Scour It Clean

I.

Heat/front seat:  the pulse of the dragonflies 

Just where the woods are torn away;

You see them lift...dip where it bleeds.

A corona burns through the window

Until the eye glazes blank to ocean--

Waves break, so neighborhoods grow

Cream houses blank to the sunset

Where we turn right, onto old memories.

Tires take the concrete pulse of place

While we look for the driveway, talk 

About boxes, tape, markers, and reach,

At the last turn, for each other's hand.

II.

Whicker of butterfly wings 

In the dropped cape of sun I step beyond

As the path gathers more shade

In my mind, always, cool shadows birth

Tigers deep in the park's bamboo

Where the whispers slide against the grove

Heat and breeze keyboard

Blind across my skin as the winter scales

Shed dry to pond's edge, tan to

Greening concrete in February's starveling sun

A great black vulture

Sheds a shadow slant among the pines

A phantom trunk falling

Over the water like a bridge to a chorus.

III.

If they renovated the complex, built over the road;

If none of it remains familiar, we've learned it new;

If none of us remain friends, are we still?

IV.

Look up! the Heaven band, the upper windshield

Just below, angel's wings, cowbird pinions gleaming

Spring onion savor, sin-dreaming buzzards reaping.

V.

Crow captains our used wisdom, a full skip we float a thousand years out.

Risen plastic coils through Avalon's apples whispering our way points.

VI.

Here on the lunatic surface, de-memed memes,

Forward headless anatomies facing wordless balloons

Everyday empty heroism--her words

These meant what you flung, years later

Your response stumbling into new arguments

Which she bought and hung

In the house that took you three days to clean out

And five canvasses to explain.

Standing on a table, squeezing paint to paper

Slinging the past forward until it fractured,

Splinters lodging in your fingers, your memory

Who never read a comic or quarreled naked through a room

Except in the ordinary way.

VII.

The fear that itches beneath the half-familiar shadows.

Is that who I think it is?

Did the poisoned dragon come back?

Her scale tattoo rises along her breath

Stretching over the memory of the lover who struck it

Deep in her skin, she hums the road she fled along

To her husband who sleeps, scale-less, beside.

Oh, poisoned eternity recovers.

She feels the itch as it scars beneath her t-shirt

Mundane cotton reigniting an occult fizz and chill

Coiling nerves burning against the scatheless scales

Where the dragon was picked clean.

Is that who I think it is?

Half-familiar shadows itch beneath the fear.

VIII.

There is one way to cling to a stuffed fox

At forty, in the bookstore:  add it to the pile of books,

Tuck it facing out, as if you remembered

Toys like to look out.

This one was balanced on the clearance table,

His back to the cafe hum sparking laughter from whispers

An exile from the children's shelves

Silent in my company.

IX.

My subconscious believes that going back to school

Means knowing:

--  About the communal peanut butter

--  That we hoard tiny food packets

--  Empty, white midnight hallways 

--  Soda only comes in Styrofoam cups

Means denying Kevin hijacked the intercom for light jazz

Means no printed diploma ever did more than preface a nightmare

Means more empty halls and pocket student universes

Studded along the night.

X.

His eyes were still deadly, but he kept them closed.

There was no carpet on his floors, claw clicks woke him.

Doors had been removed, rooms were left open

And he would have slain Sleep if it had come for him

Like a hero, which it never did, and he never slew it.

Some people prefer cats, but dogs are better.

I like the snap of jaws on the woken swarm.

I hate the sight of a cat silent, staring while devouring

My vampire dreams.

Velvet black wings flutter and he snaps,

Dragging the butterfly from my hair, tangled

Wings melting in my tears like mascara,

Its venom, monstrous wine.

My scalp itches and I scratch the dog

As he rolls over to scan the soft shadows.

He licks dark streaks across my palm.

They're getting thicker.

XI.

Nana does. Mommy does.

A toddler snuggled against the vinyl slats and floppy bags

On the mall bench near me. I looked up to see the underside of the rain.

I can’t walk the rain.

Fifteen minutes from opening, can lights off in the liquid morning

The woman nearby smiled at the girl and then at me.

