Outgrown Endings

The five-year-old or the lizard brain--perhaps both together--
Are creeping across the carpet with me, like an Escher/Scooby-Doo self-portrait.

Flip-flops slap-squelch through each flat-nubbed square.
Library patrons shift, sunlight coils in corners.

Who deserves...how do we--how do I--steal it out?

We are sneaky-polite while the books are sleeping
Stiff-spined under institutional lights.

No one talks about it anymore, outgrown in the dirty fallout
Of the brand-new, tossed out with the packaging.

Here...where the collection lies comatose beside the windows,
Perhaps here it can be stolen, like a cup from a hoard.

There are rumors. Like a the noise of being quiet.

For the a/c tech on the graveled tar of the roof, bright melon shirt
Gleaming above the brick railing in the afternoon pipe-glare.

Technicians search that rippling sun-pond for proof of failure
Not for heat lake larvae, who feed on hopes of rain and shade.

Who swim from mirage to mirage, if you believe afterimages.

Happy ends might hatch full-grown from the skimming wishes
But not for those of us wading in sunlight and shade.

What it takes to catch a dream the glare inscribes in your blink
Is a net fine enough to sieve the hope from the sighs.

The following was composed for Poets United Poetry Pantry #401 and The Sunday Muse The Muse #3. And after I flipped a hammock backwards owing to an inability to calculate fulcrums properly. Anyway, it's been that kind of a day so a poetry break is welcome.

Hope you're having a good weekend & have a great week! Thanks for reading.

-- Chrissa

Pearls

Today being a Wednesday and neither a major holiday nor appreciably on the far edge of a semester, we had our weekly WordCrafters meeting in the LSC library. Despite showing up early enough to trawl through the stacks after vowing to NOT CHECK OUT ANY MORE BOOKS UNTIL I FINISH THE ONES I HAVE and immediately thereafter checking out a new stack of books, I was looking forward to this week's meeting.

Carrie (our sponsor, leader, and exemplar of following a project through to completion) had decided that our prompt this week should be in honor of Barbara Bush. It feels like I've spent a good deal of the past year in a negative headspace--alternately cynical and fatalistic--and I'd just read a book praising Dryden's rational, civic poetry, so the idea of writing a piece specifically against my own mood and in praise of a woman whom I only knew from the news stories and as a namesake for a local library, a rational, civic response to a prompt.

The prompt draft ended up as follows:

Let us remember dignity goes with strength;
Congruence between monument and woman
Shines like an harmonic angel sings--struck
By deed unforced, voice beaming the horizon.

It's not a great poem. How can I get at the monumental quality of a woman who was a figurehead, like Princess Diana, like Audrey Hepburn--women who walked into the glare of the cameras to drag a tide of glances over people and situations in need of the attention. It doesn't require perfection to do so and I'm not arguing for any of that. We don't write hero's tales in which women catch hold of nets and drag them trailing behind them to gather up a town and draw it to the place it has ignored. We write fables about how we learn to ignore or walk away.

It's easy to do so. It would be easy for me to do. The longer I look at this, the more I want to. What can I do with it? Orphan piece of little polishing, voice of myself as else--not disowned but not properly owned, like the image of a woman whom I'd never thought that much on, truly, until reminded of virtues by others.

But then again, that's a monument. That's a fable. That's a moral.

The Dreaming Hill

Year round, we keep Christmas lights burning in the fireplace.
Today those Fruity Pebble lights sweeten shadows as I stand
Waiting for the morning birds to scratch echoes in the chimney
Against last night's dreams of the past as a mirrored boutique
Filled with knick-knacks I can't afford.

I want to unholster my nursery school water pistol, watermelon
Pink--sling a bandolier of bubble wands across my body,
March into the backyard and retake myself from those fairies
Who are pricing me translucent, empty as the bubbles and the gun,
Hollow of yesterday, unlit.

