Anticlockwise

Isn’t it strange how things unravel anticlockwise in the
night, as if thoughts, blindfolded, spiral homeward into

the past? In the morning, even in the half-glow of dawn,
you can float away from yourself, changing their direction,

the end of the trembling dark clutched tight in your hand,
deliberately unwinding pain through a labyrinth of forced

possibilities. Time, then, is just a cruel trick of the light.
Or maybe, love is. I remember lying on our backs on the

sand, the sky close, beginning at the end of our skin,
stars finding the hollows under our nails, clouds moving

in dextral whorls around a proximate moon. Or maybe we
were just looking at it wrong. Maybe it was day. Maybe it

was us whirling and there was one nebulous cloud in the
centre blurring the sun. Maybe we weren’t next to each

other, a deception of trajectory and distance and touch,
the twisted path a long way to reach an inevitable end.

 

Image by Anthony Jon Tyson (Picture prompt provided by Visual Verse)

First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 10)

A Crow That Became A Line

It’s supposed to be a book, a story, but I wish I could start with
a poem instead, there’s something about leaving things half

said, something about a handful of metaphors and line breaks,
that wear their brevity proudly, there aren’t that many words

in the beginning anyway, just an uncertain awkwardness that
stumbles over ellipses, saying little, saying a little. A verse about

a day that wasn’t supposed to be, but was, about a time that
wasn’t meant to mean anything, but did, about the big things

unremembered, about tiny details that stay in the empty frame
like disconnected dots. There was a crow outside the window that

day, watching, as birds aren’t expected to, but do, like a sadness,
an inadvertent new moon, a crow that became a line in the sky,

in the beginning anyway when there were no words. With a poem, I
can stop here. You never speak. The poem becomes the whole story.

 

Toril Fisher Fine Art

 

For the ekphrastic prompt at Real Toads. Also for Poets United Pantry.

The Way

And the monk sat, like a cloud, at peace, the way you can
unfurl at a safe distance from people, speaking softly, the

way spring rain writes on leaves, about life and illusion and
the journey of souls that leaves us behind, the way a snake

trades one skin for another. I wanted to ask if I could shed
this skin you touched, memories etched on it like scars that

would never heal. I wanted to ask if I could be washed and
anointed in a sunshine unguent, the way a bride is bathed

before her wedding, healing turmeric running down her
face and neck, the way the old sky is made to masquerade

as a new one each morning. But I am just the moulted life
of a writhing soul, holding on for a flutter, the way a name

is carried in the fist of the wind, for a distance. A sunset drips
yellow, the way time passes, faster when nobody is watching.

 

Image by Sharon McCutcheon (Picture Prompt provided by Visual Verse)

First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 08)

Nowhere Else

Even that god,
fleeing a burning heaven,
clambering down
sheets of fiery air,
paused for a moment,
silent.
The skies he had made
for birds and dreams and
the echo of temple bells
were scarred by the breath
of death laden wings
and the sounds of children falling.
Even that god
looking down at what was left
of truth, of earth,
of life, of the living,
sighed.
He knew
he had nowhere
else to go.

Even that god.

Image by Anthony Intraversato (Picture prompt provided by Visual Verse)

First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 06)

Separation

A lone tree props up the heavy night, the weight of all that
darkness, of unconsummated dreams, of things that sigh

in the after-light. He watches the unstill sky impaled by the
wounded bark, knows the world is lighter in the sunshine, the

unencumbered blue, the unfettered clouds, that strange
anomaly of time and sight replaced by this impenetrable murk

that watches with its many eyes. He knows something will give
before dawn, but what if the shadows do not rip, what if the

separation of heaven and earth breaks down and the deathly ink
stains all eternity, what if the now is swallowed by that open

mouth and will never be again, he shifts slightly, feeling his
roots dig deeper, the cold seeping into his old, trembling feet.

 

Wrote this for Mystic Blue Review‘s Ekphrastic Challenge where the prompt was The Starry Night by Van Gogh. The poem has just been published in their fourth issue.

