The Letter

I left a message for you in a book.
It is like me to mark provocative phrases,
to shake them out in ponderous verses.
Do not read too much in the fallout,
the notes in the border are for nostalgia’s sake.
I dreamt of you again last night.
My adversary, always teasing me.
Your aura I barely recall yet you linger,
the suffering is in not knowing what is real
and what isn’t.

in need of advent

Summer scatters her shades

in daring colors of red and green

asymmetrical patterns splayed

over fledgling birds taking wing

above silent fields and late blooms

of lilac  the  deep  blush of peony

 clinging  to a bowing trellis.

A flicker of  burnished  feathers

dripping with  dew flitting above

rolling wheat fields.

Bowed   stalks  laden with  crusty leaves

tender stems beaten to the soil

in need of assurance

the promise of rebirth.

 

 

Kabegami Art

The pale window

The sun is still low in the sky,

it’s rays have barely begun

to pierce the chill of our pale window.

Don’t go,  we are scarcely out of dreaming.

Caress my breast with the lifeline of your palm

while my head rests in the crook of your shoulder.

With these  fingertips you kiss one by one

I will ease the furrow of your brow and

soothe your body with the twining of my own.

Let the hours pass  through us tenderly

like a shallow river of fledgling reeds.

 

Steve hanks art

 

hungry birds

The whorl of Summer

lifts the hem of her skirt

unfurling sunsets

of ocher and cerise.

She festoons the earth

with unfastening coils,

tight throated corollas

of raw bursting blisters.

Warring birds swoop up

new born buds,

unwilling to wait for

winter’s red meat.

Painting by Xevi Vilaro

Indigenous

Without end or beginning,

in white hours I wait for you.

Near night I hunger for darkness.

Shadows of lilting swans

we plunge from cliffs of vertigo

into the gold dust of desire.

You are the hoarfrost of winter,

brilliant bursts of Autumn’s fire,

solitary eagle above the mountains.

Beneath  your wings streams

of infinity carry you to my shore.

Should you fly on to distant provinces

I will follow,

become an indigenous bird to that land.

Birds of South Asia

If I am quiet

I can watch  butterflies

float weightless over gardens.

Stained glass collages of

amber,  rust, and brown

set in facets of sable veins.

They hover  over  flowers,

compound eyes and fluttery feelers,

faces smeared flaxen

too fine for the eye to see.

Free from fear

death is not a concept on

their mystical journey.

If I am silent I can watch.

 

art by Nature Works

black spell night

Drawn by the pull of possibility

I am at war with resistance,

the desperate allure of words

becoming flesh.

A tender momentum of hands

on taut shoulders gently soothing

a tangled bough of willowy knots

powerless to undo a black spell night.

You are kindle igniting the perfect fire.

In the calm of dawn I am a periwinkle

at your pillow,

pale petals of desire bending

to what is golden.

 

 

innocensedawn at pinterest

 

About a Girl

I didn’t sit with her anymore,  her suffering frightened me.  Today  I wore a new dress, I adored it’s lacy bodice and satin sash. He  picked it out himself.  Now my grown up eyes dissolve  at  his etched face in the  photograph with an empty space  dying in a dark room.

That woman who spit me red faced into the world,   fed and failed me, flung me from the hem of her skirt into the fractured world,  stares back at me from my mirror.    I wear her hands like gloves and honor the rolling river where her ashes sank among the gravel and worship the  boulders that harbor her.

A lone chrysalis twisting in the wind,  my fluid bones press hard against the casing.  Swollen wings beat at the  space that holds me.   I know that I am meant to struggle.    These unheralded breasts,  they defeat  and yet complete me .  I can’t see or hear nor would I  heed signs of warning.  A pubescent  butterfly, excessively sanguine or melancholy flitting from flower to flower,  oblivious to life’s repressive hand hovering  above me.

 

il Mondo de Franco

freedom

In the sweet summer

below the rusty fasteners of

an old swing I pump the air

with the  spindly legs of childhood,

dream my wide eyed dreams of whirling

pathways to the beckoning sun.

My heart leaps at the sight of a brilliant

rainbow and with small fingers I reach up

to swathe its colors over a blue palette  sky.

Now I know about life, the real truth of it.

Now I know the swing is just freedom.

 

later in the dark

Near the wharf I sit on the damp wall and sip my drink, let my mind slide into a slippery salamander of sea. The moon is a glistening slice of neon, her whisper carries on the wind, “moon child I love you too”.  Sinking further in I watch a velvet Osprey swoop my reflection from the silver waves where the sighs of lovers are lost in a monsoon. Old images flicker across my frontal lobe as I liberate sip by sip. That man with the golden veins doesn’t interest me anymore. Maybe later when my pearl skinned body breaks the surface I’ll bring him back again.

 

Photo by Westergren