Shirley Mills: pommes

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:39:42 GMT

Long Drive Home at Midnight after Taking an Old Friend to the Klamath Falls Train Station

cautious progress
south on socked-in potato basin
oncoming beams five-pointed
celestial in freezing fog

swelled yellow halfmoon
steady descending
in irregular shreds of wasted
storm soaring north

slipping under tule veils
low flat gauntlet of will-o'-the-wisp
brushing over
one
by one

climbing finally
plateau's yardstick road
bursting dry from mist
onto barrens volcanic
and ink-drenched juniper
halfmoon waiting there
all cold clarity and startling
firmament

crazed and infinite

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 17:36:04 GMT

I was having one of those busy days.

Illustrated matters of fact were manufactured
and shown around the public square.

The kitchen was swept and wiped.

Something new was added to the cookie dough.

Toward evening things were put away.

The near-full moon was glimpsed
being drowned among clouds.

A prayer was said.

In bed I was comforted and yet afflicted to waking
by worries and dreads.

There was rising, and a restless descent to other rooms.

There were sounds of rain dripping on roofing tin.

And then the sounds were stopped, the cotton quiet
a signal pointing to sleep.

And there was climbing in the dark
toward strange lit windows.

And I looked out. And I saw!

September snow like bright yard goods
the moon had tossed on the hills for fit.

Sheer. Tentative. I saw this. It was I who saw this.

It was not a dream.

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 19:53:54 GMT

The Gift

I awoke at three. Cold was poking the curtain in.
Every waft uncovered a dazzle of half-moon
peering in at me one-eyed. For a long while
I had the softly cellophane impression
of irregular footfalls in the garden--deer
taking first breakfast of marigolds perhaps
or coyotes come for cats. At last I turned
the blanket back and walked downstairs
to empty my bladder and fetch up a quilt.
Coming back I paused in the stairwell, stunned
by the stinging sharp descending scent
of Humans. While the black sky brightened
by gray degrees, I sat up wondering by electric light
was this time a wakefulness meant for singing in?
I decided surely yes. When I turned the lamp off then
I slid instantly into sleep.

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 20:08:44 GMT

LYRICS WANTING TUNES
I remember once when Ewan McGregor was interviewed about making a musical (Moulin Rouge) he said that some words that sound dumb when you just say them become beautiful and powerful when sung. I've decided my poems which sound so dumb to me when I read them or speak them are really songs, because when I sing them I find them beautiful. I only know the tunes I make up extemporaneously, while reading aloud. If you are music and have a tune, please let me know.

Painted Ladies

You say you want to walk out on the river
and listen to the little fishes toil
You want to feel the hardpan give
beneath you when you sail across the soil

Do you know they do it all for you?
Do you know they fly and fall for you?
Do you think there is a wall between you?
Do you believe in walls?

Where were you when the butterflies of summer fell?
When the brilliant painted ladies lilting
through July Nevada's hot blue air
dropped and scattered just like blossoms wilting?

Do you know they do it all for you?
Do you know they fly and fall for you?
Do you think there is a wall between you?
Do you believe in walls?

You went out you said to sing back all the flowers
You said you pleaded with the tallgrass to return
You and your people sang and danced for hours
and held each other while the fires of August burned

Did you know they did it all for you?
Did you know they flew and fell for you?
Did you think there was a wall between you?
Did you believe in walls?

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 19:13:18 GMT

poem X

cup hands
scoop earth
'wife birth
in sands

watch sky
sense air
free care
spirits fly

roots flayed
food in fire
wood on pyre
making way

sweet wind
soothing water
no matter
never mind

truly met
across ether
one together
course set

single thing
sole in void
souls alloyed
minds sing

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 16:48:49 GMT

The nights of the hottest summer days are so cold here.
I clench my bones under the little blanket,
and the dog and the cat seek me for sleep companion.

When the first sun strikes
the plywood sides of the tortoise house
they crash down like walls of Jericho
and the great beast stamps on horned feet
out onto the rocks to take his heat.

Indoors in my drab sweater I blink toward the windows,
drink my tea, and resist going into the light
until the gun's to my head for some brief chore.

All the while I'm remembering winter
and totting up firewood.