A perfect, possessable hill they want, blood-stained glass dreams
Outside of which the birds, Wisdom, Gossip, and responsibility,
Peck along the sills where I have been. I have been sold
In the goblin stands that look like antique malls on summer roads
To hagglers with sharper dreams.

This is being posted for Poets United Poetry Pantry #400 and for The Sunday Muse The Muse #3. The image is posted at The Sunday Muse and is far, far too representative (substitute a dog for a cat and a hammock for the couch) for the way I intend to spend this lovely afternoon. Wishing everyone a similarly relaxed Sunday.

-- chrissa

Random Thoughts

Thinking of Carrie and Working

I'm back in the café where it started,
Where the words lived
Like children in the hip pocket of a parent.
If I bring them out, today,
Early afternoon,
To stare up at the coffee bar's can lights
Until the stars dance and space ships glimmer
In old-fashioned modernity above them,
Will they breathe?
I dream face down, over them,
Words entranced by light or sleepy
With ink still drying along their curves.
Some of them, years ago, were born here
Although none have ever
Driven those ships we are dreaming of
Into the thick white density of a page.
Perhaps these are dazzled, satisfied by existence,
By the mobile possibilities of line and light.
I am scared, suddenly, for them. Of them.
There is little of belief left for them
Of that safe landing on the printed planet,
Our fuel burns lower, bluer.

Hammock Morning

It was my mistake
To think no heaven could be shabby--
That the rusted red star
Piercing the fence, like a tropical leaf
Sword of heaven, sword of earth
Could never have fallen
Cast by a breeze clogged with an accident of angels.
I didn't look for the shade
Or the bench under the pomegranate bushes
Where Eden lurked.
You have to work for it
You have to look for it
It's hot as blazes--even early--here.
Red wasps gobble the wooden fence like slow flames
Pitchfork rears dragging the morning,
Buzzing like a snag in the film.
When it catches, where it burns
These breezes could be full of angels.
At least, if the neighbor's dogs
In full morning frenzy are greeting angels
Then I'll drop no sour curses
Into the day-melt pool at their feet.
Bless this silence, bless this shirk

Cold Comfort Hoard

Dark dragon growling its nasal slumber on the last heap
Of these last days, on the paltry treasure of a feigned lunch
Wal-Mart low cholesterol Knight-on-a-Stick (vegan)
Carving talons through your wealth, into sleep.

Dark dragon feeling the floor and the dirt close beneath
Dizzy on the bright/dim rotation flashing like speed
Claws piercing slumber itself, all treasure ground to sand
Each spiral of your body drilling out of sleep.

She Told Me

She told me about the woman
Who thought beans on the vine were free
Who took what she needed from the vine
Everyone had planted, watered, weeded, fed.

She mentions her sometimes
When HGTV murmurs and I'm at the backdoor
Pointing out those five tomato plants
The dogs & mockingbirds ravaged.

She remembers the fields, the family;
Some of them on the couch, some,
Like the birds, have swept by,
Brief shadows on warm skin.

Raise me up like a vine with the sunlight,
Fly me by like a thief on the wing,
Drop me like a prayer on the good soil,
Lift me into the long summer green.

----

The above was written during tonight's WordCrafters prompt exercise in response to the painting The Angelus.

Bleed the Wires/A New Sphere

When they shatter the glass
When they connect the field
When they bleed electrons into the street
I will carry them
Into the wire
Into the glass
Into the cable

They have shattered the glass
They have melted it thin; buried it
They have animated the world
For touch, yours, mine
Along the wire
Under the glass
In a new ether

What will your bread be now?
What will be crushed for your wine?
What will you whisper
Into the mike
Beneath the tongue
Into my tower?

How shall I answer when I...
I--a thousand desires of I--
...
Angels sing.
Wires sing.
...

In every wrist,
Vault,
Wall,
Sewer,
and skull
So shall I.

The following was inspired by The Sunday Muse The Muse #1 and also linked to Poets United for Poetry Pantry #398.