I found a beetle in the boat, laying flat on his back, wiggling his meaty, spindly legs in the air, trying to grasp something – anything – to right his shiny, swollen body.
Slowly, he stopped straining and scrambling on the carpeted floor of the docked pontoon and just lay there, little feet in the air.
He reminded me of myself when I try Pilates.
Pathetic,
I thought, sympathetically.
This time of year, the ivy on red brick walls glows Kelly green,
The same shade of the summer tops aunts wear to church under cardigans.
I could never pull off a green like that, but the ivy wears it well.
Blood flows over me, filling and spilling over the pits and lumps in my face.
Appeased, I relish the offering – life gives itself to me, and I drink thirstily;
This is beauty to me – I cannot have enough of it –
Red and coagulating, it clings to and covers the ugliness of myself.
I have never wept for any creature that is sacrificed on me –
Perhaps because each one feared me and my unending lust for the price of innocence.
Yet, you came untrembling, gentle, and lay your life over me.
I could not move in that moment, and was as a stone – fear me, fear me!
I am afraid; fear me!
Water runs down my face – it is your tears, and mine – why do I cry?
No sooner than when that life washed over me was I no longer a ball of blackened blood –
My visage has returned to one grey and undulating, like any of earth’s stones, and I am purified.
I don’t sit in a temple filled with cloying blackness or the smell of perfumed death –
Instead, I am in a forest, and it is morning;
Dew kisses my face, the birds are singing, and light shines through the new leaves.
I am soft for the moss that grows on me, and a bird plays in the places where water pools –
Life has grown on me, and I do not need more.
Some may mourn the passing of spring,
But I won’t mind at all –
The verdant, full trees an arbor
After their flowers fall.
But after summer wanes,
When fall winds play with weather vanes,
And birds turn south leaving north behind,
I’ll mind.
I’ll sow a field with seeds
Of grass that doesn’t need cutting, and doesn’t want it, either.
Growing in soft-edged clusters laying sweet and green on the ground,
Letting itself be combed by the snakes and the rain –
Combed into cowlicks where deer may make their beds.
I gave Magnetic Poetry a try since it looked fun from what some others were posting.
Here are some outcomes – I strung choice words together and left out the ones I didn’t want.
I don’t mind if these aren’t actually considered poems – again, it was for fun, right?
And a bonus one:
Draw me out, with brittle charcoal and whittled pencil
Onto whatever surface you can find.
After all, don’t I look better on paper
Than under those merciless rays that overwhelm the outdoors?
Where the external is viewed in however many angles,
And the reflected light is equal parts piercing and protective?
Here, my veins aren’t visible; you don’t see a single pimple or stray strand
Or even what the outline of my face looks like.
Here, in a line or two, the internal is traced, a strand of genotype that was never expressed.
Right, left, right, left, right, and then left again;
Though a dimension is lacking, it is almost easier to get lost.
I think that the trees are happy in autumn. Their heavy cloaks are cast off, and their lanky, springy arms stretch a little higher than before. Their simple forms are on delightful view – branches pierce the cold air, and brown bark starkly contrasts with the frosted sky of the season. Moreover, they have sweet rest; rest from the hasty making and consuming of food, and instead live contentedly on wealth already stored up. They will soon exist in numb half-consciousness that renders the weighty, cold snow not a burden, but a divine embrace; a heavenly, chilling covering in exchange for a green, earthly one.
I’m swimming in earth and can’t move. The trees and grass are overpoweringly green, the stones in the ground golden and blue, depending on where the sun is in the sky. In this noonday light, my skin looks more radiant than it really is, and my cheeks are warmer than in the average given moment.
I am confused, like some roots that unexpectedly exit the ground, assume they will become a tree, then become increasingly bewildered as they only form into what is known as a lump, as a sore thumb.
God, get me out of here.
A golden-crowned kinglet hops over, pecking the earth as it goes; every leaf or root with a meal, it kisses. I can move now, and step closer.
It does not run; it even comes closer, as if I have something to offer. Really, I have nothing but admiration and awe, to observe how this sphere of feathers and flight moves alongside me, and how easily it flies, yet not fleeing from me.
Do I? I do. I reach in order to tentatively touch, and with the back of my index finger, stroke the down between its wings. I have done nothing, yet everything, and I am happy.
I eventually leave, as is necessary, but I am still in the park in my mind.
It was not wrong to reach out, nor was it reproachable to touch a willing creature, but do others think the same? Do they know what I’ve seen? As far as I could tell, the bird was well, and could not have harmed me, nor I it.
Oh, how I long for things to be right and to be won.
I would like to know why people paint over pine,
And conceal the grains of growth that betray
The time at which a trunk was split, at what angle it was severed,
Forming ellipses where limbs were once born – the wombs from whence they grew.
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