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 19:40:51 GMT

My Greta

Lethal gymnast taut-
focused blur intent
tortoiseshell leopard angler-
off-plaster to catch
the flitting Thing: Moth-
of-Wings at wall at lamp
Greta bats Thingshadow
shade-battering globelit
within now upflapping
now flattening quiet.
Get it get it I call
and Greta seeks above
around and nose-on
the matte triangle against
the grain: she won't see:
Still Thing is Not Moth,
which is Flutter and Breeze of Air
arrhythmic lift and drop
and struggle paper-powdery
Shifting-Under-Paws.

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:01:51 GMT

This is a false posting. I removed the topmost poem in this category more than 10 days ago so that I could rescue it from injuries I inflicted in a disastrous redrafting, but apparently it won't disappear from the Web page until I post something new here to force the page to refresh. And this is that post.

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:10:57 GMT

KLEIN OPENS THE DOOR

Klein, midwife, kindly guide,
unshutters the passage
in the tall closet that stands
where the hallway els.

Cops and mobsters
surround the house.
We hear shouts
from downstairs.

Klein, grim savior, loyal friend,
unlatches the long doors
to the corner-cabinet
at the bend in the corridor.
The cheval-glass mirrors
all, but dissolves for
desperados. When we
approach a portal, it yields.

Klein, tender usher,
rushes to end my exile
in the dim cells
of my asylum.

Footfalls echo in the stairwells.
The borderlands lie before:
smooth alien fields
of nothing, and distant hills.

Klein, lonely co-escapado,
gestures toward the threshold,
urges me past a line
none may uncross.

Thu, 19 May 2005 19:34:09 GMT

The Great Clouds

The great clouds unfurled their hair.
I wept with them in dream after dream
through a month of long nights
to the drumming of nervous fingers
on the tin roofs of the outbuildings.

Now, just when I decide they're right
about the dirty world and all its sorrows,
they pull themselves together,
bind their tresses up with little pins,
lift their crinolines and drift away.
As though embarrassed in light of day
by their inebriated nights-before.

As though all we've been through together
means nothing to them, and they'd prefer
not to remember, thank you very much.
Just like that they weigh anchor and leave me
And I'm bereaved and blinking in the dazzle
of a stark bootstrap afternoon.

And all I can think to do is resume
my drills in botanical Latin and learn
my colors again from scratch.

Thu, 19 May 2005 19:33:10 GMT

Regret

Groggy today. Stayed awake too late.
The book I read was just too good.
Plus, I indulged in an ill-advised
spate
of late-night flirtation
via poem. Which I regret this morning,
as I surely suspected I would.
A blast of agitated, chocolate-
fueled insomniac elation.
One ought never to correspond at night.
Dorothy Parker said it, and she was right.
But I am ever the last to benefit
from so well-aphorized
a warning.

Thu, 19 May 2005 19:26:02 GMT

Leo

Leopold, a mackeral tabby,
middle name Longshanks
because he's lean and tall,
last name Likitung
because he kisses
his mistress's hand,
watches the starling
couple come and go
from under the eaves,
where their nest is.

Leo crouches distantly,
his cream-and-umber a cloud
on the blue roof
where he so quietly observes
the nervous birds
parenting their family.

Leo doesn't get
why they seem upset
to spot him slouched there.
He's only curious
to watch their offspring
try their little wings
and other things.
Why should they be
so furious?

Thu, 12 May 2005 18:46:35 GMT

Clear Blue

Oh! The bright clear blue of 7 a.m.
Sun hot through the glass
Water passes
by the fence.
I am
glad, if unconvinced.

By 10 the sky's gone white--
I was right--
it doesn't matter much.
Pain-bones folded under
I shove graphite points
with deforming joints
along thin blue lines
and never wonder
what next?
Never mind.
Forget subtext.
Cat shares a touch,
dog a snore.
Could I want more?

Creek forgets to sing in its hurry
to ferry
freight of minerals to the plain.
Shelves carry
tea and milk and bread.
Bound and unbound
pages spread
around me
on my purple bed.
No one dead.
None drowned.
How shall I complain?

Tue, 03 May 2005 18:25:12 GMT

(What I get for eating broccoli late in the day...)

