The Wanderer to His Wife
we’ll be home
once the empire collapses
wily nautílos, sailing east
keeping Ithaca in mind.
You can call it a good try
my feigned madness
although it nailed
my face to the mast
but look for me coming
home on a north-west wind
I couldn’t know my journey
would be Gordian:
tied up with lotus and goats
and a half-blind giant
a beautiful jailor
my sailors driven like pigs,
finally lost. The voyage
was overlong I admit…
but the tales….enchanted
In the end if I offended
your suitors I ask that I
be valued for being
straightforward with a sword.
An old man shouldn’t be
faulted for command.
Thank you for the weaving.
I’m glad to be home
where I can have them back,
my bed, its deep fleece
and its immobile frame.
Tornado Season
It was tornado season in Kansas when Dorothy went out with Toto eighty-two years ago.
Now it’s always tornado season somewhere.
Believe me, I wish I could be optimistic about this.
I wish, when a cottage blew up in a big wind it didn’t murder a witch but touched down whole in a land of the unendangered red pandas.
I want a heart, a brain, and courage without the crazy wizard.
But we have plundered the Emerald City and all our bravery doesn't change the thermometer or kindness convert the cruel, and our news has the hallmarks of laziness and low information.
So, it looks to me like if Dorothy wants to get home safe, she’ll have to find her own bucket.
Philomena
This spring, we swallowed family repast
of a fiction that had its source
in that cabin with its all-night brutishness.
By morning, it was as if my speech
were gone. April comes and May, each one
a month in which I am tongue-tied
as the birds arrive from elsewhere. Attired
in my new chitōn, I hang wind chimes,
plan revenge. Swallows fill the atrium
with old hymns of salvation and ascension.
I soar with their song until it comes for my boys
as murder dressed in a swallow’s long eyes,
seeing sideways, ending forever in his lie.
Sister nightingale, can you help me?
How We Go to the Woods
For the difficult walk ahead, we have half a loaf. We think it’s enough
as we are only children, although the woods have thickened lately, soured up,
pines hold hands overhead and dogwoods wave white handkerchiefs
in submission. Here, the forest houses exquisite deer, chipmunk,
the fearsome bear come from deep in the hive-mind where she dwells with
the millwheel, the glass mountain the necromancer and witch.
How long was our way there, how deep into the trees and how many paths
exactly? We trudged, we disarranged spider webs and their white inhabitants,
and trekked until we saw a curl of smoke and pushed into the yard. Chill
and hunger drove us in. The rest is history of a sort. The sort of history that flourishes
in imagination, not real exactly but plenty comforting—the gingerbread house
the boy with the bone, the girl strong enough for a push. Anyway, one of us
ate well, and in this tale, whoever takes the side of the crone or asks the question,
who will feed you once you have thrown down your crumbs?
Wolf Moon
In uncertain times we ease toward another Full Wolf Moon.
I’ve always loved that name—wilder, with more teeth and blood than Cold Moon, Hard Moon, Freeze Moon, those lifeless moons.
Full Wolf, a disc of moon over what is sometimes snow, sometimes just wet clods.
This is my idea of canis lupus—urgent.
The Hungry Moon that comes next, the name captures its story. It’s been a virus-time since I’ve eaten out been with a crowd that widened my eyes.
They tell me it’s getting better. What they mean is different, but the same kind of bad.
I desire a moon that explains what it is— feral, unrelenting—followed by a moon that says what I am—hungry.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle Lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. Is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have been anthologized and appeared widely on line and in print. Find her at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com
No comments:
Post a Comment