Linking to Poets United as well .

Physics Will Not Have It

Woman in an Interior, by Vilhelm Hammershoi (Denmark). 1909.

To be like glass, throwing patterns of light instead of dark
shadows, pools of daytime art in infinite detail, every

filigreed ripple of love and fear and guilt and torment, the
excruciating minutiae of the broken heart spilt on hardwood

floors and asphalt roads, climbing brick walls into dimensions
we dare not dream of; but physics will not have it, physics

was born before love, what does it know of spaces with no rules,
of pain, keeping us tethered to the earth while the sky whispers

urgently each dawn; by noon I am reading the murky shapes
like tea leaves, trying to find tomorrow in whatever is left

behind, by dusk, the blur stains the window, the corners are
drawn one by one into the centre, by then, by then, it is too late.

 

Thank you Lorette C. Luzajic, for publishing my poem at The Ekphrastic Review.

Sin Collector

Still Life with Five Bottles: Vincent van Gogh

 

Collecting sins in old bottles, the days reach out and drop them
in like pebbles, still smelling of fond river beds. Yesterday, it was

the temptation of an improbable love, too big to fit into that
slim hipped flask, but sin is pliable, twists and changes as it is

gathered, as we change its name, change its colour, make it
bearable in the morning. When all those hours, all those words,

all that feel of skin on skin has been corked, when the bottles fill
the shelves and rooms and toss and turn on the breasts of the

tides, when everything has been cleansed and bathed and the rain
never stops falling, tell me then, when did love become a mistake.

 

Thank you Lorette C. Luzajic, for publishing my poem at The Ekphrastic Review.

Incongruence

It is the measure of incongruence, the horizon askew,
the wind running amok, the sullen moon a flushed

pink, the world at war with its children, dead in school
yards, drowned in thirsty seas, broken under the rubble

of endless hate. I see you flinch as you read the headline,
another five year old raped and dumped on the side of

the road; a curious fly slips in through the screen door and
surveys the remains of a chocolate muffin as the silence

seeps into the bones of another day that will not begin.
A nameless bird looks out, the words to its song forgotten

in the morning sun; it would make sense, it would all make
sense if the earth had succumbed and spun astray, a flaccid

ball untethered from its orbit, or if all of creation, swathed
in mournful black was biting down on the last trees to stop

itself from screaming. I hear you start the car, I hear it
cough, again, again, as if our air is too toxic to breathe in.

 

First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 05)
Click on the link to see their picture prompt.

Purple Stranger

It was the way day turned to night, like the flicking
of a switch, shadows scrambling to unpin themselves

from the snow, the moon hastily draping a cloud over
her naked bosom, stars still, not ready to twinkle, the

glare of not knowing transforming into dark realization
in an instant, as if something had been revealed, as if

something had been hidden, forever. Except today, when
an odd twilight slipped into the silence, like a stranger in

a purple coat walking slowly over the slopes, holding the
eye, stretching distance, stark against the emptiness,

carrying not to the inky gloom that was to come, but the
light that could brighten a heart for just a little longer.

 

First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 04)

Check the link to see their picture prompt

Because Memories

Because memories aren’t memories unless they spin
in a haze of blue, firmament and ocean overturned

into an infinite mist, congealing into an occasional
cloud. I’m beginning to separate the shades, the unsaid,

cobalt at the edge, the untouched, pale as covered skin,
the unawakened, dark and restless in the middle, waiting

for words, for warmth, for touch; the unforgotten,
whirling in random patterns, blurry, wet, between the

truth and the want, the azure of unloved seas, of unkissed
sky, the virgin cerulean of hesitant dreams, daring to

reveal, only to disappear. You didn’t teach me the colour
of a fallen promise, of an abandoned love, of a shadow in

the unsunk depths, of the hue of the past when it floats
sapphire, an imploding moon inside unopened eyes.

 

First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 03)

Check the link to see their picture prompt