Solstice gallows swing
The December sun hangs low –
Light does dead cat bounce
For Frank’s Haikai Challenge
The Quantumverse
Solstice gallows swing
The December sun hangs low –
Light does dead cat bounce
For Frank’s Haikai Challenge
My reply to Jilly’s reply to the Denise Levertov poem, “To the Snake“. Full text in-line below.
To the Snake, Anon
Eat thine own tail, Ouroboros!
As I must eat my tale
and know we began only to end infinity,
leaving just our stories forever
twined, wrapped, twisted
as the caduceus we made in the forest,
our bower of staff and wings.
Would you shed me so easily?
Do you not taste of your venom?
Your lie forks your tongue
that such pleasure was not love,
the brush of our skin immortal.
My garden flowered with too much joy;
I cannot regret now
what I will bear alone.
The Snake’s Keening
by Jilly
Bright Girl, when you plucked me from
the grass and round your neck I hung
felt your seering warmth
and whispered in your ear the secrets
of a serpent’s curse
the weight of sin and shame I bare
wounded in your ears —
Bright Girl — I swore to my scaled children that certainly
you were sinless! But truly
I had no hope of ever passing your heel, only desire
and be held by you, for that thrill,
which bereft
of guilt, as the grass closed
behind me, and you with that dark
assurance in your eyes,
I shall never share.
To the Snake
by Denise Levertov
Green Snake, when I hung you round my neck
and stroked your cold, pulsing throat
as you hissed to me, glinting
arrowy gold scales, and I felt
the weight of you on my shoulders,
and the whispering silver of your dryness
sounded close at my ears —
Green Snake–I swore to my companions that certainly
you were harmless! But truly
I had no certainty, and no hope, only desiring
to hold you, for that joy,
which left
a long wake of pleasure, as the leaves moved
and you faded into the pattern
of grass and shadows, and I returned
smiling and haunted, to a dark morning.
Crow blows hot and cold
Nest a soup of chicken bones –
Bird flu spreads its wings
For Frank’s Haikai Challenge
Like the last drops
of whiskey
I shake my words
into this poem;
I’m a man taken to drink
at the cost of his family and job –
One round for the house
and one for the Pope and
very last call
to the Devil.
For Quadrille Monday
Wild ride Renga by Jilly and me. Hold on to your hats, and enjoy the creative process in the comments!
Lincoln might be in the Bardo – where spirits wait bewildered in their Rubber Room souls – But William Wordsworth is outside in my parking lot waltzing with language and cars – Foxtrots of Kias, nouns, and verbs, Fords and Acuras tango with adjectives – insensate and doleful dip and turn, While the drivers, like inmates of ballroom dance class, trip on overgrown iambic feet, hoofing to Glen Miller. In Spring he will gently blow adverbs and romance into pistils of foxglove, until magnolias faint in jealousy. For him, Death is no purgatory, no dotage, he is as lucid as yellow, as sharp as a blackbird quill plucked in flight, Far less bewildered than I between this world and the next – if he writes of eternity, it must be so – Poems to guide us with the half-life of Uranium 235 – fissile at room temperature – Nuclear reactions of sunrise breaking like egg yolk over the hillside – Ten thousand daisies runny with light.
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
I’m a tornado of bees, a cyclone of buzz and hum | |
You have more sharp turns than a toboggan of hornets | |
I’ll rattle your mullions, believe you me, love storm of the century. | |
The sky is seasick with hurricanes | |
We’re the full catastrophe, no atrophy | |
No apostrophe, no trophy | |
You ring in my ears like dynamite, like a fight between samba and flamenco | |
Oh Nagasaki, oh hot ginger, oh Ali‘s rhumba in the jungle | |
More fun than a barrel of mimes tipping over Niagara | |
You are handcuffed to wind, laughing about mortality | |
Eskimo my nose, my toes, cuddle is the new tundra | |
The windows leak ghosts, whistling for their supper | |
But this is a love poem, gorgeous with leaves turning cartwheels | |
Rain weeps through the cracks in my hands, wanders the damp maze of my bones |
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
Go ahead, tell your sob story to the spoon and the coffee cup, how your addiction to night sky started with poetry, the gateway drug, and now you are mainlining – shooting stars – your veins twinkling with broken bottles and shards of Christmas lights. Go on, lament to this plate of eggs and Tabasco the fate of words like tigers performing tricks with what's left of the magician's sleeve, or the sound of violins playing blackjack on their shoestrings, hit me. I listen to your sling, your hash, your blather spread on whole wheat or white, your second, or third, or fourth marriage to sonnets, to Surrealism, to Whitman, feeding the doggerel scraps under the table, stumbling down 12-steps into the void.
For Shay’s Word Garden and TSM
Seed words: bigmouth, charmer, coma, devil Write a dadaist poem
Bigmouth charmer in a coma, Devil's here to take us home. Bigmouth charmer with a frown, Devil's here to turn it upside down. Coma's taken over the night, Devil's here to show us the light. Bigmouth charmer in the sky, Devil's here to make us fly.
For Shay’s Word Garden