If the quick of bone
is marrow,
then why are my ribs so slow
to now take up your part?
Don’t they remember you –
my Eve –
how you filled their hollowness
with the haste to twin,
that keening heave
of heavenward breath?
For dVerse Quadrille
Salad Days
Life ain’t no picnic
’cause when I open the basket
I get a head cheese sandwich
which is body parts, right?
In aspic, like the gelatin
of love, holding it all together.
Ain’t a bowl of cherries either,
aren’t the pits toxic? Dog got sick
last time she got into a bunch.
More like life is a bowl of crabapples
and those make her sick too.
If life is a journey, I’m amazed.
If it’s a game, my bones feel like
at-bats, and my ribs are scored.
If life is change,
someone stole my lunch money!
If life is a gift,
are we all supposed to
live in the present?
Tossing a salad for Miz Quickly’s Labor Day Picnic
As the Adage Turns
Measure twice, cut once.
Treasure twine, split for nonce.
We’re but measured mice, cut slack.
Life’s a maze, amazed, we’re lost, we lack.
What blaze lights your path, the muse of riches?
For love nor money, wager stitches.
Worn red or black, a gamble’s set.
The eyes throw down a heavy bet.
Witless guise, weight of pride, all mulish.
Penny-wise, pound foolish.
For dVerse Twisted Adage
Portofino, 3AM
The rubber bullets of night have ceased their thrumming against the window
Dreams that wanted to run riot, dispersed to the outskirts of the city
Christ of the Abyss underwater in the Genoese harbor, but not you, not in Orlando
The two cities turning on the axis of old and new prayers
Where you write in skeins of rust, eyes heavy as iron poor blood
All that the Guardia and mall cops have have left to you for the Night Watch
The passwords dissolving in ink and wine
Quadrille 61
The time bird swings and sings
a tincture of rhyme
into the puzzle of dreams –
wake up honeybun!
Twitch back the clock’s tick tock
box of zz’s sleep caterwauls
claws the walls
trick locks in the tip of the trip of the
slight fantastic
For dVerse Quadrille
Quadrille 60
I sing you “Alouette”
je te plumerai les yeux, bec, tête
plucked eyes, beak, head
happily stripped to gooseflesh
killing you with my beautiful French
our feathers like songs
we don’t understand
itching under our skin once we’re
hungry enough for love
For dVerse Quadrille
Blind Sight
“It is life’s work to recognize the mystery of the obvious”
– Jim Harrison
Your laugh a blurry yawn –
I’m so nearsighted you are always
your beautiful best each morning
as you push me out of bed
Yet my eyes have the gift of
near sight –
Husbandry the myopia
of close study and closer calls
That look, too close
for comfort
Such when I roll back towards you
within a whisper of your lips
A semiquaver of your eyes’
plainsong light
I see how love and the world
collapse
Haibun – 白夜 (“Midnight Sun”)
“At four in the morning my body bumped against the ceiling”
– Jim Harrison
Svenn taught me how to get coffee ready for when we were pulling on our boots to go milk the cows. First, start water boiling in the kettle, then tear open a bag of grounds and dump them in the rolling water. Wait a bit and pour, grounds and all, into a cup. “Kokekaffe” or cooked coffee is what he called it, as best as I could make out. We’d drink it hot and black along with a thick slice of bread spread with butter and salmon roe.
On the islands of Lofoton Norway, like anywhere above the Arctic circle, light is a season, not a daily thump and bump of day into night into day again. The summer sun rolls around the horizon like an infinitely slow roulette marble. Or the electron of a halo, shutter stopped.
At first, I thought I was forever done with night, that darkness was something I could shed and never regret. But after a bit, the constant light started making the cows and the dogs and even the humans a bit crazy. I had to tie a rag around my eyes to try and sleep, since light leaked in through the window blinds despite my best efforts. Eventually, even just knowing it was light outside was enough to keep me awake, sanity slowly leaching out the corners of my eyes. In the end, the only handhold to full blackout was to drink more and more of the Everclear we made in a still behind the barn. Svenn taught me how to do that too.
Who knew how much we crave darkness? How necessary for our shadows to lengthen, dissolve, and fill the sky.
Calls for light season
Hints of crazy spices gin –
Distilled summer sun
Sanguine
“A violent windstorm the night before the solstice.”
– Jim Harrison
Not all the sun of yesterday’s solstice
could cauterize my dreaming
The longest day not long enough,
its rays not strong and twined enough
To bind and wind and stanch
night’s happy wound
Daze 23
“His mind’s all black thickets and blood.”
– Jim Harrison
Blood is thicker than madness,
but it is love that clots our hair
qbit 