Dark autumn morning
chill seeping, coffee steeping
outside, something cries
‘Into the darkness. Mornings are getting dark now, winter is on its way‘ Mr B’s Photography. CC BY 2.0.
Autumn morning haiku
mood
Nightwalk
The Boy and I traveled long
stopping by the cemetery
in the waning October sunshine
to visit his grandparents
(hello, Daddy)
eventually locating
our unfamiliar hostelry
near the colonial village
the hour was late
but we were not yet tired
so we walked
the timeless deserted paths
anyway
in the dim silver glow
of the waxing moon
if we hadn’t,
we’d have missed
hearing the song
what kind of bird? I wondered aloud
until the telltale skitter
overhead in a halo
of lamplight
bats
singing to one another
in the dark
loud
wild
plaintive
notes
sustained
urgent
echoing
echoing
searing the night
and my shivering heart
even so
the evensong
sent The Boy and I
heading back
locating a different path
if we hadn’t
we’d have missed
the diamond-sparkling
darkling stream
under brick archways
a beautiful sight
a beautiful night
despite the chill
spirits so still
when The Boy and I
traveled long
*******
with thanks to the Two Writing Teachers community
for the weekly Slice of Life sharing
and to the bats
for their moonlight melody
and to The Boy
a constant joy
The offering
July morning
before the dawn
I step outside
with the dog
night clings
like a heavy curtain
silhouetting trees
against indigo sky
waning gibbous moon
gleaming bright
bathing the earth
in silversoft light
that’s what draws me
the ethereal glow
and a strange star
above the moon
the dog is here
on practical business
trotting out in the yard
obediently
—he is not mine
but he loves me so
he lived here
not so long ago;
he belongs to my son
away on vacation—
the dog
is like the morning
velvet charcoal
silent
peaceable
watchful
I can barely glimpse
the glow of his white breast
out in the darkness
a whippoorwhill calls
from the pines
while I try to discern
what star that is
so bright above the moon
—Jupiter
king of the planets
and there in the east
Mars, glittering red
the ancients could read
their preordained ritual
but I, in the silverdark Now,
cannot
—a loud animal cry
shatters the stillness
No!
I know without knowing
—here comes the dog
shy and humble creature
who’s not really supposed to run
on his congenitally malformed
frail back legs
here he comes, running
as hard as he can
through the shadows
charcoal in charcoal
soft shape in his mouth
No! No!
how is it that
this most benevolent creature
who’s never done another harm, never
should be ceremoniously dropping
a rabbit at my feet
no, no, I cry
horror and awe intermingled
at the unnecessary death
that he can even catch a rabbit
—incongruous,
how Elvis starts singing in my brain
as if this act
is the sole measure
of a dog’s worth
for here stands The Dog
magically transformed
from meek pet
to mighty hunter
bringing the solitary catch
of his life
to me
a blood offering
under the waning gibbous moon
beneath the winking planet-king
oh beautiful dog
oh beautiful rabbit
I am sorry.
I could never be
a god.
July morning. Jupiter above the waning gibbous moon.
Dear Goat
Dear Goat In The Pasture At The End Of The Street Where I Make a Right Turn On My Way to Work Each Morning:
I just want to say thank you for lifting my spirits on weekday mornings as I drive by your pasture. You cannot know that I look for you and your herdmates, or how the sight of you fills me with inexplicable peace. Perhaps it’s the idyllic setting, the pastoral scene with its inherent restfulness. Maybe it’s the continuity. Your pasture remains as it always has, while all around us fields are being bulldozed and sculpted for the coming of houses. The trees farther down this road are being timbered this very moment… I wonder: Had birds already nested in them? Were there any little eggs that are now lost? It’s possible; this is March. Isn’t tampering with birds’s nests and eggs a crime? I digress. I cannot help it, watching the trees come down even though I know the new houses to be erected will be homes where people will build their lives and live their stories, where children will grow up… meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a man is busily destroying people’s homes, sending them fleeing from danger like animals trying to outrun a raging forest fire, in search of a different place to survive…
Yesterday as I came through here I heard a bird calling and wondered if its tree is gone. Will the big, beautiful,snowy-feathered hawks soon be gone, too? I haven’t seen one for weeks now. I keep watching. And in all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen skunks until last week when I saw two dead in the road and my son saw a third. We didn’t smell them, thankfully. Makes me wonder about them never seeing the end coming…
I don’t know why I should be telling you all of this, dear Brown Goat in your green pasture so often dappled with new morning light when I drive by. All I really meant to say is thank you. I see you grazing in the grass and a tiny bit of balance returns to the universe. Your placid nature spills into mine. You somehow impart the right and needed mood for the day…
I am grateful for you.
