A white-tail deer moons me, disappears behind clouds, and I'm moon walking in the stumble-light Tripping on potholes of moonman craters and astronaut seas mirrored in puddles It is way past bedtime for stoats and voles, they watch silent horror films of hawks, shadows that flicker on silver screen leaves The taste of time on my tongue, my gloves soaked and cold from this morning's sleet I trace a line to the Pole star, but is my filmy world a negative, I have it all backwards? Am I headed South, not North? I walk in light, old and yellow as sticky tape, peeled from b&w photos off the bottom of the sea
Category: The Sunday Muse
TSM 142
Wind bites through my skin – white-capped teeth off winter seas. Sand whips and tastes of banishment. Umbilical prisoner, I walk bleak Eden. Rain breaks covenant, floods, waterboards my knowledge of good and evil.
TSM 139
This will be about rope. | And so? | |
Turk’s Head knots | ||
for eyes. | Just because you say “trefoil” | |
doesn’t make it true. | ||
Braided X’s. | Like eyes sewn shut. Whipstitch is it? | |
Coils and splices. | You are spliced to me, yes. | |
Coils of smoke. I gave up my Marlboros when you were four. | ||
You are bent in death. | Bend – to join one rope to another. What ties us? | |
Our rigging of blood. | ||
Neither Neither | of us make correct use | |
of | of | |
shroud. shroud. | ||
Why are these nautical, I was a cowgirl. | ||
Arroyos to the Panhandle | ||
look like the bottom of the sea. | ||
You would have me | You would | |
hoist hang | ||
the solstice. | me with the sun. | |
Blocks and | sheaves to lift Swing me | from the crack of noon. |
the dawn. | ||
Bight, cordage, knot, Bite, pull, thread, lash, | ||
tangle what is | ||
living dying | release | |
me | ||
from you. | ||
You know you do not mean that. | ||
Braided Plied | into every strand. |
TSM 138
I guess just throw it on the compost, this dead swan at the bottom of the road. So much larger here at my feet – a dead, feathered cello, neck bent around to bow a low moan. It was never white, I can see it was a living light, bright silver now brushed with death to mottled grey. Prisms of dew bead the wings – tasting flights of fine oil feeding mites. No prayer here. I roll like a dog in dead words.
TSM 137
Winter rain splats like an egg in a cold frying pan. This morning my mind is refrigerated, congealed, a rictus of cheap margarine – I scoop fat substitute thoughts with a spatula. They splat in the pan too, alongside the egg. Isn't there meant to be an order to things? Heat first, then butter, then egg? Kitchen mullions rattle as the Nor'easter tests their strength. The vacant house across the way – Is this the year the windows break? Will it give up the ghost in a final shiver of broken glass? Outside in the storm, as with the world, birds have abandoned flight. No flying south to depilate winter, the bikini waxing of dreams – no tweezing the snow moustache from elderly Florida swans. No way to take the hair off it all. You toss me a frozen bagel and laugh – hardtack or life buoy for a morning's survival, my shipwrecked words wash ashore this deserted island. The rain slants, cants, through these old portholes.
TSM 136
A poem plunged into the sea | I hear you singing |
I row to where the words rise | The Water is Wide |
moil, roil | |
in columns | lost in time, escarpments, translation from the Malagasy |
The return of the Sargasso Comet | |
The Salt Meteor | It was hard to tap the sky |
and break through clouds | |
quarried of marble | |
Are your tatters of seaweed | |
meant for wings? | I am tired of sinking ships and sailors |
I fly the slick and rope of sorrow | |
And so | And so |
Were you ever Icarus? | I’m sorry, no |
And so | And so |
I return to shore | Your oars are oak and stripling ash |
The forest has no place at sea | |
I press the ore blades across my chest | I will bring the lightning |
Restart my heart | One hundred hundred times |
For this I love you |
TSM 135
the Sheep-to-Shore phone rings you say ignore the elephant in the room during Thanksgiving dinner its ass-end smell turkey and gasoline from the fuming motor of democracy winching it through the doorway hoping the walls don't burst then we can just go back to where we left off our regular grift and holding our noses for Isaiah 53:6 all we like sheep
TSM 134
what is a turbinado and how did it get in my coffee? this question stirs and then dissolves my mind needs a mulligan just one day that doesn't crash test my brain and blow out air bags or leave me punch drunk from the rope-a-dope news a la Ali with me praying for the bell can we go back to simpler times? like Nixon Vietnam and the National Guard opening fire on students at Kent State? OK no bad plan Manson no no not that either good god no '38 and Kristallnacht gaaah! There's no end! Rawanda Cambodia Sri Lanka the Armenian Genocide and The Terror of the French Revolution this is not going well my poem not yielding up the calm surface of Haiku – Old Pond blooms with scum fine no headlines today no nervous sounds of clicking like the tiny claws of squirrels scrambling across the shingles I'll just read about science this piece on no my god Murder Hornets and they are orange too like stinging lights behind the eyes of a four-year long concussion
TSM 133
the sound this morning's breaking broken light the blues made me happysad because muddy waters do not baptize us holy wholly with salvation only part the red sea into blue and you and I sing "Halleluiah" but we're lost as heaven knows Leonard's lonely heart 'cause "love is not a victory march" I don't know how all our voices can open the soul when only the gospel in bluenotes are sent on a red letter day
TSM 132
writing my friend's eulogy dead man dead man his body double shot of bourbon casket strength in AZ asks are the leaves here where I am all high in the treetops in skin tight red and yellow camo like floozies like his groupies like light line dancing as they fall baby baby baby hit me one more time death in the air Halloween in the bag man he said it was hard to die the music hard rock pulverized to grit like chips off the old block his skin lost to grindstone the sky's wheel towards granite and gypsum the hard times ahead hard in the ground