A lekythos (plural: lekythoi) is a type of ancient Greek pottery vessel characterized by a long, narrow body, a slender neck.While occasionally used for personal grooming at baths and gymnasiums, lekythoi were most famously used in funerary rites—placed in graves or used to pour libations for the deceased.
I Have Memorized This Ceiling
I know these walls and ceiling well.
They have so many tales to tell.
When reality is not sufficient,
four walls can become omniscient—
opening to all the world,
as a thousand stories come unfurled.
Each timber’s knot and each plank’s burl,
each water stain—each mark and whirl
has an adventure kept inside.
It is a fast horse that I ride
speeding my self, so tightly curled,
out of this prison, into the world.
A woman’s silhouette—so grand
has been sketched out by water’s hand.
Wood its canvas, it paints her free,
her story known by none but me.
The little dog—her friend and guide
when planks were cut, was found inside
that living tree, first cut, then milled
that my mind’s meanderings have filled
with all the stories that would be mine,
born in another place and time.
Those held prisoner by caste
or by our sex, held sure and fast—
imprisoned by life’s machinations,
escape in our imaginations.
Thus it is that fantasy
is the thing that sets us free.
The lock that holds us, rope that binds
cannot corral our restless minds.
I’ve memorized these walls, this ceiling,
imbued them with all of the feeling
lacking elsewhere in my life.
They are my husband. I am their wife.
Those water stains are flowers placed
to relieve sorrows I have faced.
Those hollow eyes stretched wide in terror,
the tree cannot have grown in error.
They are messages to me
that somewhere, something watches me.
They record and comfort one
who, worn out when her day is done,
spreads out her body on her cape
and looks up for her day’s escape.
A private world for my invention,
far from my life’s cruel convention.
I’d tell the whole world if I could,
these stories nature has etched in wood.
Instead, my stories I remand
to whatever high command
guides whatever reprimands
these unfair acts of human hands
bring to themselves. We cannot know
the greater plan from here below.
For 14 years, I lived in a high-ceilinged all redwood house. The wood ceiling and walls were what I viewed every morning and evening as I woke up or lay trying to sleep. I used that imagery as though being observed by another woman, somewhere in the world, imprisoned due to caste, sex, or other conditions of her life.
Malina Rose photo
Four Feet off the Ground
He loved her khaki overalls, her hiking boots and hat,
so altered his agenda to be where she was at.
He knew she was the girl for him, and though he’d never met her,
he knew at once he was in love and that he’d not forget her.
He tracked her to the lunch room, sneaking down the hall,
keeping so far behind she didn’t notice him at all.
He followed her to English class, then slipped into his own.
If it had been left up to him, she never would have known
the strength of his affection. Nor would she have met him.
She would have had no choice to remember or forget him.
From the start, he thought that she clearly walked on air
and one day without knowing it, he followed her up there.
She was two feet off the ground, and with him, it made four.
All across the campus, they were seen to soar.
But when she stopped abruptly, he simply could not miss her.
He forged ahead, bumped into her, and when she turned, he kissed her!
And though at first it seemed that she merely was astounded,
in time, they formed a pair and then they were more firmly grounded.
For dVerse Poets Open Link Night..Some Poetic Fet!
Creche by Judy Dykstra-Brown
If He
had married the girl and had children
and been less overt with his teachings
of peace and love too radical
for a world immersed in their opposite,
he would then not have changed the world, perhaps,
but only lived in contrast
to that power popular among those who needed it
and effective in keeping those adverse to it quiet.
If he had married the girl, the world would probably have ended up
pretty much how it has anyway, but he might have had a different ending––
grown old, had his cronies over to talk about the good old days,
converted water into wine and served them loaves and fishes.
Mary Magdalene would have danced for them like in the good old days,
and all of his children would have listened in awe to hear the tales
of how he walked on the water,
bade Lazarus to rise from the grave.
He would shush his cronies as they started in
with tales of how he smashed the souvenir stands
and threw the moneychangers out of the temple––
not stories for young ears not quite yet ready to learn revolution.
And all of the ill done in his name might have happened anyway,
but at least he would have had a good life. Would have suffered less.
And some other savior might have found a way to save the world
that would have worked.
For dVerse Poets Open Link Night 398
See other poems HERE.
I Imagine
I imagine one more holiday.
My mother sits at a large picture window
looking out over a broad beach,
watching dogs fetching sticks.
Then, because she cannot help it,
she takes her shoes off and walks out the door.
I imagine her sighting the offshore rock
where puffins nest.
I imagine footprints–hers and mine
and the paw prints of the dog–
someone else’s–
who joins us for the price of a stick thrown
over and over into the waves.
My mother could count her trips to the beach
on one hand,
and most of those times have been with me.
Once, in Wales, we sat on the long sea wall
under Dylan Thomas’s boathouse.
A cat walked the wall out to us,
precise and careful
to get as few grains of sand as possible
between its paw pads.
Preening and arching under my mother’s smooth hand,
it’s black hairs caught in her diamond rings.
The other time we went to the beach
was in Australia.
We stayed out all afternoon,
throwing and throwing a stick.
A big black dog running first after,
then in front of it,
My dad sleeping in the car parked at the roadside,
my mother and I playing together
as we had never played before.
My mother and the ocean
have always been so far divided
with me as the guide rope in between.
I imagine reeling them both in toward each other
and one more trip.
My mother, me, a dog or cat.
