The Winter Cabin

by Jenny Leslie

The Winter Cabin

Ghosts on the floor,

crumpled at the fortieth failure,

tousled and tossed down to

decorate dead December.

They're waiting unread

in the winter cabin

where the plague has been

and gone;

only goodbye

left of all their words;

only a snow-flaked feather

remembers the bluebirds

too small to save the world.

~December 2016

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A Snow Birthed Tale in 13 lines

for my friend Magaly

Thanks to Jenny Leslie for the kind use of her image.

To The Ectoplasmic Man

To The Ectoplasmic Man

Corazón, 

I saw you rise up

exit the mouth as a stir

in the air, the silvergreen breath

of all things impossible to prove.

You were the fox with nine tails

the kindness of strangers

memory's ghost bible

there on the bison-culled prairie

washed by a ruined lake.

I kissed 

your hot mist,

iced smoke-ring lips

unbuttoned my flakjacket

in the bullet rain;

called it the thing

it could never be

in a season of snow blindness,

dancing the spiral skipstep

of time's vertical jump-rope.

I lost you in realtime

in the harsh, in the fail

in the acid dissolve of

day after day, of unwanted things

that come closer with each

unwinding push away.

I lost you to grey

real dark, real stone,

real blood pounding its tempo alone.

Yours, as always, J.

~June 2014

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Friday Challenge: Lost Art

Herotomost(Mexican Radio) otherwise known as Corey Rowley, asks us to indulge in a spot of that lost art, letter-writing. This is one that never got in the mail.

 Image: Spirit of the Forest, 1890, Odilon Redon

Public domain via WikiArt.org