Flowers

Marshall MacLuhan

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Marshall McLuhan

Black ants drip off my pen.
They crawl across my journal
organizing themselves
into marching battalions.

It doesn’t matter what each ant
weighs or means. What counts
is the accumulated weight
of all those ants. Just twenty-

-six of them: that’s all it takes,
as they divide and multiply,
shuffle their feet, form and reform.
All this jazz about medium

and message is meaningless
when internal organs start to fight
and the body’s civil war
tears me into tiny pieces

that the ants seek out,
reshape, rebuild,
and reconstruct into
new and relevant meaning.

Sun and Moon 11

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Sun and Moon 11

nochebuena[1] – a star spreading crimson fire
girasol – bright mirror to his golden face
colibri – hovering on a whirr of wings

am I less than a flower or a bird?

if my fingers could grow feathers…
if my face could sprout petals and leaves…

hollow bones whistle a sad song
the sailor lost at sea
the wanderer asleep in foreign soil

both far from home

[1] Nochebuena / Poinsettia; girasol / sunflower; colibri / humming bird.

Sun and Moon 10

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Sun and Moon 10

Sun thrusts his fierce face
through night’s dark window
his voice booms out like a golden gong

“What have you done with my child?”

curled and flaming his orange corona
head lucent with a coronet of radiance and fire
his eyes sweep night beneath day’s rug

New Moon pales and fades in a corner
Serpent escapes through a crack in the wall

 

Sun and Moon 9

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Sun and Moon 9

Old Woman walks within a cloister of stars
the heavens arched above her like a peacock’s tail

she chants the garland of her rosary
pearls she sheds from her cratered eyes
stringing them like counters across night’s throat

beauty she calls forth
beauty fresh and youth renewed
flushed with virgin pride
she steps into her jewelled boat
and sails across a sea of crystalline sky

she enfolds the cardinal’s wings in a cage of moonbeams
“Sing!” she whispers
she rocks a new born baby in her arms
the night is hushed with lullabies

 

Sun and Moon 8

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Sun and Moon 8

draped across night’s blackboard
stars and constellations all erased

my black angel bruised by the dark
the world’s feathered wonder reduced to shadow and ash

what dreams are these?

feathers against night’s window
an angel of darkness descending a steep stairway
tumbling through the night

who’s dreams are these?

 

Sun and Moon 7

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Sun and Moon 7

Old Woman weaves a crinoline from stars
she plucks roses from the void and turns them into haloes
nochebuena blossoms on the perfume of her breath

the cardinal’s song is a crimson voice hidden among leaves
mercurial in the moonlight
Old Woman coils her relentless cage

one by one the cardinal’s tunes are imprisoned
a butterfly impaled on a moonbeam
the last note of his song

 

Sun and Moon 6

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Sun and Moon 6

“Wake up!” says Serpent. “Knock!”
I knock and the door swings open

Old Woman sits spinning at a ghostly wheel
she draws me to her with a string of starlight
I squirm on the fishhook of her eyes
when I blink I fall gutted to the ground

herringbones knit me a tangled destiny
lost people wandering in a tapestry of dreams

as I read my story in the sky around me
Moon scythes my heart into tiny slices
a fishbone slides stitches into my side

dice click
two snake eyes stare into my eyes

 

 

 

In Praise of the WYPOD

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In Praise of the WYPOD
(Cheryl, Jude, Judy, Julie, Rachelle)
and
My Other Blogging Friends

How do I love you? Let me count the ways.
I love you when together we start to write
for although you’re always out of sight,
you’re never out of mind. So many days

we’ve spent sitting at keyboards, tapping
at computer keys. Is this the way to please
each other, a choosing of words, a squeeze
of meaning into a smaller space, overlapping

metaphors and images improved in ways
we never dreamed of on our own? Each
to his or her own, we say. Yet we reach
out to each other over time and space,

not joined at hip or lip, but with energy and zest,
sailing similar seas, and trying our very best.

Butterfly

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Butterfly

A butterfly
brushes against
my mother’s rose bush.

Pale and delicate,
much too frail to survive,
in this April wind,
he tears his wing
on a thorn.

The white of its shredding:
a sudden shriek,
blanched blood
drifting like snow.

“Why did you write those words?”
My mother’s voice
sounds in my head.
“Am I the butterfly?
Are you the echo of my cry?”

From this distance in time,
my mind bounces back and forth,
from image to image:
a stone skipped across
tranquil water.

Pictures pound through my head:
waves on the shoreline
where I scattered her ashes,
and every grain of sand
a grinding of small bones.

At Giverny

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At Giverny

At Giverny, Monet found the peace
he had sought at Argenteuil, but never
found. In this photo, he walks between
irises and nasturtiums on the gravel
path leading to the Japanese footbridge
that spans the lily pond. He stands now
on that bridge and sees himself reflected
… eyes, mouth, whiskers, hat …
all floating, half-drowned forever
in the fragrant colors he turned into
plants and flowers. Illusive, yet real,
the ghost of his smile haunts the lily
pond’s depths in this two dimensional
recreation of light and movement, held
forever in the camera’s instantaneous
capture of this selected moment. Now,
in the first home we have owned, this
Christmas Eve, with snow on the ground,
and a chill wind blowing a Queen Anne’s
lace of drifting flakes against the window’s
fly screen, anniversary flowers brighten
our table, while under the tree, presents
… including this book you gave me …
are piled as everything waits, breathless,
as past and future, hand in hand, dance
slow motion paintings to the flickering
rhythms of the fire’s impressionist flames.