Wind to bundle up for and to walk against.
Wind to turn our ears away from.
Sand to pour out of our pockets
to form a small a volcano
with a crab’s claw at the top.
So that years from now,
when I empty one pocket, I will find sails
from by-the-wind-sailors
and shark egg casings,
fragile black kelp berries
and polished stones.
The dreams of my mother. The bones of me.
From the other pocket, empty,
I will pull all the reunions I never fought hard enough for–
regrets over trips to the sea we never made.
And I’ll imagine taking me to oceans.
Walks. Treasures hidden in and hiding sand.
Someone walking with me–
someone else’s child, perhaps,
and a dog chasing sticks.
I have a wonderful photo of my mother with a cat on Dylan Thomas’s Sea Wall,
taken during our trip around Great Britain in 1985, but I cannot find it, so here
is the only one I have of her and me alone together ,taken
by my sister Betty Jo, thirty-some years before .
Books
The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
it’s paper sprinkled with drops–
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory–
that rainstorm run through.
How he put it in his back pocket.
Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.
Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages–
finger food served with brain food.
Passions wrapped in paper and ink–
the allure of a book and its tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.
Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial–
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us
What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Google replacing dictionaries,
Wikipedia already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?
Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs––
perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
The grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them–as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages––one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.
For the dVerse Poets Open Link Night
And….Here is a link to another poem published today: “BEGINNING”
To see how others responded to the prompt go HERE.
Short Adventure
dog
woman
all
alone
computer
window
rubber
bone
eye-lock
pleading
invitation
one
thrown
bone
brings
jubilation
further
begging
is
for
naught
a
second
later
fun
forgot
For dVerse Poets Open Link Night
for dVerse Poets Open link Night, the image of rooftops reminded me of this poem written long ago:
The Brick Throwers
The Prompt: Reviving Bricks—You just inherited a dilapidated, crumbling-down grand mansion in the countryside. Assuming money is no issue, what do you do with it?
They were five in a chain from truck to rooftop,
each throwing the piles of adobe bricks
in stacks of four, from hand to hand
up from the bottom of the truckload
now nearly emptied.
Two of them waved me on
when I tried to park near,
my trunk full of heavy wall sculptures
to deliver to a gallery just half a block away.
And when I tried to park farther along the block,
again and again, they waved me away
until I was a block away and safe, I guess,
from straying bricks or errant cars that swerved
too far to the right to avoid the bricks or truck that held them.
They were a cheerful lot, and when I passed,
walking towards the gallery
carrying one sculpture after another,
they waved, and on my final trip back to the car,
again, the man second in the chain
who stood balanced on the highest level of the brick pyramid
that remained within the truckbed,
seemed to intuit my purpose, waving from me to them
as I drew my camera from my purse.
They all posed for minutes, miming their labor
as I tried to get them to actually throw, as before,
those piles of bricks, hoping to catch them
flying through the air between two pairs of hands.
Finally understanding, they threw and threw,
asking me for a prompt to help me catch that flight
I feared I’d never catch.
(more)
Minutes later, I turned to leave
and they, cheering and smiling in their fame,
turned back to that labor which is an art in Mexico:
giving bricks wings before mortaring them
into a permanency that holds them rigid for lifetimes
until they crumble back into that soil that was their nativity.
This poem should be a metaphor for something
and probably is.
Some future day, when I am moldering in my grave
like some lesser Ozymandius,
some graduate student or scholar of mediocre
Twenty-First-Century poetry might publish a treatise
revealing it.
And they will dig this website from the rubble
of the Internet and find
I wrote it as a daily prompt
and if such records still exist,
find how I hired those men to build a monument
from that crumbling manse of brick
that was my prompt on the Daily Post
and tell how they spent their lifetimes restoring it
and how their children and their children’s children
have benefited from catcalls
and instructions to move on down the line
and the clicking of a camera lens
and from one who follows blindly
where each prompt leads her.
To read other dVerse Poets poems, go HERE.
Crossroads
You and I are at that place where roads cross—
a new place made by the need for things
going in different directions to meet.
How lonely if all roads
veered off on their own, solitary,
never coming to a junction.
It might have been thus, but for
a thousand small decisions that led to this meeting,
here on this corner of your road and my road.
We meet here and become one for as long
as we both decide to stand talking like neighbors,
each of us having veered
halfway away from private territory
to come to the spot here in the middle
where we become two parts of a center.
Neighbor, lover,
friend, acquaintance,
interloper, by-passer
or strangers when we meet,
so many possibilities
in the crossed roads
of our lives.
for dVerse Poets
That Point
It was at that age
of worrying about others,
of feeling not enough,
of looking for a pattern that was myself
that I put words down,
fearing them
or if not them, fearing those who read them.
At that age when I didn’t know what I thought,
I was astonished that the hand that wrote
knew more than I did
and taught that I must be brave,
fearless on the page in a way I had not yet learned to be in life
so that I became a writer to teach myself.
To have someone I trusted as a guide.
It was at that age when I wanted to be admired––
that age when I sought to be loved––
that age when I yearned to be thought a thinker,
important, listened to––
that I was somehow encouraged to listen to myself.
There are these times we are led to by life
that become turning points
so long as we continue.
That sentence. That first sentence stretching
into the future, into now.
I’m republishing this poem from 2016 for the dVerse Poets Krisis (Turning Point) theme. April 12, 2025 on Open Link Night, Apr 10, 2025
