First poem for NaPoWriMo 10, tardy due to the flu.
The Quails on 10th N
Quail beads crossing the road split as they meet another bird its glider wing stuck up, its dusty feathers a finger gesture to the oncoming lane. Half of the divided flock bobs up and down, line up like pearls in the crook of the curb; the rest are like dull stone by the crushed cousin. When another car comes they glisten in the sun, give in, and take wing to the other side.
Laid lazy across the horizon two mountain ranges form feuding families, a mix of soft curves and angles, both are draped with snow white stoals two jutting peaks, warrior guardians to the rift between them, a canyon tomb of their clans. Beneath an unbending, single-minded cloud, who spread's it's eagle wings and shades grow gray rows of outcast trees, starved branches eerily ashamed of their budding greens and the baptism their roots shared with the grass in the winter run-off. While the trees meditate in the cold spring wind the grass just bristles; as it's million precocious leaves wait to begin cheerleading for the tulips youth misled by perennial beauty, by the winter run-off, rushing towards the dry, interminable summer, or, of their own accord, misleading.
An English sonnet wherein any resemblances to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Inspired, of course, by Richard Lovelace’s Song (To Lucasta, Going to the Wars).
Going Out
Yes, dear, I’m going out, though it’s past ten– But don’t wait up; relax your aching head, stay: watch TV, or chatter to a friend, sleep and warm our sanctimonious bed. Where? Though any answer can’t suffice or satisfy this pure, protective question let’s say the store to fetch a bag of ice a prop to freeze my firey intention. An affair? What could that offer me? Besides furtive eyes and red smiling lips, besides impulsive sex, and mystery– these toys can’t touch our anchored, wedded ships. Don’t say a word; parting is sweet sorrow! I’ll return by twelve, or, at worst, tomorrow.
A bref double, using one of Turco’s identified forms.
Clacks and Clatters
Foreign matter clatters hard on the floor. Sleep is broken in a crashing instant– –listening to waking, nakedly prone… It’s just the cat, strutting her distemper. But there’s something else: silence, a knock I stumbled to, and answering the door I found a bare-boned, calcite skeleton clacking his jaw, and waiting to enter. I offered it a chair, left it alone returned with tea, but poured out slick, dull clay. Clack. He said. So I applied and shaped it, fleshing a clay mask out from the center. My own was mirrored in the face it wore I tore at my hair but found only bone
Why We Must Now Love
Push your mind back, past the sticky days and weeks; and with the great scales of life you carry, weigh any measured moments of pleasure which you still grope and savor against the endless empty mass of minutes not worth remembering; though dense as lead and gray as fog lost time amounts to nothing now. You sat down uninvited, just back from the gym you excused yourself, and cinched fast my attention to your shapeliness, your black skirt and leotard, your loosened hair, your cheeks brimming with apples. Lapsing in talk we walk into the night; together we stamp the crowding shadows cast by the moon. You stop, watching me, and I bend in. Our mouths mark a soft spot, discovering, too, a tough and tangled knot obliging to untie. Know my hands are strong but tamed; feel this palm polite upon the small of your back. The other shall awaken every cell kissing skin with skin. Your smooth, warming skirt wills a presentation of the thighs within. These you’ve saved for me, and I’ve my arms for you I know that now your sharpest mind considers every facet of the world, critical in each debate does rightly hesitate, for tomorrow is a creeping ninja spying and reporting on our every move. But his master is a ghost, a myth of many centuries. And he an automaton, a shade, a vampire, a devil, wishing all who live to fall as he. But not us. For we flush these sheets and flaunt this bed till morning. He in awe, unmovable, must shrink to fill the gaps between the floorboards, and his only power, fear, will disintegrate until Tomorrow floats up, finally dust, guileless in our windowed sun. So come, the drive will be sweet, the car warm, the music painting just another aspect of this memory. Lead me up the stairs and to your door, cull me to your lips, and then into your perfect room; my fingers tracing to your hips your eyelashes tickling at my cheek. Drag me down in maddening passion, or sit me cool and sure beside you; at any pace we will embrace, and enforce together face off against the cruel accountings of eternity. For lost time amounts to nothing now though dense as lead and gray as fog not worth remembering against these precious, massive minutes– all the measured moments of pleasure which we will grope and savor, and with the great scales of life we carry, weigh our minds, back-to-back, past the stillborn days and weeks.
Some Things Organic, Some Mechanic
Autumn leaves in Springtime, mashed or matted, dried and pallid through the frozen months remind me of my son: Five-years-old in October and falling into lumpy leaf piles, reaching at the aura of magic they still retain, the budded green from which they grew, the way they whisked about in the winds of summer, shaded his eyes in hot july, and tangled with a flying toy. Wars in space come easy, as future racing cars, and dragon fantasies. but he would not guess why the plane his great-uncle flew crashed, assumed it was shot down, or sabatoged, mixed up my description of a DC-2 with a photo of a lithe little Curtis Hawk, who’s wings he imitated in a dive. He popped his cheeks, a parachute blooming orange in the sunset before shuddering to a safe, if sudden, landing behind enemy lines He expected the brave pilot, in black and white, buried his silky friend before making a quick escape beneath the same starry black sheet that now and then peeks in from his bedroom window. Like leaves that fall in the night, unseen, he could not yet know sixty years ago in Sainte-Mère-Église hundreds of the same tiny parachutes cascaded down and if the anchors that weighed evaded the flames of foreign buildings burnt to light the night, if alive upon landing fell victim to NAZI machine guns. For him it is all soft pillow, a story good or bad, to ease the anxious stillness between lights off and pushing away thick blankets to feel freely a radiant morning until, for the first time, morning pushes back and cotton to time is spun.
