Posts for June 4, 2021 (page 5)

It haunted her after her fall.
Wakeful in the night
from the pain of a broken arm,
she wandered the farmhouse,
stepped onto the porch
for the breeze and the stars,

saw the barn owl, 
ghost-white, swoop,
pounce, lift off, something
small and bloody in its claws.
Its passage punched a hole
of silence in the night. 

After the stroke, the ghost
moved in. It occupied
her loneliness, stood guard
between her and the door,
grew more solid as she grew less.

It absorbed all joyful sounds–
morning birds, grandchildren’s
chatter, her own voice singing. 

I tug the string
of sun bright beads
over the deep dirt
of her toe.
We lay our feet 
together in the heat 
on a metal bench
on Main Street.
Our matching toe rings
wink up at us
as we laugh 
outside the bead shop
in East Weaverville.

Rapidly rotting, a rotation of velvet seated animals;

I think about the train 
whistle echoing
down the tracks,
the stonewall in the front
yard, and the pawpaw tree
Papaw planted from seed,

rocking chairs on the front 
porch where evenings were
lazy with neighbors
stopping by for gossip
and cake as I played running
up and down the sidewalk.

I go there now to 
stand in the level field
along the creek bank
clusters of trees that
were our orchard the
only physical marker,

but I still see those houses 
who held the roots of my
childhood, the gardens now
filled only with memories
where the highway
leads out of town.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning. – James Dickey

here I am
on a cloudless day
awaiting the static tickle
pungent ozone smell
faint crackling sound
then the flash

My coffee mill quietly cudding at blackened beans,
raw wooden wheel unwound through ancient Grecian islands
gilt and unsettled in glorying verse and the clashing ignominies
nobly gnawing at rashed and raddling ravels, 
entangling tangs of irascibly wrung and irremeably roughened ruts
of irreparable ears, 
embattled in pickling years amid fickle kingdoms
cramped among overblown warlords’ chillingly chasmic cauls
and the cosmic barroom brawls ‘twixt godless tapsters
teased by the prickling powers proudly preening
among a young muse’s tongue—

Below where young Erato sat upon crumbly crags
with a flurry of flickering click beetles clasped around lowly groping lobes
that swept from the sun-plundered, brittle, dismissive dust,
which nettles and nurses still scarce scars of sage brush,
quivering traces of succulent birdsong
plopped about feathering trails of worms and grubs;
sounds bright as a child might drub and
stamp from a slippery shadow some whimsical
physiog’s indigo’d pearls of slurring wit and unparalleled lineaments
lingering, ageless, fixed, forgott
-en in baffling rites, amid rotten cotton batting
snuffed and stuffed against sensitive drumskins
dampened, deafened, dead, percussed and punctured
husk of a sallowed cicada who, sloughed
from but one golden moment
shreds of impeccably scaling arpeggios 
pitted in measureless ledgers of 
rough and illegible bark 
and indelible
dirt.

This cockcrow echoing, “Who Made Who”,
bedraggled in raggedy crocks that
caustic coughs of a boombox bumbling verdigrised
rifts of emphatically classic rock
debrides from the silenced static sleaved
from steelwound trellises trammeling airwaves,
pickling clouds with the proud rapport
among lovelorn children and louring troubadours;

starlings tickling prickling weeds 
with alacritous hymns among slumbrous reeds,
which pursing lips, unclasp and rasp
from abashedly chattering, shore-slumped stalks;

what winding jazz amid caterwauls clowders crane
above staritlaced motorists’ murderous brays
and the turgid purs of an overturned engine
nettled in knowing it’s nothing that new to spew or say,
glib chatter of timeless pistons splayed;

the queasily squealing saws
of a cussing triumvirate trading
a truss for a pillar;
the Lydian mode, 
old gags for Phyllis Diller,
slumping Thalia encumbered in crumbling stone
still swaddled in impishly simpering lichens. 

Retired is the proper term.
I’m tired again. Though I affirm,
My homage poet is sincere
(Though rhyme in poems can make me squirm).

My friends must think it odd or queer
That I, past full time work, revere
Past powers to function half awake.
They fail now; sleep I hold so dear.

I function now, just half awake
And frankly, had a full day to stake
a claim on napping; the creep
of sinking sun revealing my mistake.

So water boils, the tea to steep,
For I have evening dates to keep,
And hours to go before I sleep.
Please God, for hours, let me sleep.

She buries her eggs in the sand
then turns, stone-eyed towards the sea.
she leaves them behind never to see their beauty,
never to be held by her again.
it’s what she does, what she needs to do
for her world to work.
it’s up to the tides now, she thinks, or
rather, she just knows the thing –  

how the world salivates for her young
through tongues of sea bird and shark.
losing hundreds of her children to another’s hunger
lives in her like an ever-imbedded helix knife
she barely knows is there.
it twists inside her apathetic scars 
as she shuffles away into the sea
where she too may soon be some other’s feast –  

each scrape of shark’s tooth,
every year she survives adds to her life’s pattern
slowly painted in the sworls of her shell
by a passionless artist simply reporting her days
and etched into a poetic symmetry
she cannot see as beautiful
until she leaves it too behind.
it’s what the world does. it’s what her world needs to do.

The Dijon-Paris train was so late,
passengers continuing to Rodez
clattered fast across the Seine footbridge
to catch their next train there.

Halfway across, I paused.
Small in the dark distance to the west
shone Notre Dame in her reflective blue.

It seemed a pity to be traveling on.