In Someone's Shadow - May 17 Poem

I'll die living in your shadow, my only home.

May 17
By Rod McKuen

I believe that crawling into you
is going back into myself.
That by the act of
joining hands with you
I become more of me.

There are no whiskey bars
for dancers like ourselves,
and so we move into each other
like drunkards into open doorways.

My need for you is near addiction.

No sailor ever had tattoos
growing on his forearm
the way your smile
has willed itself back behind my eyes.

It will not dissolve.
It will not divide.
For I am nothing if not you.

~from:  "In Someone's Shadow", pages 20, 21

~•~•~•~•~

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Not a weed.  A bouquet of yellow flowers.

Love After Love
By Derek Walcott

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 
Sit. Feast on your life.

~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Grief by Louise Erdrich

Will it ever end, this heavy, cold, lonely emptiness & sadness...

~×~×~×~

Grief

By Louise Erdrich

Sometimes you have to take your own hand

as though you were a lost child

and bring yourself stumbling

home over twisted ice.

Whiteness drifts over your house.

A page of warm light

falls steady from the open door.

Here is your bed, folded open.

Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

hearts can be broken, love destroyed

Sorrow---

Burned out; broken; but surviving...trying hard to breathe.

I will always carry your heart in my broken heart....

~×~×~×~

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)

i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

e e cummings

~×~×~×~×~×~

Half Rack at the Rendezvous by William Notter

Color your heart out...then read a mouthwatering poem...

Half-Rack at the Rendezvous
by William Notter

She had a truck, red hair,
and freckled knees and took me all the way
to Memphis after work for barbecue.
We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs
and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers,
gnawing the hickory char, the slow
smoked meat peeling off the bones,
and finally the bones. We slurped
grease and dry-rub spice from our fingers,
then finished with blackberry cobbler
that stained her lips and tongue.

All the trees were throwing fireworks
of blossom, the air was thick
with pollen and the brand-new smell of leaves.
We drove back roads in the watermelon dusk,
then tangled around each other, delirious
as honeybees working wisteria.
I could blame it all on cinnamon hair,
or the sap rising, the overflow of spring,
but it was those ribs that started everything. 

"Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz" by William Notter, from 'Holding Everything Down'

What Colour Are You?

My Artify watercolor pencils.

George Washington Rose

A gift of Tulips, long dead now...

.

Miranda Lambert Rose today, hot pink & prolific!

My favorite color, pink.

Pink-haired, customized Blythe doll from Greece.

~×~×~×~×~

What Colour Are You?
by Marion

Sunrise, sunset, sun and moon,
August, July, May and June.
Lust, desire, coals and fire.
Graveyard dirt and funeral pyres.
Roses exploding, tulips tall,
Verbena trailing down black brick walls.
Candles burning, emitting soft light,
Toenail polish and lipstick bright.

It pulses with desire,
Burns with fire,
Drips with lust
In shades of rust.

Red is the brazen harlot of colours.
All other colours envy her---

~Marion, feeling lonely & blue...

Let Me Be Your Tattoo by Marion

Project semicolon... Life is precious ---

LET ME BE YOUR TATTOO
By Marion

Let me be a tattoo
on your cold, hard heart:
an arrow to pierce the plate of steel
protecting the soft, pliable tissue;
a black rose dripping red blood
onto your colorless psyche
to awaken you;
a skull and crossbones covering your third chakra
as a warning to others: fear me;
a slimy snake, slithering up your throat
to choke back your angry words;
an Indian chief on your left bicep
to cover an ancient wound;
an angel on your right shoulder to
watch over and protect you
from yourself.
Let me be your tattoo and
I’ll let you mark me forever
with the indelible ink
of your delicious,
dangerous love.

2011

I am not what I used to be. ~from "House of Leaves" by Mark Danielewski

A Birthday Poem by Ted Kooser

Former Rose, ashes now...







A Birthday Poem

This evening, I sat by an open window

and read till the light was gone and the book

was no more than a part of the darkness.

I could easily have switched on a lamp,

but I wanted to ride this day down into night,

to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page

with the pale gray ghost of my hand.



Ted Kooser

Japan by Billy Collins (A must-read)!

Tobacco Moth at my Moonflower years ago...

Japan 
by Billy Collins

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It’s the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on the surface***,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

-------------------------------------------
(The red asterisks are mine.  I found the haiku, not online, but in a real book 10 years ago). 
***Haiku by the Japanese poet and painter Buson (1715 - 1783):  

"On the one-ton temple bell
A moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still."

(Translated by X. J. Kennedy)

From:  "The Norton Anthology of Poetry", page 1190

-----------------------------------------

Palindrome by Lisel Mueller

Palindrome - A word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward.

Palindrome
By Lisel Mueller

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which 
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the 
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own 
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.” 
—Martin Gardner, in 'Scientific American' 

Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:

Things I will need in the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor radio
Sergeant Pepper
acne cream
five-year diary with a lock

She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.

From: "Alive Together: New and Selected Poems".

~×~×~×~×~

I highly recommend her book!  It's magnificent, a wonder...