Just a few minutes.

If you look up at the right angle, their faces cut

From the transition places, edge of clouds, opening times

Hold my hand.

I keep my eyes on Sephora glowing like Paradise behind a gate

As the light above splatters into a glass-bottomed shower.

XII.

Bees and hummingbirds enforce the stillness

But we forget, an old bumper cast into a paved placeholder,

Hinted driveway arcing to no home against the backyards

We forget ourselves to them, backwards formality

Shells neatly parked, tireless, in weeds

So that we can hear our silence in the unbuilt.

XIII.

Rain falls so lightly the spiderwebs look as if they’re strings

Of fairy lights, ready to blaze.

The wild herms have borne their fruit and now crouch

Beneath the sprays of hummingbird nectar.

Music rolls through my head, a song of the moon

Melted into electric waves.

XIV.

A breeze slipped cool around her neck as she knelt

Closer to the sharp refractions of the dew, around her arms

The air curled and to her wrist it swept.

Then pulled tight, icy metal tight against her skin

As a voice behind her said Might as well gather my diamonds

While you're secured to my whim.

She shivered and shook and slapped her wrists

As if the chains were webs and stuck only to break

If given a swift twist.

It was a fair catch, my girl, the voice laughed

You gather them up. Buy your freedom with dew

If you’ve any of the careful craft.

XV.

What color am I to bees? To butterflies?

In the inflection of their dance

Am I word or punctuation?

Lizards race—my shadow a flag that drops.

Only leaves in simulated skittering

Know me careless as they know the wind.

XVI.

This is the conversation.

You missed the first part, perhaps

An argument I agree with but found sad;

There is always an example, yes?

You are overhearing this, assuming I’m writing

Toward you and not back to her, to the piece you missed,

The part I heard, or read, or glimpsed.

Always an example of our grief,

A loose step, a wide margin, and the present crack.

I want to catch them, chase them like leaves—

What would I press them in?

Why press the sadness, why soak the sorrow between pages?

Catch them, falling, like whirligigs

Hold them, spinning, like dancers.

Remember them.

But what were we saying?

A catch of conversation, you thought I was talking to you

Justifying a memory or renewing one.

My nephew’s mother, on our couch, foreshadowing him.

XVII.

Flies and mayflies—adder’s rest—the brief and the ongoing deterioration

Helicopters drift from the room, buzz and dust

Anxiety above the weeds and wildflowers.

XVIII.

I think the match is startled when the sulfur meets the scrape

The grass will always smell like dirt with the green day crushed within

The bags released will dance but each alone and only to deflate

Those days are past that smelled like ink and math, Roger then laments.

XIX.

In an unreal season, with stars on the ground

Leaves like handprints on the ground

An entire village the season of one tree

The reality is, these hollow logs

Are only big enough for squirrels,

For all the marvels you can see.

They are kaleidoscopes to Faerie, not gates.

XX.

The kids meet again to fish when the cliff house settles

And the bedroom that they shared one summer

Yawns into the waves.

In the folded angel huddle of a tent they remember

Church songs, radio songs;

Hours chip from the foundation, days slip

Into the nets they've strung between them.

They pull the brightest to the table.

They watch the waves race Heaven to Paradise

And the dreams they once docked

Call their toes and then their souls

Into the water.

XXI.

On white shadow mornings when the bodies of mosquito hawks

Are like the noses of small dogs against the knee

There, on a concrete curve, will I sight the land.

Serrated clouds lift the sky, a visible sliver slips

Into sight like a tear wept from dreaming gods

Galloping on the face of the water.

So...yeah...I'm having to clean out some data stored on my phone, some of which was poetry and has to be retrieved by hand. Combined with the gorgeous inspiration image from The Sunday Muse (which I am posting on a Tuesday because...reasons), I was put in mind of how much lighter one feels when one cleans out a room or a phone or a stack of poems. And I had a stack of poems to potentially 'clean up.' Anyway, if you've made it this far, many, many, many thanks. I hope that your week contains more lightness and brightness than shadow and weight. 

-- Chrissa