The Myrðaling

 

 

The Myrðaling
A Ghost Story

Cold across the portal

through the shadow of the veil

the child shivers before me,

wild-walking the mirk.

She's thin as she'd never been

when she lay there, left,
tiny feet kicking in a stiff skin wrap,
taller too than when her kicking stopped

alone in the bramble where the broken light fell

as the snow wound blue around her like smoke.

Now she can walk miles

through the night from the black

back corners of the winter that rides

before and after all things,
for she's passed the doored rock

to the slaughtering shadow

that splits the soft loam, where

she blows like a seed that won't be sown

but must be milled on the stone of years

with a river of bones floating on tears.

She opens her mouth

and sings like the plague

for a name of her own to give her a grave.

Take mine I say--it's all I have

for a night sister here in the dying year,
where we've gone too far

to turn around, where too soon
we'll eat the bread of the dead,
where spirit can weigh
as heavy as flesh when the veil thins away.

Then the moon-girl came out of her pale disguise;

I saw my twin smile, and close her eyes.

~October 2014

revised and reposted October 2023 for Night of the Desperate Dead

at desperate poets

Process notes: In Scandanavian folklore, a myrðaling, (from Old Norse, 'myrða,' murder) or more properly, myling, was the ghost of a child killed by its mother in infancy, usually  the child of an unmarried woman, or of a poor family unable to provide for it, abandoned in some unfrequented place and forced to walk the earth seeking burial. The myling might appear and reveal the acts of its killer in a song, or call out for a name, when the hearer could save the spirit by saying "take mine' so that it might then rest in consecrated ground, (as in this poem) or it might vengefully possess the living, jumping on their backs and forcing the victim to carry them to a graveyard, growing heavier with each step. You can read more in this wikipedia article.

Image: The Strawberry Girl, 1777, by Joshua Reynolds

Public domain via wikiart.org

I have manipulated this image.

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

 

 

 

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

"There is no cure for love other than marriage." 

~Irish proverb 

 

 

Love's an old wolf who howls when she pleases,

her black lips drawn back in mock of a grin.

She's made me her meat for chancers and losers,

to open the locks and let anyone in.

 

Her yellow teeth are blunted with winters

but her fevers burn hot as melted brass.

Her eyes are flat-white as Attic marble

rolling behind Aphrodite's mask.

Her promises drift like leaves in October.

Her vows of fidelity make the stones laugh.

There's never been one she ever was true to

except the ones who died too fast.

Since I was that child who was used as a woman

since I was that woman who thinks like a child

I've run with her pack. The crows find my dinner;

there's a price to pay for being born wild.

I never whore for playthings or money

but three times it saved my life.

I never lie for the sake of loving,

only to play at being a wife.

I never was called to be a drunkard,

but I've ever been every drunkard's best friend,

to drop the mask when I see it coming;

 

the black-lipped snarling

bitter end.

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Illicit Encounters

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wolves, © Andrew Wyeth

Head of Aphrodite, via Brittanica

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running By Winterlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running by Winterlight

Midnight called me up from my rifled bed

where I’d searched in vain for sleep’s last hiding place.

I went out to look at the fraying brindled clouds

taped to the far ice moon, and the Hunter's sword

once Freya’s distaff weaving the raveled world.

And I knew beyond my doubts your soul ran free

parkoured from star to star canopied above me.

I saw the aching dumbshow of what’s past, 
a flickering stereopticon of days 
each one still a sharpness of blinding glass

stuck in time’s deep gut, the bleeding pass of 
a dance above oblivion’s shifting cracks.

Light of my heart, you make a fine traceur;

one slip's enough to kill, yet you endure. 

Clouds cry ice, sweep in the shaking void

with its black mouth wide, its bone-white lich’s grin.

I’ve made myself so small, so fine a dust

plaited baleen could never seine me out,

just lose me where the cell-shed seeds sprout green. 

What's lost flies out and floats on seven winds.

What’s left puts down its root to live again.