Sincerely,
An Admirer
P.S. I would deliver this letter to you in person but I suspect you would only eat it… I’ve had to eat my words before and it’s not a particularly pleasant experience… trust me.
*******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March.
Even more metaphor dice
What a roll of the dice! Well, here’s a fun poem…not my usual fare…
Your ego is a feckless maelstrom
billowing with doom
a virtual vacuous vacuum
threatening to consume
all who wander near your path
for all infinity
your Luciferian hubris-wrath
the end of you and me.
Fallidays
a poem which began as I was driving to work through the darkness and fog that appeared on the first day of October…
October awakens
in the night.
She rises in silence,
stirring white veils of fog
within the world’s
darkened bedchamber.
She knows
I am awake, too,
watching,
and that I am aware
it was not as dark
yesterday morning
at this same time
when September
was still here.
October gathers
her black satin robes
shimmering silver
in the moonlight.
She whispers of magic
and I shiver
just before the sun bursts forth
like a famous artist
with palette in tow-
“There is no blue without yellow
and without orange,
and if you put in the blue,
then you must put in the yellow
and orange too,
mustn’t you?”
and suddenly everything is
yellow and orange and blinding blue
with flecks of scarlet and brown
against the still-green canvas.
For all her dark mystery
and the death-shroud she carries,
October doesn’t speak
of endings.
She points instead
-see that golden thread glittering
there in her sleeve?-
to celebrations just ahead.
Ah, October.
I see you
disguising your smile
as you creak open
nature’s ancient alchemical doors,
reverently ushering in
the leaf-bejeweled holiness
that I shall henceforth call
the ‘fallidays’.
“Female ghost”. WhiteAnGeL ❤.CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
How would you personify early October?
It is difficult to find a photo of a veiled figure comparable to the dark morning bands of fog.
“Figure In The Fog”. paulmcdee. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The quote, “There is no blue without yellow and without orange…” comes from Van Gogh, written in a letter to his brother. I have used it several times in poems. Seems especially fitting here for the colors of October, illuminated by the artist-sun.
“Symphony of autumn colors”. PeterThoeny. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
******
with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the weekly Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge
(even when my small-moment story morphs into poetry)
Blue Valentine
Sunday dawns oyster gray, cold.
Rain rolls down the windows like tear-streaks of the wind, which howls in anguish under the eaves like a maimed creature.
In the backyard, pines stand in solidarity, like soldiers at a burial. Knee-deep in a sea of mud.
All dreary in its own right. I do not need to color it more so with my own thoughts, or to further stir my restive soul. Day after day after day of rain. No snow. At least no ice.
Am I unhappy?
No.
It’s Valentine’s Day. My husband and I have exchanged cards, chocolate, a sampler of hot sauces. “Burning Love,” the box reads. The flames on it are certainly a bright spot.
Am I tired?
Not as much as I was at the end of the workweek, the final one of remote teaching. We return to campus this week. Hard to envision the epic regulations to be enforced, the acrobatics of keeping elementary children distanced in imaginary bubbles.
Am I worried?
Concerned is a better word. It is a time to be like the pines, standing in solidarity despite the grayness, the bleakness, the muddiness, the wearing-on of things. I don’t know if I have it in me. This is not like me. My patience is peeled unusually thin; turpentine burns too near the surface. I do not like the feel of it.
