I agree, this is a Delta masterpeice and one of my favourites
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I agree, this is a Delta masterpeice and one of my favourites
"That Time" by hallaig
Do you remember the English girl you met,
spent a week with, that July in Spain?
She seemed your alter-ego.
Brown as fish, you haunted that place,
young enough still to playact
in the garden with its antique swings
and old blooms tired with heat,
though in the afternoons, fanned
by that sudden wind, you prismed the pool
like nereids. She left a pink fishing pole,
thrown haphazardly down for you
on a brown tiled floor
while outside mountains boiled
and time slowly skewed.
A pink fishing pole, something briefly gained,
something lost for good.
I am honoured. Thank you kindly.
"Recognition" by dyne7
Sometime we borrow things
forgetting where we put them.
You watch your daughter
late at night, when she is
in the deepest stages of sleep.
She shifts. Turns. Repeats.
She wants something to hold on to,
like the former prize fighter
next door who shadow boxes at every gathering,
the effort spent on your high school what is love
assignment when a minute was too much,
the hug you gave your second father when only
a smile was needed,
the amount of shampoo you poured in your spouse’s hair
when only a drop was enough.
Daughter, soap in the hand, clothed light,
it’s all the same to you.
To the youngest, we are like gods,
fully grown, fully human.
The colder it gets, the less we see our shadows,
the reminder—snow angels with her,
and the one snowflake that landed in the middle
of your head, where her moth-wing lips kissed
at the moment of its falling, the line of demarcation,
the separation of all things good and evil in you.
Love is recognition, is what you wrote.
Recognition. Like the look your father gave you
when you asked for a pen to complete the assignment,
like the look your girlfriend gave right before
you asked her to marry you,
when you breathed frost in her ear,
and said her name.
"Cordova" by dyne7
Hurt. So simple a word. Esther says in Cordova, dreams are like liquid,
tangible, a colossus. So what? Fondness. That is what ends us.
Ask Isadora. Isadora and her scarves. She knew. Her scarves leapt
from that carriage door in search of something that would crush them.
Isadora. So simple a name. And those constellations that bore witness
to the slackening of her neck? They know us through and through,
see everything we do.
_____________
The night my grandfather died, they watched.
An unthinkable number of years it must have taken them to see me.
But there they were. Andromeda in her chains. And Cetus, you great brute,
would have her devoured like the air of our final hour. You were there too Draco.
Were you not hungry? Hercules needs those golden apples more than you know.
The moment is now, Horologium whispered. I already know, I said. Latin tells me so.
_____________
The wolf Lupus paused for that. Even Perseus took the time to pay his respects,
refusing suicide. Days later, the funeral. They came again,
eyes flickering like the vigils of the dead. Scorpius, Tulcana, Vulpecula.
Even the shadows of memory must be tampered with,
allowed to blemish our body.
_____________
Light is not all that is needed, no matter what one thinks.
The press of some unidentifiable clothing like Hiroshima ash. What is it from?
The Cordova of youth knows, threatens to tell us all our life.
The promised fields of ontology our fathers hinted at when we were still virgins.
It is said that in the Plains of Asphodel, the dead eat flowers.
Flowers here. Flowers there. Rooted in all of us, siphoning
what we know, what we think we know, spiraling to blossom.
_____________
And like a tape in constant reverse, I see the indigo-purples and greens
of his eyes, newly closed, newly blessed. The sudden flash, the double exposure.
The open curtain, the morning light, persisting, traveling impossible miles
to show me the muted form of my grandfather.
_____________
A week later, the burning came. The collecting followed.
Then, the latch in my father’s hand opened, and out came the former him,
exfoliating, purging me like soap. When I was young,
I thought that if someone cut me, I would bleed ambrosia sweeter than honey.
Later, the salt of some inner beach stung me here and here, showed me
the mortality of youth.
_____________
Somewhere, all of us will be minted on some giant coin, reading IT HAPPENED.
At that hour, we’ll realize the nicest flowers we give, are to the dead.
And the ones for the living? They’re nice too. But they tend to hunker forward,
unable to remain erect, like tiny, crucified children.