February 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Open Link #9

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes: Parkour...is a training method which focuses on rational movement [where] the focus is to move around obstacles with speed and efficiency...to move through the..environment by vaulting, rolling, running, climbing and jumping. Parkour practitioners are known as traceurs.~wikipedia

The last lines of the first stanza refer to the constellation of Orion, a Hunter in Greek mythology whose belt of three stars holds the Orion nebula, representing the point of Orion's sword, and in Norse mythology, the distaff (a spinning tool) of Freya, goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war and death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Man From Planet X, ©Edgar Ulmar   Fair Use

Orion Mosaic, ©Derrick Lim Photography courtesy NASA   Fair Use 

 

Chimera

 

 

Chimera

When I left all I asked was peace 

of the starry void, that

every shrewish hope be finally silent 

yet after me you sent one white bird

only marsh cloud singing,

too soft, too frail to fly far.

I dreamed of you last night--

did you call me?

No, it was just my broken eyes

wanting to see the old calligraphy

strong and alive on the blank page but

that will never be again.

You were dream's pale clerk

troubled, frowning at the paper

on which many things were written

none of them my name.

I stood by your shoulder;

you turned, walking through me.

Waking, I couldn't say which,

you or I, was the ghost.

The gift of sleep

is taken back and I sit staring

at the wrinkled day, at walls falling

in this helpless place of the dead

where I've washed up,

already chewed by the chimera

stung by the manticore,

wondering what white wings will come

out of the siren darkness, 

what ghost bird is left.

 

 

June 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #143

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Chimera, by Gustave Moreau, 1884, watercolor

Public domain, via wikipaintings.org 

Lion And Ravens With Unsettled Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 "..It is a wheel, the rays /around the sun. The wheel survives the myths/The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.."

~Wallace Stevens

 

~  *  ~

 

Lion and Ravens With Unsettled Sun

 

Two ravens circling in a spotless sky

on a warning wind with fire on its breath

soft but dangerous as a lion's hiss,

in dead grass gathered to burn a phantom's past

that now in turn burns us.

A feast of the senses is just

another place to die among strangers

hearing the hiss of lions trapped

in a body devouring itself

in camera, the dark heart.

Best to fall to the sudden sharp sword

of the god's divine panic, danced to dust

under his dusky foot, his pipes hissing like a lion,

a screech and flutter of ravens at the window.

Light is sliced to crescents dazzling at the edge;

nothing but the sun survives the myths.

The lion has no wheel behind his hiss.

Ravens flow in the tempest and its drum,

dark lettering spelling out the ride to come.

November 2022

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

and

 

 

 

earthweal's

Open Link Weekend # 142

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The Word List this week is taken from the works of Jim Morrison. He has always reminded me of a lion in figure and impact, though perhaps a bit more prone to roar than hiss. I've been reading Stevens again lately and somehow he got tangled up here, with more of a sun king's than lizard king's flare.

 

 

 

[lyrics begin at 1:12 mins]

 

 

 

Images: Lion, 1492, by Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Samhain Night 2014, ©joyannjones

 

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

 

 

 

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

(or, No Medicine For Melancholy)

Up on the hill where the blade never goes

skimpy clouds dangle like a phrase of bad prose,

with May Day's and Hallows' night stars locked in boxes,

up on the ghosts' hill with the little foxes

 

sits the old witch always stirring her pot

of bandages and sweet oils, scalding hot,

her dry smile a bleachmark on her tie-dyed skin;

she's only waiting for the crows to begin.

Give her a coin and she'll midwife next year

or recount the rest of your life for good beer

in her voice like a hatchet while her fingers stir

mockingbird's screech into kettle's blur.

What's in the cauldron you sainted crone?

"It's hope, she croons, the alphabet I own.

You can't live on it, though so many try,

but you can certainly die on it time after time

riding the Big Wheel on dandelion silk

sucking tobacco like the baby's milk,

drinking and thinking you'll go up and up

then crushed on the revolve like a styrofoam cup.

 

Before you learn what your body can do to you, you

think its a warm glass of wine poured out for you

but it soon cracks in the time-slip and shatters apart

like your broken heart, dear, your broken heart.

 

Before you see what hope does to the living

you think it's a wise thing, loving and healing,

not bitter and blinding, 

hiding the reminding 

of the shambling footsteps shuffling in back of you

of the behemoth ambling in one night for you

the only hope that turns out to be true:

he'll break all your bones, dear, and eat them, too."

 

But dreams can be merciful with their endings

whatever the bile-twisted gist of their sendings, 

for dawn took her words just as fast as she spoke 

and drowned them all in the lovesongs of crows.

