The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

 

 

The Burning Tongue

 

 

 

There is a burning that

makes the same smoke

from flower or flesh.

 

Air is dead.

Sound will not carry.

Words will not form

 

on a tongue blackened by 

summer's brass palm, for weeks

held radiant over earth's dry mouth.

Heat is a cloud-killer, builder

of invincible domes in steelmelt

sky. Dust catches fire.

 

Only the insect machines

still rattle. Yet every morning

in the stillborn dawn

 

there is a gasp of birdsong,

begging and faint, staccato, sharp,

freezingly sweet. 

 

In fever dreams

I gasp along, for every note,

for any word, for a charm

 

to make this yield

of burning tongues

sing out

 

in oldest music, 

wilder words,

the sparking chant

 

that death-heat kills even itself,

that someday it might

still be worth the parch

of trying to keep living.

July 2022

posted for earthweal

Wild Language

Images: Dead Woman's Crossing, Oklahoma  by Nathan Gunter   Fair Use

L'oiseau blue,© Marc Chagall 1968     Fair Use

Rose With Stars And The Turning Year

Rose With Stars And The Turning Year

The stars mind their own

business. The wind runs grasping

up and down the night

arms stretched,

thrashing the impassive trees

with its flapping desire.

Here below: only a bickering

of whelps, the sinuous peristalsis

of the snake, the mechanical revolve 

of all his poison-spitting brethren  

churning and contracting,

knocking the Parthenon down

and your hand, poised, your voice

whispering, your eyes that watch and shine

on every petaling memory made

of the rose under windy stars

pinning the mind 

close to her fragrance by her thorn.

The year turns

with a flash in darkness,

an onslaught of velvet;

a last
loose ruby shut away

in a box.

~October 2016

Image Public Domain: Roses, 1871, by Henri Fantin-Latour. Manipulated

Time And The Reap

Time and The Reap

Time may dull away pain

that drives you mad

but time is slow

while madness will grow.

So long ago

in a nightingale's gown

I sang for you;

when I was a wren

I wove.

When I was a reed,

I bent for you

and all the while called it love.

When my breasts were the apples

on Yggdrasil

when my eyes were Lethe's mad run

when my arms and legs were

the loom of the Norns, you found a way

to use each one.

Time remakes me

a bird dying in snow,

a reed gone hollow

missed in the reap;

only my heart

is living yet.

Have you

a use for that 

before we sleep?

~April 2016

posted for    real toads

Challenge: Poetry To The Third Power 

Yggdrasil:Scandinavian Mythology: the world tree-- an evergreen ash which the Norns water and where they sit weaving the fates of men.

Images: Freya, Das Rheingold,

The Fates on Brunnhilde's Rock,  by Arthur Rackham 

public domain via wikimedia commons