The Oracle gave me a handful of words that made an instant poem.
Night fishing
I went fishing for stars in the ferocity of the night,
searching for the sacred in the softness of the sky,
but there was no pool where brown trout slept,
no skim of shifting reflections beneath weeping hazels,
only an empty universe, rushing away from my questing hands,
the hurtle of bright pinpricks, no more than laughing gas.
I’ve started the edits for my Pasiphaë story that is coming out sometime next winter. The words the Oracle gave me were so very apt!
Fading away
The days have come of obscurity,
of sun too bright to see the shadows,
shadows too deep and black,
and the nightingales sing too loud, the nights,
to hear the small things rustling.
The grass has grown too high to see the meadow beneath,
the pink and white and yellow, cross-hatched with waving stalks,
and the sky is flat as a silver plate, a lake of shining steel.
There is too little that we see, perceive, in this tangle of things,
how this year’s nests are fewer than the last,
the fox no longer watches with her cubs at the meadow’s edge,
and we are silent now before the setting of suns.
I have only just had time to visit the Oracle, and I’m drugged up to the eyeballs with pain-killers for another stupid pulled back muscle. Weeding yellow avens, tough, deep-rooted, tenacious beggars. The Oracle has given me an appropriately off-my-head sort of a poem, with a nod and a wink to Paolo Conte.
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Blue as dreaming
Blue, he said, listening to the rain,
blue and far away,
not knowing how else to reply.
I painted my canvases,
blue and far away,
my islands of dreams,
asked nothing that required an answer.
He listened to the rain,
while the wind blew them away,
islands and dreams.
Far away, the islands lie,
cloaked in mist,
blue as a dream,
and when he dips a brush in the sea,
it drips sadness,
round as moons,
as eyes filled with tears.
He came looking for a woman
and found only me,
the brush I held,
golden as laughter and yellow suns,
red as the tip of my tongue.
The brevity of happiness
Eggs hatch, nestlings,
and death fledges
from the first instants.
Feathered life is short,
a breath on the wind,
a wing shadow plunging,
furred agility balancing.
But such a life, canopied
by the sky and blowing leaves,
behind the palisade woven
with love by parents’ beaks,
this womb of the spring world,
greening to balmy summer,
is perhaps as sweet in its brevity
as our lingering, in fume-filled boxes,
screeching with the voices
of a million million machines.
As I was staring at the Oracle’s words, wondering how to make sense of them, one of the pheasants started cough-crowing outside. Suddenly I knew what they meant.
Morning meadow with pheasants
The morning cries out to me
with the voice of the pheasant,
the great glossy jungle fowl,
and I wonder how they last through the night,
the chicks in the nest, when fox and weasel prowl,
and the long grass hides nothing from gimlet eyes.
The sky looks down, and I look
for the fabled haloed beneficence,
the sun-smile of protecting motherly arms,
see only gnarled, cold fingers that refuse to die,
teeth that glitter in the dark, hear the pulsing
steel pump in the chest that never slows.
We are all chicks, downy and wingless,
the darkness full of gimlet eyes and insatiable bellies.
The Oracle’s message is a harsh but just one.
A quiet life
I drift above cool clouds,
above the billowed beauty of wind-blown roses,
the rising rain mist.
I soar above the world’s worries,
remembering only the good things.
I sleep in pink drifts,
away from the gull-screaming sea and salt-sprayed cliffs,
close my eyes and ears to the small boats sinking,
the children too weak to cry,
and I turn up the sound of complacency
that tells me it’s not my problem.
And I would so like to believe
the nodding-headed person with impeccable teeth,
but the wind brings the stench of death,
the beached whales of the end,
and whispers that it is my fault too.
Not sure I’m going to have time to visit the Oracle today. This is one I wrote a few days ago.
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Whales and the water-world
We come from water,
the salt drip of birth water,
the pulse of pumping water through the veins,
the distillation of starlight
in the gaze of the great whales,
drifting moons in the sunless profondeurs,
where krill glitters like golden dust motes.
Tongue-taste the salt in sea winds,
the nip of blood, the ooze of spring sap,
and the pop of mussels marooned by the tide,
and hear how whales sing a ziggurat,
climbing slow from the dark of the deeps
to the dark of the sky, a monument
of all that was, all that we were,
all that we have forgotten.
The dark times
Away is a bitter word from a friend
like gone and no longer.
Let me take it to the lake
crown in with Ophelia flowers
and set it to the sea.
No mother’s milk of human kindness
no light fingertip brush of the skin
this summer’s heat will sear and soar.
Ask me why my arms ache
and I will say from the weight of blue and black.
Bruises you placed there instead of kisses.
The time of ignorance and brutality has come
and I wish I too could float
among the indifferent flowers.
The Oracle knows what has been waking me in the mornings.
Bird-music
The bird that drives the dream
fills the garden with beauty, pouring waves
of notes, oceans and seas, into tossing skies.
The bird that sings the song
drives the tides, that rock the ship
amid the waves, flying foam-feathers.
And in the spray of singing,
what wind will drive this water-music
with such wild joy?
The Four Swans 