Feverfew and Darkness

Find what you love, and let it kill you…

If I try to cook in a bad mood, you’ll taste it in my meal. Trying to create art when my mind is full of darkness sounds poetic, but that darkness leaches into the words and the images as surely as sadness slips into stew. Last week, I spoke of that darkness (see Into the Void) and the effort to get outside it (or confront it) by venturing off in search of photographing the void/communing with nature. Building on last week’s adventures and images taken along the way, I’ve created a few more composite images, and was able to polish a couple more poems for Cantrip and Loveletter, as well as picking the above Bukowski quote for the beginning of the book. Swimming around in physical, metaphysical, mental, spiritual, and every other type of darkness, they are sadder than originally intended. Or perhaps they are exactly what they ought to be. I’ll continue collecting more material for the next couple of months; time, so to speak, to murder and create, and dwell on things other than the darkness of the void.

Feverfew

A flutter before the breaking
a whisker and wink;

I dreamt in dandelion haste, of day
and just a day, no more and

morning is dark, my wordless friend
when I slip from you and shiver,

dressing in moonlight, silence.
I would rather leave you in dreaming,

heat the kettle and smudge my lips.
You are a sleepy kiss between

my teacup and the day;
and the day is long and I

do not think often of you,
and there are when I return,

a few moments that are mine,
like forgotten wings, clean time

when I am linear and square,
and then I am glad that you are home

and there is time for chores and
time to hear your thoughts,

time for bathing and for laughing,
time to fit within your arms.

I know my left hand from right,
the world is wide and I would

still the stars, make a butchery of time
and bless our everyday.

I wake and brush away the stardust,
the dandelion, and wash off the night;

How cold the branches bear
the morning dark beyond the sill.

Bookending

Must you be seated on the knife sharp edge
of my world, fingers curled around mine
bookending the wine, the lunch plates,
the bill and books.

You read yours to me and I to you
from mine, like slow clockwork ticking
the shade across our afternoon until
we rise and turn to home.

And you are useless help with dinner,
twining arms around me as I salt and cut
and you are banished to your own world for a time
like slow clockwork ticking the evening business,

until we lie wrapped around each other like
Burroughs’ snakes, you teach me
jokes to spite my serious joy;
I teach you all of the Italian I know,

mi lo dia una bacia;
even as I fall asleep,
even as I fall asleep,
laughter on my tongue like sugar syrup,

sure this cannot be right
some scale left unbalanced, you
have become that god of my idolatry
and I have no longer myself.

 

 

Under Sun

We stand in opposite rows
hedge divided; berry picking
when there is no need;
this is the twentieth-first century
where jam and juice
come from a store-
no, this is
a sensual throwback
a luxury of hard work
where the too hot sun
freckles our skin,
I like it
and you don’t
where baby skin fruit
stains our lips and fingers
a harlottish red
and the sight of pips
left behind
is almost sexual
and we giggle
and gossip,
I envying your speed
you coveting my choices;
it’s a rivalry is it not?
husbands, homes,
our dailiness
your science, my art
the gaps that open and close;
it is a polite politic
that makes us stick
pointed garish
gory red tongues out
at each other through the
holes in the hedge
and laugh.