

Suede words in the wind

fell hollow and old, phantoms

fogged out of caves

by drenched lips or tongue

concealed in the dark

of a half-dried smile.

Spirits swayed windward.

Broken clouds dropped rolled,

flowed their cottonwool glaze

on earthenware folds; we hummed air's

humid song, pitched low, pitched black

when the grey age was gold.

~September 2015

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Images: Beaumaris seascape, by Clarice Beckett, public domain via wikimedia commons

New York Dawn, the Hudson, by Leon Dabo, fair use via wikiart.org

The Estuary

The Estuary

A sestina

In the dream estuary mud is alive with flamingos' coral flow

their yellow toes buried in the face of the mirrored moon

beaks spooning up warm worms that turn on the ebb

of yesterday to bolts of storm-worked silver

among the reedy songs long rimed with salt

that paint a mime's blank white on the changing river.

Summers' weeds black-lace the ice-pock craters, edge in river,

stubbling down to staggered stems where nothing flows.

Still, here we basin weeds and snow together, sweet and salt

spiraled milky smooth, stranded in a sudden fall of moon;

the coming sea that floods each tarnished top with circled silver

cries before dying in our arms, a white-boned ebb.

We are also in that moment, alien and identical, an ebb's

shoulder from the places where we touched. In the tangled river

language of affinity and loss, you write your silver

runes upon my hair; we hear we've lost enough. We sift the flow

for comely bits of iron comedy, for relics of the servant's sinking moon

trapped in columned hours bleached and bleating in their pillory of salt.

I keep my eye on rock-torn shingle whitened by a sepulcher's salt

wound, you watch the blue horizon stretching from this pebbled ebb

to the birth-blood of a blind thing whelping her litters of moons,

dropped to drift aimlessly off on the tick of the restless river

that I have learned to welcome, flood and flow,

as my inconstant lover, servicing me with lenience and quicksilver.

In the dream estuary, wading a hundred thousand silver

roads that ache with snow, winding fingers through a century of salt

I measure each brackish heartbeat in your flow;

I feel you pulse my throat at my own life's ebb,

a meeting where the ocean loves the river,

a shattered, reshaped promise to the robber moon.

I hold you as the ash tree holds her vain-caged moon,

an empty outline far from rock reality's shot at silver,

yet full of light, a fuzzy gilding on the dimples of the river.

I forget the bitter glint of trickling salt,

the painted mime's black tear on this masque's ebb,

remember only what receives us dreaming as the estuary flows.

Between the weeds and snow, flow the moon and go;

the blend and ebb of silver sing together. Neither sweet nor

salt, sea nor river, yet two are one at last and changed forever.

~February 2015




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The Tuesday Platform

"estuary: that part of the mouth or lower course of a river in which the river's current meets the sea's tide." ~dictionary.com

Photo: Allegheny River, Winter
copyright Diana Lee Matisz 2015

Used with her generous permission. Thank you, Diana!

You can find more of Diana's exquisite work on her Instagram page, here, and more about her, with links to all her blogs and her Red Bubble store, on her About Me page.