This is the dark tip of the spindle creasing the clouds,
pulling the curtains down; this is the cue stick that flicks
the wobbly moon across a velvet-flocked table, hoping
yet to fill a pocket with casino silver. These are the few
remaining blades of scent from the last of summer’s
herb garden, where hair-thin slivers of frost have begun
to nest. Here are the low-creeping vines that argue in
their own impertinent flowering, for that green hope
which pushes between rocks and over graves. This
is the smolder of sticks, of touchwood and spunk
pushed into the grate as tinder; and this is
the resin that shades the veins copal or brittle
amber, amorphous soul I feed to the fire each day.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes
- Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands
- Encore
- Dear nostalgia,
- What We Look For
- Without Translation
- Heart Weighted With Cares
- Fables
- Tableaux Vivants
- Listening to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15
- Fountains
- Dear solitude,
- Nocturne
- Frontispiece
- Landscape, with Notes of Red
- Blue Stone Blues
- Landscape, with a Glimpse of the Soul as it Leaves the Body
- How I Came to Writing
- When does the hunger abate;
- Dear errant winds at dusk,
- Aerogramme
- Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
- Monday’s News
- Counterpoints
- Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
- On the Nature of Things
- Spell Against Grey
- Landscape, with Castoffs on the Sidewalk
- Sleepless Ghazal
- Last Call
- Delivery Confirmation
- Landscape, with Early Frost and a Dream Interior
- Campus Elegy
- Petrichor
- Ghazal: Chimerae
- Maguindanao Ghazal
- Insurgent Song
- Paper Ghazal
- Ghazal of the Transcendental
- Hot Lyric
- On the sense of danger or foreboding, the prickling
- Postcard from the Labyrinth
- Hunger
- Debris
- Letter to One Seeking Flight
- Unbelievable Ends
- In the chapel of perpetual adoration,
- Night Rain
- Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting
- Lyric on the Edge of Winter
- Paper Cut #2
- Herald
- Walking
- And once again,
- Prayer Among the Stones
- Call and Response
- Recover
- Dark Prayer
- Song of Snow
- Santa Milagrita
- Song without Strings
- Morning Song
Your vocabulary choice is usually inspired, Luisa, but this one is larded with especially choice words: spindle, smolder, touchwood, spunk, copal and amorphous. Love it.
I keep looking for a “Like” button here. :)
Never!
Kidding :) (not about liking your response to my poem, though)
Yeah, but we’re used to the richness of the Luisa word-hoard. What I love is the way the syntax blows up in the last three lines. What the hell? The words just pile up there like sticks against a weir.
All Luisa’s crossed lines (spindle, cue stick, blades): sticks against a weir, exactly! Perhaps prompted by “casino silver”, I saw the weir minaturized. Sticks clog the catch-basin grate on the loser’s street, but the tinder never catches fire.