A human has two opposable thumbs, is compelled by lightning and rainclouds that storm upon his brains as on the plains on Venus. With these man makes endless imitations. His two legs that walk or run him like a bicycle's wheels are easily mis-balanced when slowed If he steps toe to heel, if lungs dilate he'll fear falling over if he adjusts his pace, the placement of weight mind and body bend to be a tuned kaironmeter the tunnels in his head, a breathing triad: in, out, stop each phase qualified equal. Then may he finally see the brown dirt path, with weeds thereby dusted, green stems arrayed upwards, gray bark with blackened cracks from a burn a dozen summers ago, finally see the first bud, smooth like plasticine, a new leaf, all things observable, as Man, once again, becomes a mirror containing everything and nothing. So may he shrink, the dilatory respirate until breathing, time, and nature again gain touch, taste, smell, form; recede to the original. Or elese are released and forgotten in favor of the easy imitations that we can control.
And Chris Lott thought the villanelle was hard; the ghazal, done according to the rules, is hellish! I was doing alright until stanza 3, but I soldiered on; I even referenced my name in the last sher. In the morning my fascination with this form will probably renew, but right now I’m just pleased to hit publish and be done with it.
Lovely Time
Shear ambition and invention! Show all her clothes drop off! Let my logic and my conscience, perched like drunken crows drop off. So like coalescing bonds we cling and cull our love. We pull our hips, our bellies press until our lusty throes drop off. For her I’ve planted tulips, weeded bushes, battled aphids. But she’s let stags eat at the bulbs as petals of her rose drop off. My passion grows; each day I yearn to have her more and more. Yet more and more each time I do I hear her clamored Os drop off. Summer love, once a volcano, burned our curious fingers. Now it’s lava’s icy glass. I’ll walk its path till toes drop off. Now I breathe out opium, and absinthe slips me sleep. I dream I’m dancing roof to roof as cuckolds and their woes drop off. I dreamed that pirates claimed her ship, and made her watch the plank. I memorized her wailing tones as all the men she knows drop off. Alone I’ve passed these many years, but drugs have stoned my heart. Those memories pass out with me, as dogs inclined to doze drop off.
I’d worked out several additional stanzas, but I couldn’t let them make the cut. Here are a couple of them, for my own record:
We had a circus full of joy, with I, the lion tamer. Now I've let slip the acrobat while tightrope act bozos drop off. My secretary shoots at me the eye that failed on you. I pretend it's you instead as skirt and blouse and hose drop off.
The first was too silly; the second a bit to bawdy (but not incriminating, just so you know).
Just Before Lunch
On a fresh wet and west-fallen limb a blue-gray bird the true size of my heart holds and bobs on one leg eyes blinking like a boat in the night, black to white her friend has landed in the stream, splashed out to a patch of bright green moss he picked a water fly then fluttered behind the waterfall’s white insistence. Minutes out of sight I worry for the absent friend, but the blue-gray bird still holds on one leg, bobs and flashes bugs his black fantastic eyes.
Since taking up skateboarding again last year after a 15-year hiatus, it has brought me back to several things I’d loved in my youth but taken for granted as my commitments to work and family have grown. Writing is one of them. So it’s fitting that I at least try to pay tribute at the shrine of the skateboard, and here’s my first offering.
Cool Night
Cool night given freely to me; the lights of the city, the incandescent eyes that pass, playing on the pavement and curbs; the mantis lamps preying on a subcelestial emptied lot. A skateboard stamps, I, the rider, step up and am shown a third/foot taller. And, at last, the spring airs sweep the grime of winter, the scent of rot. The muscles know they now may flex, tendons stretch, and thus will wheels run on in twos and fours like a train rumbling, a rough dog panting. Their hot fric’tive spinning incenses my soul and spurs it on, toward imitation and invention till the body chafes with it’s burning. And each tap the wheels time down resonates ancestral roller-skates. I speed past a sign: No Skateboarding not rebellious in my age, but desperate. A pop and the wood will flex, the feet attend to it: one heel kicks, or these toes flick, to flip the board on either axis; a sharp mind and smart catch will land it, else chaos worsts and bites with vicious gravity. Whichever, let my chest swell in the cool night, it’s lights, it’s airs– elements of which new blood is constituted. So I force life to circle through me, as inevitably the night will end as it began, I just one of many sad dogs running solo, in training to be Lone Wolves: unconquered, uncapturable but by film.
