Archaic Fragment

( after Louise Glück )
  
How was I to know          
dormancy could craft          
the art of contentment;          
         
that breaking beyond winter          
  to spring’s hustling charms          
would teach me of solitude⁠—          
  instill a crisp propensity          
  for suppression again        
         
Spring is cursory⁠—          
  a budding headdress only          
⁠for those that cannot observe          
  beyond outward beauty;          
who swallow, eventually        
summer’s flippancy;        
         
but, Earth is eternally employed⁠—        
a mother whose cord cannot be severed;          
  suckles you deeper within layers          
  of crusted shale to root forever;          
         
obscured bones of treasure⁠—        
  dust and ash reflecting yourself;        
the prodigal child          
  having survived the world        
  returning home after all          
~

        
o h m m m m m        
       
I hear it
I hear you        
       
talking on wings of the wind        
speaking to me as if I know your voice        
from the distant gossip of crows        
       
o h m m m        
       
and it resonates        
       
no, wait---        
       
v i b r a t e s        
       
with the familiarity of a        
       
h o m e         
       
that I don't recall        
ever stepping into        
   
regardless, feeling its floorboards           
creaking underneath my restless feet        
still with impatience to explore
a world of words, creek beds, and cornfields        
outside the door  
 
 

( after Louise Glück )
  
   
I recall in the year  
once I came into season,  
after the leaves all left,  
   
in the abandon of Fall,  
and the earth held its breath  
from the long chill I wore.  
   
I no longer felt alone,  
not on my own, to sort out    
the poetry of myself.  
   
To recognize you only  
as an atrium of airy clouds,  
not within, like a pulse.  
   
The life that began to  
resurface as I rolled my grief  
as thunder of lightning,  
   
a bursting from the ice,  
to announce you in the rain—  
a solitary song, an ache.
 
 

Waited with seminal pose
The dormant    
A hidden self    
locked in the cold  
I would welcome the warmth  
That resting prolapsed  
Did you bring the cold  
A permafrost masked  
To stunt awakens lay  
To hold and not release the bud  
The new growth from the corm  
Its green to unfold  
Insects in burrows like hermits  
A commitment to industry  
The spring brought its work ethics  
Earths nurcher and nature of raising  
Warming arms come to chase  
The first kiss    
The pout that god made  
Verdant feelings rising    
Its flower bud just formed  
A thin winter coat  
A cover for the festival  
From small and brown and underground  
The blossoming of hope
But question our longevity
The bridges burned in winters heat

(inspiration poem "Snowdrops")

 
 
 
in this season,  
   season of decay.
when all the leaves
have fallen,
     fallen all away.
 
cold blue death will
 come,
    come to pull life away.
love will be forever gone,
    gone with the pale kiss
of death to stay.

( after Louise Glück )


At no time, while the spirit
moves through you, are you dead.
You cannot be fooled,
You are not proud of this fact.

And all things being equal,
no matter the wasteland
or inclement weather,
is all there is, nothing you can do.

Still, I can’t bleed for new chicks
that have no history, this latest
generation that thinks
I can’t spell, or buy a chair.

Mine look at me as if I’m a typo
from a dead language
that lies in a silted harbor
where Trojan warships once stood.

They mimic a blasé-insatiable age
while I could no longer care less—
anticipating the lack of
what everyone else anticipates.

visiting the darker places  
no one lingers  
not on purpose; not them nor I  
tending the wilted flowers  
on autumn's doorstep; yet a welcome breeze  

learning the embrace,  
the lull, the sting  
not on purpose; if only one time  
to hold a rose's thorn  
 
awake! walking the softer sands  
the homeward journey  
awarding a quiet reprieve  
behold! another artist, like me  
dripping color on the canvas  
brushing a red dawn  
over distant, turbulent waters  
painting death; yet a calming end  
not on purpose;  
nor the darkest dream

Frailty in paper,
a thinness blooming:
She is seen in a mirror.

He sees her, the writer,
bleeding ink onto his pages,
decorating his drab days:
She holds a single rose in her
subtle emergence.

She must be born, he thought,
this way that only fate allows.
The tactile grief is necessary,
that she become seperate from him.

The blossoms fall first
dried under his sun,
yet they remain white:
Floating in tiny winglets,
they become the very air.

Her veins emerge within
his parchment window,
feeding her persistent growth
upon his slippery branch:
A leafing out of his inspiration,
he is writing her ending;

The fruition will fall and rot
in the late season.

    ......

