petals and bees

Paint Chip Poetry is a project inspired by an artist colleague who suggested using the paint samples found in hardware stores to inspire mini-poems, beginnings of fiction, haikus, surrealism, fantasy, word-play. 

In France they say fait accompli, in Japan, they write haiku

Listen to the sooty teapot whistle seaweed steam

Wind play world’s away

Mykonos, the city on a blue lace shore

Figure in a curtain when the north wind blows / window shut, tempest rages

Electro eye blink, a melody in a wink

I dream of a cottage on an island in the berry blue bay / and rock with the porcelain white tops / my deeper sea beckons.

The woman at the wetbar calls herself harmony she has cocoa skin in the shape of a vase walks sultry like everglades in a florida summer

from ocean to sea, the chagres river delivered our greed

aqua lotus botanical bliss

woven alder branch catches the day sleeping on its linen shadow
Ranchland sundown.

Black hills release the hounds

down, the crocodile froth

up, the citrus white sky

here, in its limelite, walks your salt-weathered plank soul.

butterscotch, amber / my tongue turns gold when you kiss me

i call my curiosity Lady Ophelia, she tries the honeycomb before the bees have left and the yellow stains her eyes long after, searching –

When they found earth, it was all alone: elegant, from a storybook. They all but frolicked into that desert crater with its craggy floor that looked like cracked wheat or appropriated pottery. In the evening, the heat burned off into antimony shadows. The mystery was sublime. They breathed deeply and air hit the back of their throats like bourbon underneath that great golden antiquity.

In their celadon throats some essential call,

meadowlarks of the marsh

hang over the waterscape like lichen

  
There are pockets behind your eyes where sorrow swings until the wine is drunk, until silence wakes you to the accumulation of dreams you’ve been sleeping through 

rushes like a herd of cattle – how long has it been since you practiced singing to them – bottomed out by the echo of their hooves from the other end of that sterile plain 

no breastbone to hide behind so reach deep into those pockets where everything you witness but never feel goes 

to wait, to rescue you.

^{A white sky is at its heaviest in November; under it, two old sisters share the sidewalk where}

^{once they felt narrower hips reach over crack, over slope. This year, they use it to retrace,}

^{talk, familiarize grief with thief as if initiating the actor to the role}

^{of red fall leaves, from the enflamed cul-de-sac Sweetgum,}

^{collected to embellish the dinner table.}

^{As kids, they knew those stabs of pleasure}

^{preceded empty branches,}

^{which is why the pleasure,}

^{and why the empty.}

^{Just as quick as crunchy leaves are swept into the trash, the white poinsettias arrive wrapped in holiday foil.}

^{But this ugly decoration is unrelated to how and when winter should abbreviate autumn, according to them;}

^{daytime shortening against their consent, and the sisters accept they are not in charge of the changes,}

^{like an act curtain descending, they kept looking for the operator. Still, looking.}

^{Though upon coming home, the table is suppressed by a fresh collection –}

^{leave-taking, the endings of sweetness and expiration of grief,}

^{often a more problematical scene change for an older crowd}

^{who clutch tightly at everything – purses, railings,}

^{the hand of whoever can be taken away,}

^{even at their own pain, even}

^{the poinsettias.}

Like a first time homeowner, key jangling and body moving through the stud-wall frame, imprinting the spaces with domestic prospects –

Grabbing at hair – a master bedroom, tongue in ear – a dining room for the family he imagines, with both hands to steer the wings of my hips – a garage for the car,

And all the accessories we outgrow, but won’t let go of; myself, the woman, the wife in his pipe-dream, the floor plan he selected for permanent residency,

I wave him across the finish line for the hundredth time; I listen for a groan from the subfloor as this new house adjusts to his footsteps down the hallway –

I take the glass of water from him with a desiccated kiss. It isn’t mystery that holds a house together, but exactness of calculation rendered by the grain of wood –

I bear everything beneath these joists, support beams and this foundation, plumb down into the fault line of the earth beyond retrofitting or indemnity;

Each night he locks the door and shuts the curtains. I don’t tell him when I feel the trembling; he cannot feel it, that’s how the friction began –

The bed swallows us and I wait silently for the slow tossing that will turn the walls into waves.

When I stop writing poetry for too long, I continue to make allusions at the gas station, holding the nozzle waist high, blowing kisses, exaggerating a wink –

He shakes his head to smile from behind the passenger window;

I still see a curve in the white, plastic lawn chair and imagine the way it looks with his body occupying its negative space.

We want to never be alone.

Now his scent has become my own over the course of time, our animal bodies busy composing poems that are only legible after he is asleep –

I used to believe that when I stopped writing them, I started living them, until it became apparent that the writing makes the living finer, more full-bodied;

When I stop writing poetry for too long, I still look at the stars. Usually long after he has fallen to sleep –

Still obedient to this knee-jerk for filling in the blank of air we’ve entitled being alive.

The abalone diver;
Who will plunge the deep for shell, pearl, meat.

How friendless are you willing to be
Down on the floor of the sea, or the roof of the sky,

Everything is turned around when you’ve gone inside,
Even the inner nacre doesn’t know whether it is the color of brine or sun, prismatic.

You shine the light in and you are the one choosing to never not know again
Whatever it is you’ve traveled inwardly to expose.

Against the weight of your origins, can you bear the thrashing
And become tender, too? Like the abalone seared in butterfat.

Suspended over the stove, you reflect your role as predator in the food chain,
With tongs you place supper on the plate, some lemon.

Whatever you come back with, from the dive down dark,
Feed yourself on it, on the holler of your heart.

photo credit: Jos Van Riswick

I had nothing enlightened before clearing beneath the pear tree, only, it’s February, and, I want cut flowers by July.

At the time, I didn’t know what moved me, except a craving for beauty, so that I would keep burning, much like a wicker dipped in layers upon layers of beeswax.

So I pulled the weeds that were greedy for space, the field marigold, and the weeds that were needy to stay, dock and devil’s grass, right down to the leaf litter.

I tucked the seeds into soil where armadillidiidae scuttle, where the centipedes and beetles are where the jellied fruits sit on a fast track to becoming dirt are where

The feathers and foliage pause, until time lends them useful above and below through a process known as decomposition, wherein a fraction of this seed will make

Perfect, velveteen panicles beneath a weight bearing pear tree in the full swing of summer. Noticing whatever you touch is a donation to your own life.

Everything within grasp, lovely or otherwise, deserves a lucky me, to be filled up by the sight of you. Take apart any composition and gape at the unenlightened chores

Which lift us into the making of magic.

Tonight the moon chases me,

Egg, over easy

Bowl of creamed corn,

It is jaundiced, baby faced,

Spoiled rotten for myth and song;

So with the help of the stars

We keep the wailing at bay –

I can do nothing but

Shout back lullabies,

Some like caramels, some like soot,

Until day breaks open

Its toy chest of colors.

(photo: http://kaulcogranniah.blogspot.com)

I went to the ocean on a particularly lustrous morning,

It was washed in all the softened, secondhand light

That the new sun, so far away, could yield.

I felt it pull at my ankles on the sand,

To the edge of that great, wide water and

Before my eyes, a hundred gulls lifted in unison:

Church is out, it seems; the day begins;

I had been asking for happiness as we all do,

Daily, carelessly, and without knowing –

So it’s the prayer that put me into my boots,

Then into my car, and out there to the line in the sand

Where it was answered, by the blush of heady light and the rush of the gulls,

To touch me like someone new who brushes your

Shoulder in those first brave and leaning steps into each other–

What I’m saying, is,

So strong is its pull,

We will always walk into our joy.