Revisions (a collection by dyne7)
Revisions
As a boy in Dachau, the memorials of dead
gone for generations were everywhere.
German chocolate dripped off my lips and stained
the walkway like the blood of the dead*
once stained the rows of henbane and belladonna
in the fields around us.
But my eyes always drew back to the wall—
the polished marble wall showing the names of bloodlines.
Stein the carpenter. Goldberg the farmer. Eckerman the girl next door.
Kaplan, the young boy who loved to read.
My reflection covered them all. For moments, they lived through me.
The pictures above those names? They envied me.
And so I wiped away the dust darkening their faces,
the pollen of our dying.
That’s what we are after all, doppelgangers of ourselves at every turn,
revisions of each other, word economy of the gods…
Older, we sense this. Nobody to tuck us in, no stools to reach
that colder light in the pantry of us all.
And that wall at the camp? It was razed.
Likewise, the porcelain seraphims lining the entrance,
and the ashes of mourning littering the hills of flowers
whose roots stamp out the faces of the dead.
We are memory over and over.
Traces
Like the color of flowers in darkness,
so are the traces of the dead,
filtering among their absence like
the roiling veins of the human body,
the marred opals of our being.
The reminder—crumbs on church floors—
flour coating the grainy faces of Christ
like the dust on moth wings,
dispersed among us like your father’s
ashes among the Aegean. But even
your father knew the unspeakable
truths that are voiced among*
the dead—the apple juice*
you once spilled on his old coat,
the one blank line*
you left alone in Sunday’s
crossword puzzle, and
what was it, just what was it
he always said about your hair?
The darkest color of them all.
Try telling that to your mother,
a painter nonetheless, crafting
her unspeakable story
onto the old canvas in her study,
the human condition forced upon its surface,
the linen seemingly hating her for it,
the Golgotha of her hands
crafting the Jerusalem
of her life.
Blood Lilies
The two men burdened with the task of telling
this wife that her husband had been found dead
were never the same afterward,
spoken nightmare released from their lips
like the barb of a wasp, the pooling
of everything that followed.
He had been found by the river,
body turned to the side, white shirt streaked
with blood, reverse of the blood lilies
lining the shore of the water.
They had no more. Nothing more to say,
nothing to offer her for the loss.
The dead do not bargain, do not trade
at any sign of someone capable of joining their own.
And these men kept their distance from the inside
of the house, not wanting to disturb the children,
not wanting to be the filaments of the fallen,
whose power descends through them
like the light of a prism.
They went home, going their separate ways—
one, to a prison to visit his father.
The other, to a bar in the suburbs to drown
out the synapses of his brain firing,
alcohol dulling his breathing,
postponing the return
to what keeps him going—his own family,
his harness from sleep.
Chemotherapy
Hard work will set you free they would say to you.
God rests here, no motion needed—Lazarus rises
dizzily, to fall again, to rise, to fall. You
would sooner remain here, the former you abandoned
like cicada husks on trees. The incoming hour
encroaches like the dark, sways inside like motion sickness.
That alluring black sky you admire is the coat of God,
ruler of galaxies, promoter of all time.
That mercurial brine below laps at your feet—
recedes—comes back, goes, comes back.
Every finger moved, every lip touched, every thigh
worshiped is the mirage you think you see.
Like freckles on a face, like dark grain
on old film, like those spots that bleach
can’t remove, we’re cindered here, graffiti of the cosmos.
Once, your mother lay with you whispering
I’ll do anything. You’re my whole life.
And the proof—a photograph on the wall
of a young, hairless boy grasping a bucket of broken
shells and sand, and the blue canopy of earth
above him, big enough for all of us.
We, the archived of the living, the footnotes of the dead.
Control
I had taken her in from the rain.
Driving away from another fight
with my wife, I saw her by the road,
soaked, red dress clinging to her
the way that rose petals will sometimes
cling to the water’s surface, hair tressed
over her cheeks like the flaws of midnight,
groceries in hand.
Just some young lady. And the gentleman
in me just could not stop, felt compelled.
She would not tell me her name,
but she invited me in anyway.
And as I sat across the room from her
as she made us tea, I didn’t say a word.
