I remember it was so early. We started out walking and carrying lit candles around the block. We went back into the chapel. There was Latin chanting. Then the question: do you renounce Satan? The sun came up and we went home. I had a terrible nightmare. I attended a dinner party and Satan was a guest! On Easter Sunday morning – even as an adult – I usually always wait for the sun to rise before I go to bed. All the scary parts are over. Happy Easter.
Ellespeth
I’m not going to count the number of entries I’ve made today. I’m fairly certain that it isn’t going to work. My creative life can’t be separated out from my daily life. Two blogs are out of the question and would require too much work and would be too confusing. To me anyway. I’ll try to get better with categories and spend time fixing those parts of past entries. I’ll try to remember to do categories better when I post. Like I say, in my about page, it’s all real…sometimes the colors are changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. And it’s a blog. If I don’t enjoy doing it what’s the point? It’s Holy Saturday. The story suggests that one floats, on this day, between death and life.
Ellespeth
You took me to a party Sunday night.
I found the people there a rare delight!
But none is clearer in my memory
than one who wore a purple feathered tree
on top his head. Its twinkling lights were strung
just like a Christmas tree. So gay! So young!
And by an outlet he was forced to stand,
plugged-in, so everyone could see the grand
appearance of the tiny lilac lights
as they winked on and off. Such flashy sights!
This player might feel slighted, I confess,
without the mention of his mini-dress.
Such manly calves! I never will forget
how straight the seams ran up behind the net.
Ellespeth
We were a little braver today.
We opened our relic boxes
and shared those rusted badges of honor.
Buried dreams and letters and magazine covers;
address books filled with names and dates we don’t recall.
There weren’t any maps. So we started out
just beyond there and paused about here
where the sun cuts through the mist.
Ellespeth
Artemis and Apollo
(Apollo (left) and Artemis. Brygos (potter, signed), Briseis Painter, Tondo of an Attic red-figure cup, ca. 470 BC, Louvre.)
Dream In the Attic (1987)
He comes
at one with the night into my attic.
Known to me yet not the night
this one beckons my spirit rise
where bathed in the moon’s transforming glow
I witness him:
settled deeply in a winged chair
spreading fully on his lap
brittled leaves of paltry posey picked from seasons past
as though reading into future’s time yet discovered euphony
and, upon what he transposes,
I lay my grateful weary head
to see the emptiness of space filled with thunder’s promise.
When fear,
sworn not to be undone,
does have it’s anxious way
for, turning back, I thus observe:
the attic’s filled with me!
Freshly washed and lusty haired
– primed for celebration –
an apparition merged into such complex harmony
that, fleeing from what once I sought
down spiraled flights of discord,
I penetrate the changing room
still steamed from noble triumph.
Pulling back a vapored sheer
I gaze on fortune’s stall
where I behold the fallow font that justified my fall.
It bids me
cross this threshold
that our nocturnal union might yield a seasoned harvest yet
saved beneath this shower.
Ellespeth
About those boxes…yes, the ones you’ve just brought out from the closet and placed around my desk. I didn’t think there were so many. I must have been practicing downsizing or retiring for several years. If some of it didn’t have my name and personal info on it, I’d just say toss it all. What? Today? No, not today! It took two years to get those boxes out from the closet. How can you even imagine I’d go through them by day’s end? What? I don’t know…sometime between now and our dinner party next weekend.
Ellespeth
(This will fit nicely – somewhere – with the lace and the venetian blinds and baby’s breath and the silence of Holy Week…It will, if I keep working at it)…
If I was a dew-kissed rose,
I might be brushed by the palest shades of lavender;
centered in citrine;
petals cool and soft as a baby’s skin;
touched by the breeze of awakening.
I might live out my life
arranged in a vase
amid delicate fronds of fern,
on a table
near a window
in an otherwise empty room.
I might be watered occassionally;
pruned to keep my color.
Perhaps a glance would fall upon me, now and then,
until the arrangement withered, faded and was replaced
by one of another day’s fancy.
I might be pressed between the pages
of some sentimental book
to mark the place where I was last remembered.
There ought to be a penalty for picking me
if I was a dew-kissed rose!
Ellespeth
Someone gave me that title – a while back. He’d suggested it for another story. I tucked it away and thought about it now and then. An obvious problem is that I don’t like wine. Sometimes I write sonnets. I like the challenge of a certain meter requirement and predetermined space/lines. Plus it flows – to me – like a story. A journey. Right now, I’m breaking open poems into stories. This is the present one – that lace and venetian blind thing I’ve mentioned here before – in it’s sonnet form:
White Wine Won’t Stain
She sits inside, behind venetian blinds;
windows opened, slats ajar to catch the breeze.
Lace curtains flap and wave into the room;
the faintest scent of jasmine rushes in.
She’s drinking white chablis and listening
to Willie singing on the radio
about those blue eyes crying in the rain.
Her gaze is focused on the passion vine
that blooms along the picket fence outside,
it’s tendrils wrapped about it for support.
Then all at once a hummingbird appears
and hovers near a purple passion bud.
She fills her crystal glass with more chablis,
turns on the ceiling fan and shuts the blinds.
Ellespeth
My feet, in borrowed rubber boots,
don’t carry me quite fast enough
down slopes, through woods, to soft wetlands
abundant still with cypress knees.
Brushing past wild magnolia
and budding dogwood that refresh
the ruddy heart of this spring swamp,
I peer through veils of Spanish moss
to see a fluttering field of fans,
transparent green in twilight’s glow.
And, bathed in this tranquility,
I rest upon a driftwood bench
until an egret circles near
and lifts me from my reverie.
In graceful spirals it descends
as light, into palmetto fields.
Ellespeth
The bathroom faucet is leaking. I’m not sure you know what you’re doing. You announce that the faucet must be taken apart. Aren’t you supposed to turn off the water first? Hmmm… This could turn out badly. I retreat to the balcony to do some gardening.
Ellespeth
Views From A Poet 