Sunday, 21 May 2023

Five Poems by Dr Ralph Monday

 





 

Cultural Conversation Over Creamed Coffee

 

A close friend, we often had conversations

in the office, sipping milky Greek coffee flavoured

with honey. The two of us, like minds

searching for the philosophers stone, the

modern grail in clouded coffee, ambient

sounds from Grooveshark that would

synthesize the fragmented historical shards

severing any semblance of rationality that

had nothing left to turn to except the

irrational walking the city streets, suburbs,

even the tree breathing country now infected

with pixelated pimples strangling every pore.

 

What is there left to turn to? I asked. The death

of god, Freud's terror, Darwin's dark descent,

the loss of the soul. There is no exit, nothing

to believe in, empty bottles filled with all the

vapours ever imagined.

 

We are all alone he said. Left with nothing but

our imagination, we must imagine our way

back to meaning, the meaning now only

personal, subjective, for there is no object. May

as well worship Ken and Barbie, the blackjack

table for all we can do is make our own odds.

Even then the game is rigged like the stock market.

 

How so unlike you I said. The one always searching

for the troubadour's love, for fireflies filling a

June night, tails like flashbulbs stitching neon text

that you read.

 

Divorce will choke the sublime from you he replied.

Discovering that your wife slept with her brother in law,

screwed him in the barn on the family compound for

months and I never knew. The only truths which remain

are the personal, and those are just a fool's dream,

shadows chasing shadows on a child's merry go round.

 

What is left are fragments among fragments, the death

of history proclaimed by every dime store pundit preaching

the latest agenda: sex as electronic power, incompetence the

new virtue, oppression a big stick wielded by a bigoted bully.

 

We must learn to speak anew in old tongues. We must write

novel chapters with our voice as a sacrament unsoiled.

Salvation lies only in a past renewal, the drinking of old

wine sipped from goat skins that will reinvigor this somnolent

moment.

 

May you live in interesting times. Take the pieces of your life

and all those in your line that came before, and knit them

together as a Frankenstein monster—lame, blind, deaf, mute—go

on Percival’s quest for the sublime, for the lady on the pedestal

awaits. The flotsam from the wreckage can still be salvaged,

meaning wrested from the chatterings of a shattered past.

 

Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so, he said.


 

All the Doubles Never Known


 

Doubles are never thought about much.

A primary mode of existence, they shape

Minds like water inflated balloons.

They float about, particles in space, exist

As three dimensional twins, patterns

Projecting outward shaping myth.

Doublemint twins so wholesome,

Encapsulating an America still possessed

Of a moral and ethical center not out of

Plumb.

Double down in poker, marriage, lovers.

Staring down a double barrelled shotgun.

Loitering over twin bra cups loosened by

The wrong person. Sliding into the second

Relationship off a long double—out.

Biblical doublettes that are not just

Binary bedfellows boasting reality.

Double servings of just about anything—

Double martinis, double rum and coke—after

2 a.m. double trouble. Double jeopardy lying

Like perfume on both shoulders.

50s televised twin beds, Puritan single

Twining introduced by the Mayflower and

The Arabella. Double meanings for double

Lives. Binary stars pulsating with double drum

beats doubling over in double time. Tennis doubles

playing a different game off the court.

Double lanes leading to nowhere. At the end the

Doppelganger dancing in double time.


 

Sand Painting a Promise

 

The magician who did street

tricks for a living told me

that if the first painting didn’t

do the job, a second was a

necessity.

 

No bones or river rock—

a true earth artist fingering

my spirit through sifted

coloured sands to take my sick

soul like a broken yardstick,

measure out the worth of a

wrecked promise.

 

A Navajo medicine man who would

heal me in a Hogan outside Boulder,

peaks snow covered in a dead-white

shroud that mocked the secrecy once

held like cupping the heart of a terrified

bird in one marked hand.

 

Show me a picture of her

that he studied

 

like clouds

like rain

like geese gone home for autumn.

 

This one has stealth of weasel

leopard’s mind

intent of fox

heart of snake

rat bearing disease

 

Medicine must be strong.