Last night I dreamed my mother was a cabbage, Cruciferae

In dreams she's shell-shocked. Gunshy, you might say.
I keep taking her hand. We're house-hunting.
Sometimes she sits with me on a bus.
Or she rests with velvet on a bed of illness.
I hold her smooth beautiful legs on my lap.
I rub the soles of her feet.

In a past life we were Minoans together
when my mother was a slave, a bull-dancer,
and I the wealthy patroness who loved her.
From a seat at the arena I watched her fall on the horns.
She was eighteen. I never forgave myself.

Last night I dreamed my mother was a cabbage, Cruciferae,
like a great green globe of the world I toted under one arm.
I pared away the ruined places, which after all were just skin deep.
I put a cool pale square of her on my tongue and chewed.
She was sweet and good.

Sun, 01 May 2005 18:56:20 GMT

Ink

Drat! again
I've slept
with an uncapped pen
and wake to a blueblack
stain blooming
on the bedsheet.
Older blots
have grayed,
laundering rendering
the cloud, the fingerprint
and fading bruise
that whisper
to my dreams.
And now another dark
Rorschach,
indigo nebula,
indelible mark
of exclamation
punctuates the half-
remembered paragraph.

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 19:41:12 GMT

It's eleven
on the third night of phenomenal rain.
I'm reading my eyes out
to rhythms of the weather's ecstatic chorus frogs.

Too sleepy to comprehend sense,
I persist against heavy lids,
because something may resonate
to an influence.

I'm hungry.
All I think about is food.
I'm careful--wheat toast and tea,
nothing after seven--but it's eleven now,
and my stomach aches
for hot milk and honey.

A steady rain.
How do the turned-out cows fare
calving tonight in their spring pasture?
And what of my former homeplace?
Will the hundred-year-flood waters scour
the silty trenches of just-born kittens
I murdered by dozens
in the dreadful years of my penury?
Flush them down to heaven
in the alkali lake
whose whiteness gives caustic suck
to the martyred?

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:50:46 GMT

DOOR

When will it happen like before--
the doorway simply appear
in air, wherever I happen to stand,
make its shimmering outline
in the nothing in front of me
and then all on its own open
to a shining land beyond,
where kindness and faith make
for inner peace, and faces turn
toward one with welcome,
a threshold beyond which lies
the apple orchard humming
with mason bees, and in the house
a child and a parent, both,
who receive one's love?

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 20:27:56 GMT

THE LOST BIRDS

How does one bird find another
out in the unfortunate caesura
the world is? When on a taut spring
day starlings perch together
on the galvanized peak of an outbuilding
and then one flies off south-southeast
and the other lingers bobbing
and glancing toward the west
how does the tardy starling know
which tree on the populated hillside
contains his anxious companion?
When cranes soar at altitude
warbling in their lazy Ws
how do they account for the missing?
Who finds them? Who rounds them up?
Who brings home the lost souls of birds?

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 20:21:50 GMT

A BIRD

in the willow thicket a bird
rehearses, advertising his stamina

once I owned finches
in a copper cage from Farmer's Market

quiet birds--sometimes
they muttered to each other

when a stray fume took Bess
Porgy let loose with such song

later the cat ate him and then ran away
the flows and ebbs of pets

I wish I knew which bird this is
of the morning tune

brays of Canadian geese
make crude counterpoint

to chitters and glissandos
against the rushhhh of creekwater

white ground on aural canvas
or the canvas itself

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 20:10:43 GMT

WILD FENNEL

I remembered the tallgrass from Lakota,
Iowa, the fallow field with its red fox
escaping at the far side, and I hunkered
down in for hide-and-seek with the Kaiser kids
from across the road, and the slender sunflowers
leaning on their stalks in the least wind, and milk-
weed, with monarchs and bumblebees attending.

In Culver City, California, the lot
next door, triangle abutting the concrete
creek--no way to build there, fallow real estate--
yellow mustard grew dense and tender, shoulder-
high to a six-year-old, and I crouched down in
for hide-and-seek with the Japanese kids who
lived in pastel stuccoed houses down the street.

And one year the succession of invaders
brought fennel in. By then I was apart from
any playmates, and I explored alone these
great alien structures, deep and dense and tall,
accreting on the lot--not unlike crystals
of ammonia on brick in the dish at school.
And open enough inside to let me in.

