Four Hours

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four Hours

 

 

Four cold hours

far from dawn

I sit in

manipulated darkness

waiting to see

what will come lie down in

this coffin of a moment,

 

thieving the spray of rosemary from my hand.

 

I've followed

the spark

all my life

seen it birth and kindle

seen it flicker deep

in eyes dark-sweet as berries

when all other light

 

was taken

 

but there is

nothing in this roving 

black behind the blindfold tonight

not a single reflection glancing bright

off the book of stone; only that absence

which is the certainty of death

its witchlight capricious as hope

 

with no thing fair about it.

 

Why have you

brought me here now

to such circular endings, to

this museum of

stolen seeds, false gods, burned

fields, raped children?

Four hours cold

hold too much

 

too many graves

too much

silence.

 

 

 

November 10 2024 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: This includes words from both this word list and the previous one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Black Bowl, 1907  © George Seeley   Public Domain

Curse the Darkness, ©Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

Fantômes de Versailles

 

 

 

 

Fantômes de Versailles

(a 55) 

 

 Ghosts go hungry

at Versailles. 'Let them

eat cake,' the custodian mumbles.

Marie-Antoinette tries to bake

but flour falls through her fingers

dust to milky dust.

Marie starts the minuet.

Diamonds drop off the

Shepherdess like old flesh.

'Les riches, she murmurs,

are not quitters.'

In the Labyrinthe,

fables dehydrate.

The custodian

watches World Cup.

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a little historical nonsense

 posted for

Word Garden Word List:Ghost Eaters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Marie-Antoinette and her waiting women often dressed as Shepherdesses and played at being country peasants in the elaborate gardens of Versailles. 

 

Regarding the Labryrinthe, or Bosquet de la Reine at Versailles: 

"In 1665, André Le Nôtre planned a hedge maze of unadorned paths in an area south of the Latona Fountain near the Orangerie.. In 1669, Charles Perrault – author of the Mother Goose Tales – advised Louis XIV to remodel the Labyrinthe in such a way as to serve the Dauphin's education..Le Nôtre redesigned the Labyrinthe to feature thirty-nine fountains that depicted stories from Aesop's Fables..accompanied by a plaque on which the fable was printed..in verse..; from these plaques, Louis XIV's son learned to read..[C]ompleted in 1677, the Labyrinthe contained thirty-nine fountains with 333 painted metal animal sculptures. The water for the elaborate waterworks was conveyed from the Seine..[and used by].. fourteen water-wheels driving 253 pumps.. Citing repair and maintenance costs, Louis XVI ordered the Labyrinthe demolished in 1778. In its place, an arboretum of exotic trees was planted as an English-styled garden. Rechristened Bosquet de la Reine, it would be in this part of the garden that an episode of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which compromised Marie-Antoinette, transpired in 1785..."~wikipedia

 

France is defending champion for the 2022 World Cup. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:  L'Entrée du bosquet du Labyrinthe, © Jean Cotelle le Jeune (1642-1708) Public Domain

Marie-Antoinette Queen of France 1775 ©Jean Baptiste Gautier Dagoty

The Child As A Postcard

 

 

 

 

The Child As A Postcard

 

 

To the passing postcard written in

the massing uncolored sky, posed

in the medium of ice and flesh surely

my child-self seemed the response,

scribbled head high to the bare lilacs,

a winter blackbird lost in a fragrance

dancing to cold.

 

While the wind was witching, while it was

twitching my skirts, and its white book

came clattering down with the frost on every

page, while the sky snowed down with the pomp

and swagger of a drunken policeman, did the

heft then of my grandfather's arms know me

for myself as I determined,

as everything I determined 

thereafter came to be? Song or catastrophe,

the wide smile of the chimera, or its

diamond mask, the bright white light

of a lilac breaking bare in the snow while

I watched time plow its path

across my life;

not a moon-fair there, not a star to be seen

dropped from the basket of a lover's dream, 

only a stillness of snow haunting the hour

of papier-mache in a maundering dazzle.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

Shay's Word List # 10

Wallace Stevens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: I have not tried to emulate Stevens' style. That is far above my pay grade. But I have tried to infuse the poem with some of his moods and fancies as I interpret them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image:Snow Effect: Winter In The Suburbs, © George Seurat

Public Domain. I have manipulated this image.