I let her talk about all the things in her life
that she once had control over.
I learned about the job that let her go
and the mounting bills, her grandmother’s funeral
and the lack of lilies—her grandmother’s
favorite. She told me about her third
miscarriage a few weeks before,
the damp blood that awoke her,
the noise that no human should ever have to make…
I realized then that I had heard enough.
The midday light broke through the curtains
as I moved closer to her,
and the patterns of the fabric
pressed their monograms
of shadow over my body.
And I took her, this stranger,
this woman I did not know
into my arms, and felt her press
her face into my shoulder,
like the pigeons of the city who love each other,
and escape the rain together.
The Nameless
On the marble porch
added on after the homes
waltz with Hugo—the lotion of dusk
drenching us, family game night
went off without a hitch.
I was eight, and a real estate
tycoon to boot—with my
lion’s share of every house, hotel and
avenue I’d ever want.
My mother’s sundress matched the
bruising sky, and like a conductor
in 2/2 time, my father spread
butter on the last of his dinner bread,
hue like the cold light
the chandeliers emitted within
the house.
“Bedtime kiddo.”
I didn’t listen. I kept bargaining
to be with them for just the
next moment longer, and the next,
and the next—
until I drifted off to the
baritone voice of Nat King Cole.
What’s worth knowing slips
between the nameless, and
my fingers curling on the Boardwalk,
my mother, her hair now mussed
from the humid Carolina air,
took me inside the house with the
tenderness only parents know,
and careful not to brush
the porcelain salters within
the house, took me upstairs
and placed me in my bed.
Eyes adjusting to the dark,
artificial stars glowed,
revealing the glass model
of the human circulatory system
on my night stand.
In that moment, I was safe from corruption.
All that before the funeral the week later.
I was born for this I thought.
And careful not to slip around
the muddy edges where the waterlines
crisscross grid would soon cover
her bones, my father and I helped the*
pallbearers lower her casket into the ground.
In shock, I ran away as fast as
my young legs would carry me,
past the front gate reading
Let the dead bury their dead,
towards something inhumane,
something rotating us into
the soil of everyone.
The Difference
It’s mid-afternoon in April,
and Llewellyn and I had been
walking for hours.
He wants the best casket for his mother,
but the shops here don’t quite have
what he’s looking for.
Hunkering down on this bench,
Llew says something about how quiet
it is right now, and I can’t argue that.
This time of day, light precedes the dark,
and the cosmic blood of sky halos over us.
”Cremation”, he says.
I’m confused. But he tells me she hated crowds,
and that death probably wouldn’t change that.
I don’t know if it’s the right time,
if it’s for me to say,
but I tell him anyway. I tell him
there are moments where we find
ourselves in the rawest of places.
Here, the dead swirl around us,
and their briefer selves play
with crayons darker than black.
Sometimes, the most vivid colors
one can know are the ones that
remain nameless, the ones without verbal
fingerprints to deter us from searching further.
It has become awkward, and we both know this.
And like a death’s-head moth taking flight,
he stands and walks a few yards away from me
and lays down, arms and legs spread wide.
I think he gets it now. From here, he’ll reach
that place we all fear to go—the divide where
subtraction has become the only addition
we can ever know.
This is when I recall my old father.
And how a young boy waited for the first
sign of his old man, by the arrival of his
shadow on the porch blinds.
And how wiser now, sees nature
in the most cartoonish of ways—like a
touring rock star shooting heroin, and in this—
becoming his next word, breath, twitch,
processing the next surge he takes like an
antibiotic,
and how smiling grimly, sees his latest
groupie offering herself to him with
a tramp stamp that says Bella Luna
in a blue like the arteries of her body,
everyone else lying around him
like Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, and he
wonders where he left the prophylactics.
We spend the day picnicking
on the grounds of Threave Castle
in the shadow of lichened stone
and agreeable ghosts.
We watch our children
darting through foxtail and oat-grass,
summer-brown and quick as rabbits.
How did we spawn such creatures,
these tangle-haired girls, so wild and free?