October 2022

posted for Shay's

Word Garden Word List: Susie Clevinger,

a fine contemporary poet and friend

Note: I've taken a lot of liberties with the history of St. Walpurga, a medieval abbess known for Christianizing the heathen Franks, learned in healing, who was canonized for, among other things, the 'miraculous oil' that oozed out from her dead body, and whose saint's day was enthusiastically celebrated with bonfires for many years on May Day. Obviously, I have added All Hallows to her domain quite mendaciously. She was said to be the bane of evil spirits and witches, so I'm sure she is turning over in her grave at being combined with one here. Finally, apologies to the Rocky Horror Picture Show for stealing 'time-slip,' and thanks to Susie for the gift of her poetry all these years.

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht, 1923, © Heinrich Kley

Antlers with Crows, author unknown, via internet

Blown Away

 

 

 

 

Blown Away

 

 

Come look

at what I salvaged

from the breakdown:

 

in this jar is Chicago

with its concrete throat

that tried so hard to swallow me

 

and here is Montana

mountain wild, spruce bending

to save me, painted

 

in five colors on my spurious tongue

that cracked ripe hearts

like nutshells in

the vise of logic. The rest

of what I had sailed in my witchboat,

to a quiet Viking funeral with

 

 no one watching--riddled

seeds, costumes and seven secrets

wrapped in your trinket kisses--

but I kept the beach

at Point Reyes, where the wind

clean off the ocean

is strong enough

to blow away

your life.

October 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (marina) © Zdzislaw Beksinksi   Fair Use

Point Reyes, California, Tomales Point Trail with Wild Radish, NPS/A. Kopshever   Fair Use

Last Light

 

 

 

Last Light

 

 

"All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born..." ~W. B. Yeats 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was born

in the black and white,

a changed place still living what had been,

a winter child in a fossil's spring of

sun and shadow, war's unmercied clarity

and the trampled mud of peace,

 

its empty whiskey bottles

and gardens of shaded violets, deep

black soil, black thunderclouds, 

white winter sky, blackened medals,

white gauze veils packed away 

in crackled trunks.

 

Now I live my last in a red dirt country

where the heat-song of September changing

dips the fading wheat in ginger honey. Wind-weary

trees lace still-green leaves thru the soft

reaching fingers of clouds, holding tight

before their scarlet fall.

 

Earth is whispering her love words

in the rustle of sundried grass

and blackberries tumbling over with

thickets of banquets in seedy puzzles.

When I turn to face the setting citrine sun

it's you I call to the open door

 

to sit beside me in the shortening days

drunk with bees and crow-call,

rich with the gatherings of every flower.

Won't you come, beloved,

before January rimes the windows

with its deep blue loss. 

 

Come to the place 

where you can't be forgotten.

Bring your cinnamon september skin

and your wild silver-grass hair to these ruins,

and your campfire eyes,

alight in the night of dreams so far

 

beyond the black and white.

Lace your fingers with mine

as trees do with the sky,

separate and one

where the fire of what was

in the hope of what may never be

 

is the only light left

before the scarlet fall.

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for earthweal's

Lyre For A Changing Earth

 

 

 

 

 

With thanks to Brendan for the poetry of W.S Merwin and others which inspired this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: My mother with myself at 2 months of age, Evanston, Illinois March 7th, 1949 

House North of Nash, Oklahoma, 2022  photo © Terry Wassan   via internet   Fair Use

Green Summer Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green Summer Country

 

 

"The sea turned to plain land, the snow on the mountain disappeared. In my eyes thousands of years fade like dust yet my heart is as before...I thought I had forgotten, but I remember everything" ~unknown, from the Mandarin

 

 I walk there in dreams,

the old summer country,

nave of a worship

where ice dies to green fire,

where we tended the world tree

whose roots wrap around

the well of the word;

where we bound the Great Wolf

with the trust of a god

made one-handed,

in the time when the mistletoe

was too young to swear oaths.

I walk there now, with

snow spirits warmed

in green shadow,

where the deer

sigh and surrender

to the arrow and its prayer,

where the Great Serpent gentled

belts the water around the wide land,

waves married to shore.

 

Where to eat is to be blessed

to love is to be whole

to suffer is to gain wisdom,

where bees make our wine,

where every leaf

hides the saga of a king.

My feet

wander lost, my throat blisters

when I wake to the Serpent unloosed,

the sea spoiled and untied,

the Wolf's bite tearing the snow 

from the mountains. My eyes

hold the dust of a thousand years

yet my heart

is the same.