Hues

 

 

Hues

 

 

 He was just 

 

one of too many

born black for the factory

taught to make salt

 

into roses and clocks, just

a sole to spare the parade marshal's foot,

a board for the floor, another pot

 

of coffee for the landlord

but there was something

he got from the moon; that weary

 

knife-smile, a jones for books and

bitter truth, a taste of jazz

in his blood, and so

he became instead

the blister on the heel, the knot

in the plank, the spider in the cream,

the argument for faces.

 

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

Shay's Word List: Langston Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The photo above is a snapshot of Hughes with his good friend and fellow activist, Louise Thompson Patterson, both thorns in the side of contemporary white/status quo culture as members of the Communist Party and prime movers in the Harlem Renaissance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Shoemaker,  1945, © Jacob Lawrence   Fair Use

Louise Thompson and Langston Hughes, shipboard, circa 1915-1925  Public Domain

 

 

 

 

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stage Set:The Ninth Tailor 

"Nine tailors make a man." ~anon.

 

 

The night was dark-haired and delirious.

The cheeky moon clung precariously

to a crooked branch, a bibulous marquess

embracing a lamp post, ready

to strut a whole dancehall

for a cigarette and another chance.

It was the last act of a first edition.

Drying at the prompt, they walked on the

edge of a feather. She'd stopped feeling sorry;

her heart was a trespasser in Vienna,

silent at the soiree instead of begging to

strip to the skin pour épater les bourgeois.

 

He knew he was passing his prime,

going flabby at center, his bons mots

withering like December dahlias. He'd lost count

 of the hands that had picked his pocket, stroked

his celebrated champagne hair, each morning

  combed back unsteadily at the hotel

before the bitter waver in the mirror.

When the curtain came down

it was too weak to exist in more than

one dimension, but it knocked the play

into next week, and left behind its mournful bell

broken at the ninth tailor.

November 2021

posted for Fireblossom's word list at

Shay's Word Garden

epater les bourgeois: to shock or startle the coventional

  

Nine tailors: "As explained by John Shand in his 1936 Spectator article The Bellringers' Art, 'Nine Tailors' means the nine strokes which at the beginning of the toll for the dead announce..that a man is dead. A woman's death is announced with 'Six Tailors'. Hence the old saying ... '" ~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Human Parody, circa 1878 © Felicien Rops

The Hanged Man At The Bell,  1867, © Felicien Rops

All The Things That Kill

Linen towel with drawn threadwork accented with embroidery in stem and satin stitch

  

All The Things That Kill

All the things that kill

are beautiful tonight

sleek with purpose

come to end promises

sworn in diamond dust;

the poison drop, the  quick

metal bee, the slick sharp edge;

all beauty's finality shining

under a flawless moon.

In my sleep I hear

the spell of no more

lifting the weight of life

beautifully

boiling the clinging

off into black:

Let us unpick
the pulled-thread smockery;
return us the
whole cloth we were.

Let the light bend

beautifully

into our blinking eyes

blinded by tiny needles'

broderie-anglaise tasked

to make order out of holes,

whitework fine-stitched over

vacant years by galled fingers 

in candled rooms 

too dark to see,

so at last we

are no longer terrified

by the corpse march

of  dawn after dawn

where we imagine

the uncaring dead

dance around us

potent,  grasping,

more alive

than our own blood.

~November 2013

 

broderie-anglaise detail, Broken Vows by Philip Hermogenes Calderon

Process notes: I mention in this poem three types of embroidery, described here:
"Whitework embroidery refers to any embroidery technique in which the stitching is the same color as the foundation fabric (traditionally white linen). Styles of whitework embroidery include most drawn thread work, [as well as] broderie anglaise...[which is] is a whitework needlework technique incorporating features of embroidery, cutwork and needle lace that became associated with England, due to its popularity there in the 19th century." via wikipedia

posted for     real toads

Kerry's Wednesday Challenge: Black and White

Kerry O'Connor asks us to think of the composition methods in black and white photography, and transmute them to a poem. I attempted to work with some of the concepts she presented, including high-key and low-key images, and her key words of" contrast, tone, mood, atmosphere, focal point, highlight, patterns, textures."

Images public domain via wikimedia commons