Verse for a Reclusive One
I refuse to say goodbye. I’d rather say hello
if you should ever come back from where you have to go.
In the interim, I’ll let my memories be my guide.
Sometimes they are the safest places to abide.
You decried my frivolous gestures, yet ate up all the cake
those birthdays when you swore festivities were a mistake.
Oh, my reclusive loved-one, why do you hide away?
You do not have the answer. That’s why you never say.
Prompts for today are goodbye, refuse, guide, frivolous and cake.
Secrets of a Warm Climate
After a hot afternoon,
a sudden rising chill wind
blows his canvas from the wall.
The pool, filled with the blood of the volcano,
is still hot soup warm after twelve hours of cooling. I slide into it,
all others in the house and neighborhood asleep or abed.
Strings of papyrus blown into the water
catch at me like cobwebs as I swim through viscous water.
I comb them from the water with my fingers
and launch them poolside.
Gentle music floats up from the town,
backup to the repetitious trilling of the nightingale
and the far-off Who? Who? Of an owl.
The crack of the house settling into night.
The wind singing in a different voice from every palm tree
under a clear sky filled with stars.
Air cool on my face,
water hot around my body— its currents like silken whips,
I try to remember sensuality with someone else attached to it.
Moving forward and back, then in circles around the kidney-shaped edge,
I am drunk on the night, making my own romance,
knowing that what matters, now that past loves are over,
is not sharp words or all the craziness of love’s endings,
but instead—the first yearning wishes met impossibly
by the answer in another’s eyes and voice, then mouth and hands.
What is important is that sweet pain of wanting—
the answering pain of wanting back.
All the fairytales of new love:
tropical sand or mountain canyons echoing the call
of goats and the answer of goatherds,
a first sight across a smoky room,
hearing a poet’s words about a past love
and, knowing that power could be directed towards me,
dizzy in love before I even met him.
His death or love dying first is not what it is important to remember—
just those days where love was everything that mattered.
And in this life gained after those first vanished loves,
”Send me a sign,” I say, looking to the stars.
And there is a flash, immediate.
Not a falling star,
but one shooting upward in a quick bursting flash of light.
Here is the prompt. And here is what others wrote for the prompt: dVerse Poets: Secret.
Photo by Giovanni Ribeiro on Unsplash. Used with permission.
Words of Wooing
He took her to the movies. He took her to the fair.
He raved about her choice of clothes. He doted on her hair.
He brought his uke and stood for hours strumming at her gate,
riffing on the talents of the lovely Kate.
Was he accurate? Were all his laudatory quips
valid? All those praises of her swan neck and her lips?
Not likely, but it’s lucky that the lady was so vain
that she took verbatim the praises of her swain.
They married in the autumn and by spring the truth was known.
He no longer sang her praises. She had to sing her own!
Prompt words for today are movie, valid, riff, accuracy and gate.
This is a poem I wrote 39 years ago when I decided to give up my job, sell my house and move from Wyoming to California to write. I wrote it sitting in my car at Dana Point Harbor south of Huntington Beach, where I sometimes went to write. Janet, who has mentioned Dana Point several times in her blog, asked to see the poem. Here it is with all its warts, exactly the way it was first written:
(Oops.. this was in a different form, but WP straightened it all up. Oh well….)
Dana Point #1.
Inside these clothes, this car,
inside the hairdo and the
rules,
something lives.
A hand reaches from
the sleeve it lives in. A face lives behind
this face. And only journeys out to walk straight lines on
yellow paper. Freeing words, then
wondering how
to follow. (if she dares, for
prohibitions do not stay them.)
And who is she if she is not
rules to live by
standards to love by,
codes
morals
laws.
The only way to know
is to follow straight blue lines on yellow.
And it is an empty page.
She is the only one who walks there
the only one who weeps there
the only one who laughs there.
Inside these clothes, this car,
inside this hairdo and the rules,
her company resides
within a crowded mind, to call her home
again––home from the yellow sea.
Amazing facts with photos for proof!
Don’t you just LOVE typing 2020? I am hooked on it. Humans have not had that experience for 101 years–since 1919, and there is something much more satisfying in typing 2020. In 2012, the United Nations estimated that there were 316,600 living centenarians worldwide, so there may be 300,000 people worldwide who twice in their life would have been able to write twin double digits for the date, but how likely is it that they would have typed it? The first typewriter was invented in 1867 and came into wide usage in offices in the mid-1880’s, but I doubt that anyone younger than 10 would have been using a typewriter, so that means they would have to be 111 this year to have possibly typed both 1919 and 2020 as dates on a typewriter. There are 86 people in the world 111 years old or older, but no one has had the foresight to ask them all if they had access to a typewriter in 1919, let alone even once typed that date. Am I obsessing? No. Just enjoying this nicely-rounded-out year!!!! (Don’t miss out on the thrill on Feb. 2 of typing 0202 2020.)
Does anyone else feel the same joy in typing 2020 2020 2020???
If so, please confess to it in comments.
For Cee’s FOTD