"Let me paint you," he says,
and I laugh, gesturing to the castle ruins,
hulking and solemn against the blue-violet sky
of a steeping storm.
"Och, no," he says,
tugging at the yellow ribbon sash
of my eyelet summer dress.
"Aren't you the sight?"
The wind stirs,
sweeping off my straw hat,
skipping it like a stone
across rippling grass.
My sash is between his fingers;
it unfurls when I rise,
caught by the wind like a kite.
This is the scene he will paint:
A woman with wind-swept hair
wearing a smile of dismayed delight
and a white dress that gusts about her knees,
hem billowing upward
as if to follow
the silken stream of sunlight
set loose against churning sky.
I agree. This is one of EA's best for sure.
By Hillwalker
The Trespass
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TRESPASS
This is my beach;
this strand of white
unsullied by another’s words,
unruffled by the morning breeze,
unstained by rouge of blushing dawn,
all evidence of last night’s hectic fever
ebbing with the tide.
I wipe the grit of sleep aside
and search for rhyme beyond the green-stone point
where hulks of rusted rock
lie sulking, anchored to the deep.
I watch the day unravel,
picturing the palette’s tilt
as dabs of summer sunshine
verdigris the shallows,
spilling bands of burnt sienna,
persimmon, sinopia and icterine
across the flawless canvas of the shore.
This is my beach
and yet I give each season leave to make its mark;
then note the scars and scabs of storm,
the dazzling spray, the gulls' reluctance to draw near,
or snowfall where it frills the shoreline...
But
today some other force intruded on the scene
with nerve enough
to pad across this virgin sand,
to scribble verse in stilted lines
and daub a patch of jazzy pink,
enough to break the spell of solitude;
five toes one heel
paired off in symmetry,
two feet so small
my hand could hold both imprints
in my palm.
I came too late to see
her spindrift hair tied back,
or hear the squeal of shock,
or watch the grin spread wide as prairie sky;
the child at play
among the wreckage of my inspiration.
I love these Dyne7 poems. Where is Dyne7?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack of Hearts
An untitled poem by hillwalker
Crosby, Stills and Nash,
two beards and one moustache
By Last Chance Creek
Last Chance
There's a place in the woods
where the air is cool and clear,
distilled by waterthrush song.
Sunlight sieves through aspen leaves,
stippling the water of Last Chance creek.
This is where huckleberries hide,
growing plump in the underbrush
of shadowed hillside.
We spread my quilt here,
beneath the spell of spindling trees.
You read Thoreau aloud,
and the thrush ceases its song.
The forest listens to your voice,
words formed gently and exhaled,
as trout bubbles in a stream.
I think awhile of Love...
When the light grows watery,
you pluck plump berries
and feed them to me, one by one.
They are firm and sweet,
inking your fingertips a tender purple,
the shade that shows
below the surface of sleep.
What an inspired choice! Congratulations to Bar for selecting it and, of course, to Everyadventure for composing it.
I can still smell the lavender in my hair
from sleeping in the field that night,
my hands wrapt about the belly of the Earth,
I swear I could feel a heartbeat.
The moon shone like a secret lover,
quiet, yet bright, never wishing to disturb
the poetry that breeds
in its softest spotlight.
He gently swaddled the hot, tall grass
in an elegant gown,
reassuring his position as the Muse,
as I reached out to him with both palms forward.
Stretching, waxing, waning,
my limbs tousled the wildflowers, as the
sweet, humid air filled my lungs.
It was
thick like honey;
one of the richest gifts of the universe,
disguised in simplicity,
and wrapped in innocence.
I warbled like a morning sparrow, aching for the presence of
a lover, a muse, a friend, but all that was left for me to find
was the soft but steady ambivalence
of the Universe.
"Butter on the Harp" by munkinhead
Pigboy Crabshaw
came through Moab.
I heard him
on the scarp.
Not some
cyber-bifurcation,
but with Butter
on the harp.
I heard them there
quite clearly,
it was Pigboy's
mournful wail,
with Maria
on the high notes,
like a comet,
and a tail.
Some might say
it was the mescal,
or a remembered
happy dream,
but I am sure
that it was Pigboy,
the way the guitar
screamed.