( after Louise Glück )


My parents at opposites,
and I in the middle.
Of the death nothing but good.
The plan as it’s shown
on the chart,
I can’t have it said of me,
unless it’s every bit
the painful truth,
on the edge of the maw,
a flower-eater.

I met halfway
as it was foolish sense.
And, looking in,
campaigned for mercy
and mother.
I grew into this old life filled
with blind dates, stretch lines.
The Lord is my Shepherd.
Of the death nothing but good.

Remembering what I said last night, now I reflect
I should have been a little more cautious with my words
But then again hindsight is always twenty-twenty
I blurted out the things that came to mind
And now I’m choosing on what to do next.
 
I don’t know why I said it
But my intuition was to be honest,
Now the poet in me is sad.
 
I slept on it but still
No answers came to me in dreams…
 
It’s like we go through this cycle,
Every once in a while we’ll argue,
Reconnect and become closer,
Until something else comes along.
 
I kept saying “I don’t know”
Because I don’t understand it,
But it’s a little frustrating to listen and hear
That my monotone deliveries
Are fake and unfeeling.
 
Fuck body language!
Listen to my words,
 
I’m slightly autistic  
I don’t care what the experts say
 
I’m opening up
But you’re stuck on the reflections
Or the façade of my crossed arms,
 
But my honesty tends to do that,
It’s kind of ugly when I speak it,
Unless I put it in verse…
 
I don’t want to do this shit at forty-five,
Giving up everything I have,
Sleeping in my car,
Just so I can provide,
And no I won’t ask for help,
That’s my fault for too much pride.
 
Maybe that’s what wrong, me.
Maybe I’m bi-polar
Maybe it’s the Gemini.
 
I don’t want to settle, or deal with
But you know me, I become numb,
I shut out the world and go live in a fantasy realm
Because that child me still dreams.
 
Maybe I’m not mature enough,
To deal with my karma and your insecurities  
To understand what you’re going through…
 
They say women mature faster than men
And if I’m only nine months ahead of you
Emotionally I’m two decades behind...
May I should catch up.
 
I don’t know, if feels like
Our perceptions are so different
But your self-doubt backs me into a corner
To a dark place I used to dwell
And I don’t know want to go there
Because that’s not who I am anymore.
 
Perhaps that’s the answer,
We’ve grown apart
And that for the sake of children
I shouldn’t be unhappy.
 
But you know me, I won’t speak it,
I’ll write it in verse
I’m a little slow that way,
But if I publish and post it my voice is sure to last.

 
i.
It’s like once having known a
chronic alcoholic, which I never had,
at close quarters, which I also
never had. No more calculating
minutes, soft-boiled to hard.
Waiting till he finds the butter knife
is not with its dish, oh my God.
A ceramic coffee mug stained
with its last watermark, good Lord.

ii.
Like mix-match napkins set carefully there,
I stood in place on each black and white square
on the stage of our chess board
to which I’d record  
all of the years I thought I could fix,    
and spent waiting for our Apocalypse.    
An echo resounding, taken aback,    
off a rook and a knight carved and shellac’d.    
It was then at the time, matter and mind.    
both plotting revenge, if only for some,    
for a moment I felt would never come.          
 

'The girl who disappears from the pool
 will never return. A woman will return
 looking for the girl she was.'
                    -Louse Gluck


She is too loved, one might say,
to know darkness;
too much a mother, a child, her fields
too fertile to know Winter.

But, she can't know Winter
when she is removed of it--
Death is another Summer.

So, she courts him, that death
unknowing what he really is
by living so fully her heart could burst.

This is where the harvesting of her begins:
She runs toward it's power, arms open
to receive it.

The fields are neutral, she believes,
alive in all she feels despite the
earthen pull of their rooted grains--

All food is good food, she thinks;
my mother bore me in this way:
I am her food.

So she sings a siren's song:
I am love, I belong to it;
then from the ground he emerges,
parting the grass.

His voice fills the air, beckoning her,
replacing the hollow sound of
her heart in her ears
whistling like the wind--

She, at once knows her
mother's love for her, the
resignation of it;

loving the magic of something,
not what it consists of,
and knowing magic fades.

She bids goodbye to constant
with it's endless sun for a god
whom is devoid of sunlight.

Winter becomes another Summer
but with a different sun
in a similar sky.
The old sun is forgotten
as if it were archaic and lacking
in radiance any longer--

Darkness becomes her new sun
in the absence of a real one.

In time, she will run back
to the old sun and the fields,
praying to remember it's bounty:

She will not be aware of her own
great absence from it.
But, in seeing how it has changed,
her prayer will be answered.

         .....