Winter's Relic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Winter's Relic

Winter is on the steps

and in my hair. She croons

as she starves sparrows

rocks pigeons dead in the cradle.

Spare me her holy patience

her frost palimpsest on the window

her holiday coffins.

Feed me instead

on figs and sangria

scarlet under a firecracker sky

rippling with heat and Spanish moons.

 

Throw me on a bed white with

linen, not this nullity of snow that

 melts away beneath my fever.

Let me have something

besides these starving cats

under my skin, hear something besides the blues

they blow like a train-whistle from

 the feral saxophones of their  throats.

But if I open my eyes,

I see reflected only winter's relic;

a twist of shadow in the blizzard,

trying to hold back the wind,

while around me the plague

doctors work, looking for

blood from the stoned, and

the Fearless Captain stands at the door

overseeing our dispossession.

 

 

December 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Shay's Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Looking southwest from Five Barrows under Snow, ©James Ravellius Fair Use

The Snow Queen Flies through the Winter Skies, © Edmond Dulac   Public Domain 

Windfall

 

 Windfall

 

 

 

Fill my glass

and let it be. The night 

moves over the unsodded graves

unquiet between

the roadhouse and road,

seventeen mounds

to home seven sins,

my vanities' bones,

my castaway loves, my old

car-killed cats.

 

Fill my glass

and let it come

at the end of the sky

when the broad brass sun

sets aslant on black apples

wind threw to ground, on

the last summer moths fluttering down,

warming them ripe for the locust's hall

with autumn's endings

packing the rows.

 

Fill my glass;

half empty is full. Let it be

as I drowse on the lawn,

sweet shattered moths and

brown thrushes for company, my

sore eyes wrapped with

a bandage of stars, peace

spilling into the void

where understanding

has flown.

 

 

 

 

 

August 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Apples, Jug, Irridescent Glass, © Paul Gauguin  Public Domain Manipulated.

Night Hill  © Andrea Kowch All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Photograph of cat and wineglass from Sunday Muse, artist unknown. Fair Use

 

The Lion Ghost

The Lion Ghost

I thought you were

a toy animal

but I was only

half-right.

Why do you still bother

to come snarling at me in dreams,

belching your fuzzy

last-night's antelope

across my face,

prowling the corridors of 

my stony veins, 

looking for a way 

to tear them open

once again.

That jungle has been razed,

burnt in the change 

of a dying planet,

buried at the black sea bottom,

cindered and sucked dry,

half-arid and half-drowned.

I think of the rubble on wheels,

the broken sharp ungraspable

thing you were, and the rubble

you made of me.

I see the chill soft cheek-

fur dry and peel across

your taxidermied bones,

and your ruff of sunflower mane

unpetal bald and

blow away.

I  see you in your ghost shape now,

a softness as yet unkilned,

a rolling clay plaything

half-baked in the shape of a cat;

your claws are made of painted

sugar, your white fangs

of fraying string.

You thought you knew

which of us was the toy,

which animal, but

my tiny roaring lion, my keepsake,

you were wrong.

~October 2015

Image, Internado Ambulante, by Remedios Varo. Fair use via wikiart.org