Being There
An odd pair these two, Marilyn’s ghost,
Rush and his cigar, dinner date
for the living and the dead, he pontificating
about conservative values while she
speaks of Joe, Bobby, and Jack, all three
in her bed at various times—such strange
languages over duck bones piled on plates:
You are frail avatars waiting to be
spliced within the seeds of the earth,
vapor, twice-made silhouettes beneath
heaven’s windows—spirits moving on
through primal forests dripping dew.
If we only could achieve a kind of grace,
to love and feast as the ancients did,
like gods turning in bed on Mt. Olympus,
we’d incarnate both spirit and flesh
in moments undarkened by the past.
Look to the wolf nature engendered by Rome,
bird Auguries spun into DNA across
a thousand seas, generations speaking
through the dust rising from crumbled stone—
an empire’s sheen haunts the present
like parody, pastiche, becomes a Frankenstein
relativity quilt, reality a deconstructed
construct for the mind seeking form.
Cigar smoke and perfume commingling
as though Plato’s cave shadows thrown
up on the wall from the fire burning
brightly in the hearth—such fleeting
shapes we chase through endless dark.
Impressionism’s pastel moments wiped
clean as though a new fall of snow—
the artist’s intent forever gone like
footprints covered by winter’s white
shroud across the earth’s vast face.
No soothsayer needed when the earth
speaks its own omens through cracked mud,
a farmer bent over his tractor hears
only the engine’s hum drowning out
fate’s dry cackle carried across the plains.
Echoes of Decay
Winter is coming,
the energy leaves the mantis,
mechanical ghosts groaning machine tones
from a junkyard underworld with no human
to wind their guts.
The mother cooks no more meals,
past relics voicing thin gramophone tongues,
anachronisms like bad apples
in a medieval painting of the garden.
A grandmother corseted, grim,
cries out to the digitals for permanence that
wither, decay, while the new human buries the old.
The girl leaves high school,
throws away her books,
the boy abandons church,
finds energy in wine,
rusty minds, creaking bolts like mechanical
fingers walking over aluminum Braille.
The last prom dances in a country courthouse,
filled by women moving like ghosts
through barricaded corridors.
Vintage dressed mannequins wearing only threads
thimble stitched by thought,
the final prom was over before it began.
The husband spies the wife one burnt night,
loves her no more,
thinking of different days,
the mistress is a serpent temptress.
Tools fill his workshop, cradled in drawers
like hiding insects, pegged on walls,
locked away in toolboxes, criminals waiting release.
Immobile crippled things, they live in tombs,
mute to their machine god
that never plumbed severed alloys.
The minister, clothed in umber,
cannot tongue sin.
Shoes paw at the ice,
patterns fading into the trees,
entropy slows the paralyzed motorization
of these brooding junk yard animatrons.
Such a simple metal container,
my grandmother’s round, circle box,
old before I was born,
the circle is broken, never repaired.
Buttons lie in chaotic formation ready to march,
compasses unbuttoned beneath the fastened lid,
tiny memos never written,
they cannot revive the final revolution.
The seeds of evolution are time and death,
like a pair of well-worn socks,
time and death, death and time,
harbingers of any form of any relationship.
No one knows from where
their tongued hieroglyphs deciphered the center,
in their corroded minds lies yet a text undeciphered.
Ghost conversations fractured by time,
the moment always fractured,
the universe must first be invented
to connect the you to another,
from the big bang to your dark whole.
Smoke and Stone
This is where we are now—agents of smoke
curling about each other, filtering away
thoughts, obscuring moment’s meaning
beneath a sky empty of eagles, summer air
thick with cricket song pulsing through the grasses.
She wrote the psalm for the morning
on her palm where the forest dripped
sodden tones, tree roots buried tongues,
moss her sage gown that sweeps along
a wild ballroom floor the way she once
danced to manifest notes, childhood
memories of girlhood: long skinny legs,
an imagined ballerina’s pirouette on
bone white river stones—grace that calls,
as if she was ancient Greek Erato,
a muse driving the chariot. Satyrs, epic
heroes, wine dark seas, hollow horses—
all depicted on a golden shield made by
the gods would plough the field melodious.
