#dversepoets

Bewilderment

I am floating face down in a horizonless body of water.  My eyes are open; I seem to be balanced in the center of a giant labyrinthine sphere.  Like an octopus, or a circular net with ends stretching down, down, beyond all comprehension.  Somehow I can breathe.

All the rootpaths below me are in constant motion.  I dive between, in the unfixed spaces that surround them.  I sense that they are hollow, that they lead somewhere, but I can’t locate the wormhole.  The orb turns, whorling, gathering me into its patterned dance.

I am nowhere in space in time.  I sit thousands of feet above the sea, star-covered, as I swim inside the ocean’s womb.  I don’t understand how to locate myself, how to divide the illusions until they reach zero.  The still point of what is and is not.  There.  Here?  Both.  And…

Merril provided this quote from May Sarton this week for dVerse prosery: “In space in time I sit thousands of feet above the sea” But as she pointed out, my prose is too much like poetry to really be prosery. I had a couple requests to leave the post up anyway, so I decided to put it back up.

sun moon earth

Laura at dVerse provided lists of word-threesomes to choose from to write a sequence of three poems. Sun, moon, earth jumped out at me and the Oracle seemed the right place to go to construct verse using those three words.

1
ask the sun
if dusk feels as full
as the dawn

2
ask the moon
if dark is as deep
as always

3
ask the earth
if between grows roots
with seedsong

embodied

a misted bridge forms
across the water–
our voices dance
as if they were winged

across the water
we float airborne
touching the sky

our voices dance
uncontained
scattering the light

as if we were winged
needing no reason
playing with life itself

For dVerse, where Lisa asks us to play. Also inspired by the photo, above, by Terri Webster Schrandt, provided by Colleen for this week’s Tanka Tuesday. I’ve written another trimeric poem.

Mezza Luna

I pause on the edge of dark, on the edge of light, my direction halted by uncertainty.  Between is a narrow ledge, a threshold balanced on an abyss.  Am I coming or going?  The end is also the beginning and all my questions are merely maps without roads.

I have become abstracted by an imagined journey in which seeking transforms into finding.  In which the visions that ripple my consciousness turn out to be real.  But what if matter is as transient as thought?

half-awake, spirit
splits, expands—crescent-mirrored
into cosmic tides

Frank at dVerse asks us to write a haibun referring to the Mezza Luna, the half or crescent moon. When I was looking for art for the post, I came across the collage at the top, which I used for another of Frank’s moon prompts a year ago.

I am always photographing the moon, so I had plenty of photos to choose from as well. The mirror effect in the first photo is caused by the window through which I shot the photo.

No Match

The music
of your tongue is sweet,
flattering–
yet I re
main unmoved, quite resistant
to the tiresome songs

you string with
vague glittering charm.
A flashy
pointlessness
can be pleasant, amusing–
but rapidly fades

into the
redundancy of
easily
forgotten
old news.—May I direct you
this way, to the door?

Colleen provided the above painting, Portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent, as an ekphrastic prompt this week for Tanka Tuesday. Bjorn’s prompt at dVerse to use an AI tool had me consulting the Random Word Generator–I realized Jane had not posted one this week, so I generated the words below to choose from.

It led me in a direction I would not have thought of on my own, which is the point I think.

As to the collage–as you may have read in a previous post, I’m in the process of archiving all of my art–50+ years of it. This has led to quite a few surprises. It seems I did a group of abstract door collages in 1983–who knew? Not me, that’s for sure. The colors of this one work well with Sargent’s painting I think.

Nowhere

It was almost black,
the river serpentine—
everything looked like it was
coated in silver, much bigger
than he imagined, as if
the surface was somehow
a river of birds. The moon
was right there, and every
part of it, calling.

It’s an ancestral memory,
a sound he remembers
from before he hears it.

How dark the water was,
prehistoric, too loud,
flung forward
as the wave broke.
The sky slips from peach
to garnet to blood.

Who can say?
Life is long out here.

Laura at dVerse asked us to alternate lines from one page in each of two books and construct a patchwork poem. My sources were:

“The Echo Maker” by  Richard Powers, page 422

“Duplex” by Kathryn Davis, page 152

diagrams

body mind time
collaborations
concealing
revealing
light line shadow surface trace
inhabitation

reshaped by
fragmented motion
like shadows
like mirrors
reflecting and following
the moon caught shining

left exposed
particles disguised
by outlines
beclouded
by time by futures eclipsed
by the dance of stars

A quadrille for dVerse, where De has provided us with the word star.

threading the needle

the sign said
catch me if you can—
I inquired
as to who
or what, but the Universe
declined to answer

instead of
illuminating,
it withdrew–
tangled, cleft–
its secrets woven into
labyrinthine curves

it looked like
a portal—but it
was only
a loophole–
false passage, another de
lusion full of knots

For dVerse OLN, hosted by Grace, where I’ve finally gotten around to using Jane’s Random Words for the week.. I’ve also finally produced a poem with the word “loophole” which I told Sun I was going to do months ago…

Miss Wilms

There were three Wilms sisters.
Long after that generation was gone,
I discovered they had a brother
who served with my grandfather in WWI.

They never told my grandmother she had cancer.
She was in the hospital for months,
but the grandchildren were not allowed to visit,
because we might tell.

I was only eight years old
when my grandmother died.
I remember most of all
the delicious smells of her kitchen.

My mother adored her mother-in-law.  She told us
how much my grandmother loved us, the children
of her son, her only child.  My grandmother’s sister,
unmarried, childless, became her surrogate.

When we lived in Baltimore, Aunt Lil
came to dinner almost every Sunday.
She taught us to play poker,
and called my father “Chickie”.

I cried on the the train from New York on the way
 to my great-aunt’s funeral.  I was allowed to take
a jade vase from her apartment.  I still have it,
along with the ashtray we gave her that says “Miss Wilms”.

For the dVerse prompt from Sarah where she asks us to write about grandmothers.

Aunt Lil made this vase, trying to capture the color in a Van Gogh painting that she loved. The painting on the shelf behind it is one of Nina’s.

windward

the bridge to night,
hushed and wakeful,
asks me questions–
the words cast spells,

hushed and wakeful,
delicate and cobwebbed, into
ice—a sudden snow

asks me questions,
but I remain cloistered–
self-contained, undreamed—

the words cast spells–
maps sailing silent
unknown boundless seas

Boughton, George Henry; The Lady of the Snows; Walker Art Gallery

I started to construct a quadrille for dVerse, using the word ice given to us by Mish, and words from the Random Generator which Merril posted on Sunday. When I saw Colleen’s Ekphrastic prompt, above, it gave me a focus for what I had begun. I used the trimeric form.