Hot Earth on Earth Action!

Live nude verbal imagery?

It was Earth Day when I started writing this – I couldn’t resist.

I am growing closer to having the images complete for Cantrip and Loveletter. As previously mentioned, I’m using the five classical elements as a framework. Ultimately, it will be a body of fifteen images, each element paired with another and with itself. Those images will be then paired with fifteen poems.

Poems are troublesome creatures. It is very rare that I write with someone specific in mind. But the poems that are a part of this project are a departure, each written very much for someone. But whereas getting to the final point with an image is relatively easy for me, poems have to be wrestled into compliance and sweet-talked into being complete. All of the images for the project will be done by mid-summer at the latest, but I expect to be torturing words into submission well into early autumn.

Well, this is art, not a construction project. I would like to have it finished by the end of the year, but it will get all of the time it needs. This is just pushing things a little further down the road…

Unkempt Prayers

Suppose some red-orange star
or an idle god in an idle hour
heard some unvoiced words,
caught me looking at your hands,
and granted for pique or pity
these unkempt prayers.

Then I would have you.

But I have fallen from grace
with earless rocks and filmy faith;
what could be held in your words,
my hands, the clockwork of our days
for some other key’s winding or
witch’s work will have to wait.

 

The Wedding Song

UFOs and comets were reported
to be flying about in the sky tonight-
strange lights to send us and warm us
and I am your girl as of six-ten, amen,
as fine a bride as maids can muster
with paste and humor and estrogen,
free to leave strands of hair to cling
and I smudge you with my color of
lipstick like a territorial marking.
It flutters like such a little thing;
the constant buzz of the fly in
circuit around our untried room
the weight of gold made heavier
by script and intention and hope.
But I have been stamped approved;
let there be no mistake of my depths
beyond words or fear, my affection-
and rightly, I will not keep the same sort
of secrets that I have kept in the past.

 

Broken Bull Sonnet

mouth of wine and mead spinning
turntable spun, you caught me,

nick of time pale falling found a
first kiss and sealed fates to be

knitted and knotted and ringed us
in poor madness, honeymoonless,

not a penny for a baby, but a happy
war, stoned, textbooks, pocketed

things, a warm morning bed;
a turn of two of cups, two swords

by firelight; I dreamt the ghosts
and the wasteland after the storm

and we were lesser creatures then
and we were greater creatures then.

 

The Morning Hour

It is a little motion
a body swimming forward,

Momentum.

Stopping to look around
for you. It must have started
with your rough cheek to mine. Hold.

Held.

Naked for a breath and then
ice makes all things solid, still.

We like to build our walls.

Maybe all it took was for you
to pluck me from air
down to dance.

The morning hour has gold
in its mouth, but the night,
our bed, this sheet of nothing;

you will not, nor I, be found.