Without a mirror, she knows the sky looks down
upon itself, broken by bent trees
leafless in February wind moaning
through the branches—their shadows
thrown up on garage doors like Giacometti’s
elongated figures stretched thin
across time’s fabric, a girl’s face
peering out through the decades from
a frost-covered windowpane—she moves
on and away carried by the wind’s
hollow notes playing a different tune.
One could tear the pages from a book,
nature’s psyche and read the frozen
pumpkins, still in the fields, as moons
circling far planets, the treeline black
& white undeveloped sticks calling for
the sun’s return that prefers to remain
anonymous where its thin heat does
nothing to the cold traveling from
the moon. Bent as it is in solar
improvisations forced upon it by
the texts of men, its light sweeping
through the long dark in asymmetrical
lances.
The Unravelled Psalm
She said that words create reality,
Like vivid dreams making love to the moon woman
after she told the village children
moon stories beneath a sky spilling light.
She wrote the psalm for the morning
on her palm where the forest dripped
moss, her sage gown that sweeps along
a wild ballroom floor the way she once
danced to manifest notes, childhood
memories pulsing through decades past.
She moves on and away carried by the wind’s
hollow notes playing a different tune
than spring’s promised greening—she knows
the weakened winter sun is a prophet
speaking with gas & atoms—no one hears
her voice in the fiery sermon’s fade.
She said that reality creates words,
spoken out in syncopated syllables,
but she walks death’s road where history
spins a lost generation moved by nation’s loss.
She wrote the psalm on crumbling stone
among Rome’s mythic hills. This is what
she told you: The Moon is an old, silver
rimmed lover, blood burned pewter at night.
Her gaze tracks time’s arc across the sands.
Yes, it becomes personal then, like
taking Monet’s water lilies and stroking
the oils with bare hands until she leaves
nothing but smeared canvas, a blank
white mind empty of flower thought—
a frame she hung on a wall in some
obscure museum visited only by stray
travellers seeking her lost refrain.
She moves through March corn stubble,
brown husks rattling like Caesar’s bones—
she hears superstition ride the gusts
whispering to barren fields where she
waits for spring’s plough to carve her name,
for what she was always walks with her,
like shadows cast on a yellowed photograph.
The Weight of Absence
Why is it that empty houses wither away,
atrophied limbs, joists and timbers creak, moan,
like winds whistling through a mountain pass?
Hallway lined with generational images,
faces behind glassed frames, many that I knew,
others unknown except through living stories,
now only faceless faces, muffled, uninhabited.
Their scent is always there when I enter,
my aunt and uncle entombed, their trace
clinging as late summer ivy on a decaying tree.
The house, full with their life’s debris,
is empty as a buried archaeological urn,
a shell of confused deception, windows blank eyes.
Paint peels from the siding like sloughed off skin,
shingles become flakes of black dandruff.
Here in these rectangular pieces of paper,
fragile old photos hanging in an empty house,
last remnants of inexistent flesh burnt through light,
my grandmother in a Victorian dress,
her father, stern and cold, hands on a cane.
None are smiling, no glee polishing the wood floors,
no church song to lift them up, only black eyes
reminiscent of holocaust photographs.
Passed on in time, the house is filled with clocks,
measuring some automated moment,
a transubstantiated ticking eucharist—gone.
The cuckoo’s stilled song, lifeless springs,
the lost tongue of unwound antiques.
My tread marks out metronomic rhythms,
yet the outside wind brings no breathing resuscitation.
Their insides, though still filled with lingering presence,
are hollow, like a buried log,
a giant elephant lying supine, struggling for air.
I wonder if they had voices, what Sunday tales
would they bleed, stifled by packing tape?
With my passing, no poets will sing of their humble tasks,
only a cardboard boxed Sheol,
where sunlight flickers, pulsing immortal substance
in that darkened realm,
terminal, awaiting new life that never comes.
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 2023.
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