Sigh Unseen

O, wood that smells of lemon
While the songs make it sweet
Whose bench conceals the evidence
Of music in its sheets.

Sight unseen of our own back
Silent before the tall, dark wood
Whose throat still rings when bumped
A chorus of old "shoulds."

Gelatin prints will separate;
Memories fade blurry into bands.
Music beached in childhood's shell
Was upright, never grand.

In a Nano-driven panic, people. I think I'm going to have to revisit this draft in November. However, taking a break for The Sunday Muse and Poets United Poetry Pantry this week. Then, back to shoveling words into the tentacles of my draft (which features actual tentacles...) and silently apologizing to all make-up consultants (er...one of the villains might be a make-up consultant...which is kind of a theme with me...let's just blame that on a lifelong possession of freckles). Hope you're having a good beginning for the coming week! 

-- chrissa

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

Floating on Diamonds

We could be floating on mountains bubbled under with diamonds
Down by the flames, holding the yard, the house, the highway
On the flat slope of the planet's curve, while underneath us,
Down where I imagine the world kneeling on a star she has found
And must keep burning because that is her job--
Always there is a job--the diamonds on her knees
Feel like this grit, like the tiles gnawing into my knees
As I try to defy the dimness beneath me with Clorox
While a continent slides through my thoughts
As I follow the sun burning beneath me.

This is being shared with Poets United for Poetry Pantry #412. The poem itself is...well...I hit a bit of a writing slump this week. There was a day when I was in the bookstore, looking at rows of books and my brain just went "nope" and I've been variously avoiding writing since. Several years ago we visited a park where a spring had run dry--there was a pump and a nice little plaque about how pioneering families in the area had depended on this water for a nearby fortification and now it was a nice grassy hollow in the shade of a treeline just at the edge of the park's maintained landscaping. For me, this poem feels a bit like that--the last bit of water trickling out and leaving the last edging of limestone about the mouth of pipe. 

Hope this week brings you plenty of interesting reading and more than enough water for the pipes!

-- Chrissa

Sally Blue

Bell your story for a warning, Sally blue
Stand with your toes curled 'round the weeds
Call for countries rising on the sea-thick winds
Hang a bell about your throat, Sally blue

Hold him close to your chest, let the snore tumble amen
Belly to nose, who never sang a hymn, Sally blue.
I'll dream those waves beneath the sky, rolling
Green above the sand, beneath the storm, roaring
In his snores.
We'll sway like weeds together, Sally blue.

There are fairies beneath the underpass
Hives below this concrete summer sky
Pulsing down my neck and shoulders
Heat thrumming like wings.

Where have we come apart? What seams were torn
While your dog was sleeping, Sally blue?
I'll climb the clouds that fall, cruel upon
The swimming cars, I'll make the melt
Of oceans
Water our weeds like faith, Sally blue.

Cry through glass and glimmer--
There were fairies in the underpass
Who sieved ocean through their wings
Whose only pulse was heat.

Who told you dogs dreamed faith, then breathed
The only rumbling hymn I've never learned
Sally blue? Stand and hold him closer
As he kicks away my salt-rimmed fingers,
Draw him near,
We'll dance the weeds one day, Sally blue.

Sharing this week with Poets United for Poetry Pantry # 411. 

Magic Glass

I embarked for Oz from Texas, from couch or carpet in the once upon a time
In the days where the cars left no ruts on the highways, the motion its own track.
Restless, she whispers. Not rootless. Tethered, lifted with the heat
Pressed up from the asphalt, the heaviest of birds, my own ghost, drifting.
We have been so many places, she whispers.
Green glimmers from the edges of the window. I can hear the vinyl
As I slide across the seat, feel the windows sliding down as I press the lever,
Waiting for someone to come, to turn on the air, to twist the engine
Into the deep thrum that will carry us toward Port Arthur and deep into
Fairyland, where the Cokes are cold glass fish drawn from the horizontal fridge
In the shady salon, deep as a swimming pool.
We can drift again, she promises. I see her toes trailing in the bright dust,
Universes swirling miniature in the sunbeams. She drags a hand through
Light and particle, through dream and consciousness. I hear a door click
As she wavers, the edge of vacation flowing like slow glass until the daylight
Bends and we are treading
In the magic glass.

This is being cross-posted this week with both The Sunday Muse (Muse #12) and with Poets United (Poetry Pantry #410). I think I'm ready for fall...
Hope you have a good week & if you're working on NaNo, may you have many words come visit you. My brain has decided to distract me with cover possibilities (because what's the good of having the barest beginning of a draft if you can't daydream about covers?) but I'm still moving forward. 

-- Chrissa

Window Shopping/Conjuration

Doors slide away, pulling the dust and heat aside
Step through onto concrete polished by sole and mop
Gleaming under the lights, where the fruit tilts
Toward the sheen. Remember the way it felt, smell it now--
Magic is the place where you don't live.