Is my spirit failing me this Sunday morning? I should think not. It is a seasoned spirit. Today also happens to be the anniversary of my husband’s ordination, many, many years ago. We were so young, setting our feet on a path we could not clearly see, but we walked, and we walked, moment by moment, in sun, in shadows, over years, across decades…and here we are. I am grateful. He has already gone to church. I am getting ready, mulling this miserable scene beyond the blinds. I should have kept them closed.
I wish I could see the bluebird. He shows up almost every day, if I’m watching at the right time. He sits on the deck railing for long stretches. Little messenger of brightness.
Why should seeing him make me feel better-? Maybe hope is electric blue. Never thought of that before.
I sigh, and am turning away, when I catch a fluttering of wings…
The female. Not the bright blue I am longing for, but still. This means a nest may be in the works, nearby! Might I see baby bluebirds this spring? Dare I hope for such bounty? Do I deserve it?
She takes a bath, there on the railing. I think of Esther’s yearlong preparation for her union with the King.
And then my little lady bird is gone. I wait. The railing remains bare. He will not come. Maybe it’s the rain. I can’t keep watching. Must get to church or I will not be in good graces with the pastor, which is a problem I don’t need, since I live with him.
Happy Valentine’s Day, bluebirds, I say in my mind as I bundle up to leave.
And then, at the last, a flash of blue, landing on the railing…it’s him, it’s him! No, wait! Both! I have never seen them together before.
Rain never interferes with the mail and this is surely addressed to me as much as an envelope bearing my handwritten name.
A gift of love, my blue Valentine.
One day I will be poised just right to get a photo of MY birds, which look exactly like this. Eastern bluebirds are known to begin nesting in February. Let us hope…
Update: The Phrontistery definition: “valentine – of birds, to sing to a mate.”
If you are so inclined, here’s a little poem written on the occasion of the first sighting last week: First bluebird.
*******
Photos:
Vintage postcard. Kaarina Dillabough. CC BY-SA
Eastern Bluebird. 611catbirds, too. CC BY
Blanketgeist
One recent morning, dark and dreary, as I pondered, weak and weary, after binge-watching vintage noir films (as if one needs more psychological drama on top of taking one’s husband for another ER visit due to his sky-high blood pressure and pains in his still-healing heart, rising pandemic numbers and escalating real-life horrors televised nonstop on the news, hurricane-spawned thunderstorms, demon-possessed Internet connectivity, and Election Year), I’d had enough couch-cocooned passivity. I tossed my safe warm blanket aside. I got up, showered, dressed, fixed my hair and makeup even if I wasn’t going to see another person but my husband and son, who’d taken his dad to pick up new prescriptions. I would face the day and whatever it held, head-on.
Having pulled myself together, feeling quite in command for the first time in a while, strolling back through the living room, picking up random bits of fluff from Dennis the dachshund’s destruction of yet another furred squeaky toy (why do we keep buying these), I noted one of my guys sitting on the couch.
Huh. Could’ve sworn they’d already gone to the pharmacy... barely glancing, bent on my fluff-retrieval mission, I said, “Hey, didn’t know you were—”
Whoever it was, sitting there on the couch, wasn’t.
There were no feet on the rug.
No legs, either.
It was the blanket. Sitting on the couch, right where I tossed it.
Now, this is when it either really pays, or really, really, really doesn’t pay to be a reader/writer/film noir binge-watcher.
Because, voilà! A STORY.
And because, Heaven help me, I know too many, truth is stranger than fiction, brains can’t always process what eyes are seeing, I overdosed on ghost stories and tabloids like National Enquirer and Weekly World News as a youngster, watched too many Twilight Zone marathons as an adult, it’s my fault I’m this wired from excessive cups of coffee, that my mind short-circuits with what and why and how, as in: How could the blanket land exactly like that and look so like a person? Albeit a kind of smallish one? Unless… unless it happens to be covering something heretofore invisible… and how long might it have been sitting here without my knowing?