I thought I had forgotten this;

I've forgotten nothing.

June 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Dreaming In Green hosted by Sherry Marr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: The poem references figures from Norse mythology; Ygdrasil, Fenris,Jormungandr,Tyr, the story of Baldur. The transcribed quote at the header I heard last night while watching a serialized Chinese television drama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Glenn, 1936, ©Maxfield Parrish  Public Domain

Jormangand, the World Serpent © Aleski Briclot  via internet Fair Use

 

Stormlight

 

 

 

Stormlight

Rain-giver, hail-maker, tornado-farmer,

May's black hammer mesocyclone bouquet

falls into the world; 

a twist and wrench

of chaos-stacked air that knows

only one gamble,

hanging its fate,

its otherworld gate

over wheatfields and wiseacres

it will strip down to skin

in a boiling of sky,

where one will be wrecked

and another spared

by the luck

of the drawing wind.

After the storm,

the crash gasp flash drama,

light is softened,

sky-wrapped in puff-clouds

like a newborn in crochet.

Trees stir and push

to their wild/calm lover.

Birds streak back in sepia

down to a world

neither colored

nor monochrome.

 

We ride these last days

between daggers,

between fear and relief,

between the holy

and the unholy,

the quick and the dead

 

watching domestic

disputes of drunk giants

from a mousehole of hope.

 

 May 2022

posted for earthweal's

Spirits of Place

Mesocyclone: A storm-scale region of rotation, typically around 2-6 miles in diameter and often found in the right rear flank of a supercell (or often on the eastern, or front, flank of a High Pressure storm). The circulation of a mesocyclone covers an area much larger than the tornado that may develop within it. Properly used, mesocyclone is a radar term; it is defined as a rotation signature appearing on Doppler radar that meets specific criteria for magnitude, vertical depth, and duration.~NOAA Weather

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Binger, Oklahoma F4 tornado of 22 May 1981. Courtesy of National Severe Storms Laboratory, NOAA Public Domain via wikimedia commons

Stormlight, May 2, 2022 ©joyannjones

 

The Night Call

 

 

The Night Call

 

 

 

The woods are dark

and important with green, restless

with a pushing wind bruising the white

 petals of the moonflowers against

 

the walls of this house I never enter

that stands at the edge of the dream. I'm

not here to come in from the green dark alive

with a canticle of constellations and the wind strumming

 

 soft in the moon-colored strings of my hair but

sometimes I watch the wisp of a dead bishop

rigid in the doorway holding the lantern high

questioning the heretic hours, the faceless rain,

 

the expanse teeming with life between us

that answers in crickets and owl song

and the giving language of pines

he will never be able to speak.

 

None of these will tell the secret; that I'm here,

 that I'll never come in

to the house filled with traps,

whose convenience of hot and cold

 

running happiness has leaked

out in sickly anger, leaving that stink

of broken love that clings

to a dead wisp calling,

 

calling me back to black dreams

I'll never share again.

I'm already gone in the breathy night,

into the green dark, alive.

 

 February 2022

posted for earthweal's

Wild Mind

 

Photos © joyannjones 2-27-2014, manipulated

 

Fenrir

 

 

 

 

 

 Fenrir

 

 

"..from where will a sun come into the smooth heaven
when Fenrir has assailed this one?"~Vafþrúðnismál

 

I.

 

They say the basilisk

walks her own wasteland,

each green thing that springs

corrupted by her breath,

 

each life that starts

turned to stone as

she spies it, so that she lives 

with nothing all her days.

 

She knows the sphinx

has long since forgotten

all riddles but the one

whose answer is sand.

 

 

II.

 

The wolf at the door

puts his paw on the child's neck.

His breath smells of tiny lives, 

his eyes are round as the moon.

He waits with her for the Ragnarök

to devour the world, to swallow the gods

to bring a new sun

to the skies we defile

but while waiting he smiles

his dog-smile, his tongue soft on her cheek.

From deep in the shadows 

the basilisk regrets

 

the power of myth, and

 the child

waits to grow

and run with the wolf.

December 2021

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: In Norse myth,  ragnarök refers not only to a time when gods and men will fight against monsters and jotuns and be destroyed, but also to the world which will follow, where the earth is purified and gods, nature and man are given a second chance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Odin and Fenris, 1909 © Dorothy Hardy   Public Domain

Wolf and child, via The Sunday Muse  author unknown Fair Use