There are overhangs, deep shadows over smooth concrete
That chips into sharp, stony fluff, like a bitten candy bar
On the corner, where the steps lead down to asphalt
Somewhere you've only been once.

Sun, heat, puddles; the swift shade deep behind you.
Turn back to the window, to all the homeless things
While the heat catches your arms and ankles
Breaths chasing you to the car, to the heavy heat
In the backseat, before it blows over you.

And everything moves, all the things you've carried
Sloshing across the backseat. You'll be home in a few days.

It's the leaving, the heat and the air, the bright lights,
The heavy light, the shadows and the still shade
When you're young enough to parse each separately
Before the blur that becomes errands erodes you.

Magic is the sour surface gleaming like a rainbow,
the puddle that gives you the town in pieces of sky.

Magic conjures the sadness that must be slaked
By neatness, by things properly placed.

Magic is released in the sweep of the doors,
In the smell of the antiseptic difference down the road.

Doors slide away. Buy a spirit for everything that waits.

This week's posting schedule is a little different for me. With the beginning of the summer version of NaNo (I'm already behind...) and a holiday week, I decided to try to get in several poems regarding formative places. Probably because of the holiday, I'm caught up in thinking about vacations from back when I was young. The way I was fascinated by mundane differences, like not-my-grocery-store. The tiny coke bottles where my grandmother had her hair done. The possibility of going to dinner with my cousins and standing in the tile entryway of the old Luby's, waiting for the line to move. Tuna noodle salad in a white ceramic bowl. This isn't really what was intended by the prompt (which mentioned historic markers and wasn't really meant for a writing exercise, anyway) but it's the way I took it. And so, poems about memory (and magic) through the 4th.

-- Chrissa

Dreamers Like You

Heat gasps from the a/c whenever the car stops at a light
Lever the window down--living in the future, now--but the past...
Grass lines by the roadside smell sweet, smell of dusty import stores
That have been, of bound brooms, of sharp, gold-fringed decor

Sunlight wavers above the asphalt
Drive through a heat shimmer--
Not exactly a rainbow--

And this isn't a green land...it smells like packing and drying grass
Sweet as sugar on the edges of this melting roadway.

There are witches in the wisps from the side of the road
Wine-blue morning glories keeping the weed sheaves straight
Summer smells like this, the green heart of the season cut and bleeding
Hair drying in clumps while the witches creep in wisps and shimmers

The road summons what it will, huffs flight along the shoulder
Like coals just caught, hot air leaping and licking at the taste
Of spring drying like fruit leather on that open blacktop griddle

Through the mirage, where the liquid is like gas and sight
Is drunk and slides down the slick edges of things
That used to be transparent
Someone remembers glass is always slumping--

Or that's an urban legend.
And the witches? Climbing over the thinnest edge of the story
Where the window is cracked open and all the green sugar
Ghosts invite you to stop, to taste of yesterday's grass?

Well, the witches sweep the road clean
Of dreamers like you.

We've entered the season of baking in Texas, meaning the season in which the state would like to bake you, preferably in a handy parking lot that's been heating since 7 in the morning. This isn't quite part of the remembrances that I intended for this week, but it brushes up against them:  stores that I used to visit, car trips in which I'd watch for the mirages on the road ahead, and repeating stories you don't necessarily believe (does glass really slump over time? Is it constantly flowing, only super slowly?). 

-- Chrissa

I Am Led

I am led, though the path has been shaken from the forest's back
The stumps of the thin trees have emerged--boars sniffing the wind
For the smoke. The forest is running. I am led by the trampled paths of
Boar and deer in the haze of dimness blooming like algae above us
Dropping the old signs from their backs and unspooling temporal rings--
Smoke rings take life from grass to stone, through bitter dust blowing
Through the conch shell passage of my sinuses until I am singing
A path for the forest as it rises, running, the opossums making handprints
In the dirty blue sky like notes in the staves from which we hang
Primate notes running with the forest down the snapping tension
Lines that I read like the letters broken from the branches rising
Before me, great antlers tearing from the skin of the world
Boars running madness through the ashen fields
Shaking the clay from their bristles for the hands of the opossums
For the notes that sound in my nostrils, for the new paths
Down which I am led.

This was inspired by The Sunday Muse Muse #12 and is being shared with Poets United Poetry Pantry #409. This week I'm hoping to do a few posts inspired by the sermon that I heard while visiting my parents--at their church, not from them :) --about remembrance and places that are special to you. Also, Camp NaNo begins this week, so a big cheer to all of my fellow Nanoers! Yea!!! Your will project will be awesome! :) Best wishes for a week of good adventures,
-- Chrissa