But it’s only the blanket, right?
I check the driveway. Yeah, my guys are gone. No one’s here. Just me and Dennis, who saw me cleaning up his toy-wreckage and promptly took off for the bedroom to hide under the bed.
I eye this blanket. I walk around it.
All those times I told students to think what if? comes back to haunt me… What if the blanket has taken on a life of its own, after I cocooned myself in it for so long? What if my melancholy has taken form, substance, become a Thing, made manifest by the blanket? What if I’m just, like, finally losing it (would that be so terrible)?
—POP—
I almost come entirely out of my hide to leave it lying beside me as yet another separate Thing. I was beside myself …
It’s just the house popping, does it all the time, you’d think I’d be used to it by now (why is it SO LOUD, it sounds deliberate … what if someone is living in the attic? has been living there for ages and I haven’t known? … don’t be ridiculous, the floor up there is incomplete, no one has fallen through the ceiling… yet…).
Well.
The blanket isn’t moving.
It’s just sitting. Rather benignly.
I decide to take a few photos (proof, you know. In case of… whatever).
That’s what I said I was ready to face, right? The day and whatever it held? Head-on?
Be careful what you wish for…
So silly. Absurd. Over it.
Time to reveal what is and isn’t real. I reach for the edge of the blanket and
—is that faint chuckling I hear?
Mourning dove blues
Mourning doves are said to symbolize providence, grace, peace, safety, renewal, and moving forward. Their low-pitched song sounds sad or comforting, depending on the listener. I dedicate this lament to the dove outside my kitchen window, whose plaintive murmur I hear in the dark, just before sunrise.
grim gray morning
grim gray news
grim gray outlook
grim gray blues
time to shelter
time to snooze
time to waken
time to muse
dream to endure
dream to choose
dream to escape
dream . . . a ruse
morning to ponder
morning to lose
morning pours out in
mourning dove coos
*******
Photo: Nesting mourning dove. Katy Tegtmeyer. CC BY
Lost
It started with a feeling.
It led to a word.
Lost.
It led me to look for a beautiful book, The Lost Words.
I couldn’t remember where I put it.
I looked everywhere.
It’s lost.
Ah. A theme.
Maybe it’s the dreary January dusk, or the drizzle, or Monday.
Maybe it’s the news. Lost lives.
Maybe it’s growing older and being reminded of things I loved long ago, like koalas, because of a book my grandmother read to me, and wondering how many koalas are left in Australia now. Wondering if there are enough eucalyptus trees left in that charred landscape to keep them alive.
Maybe it’s everything.
So much is lost.
I am not lost.
Just caught in layers of lost, like being wrapped round and round with invisible tulle.
It’s there.
I feel it.
Cocoonish.
That’s what sent me searching for The Lost Words as reading it suited my mood. The book is a glorious creation based on words that are disappearing from the dictionary. Words about the natural world that children don’t know anymore. Lyrical verse, majestic illustrations, making something beautiful of something lost . . . it was calling me to reread it. The very thing I needed.
But I can’t find it or remember where I last left it.
It’s really lost.
Naturally that beckoned lost associations. Lost people, lost friends, lost dogs, lost moments, lost time, lost things. Lost opportunities. Lost relationships, lost trust. Lost vision, especially in the educational world of late. Lost sense, lost direction. Lost ideas that I didn’t write down (although I am better about it now than I used to be). Lost dreams, so vivid and clear — what great stories they would make! — disintegrating as I wake, alas. I can’t seem to hold onto the dream and wake up; too often I am left with odd fragments.
But even in my tulle-swathed, piece-y malaise, never lost hope. No, not that. Never lost faith. Never lost love, because, if it’s love, it’s there forever.
I lost interest in reading tonight. So, I write.
Never lost words, not for me. Not yet. They find me, somehow.
And tomorrow I’ll find that book.
Photo: Lost. gwenole camus. CC BY-SA
lit bits and pieces 