I was the skinny eight-year-old who entered
the wild fennel clumps like friendly coat closets,
the feathery foliage folding me in,
overwhelming with pungency of anise
as the room I made once among the lilacs
in Lakota, Iowa, its green twilight
and sweet scent miraculous just before rain.

Finding a form to nudge this into wasn't difficult: it was virtually hendecasyllabic (but not strictly accentual) in the first draft.

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 18:51:51 GMT

3/4"

three quarters of an inch
depth of quill
porcupine plunged
back of bitter
dog tongue. three
quarters of
an inch opening
in lateral-slid
window to make
flute slot
for lip of wind.
April's startled
snow, three
quarters of an
inch on pear twig.
three quarters of
an inch--third
phalange of this
little finger
already deformed.
three quarters of an
inch on the road
map as the crow
flies from here
to there, there to here.

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:16:32 GMT

Partial Inventory of Personal Serpents

First one? A Red Diamond.
I was running on the
lane downhill so
fast I couldn't
stop and I
leaped
the dead-center skein
of something reptile
Daddy beheaded after. "Rattlesnake," he told me.
I jumped right over it!
I jumped right over it!
And who believes a seven-year-old?

Then later the pretty whips,
the gleaming garters
essing harmless in long summer grass.

Oh my pet, my little boa, smooth cold
tendril on my neck
snuffing up through hair to nap,
a happy whorl on my adolescent head.

One night sometime in my thirties
a man would dance
in the dusty beam of headlamps
on a county road,
a fat caught rattler on his arm,
and I would drop down
into a love
like a standpipe,
live immured for years
in a thigmotactic passion, writhing and mindless.

Ouroboros, cosmic kundalini
embroidering the galactic fabric,
inured we are to your insistent hiss
even as you twist within our bones.

I dreamed, as one does, of snakebite,
sensed venom coursing through me
like a thin gelignite--I dared not move
lest I go off like a Bouncing Betty.
Once I even dreamed a viper
loosefleshed and flaccid,
just able to wobble up
on its ironical coil, mouth agape
to brandish its soft pink fang.
Comical. Terrifying.

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:46:12 GMT

Bisbee, Arizona

Back home,
water's the burthen
of winter. Rain
stays for months
oppressing with its
unrelenting wet
unvarying drab
driving the light-
deprived to self-
destruction.
Here, though,
rain is summer's gift.
Every afternoon, thermometers
like clockwork hit their stride,
and thunderheads arrive
on cue, entire, like
enthusiastic brides,
or no--cakes in a bakery
window, we the urchins
yearning for crumbs. No.
Actually, like angels of heaven
gliding on vast wings,
arms wide, and after
their blessing, however brief,
we all feel blessed.

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:34:33 GMT

IN THE BEGINNING the pond
the man made
wept
in its alien space.
It lay blindered,
the proud flesh
of its own wound
concealing
the desert world
it used to be.
But you know
it's learning a thing or two
it never knew
before: Minnows
shifting quietly
in the shadow
of its clavicle.
Tickle
of crawdads
scuttling on its gut.
Freezes. Thaws.
Larval metamorphoses.
The gratitude
of mallards.
It's true
one day the pond
will lose itself
to a hundred-year flood,
or else the stream
that feeds it
will wander off
and it will wake up
mired
in dense felts of algae
still in the throes
of smothering polliwogs.
But the pond has time.
There's always enough,
really. It carries on
its practice.
Being still.
Breathing.
Before long
mark my words
that pond
the man made
will know
how to mirror
the great Looped Nebula
even as it shudders
under the wing-beats
of moths.

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:11:16 GMT

Ex Cathedra

But we adore a purpling gloom,
a glasswork phenomenon that refracts
a Sabbath sun, a hint of doom, whispers
of wayward architecture in the vestibule.

Only admit the willing fact to find us
lumbering through the narthex in our Sunday best,
sitting in an ancillary pew near the early Stations,
folding our bodies up at the large joins.

So let us put our hands together for our
Special Guest, that Slender Redhead
oozing rubies, that Wacky Pal,
that "Pallid Bat" who hovers to love us.

A clap of implicit thunder, a silent ovation,
and kiss His scented lip by proxy.