 

The sand painting was her

gone to Oz—brunette grains

for hair, eyes made of myth.

 

I sat in the center, naked.

He made the medicine,

incensed the moment

brought language from a bear’s

cave before the last ice age.

 

Conjured walking shadow women

on the walls strolling west, a

Mayan priest holding a dripping,

sacrificial heart, charcoal and ocher

rock womb paintings of Paleolithic

bison, mammoth, horse, a

frozen moment, a lost time.

 

He made the hunting medicine,

ancient anodyne for vanished women,

made of me at the head of V-flying

geese hunting the sun. 

 

Pulled me by the hand from the coloured

sands, dissolved the image with antler

horns.

 

All I could hear was the sound of

cracking glaciers, fissured rock,

air-preaching sermon, the moon’s dark

side composing a promised eulogy.


 

An Appalachian Moon

 

There, walking on the trail

closed in on all sides by the

deep width of hemlocks

brooding like Socrates over

some philosophical puzzle,

 

there in the tear of sky,

clouds ripped like the lid of an

opening eye,

 

an old moon burnished like a

shaman’s tossed knuckle bone

rose like a spring leaf, drank

light from a retreating sun.

 

A visioned face emerged from the

moon’s pockmarked craters,

whether mother, friend, some

forgotten lover, the mind’s

creation could not distinguish.

 

The wind fallen, pregnant sky

belly swollen full gave birth

to one form, then another disposition

where I felt a kind of command not to

touch them.

 

Yet, they were there, wavering forms

dug from the mind’s deep earth,

synaptic fossils washed clean by

electrical impulses.

 

Outliving time by telling a story,

riding a cold moon bringing this

latest incarnation.

 

They told that we walk about but are

all inward, internal boreal whiteness,

stilled in the still forest, in communion

with ourselves,

 

taught by reflected light that stabs the

subconscious and dispels the industrial

world,

we find something scattered across the

sky that we did not know we loved,

almost like undiagnosed pains

not understood for which there is no

antibiotic.


 

Love as a Cosmic Quandary

 

The guys who live their lives in the

air poised on the interface between

Earth and heaven where cloud tops

Move beyond Olympus, these sky

Jockeys with one eye fixed on

Stars beyond the sky, Gemini air,

Below the planted earth, beneath their

Feet steel and aluminum fire powered—

Do they see with some great transparent

Eye the cosmic quandary of love written

In the heavens that entangles those below?

 

Such as we, two lovers star kissed before the

Womb, met now in time, in space, intertwining

Through feverish waves of possibility.

 

We dance together.

Sing together.

Vibrate together like human tuning

Forks struck so that we resonate as

One living force

 

Where she thought that I show          

Love to her with my hands in two

Different ways. Through

Fingertip caresses gliding along the

Top of your thighs clothed in a silk

Dress, hear your soft moans as longing

Takes hold of your throat, your breasts,

The wet, woman dew flowing between

Your legs like buttery, wildflower honey

And you glow with deep light radiated

Out like a prophetess on a desert hilltop.

 

Can those sky flyers see these things in

Heaven and earth? Do they long for

Such perfect pressure within a pressurized

Cabin. Do they know, do they know….

 

            The second way with words strung

Together where I wrote let me caress you

With my lips, my hands, my mind.

Let me taste you as a woman until you

Swoon, rebirth in the dark, and know

That you are living flesh and spirit who will

Only be complete when you merge with my

Flesh and spirit, and bloom as living woman

Fulfilled to your essence.





Dr Ralph Monday is Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 100 journals. Books: All American Girl and Other Poems, 2014. Empty Houses and American Renditions 2015. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer, 2015. Bergman’s Island & Other Poems, 2021. The Book of Appalachia, 2023. Humanities textbook, 2018. Vol. 2 expected in 2023. 

Ralph was inducted into the Lincoln Memorial University Literary Hall of Fame last October, 2022. He also won the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival poetry award in June of last year.

Twitter @RalphMonday 

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