Between reading Sheila Callaghan and Erik Ehn, my brain is getting funny

Peter Counts His Darlings, he doesn't know how

Flying is just falling backwards.
I fell out of nurse's pram,
Tumbled starward,
Never never looked back,
I think?
I don't remember.

Michael has puns
That are too old for him,
They stick out through his cradle
Like too long toenails,
Wendy snips them off with doll's scissors.

John is fighting to pulse through
His own machinery,
Sometimes he is a clockwork crocodile,
But not as hungry.
Wendy complains at the steam coming out of his hat.

Wendy,makes every corner a throne,
Her eyes sparkle by needle-light,
Nothing in her face is anything I understand,
Her heart is a bird, beating against a closed window,
She tells me that flying is just falling upwards.
Mother,
I think?
I don't remember.

Some Mary Oliver for the Solstice

Poppies
Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

Mad Women Do You Love

Soo, I may have been watching the show Mad Men a little. Or a lot. This happened next:


Mad Women
Do you love

Lucy
Brick-a-brack brightened
Smile curved string of pearls
Do you love

Patsy
Swollen voice
Bruised lovely as a tumbling car
Pouring out past the wreckage
Do you love

Or hate
The signs on fountains
Wire and bone
Curled tight as your hair
Around your middle
Back straight
Do you love

Sexton
Or sex
Are your children bird-tongued
Indecipherable as your hands
Cramping for wonder
Do you love

Sylvia
Oven dreams
Crowding the bedside darkness
Anxious with thirst
Or cold
Do you love

The curlers
Tin cans
Books hidden under the bed
Do you love

When everything is either
An outside cardigan
Or an indoor plant
Do you

When you smell Marilyn's cocktails
And lethian fumes in your baby's shampoo
Love

Yourself inside-out
And back again
To you

Love.

To David Ferry's "Seen Through A Window"

You say she has plump milk arms
(The woman at the table)
Flowered with a blue bruise,
A cornflower kiss,
From some menial task.

Maybe her husband beats her,
Or perhaps he printed it on her mottled skin
With the hot and tender mouth
That even now gently masticates his food.
Perhaps they cannot wait for the end of dinner,
And bed.
Perhaps they are dreaming of other dinners,
Tables, and different chairs.
Yes, they are very beautiful in the green light,
Bearing each other up and down
Through the years and body of the room.

As seen through windows,
Aren't we all stones singing underwater?
Whatever we know of each other,
Is like these blue and milk kisses,
Is like a stone.




Here's a link to the wonderful David Ferry poem that inspired this one:
http://faculty.washington.edu/rmcnamar/383/ferry.html
(sorry, seems you'll have to cut and paste it into the browser)

I shouldn't read medical texts before bed.....

Lullaby

Dry-boned blinking child
I'm afraid I'll never bear,
Are we in a cradle
Or an old rocking chair?

Baby thrusting skinny
Little fingers into mine,
Our knuckles crack together,
Holding breath and keeping time.

You are thin as any whisper,
I'm concave as every word,
We are empty as an eggshell,
And your softness is absurd.

Though this dragon may deny you
I can see you from above,
You are made of crystal candy
Dreaming, stillborn little love.

Olive Trees: A Poem To Keep Warm

The hot shadows are pouring out from under the trees,
Draping themselves over tussocks and hollows.
We mirror them.
Peeling off clothing
Like dust scraped off of oiled skin,
Everything is found fresher underneath;
Rejuvenated and rejubilated
In the settling air,
The wondrous curve of limbs and twisting, artful trunks.
And we are damp against the baking earth,
The drone of crickets,
The quivering leaves.
The line of mountains softening into horizon,
The sky
Forged into beaten gold.

1,001 Nights

"Tell me a story."
He is hungry at her breast,
Impatient as his hands--
"Tell me a story."

Just once she would like to finish the tale
'Happy ever after' but
He likes to take things off of her,
Gowns and veils and secrets and
She must keep acquiring new ones so
There is always something for

The next night.
She re-dresses, though
Her skin aches underneath and
His kiss is an axe
She feels on her neck as
She weaves her myths together he

Listens, like a desert,
Raptorial, all eagerness to
The sticky truths she conjures up, she
Wonders what the end might be,
She tells him just enough.