Poetry of the Senses

Hosting Poetry Jam this week, Dani asks for poems on our senses.  Here's one about a significant loss of one of them.   (I posted this poem on January 15th. last year in response to Tess Kincaid's Magpie#48)

Affliction

"Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf."

They heard the windswept tremolos in awe,

their ebb and flo, as waves crash on the strand,

an undertow to anger, loss, to pain, 

his jagged figures challenging despair.

"Speak louder, shout, for I am. Deaf."

They asked “What does your new sonata mean?”

Can you imagine the withering look this brought?

How he might snort and shake his untidy locks?

“Go to your Shakespeare! Read ‘Tempest’” he scoffed.

"Speak louder, shout, for I. Am. Deaf."

‘Tempest’ The nickname stuck!  At least it’s more

appropriate than “Moonlight”  No moonbeams

light the rage of that finale, never mind

triplets that lap the shore of Lake Lucerne.

Go to “The Tempest”, then. So. Does he mean

his new work is 'rough magic'? Or perhaps

the lilting rondo is Miranda’s dance

at her wedding to noble Ferdinand?

For sure in the wintry gales we hear

a ship grind on the reef, splinter in shards

and sink to the deeps on bass arpeggios

I prefer “Our revels now are ended.”

Here he admits the best of life is over.

From now on all that seems sublime, heroic,

wild, will play out only in his unkempt head,

where still he hears what his ear no longer can,

with courage that proves the artist and the man.

"Speak louder. Shout, for I am DEAF."

Beethoven composed the D minor piano sonata, Op.31 No.2 (sometimes referred to as “The Tempest Sonata”) in 1801/02 at the age of 32, the same year that he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament in which he admits his almost total deafness. 

Much more about Beethoven on John Suchet's website  "Mad About Beethoven"

Magpie#101

A Haiku Lament

Now what shall I do?

Amazon's Gift Wrap service

knocked off half way through.

Posted in response to Tess Kincaid's recent Magpie prompt from Willow Manor.

What Makes You Really, Really Angry?

I wrote this little poem in response to a request for poems about Thanksgiving from Kerry O'Connor at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. So here's a picture of a Real Toad, sadly not an imaginary one, indulging in one of those quaint traditions that makes America the Greatest Nation on Earth.

It meets the 55 word allowance for G-Man's Friday Flash Fiction, so let's electrocute or otherwise terminate with extreme prejudice, two birds with one stone. 

Pardon

If you're full-breasted, feathered, tender, lucky
Mister President may save you from the pot
and you'll give thanks for this Thanksgiving -

but if you're poor, uneducated, black,
and some thumbs-in-gunbelt sheriff, real hot-shot
and white cops and judge and jury all say "It's HIM!"
and point you to Death Row -

he certainly will not.

Magpie Tales#89

Tess Kincaid's picture prompt this week is from a bygone age -

     It's Halloween.
   Zack is working late most nights, finishing his doctorate thesis on African tribal masks. He works in the room we call the lounge, hunched over his PC, and if the bedroom door is open I can hear the keyboard pattering, but mostly I hear Zack cursing - Windows, the printer, the memory stick he left in the Department, or himself for leaving it, or "How the hell do you spell 'tautological' anyway?"   He's onto the section "Death Masks." He reckons he'll finish a draft to show his supervisor by mid-November.  It's been slow going; one reason is he has to be careful to avoid taboos. Someone might read it. Unlikely, but you never know.

  "Go to bed, Pumpkin," he says. "I won't be long."  He makes us both malted milk and sits on the edge of the bed to chat for a bit, then decamps to his desk . . big old cupboard door on two saw-horses, we haven't much money, just each other. He leaves the door ajar.

* * * * 

   I woke suddenly and my first thought was, it was raining. Then I clocked that Zack had come to bed, that he had left the desk light on where he'd been working and that it wasn't rain on the window I could hear. Too regular. Too mechanical. Too loud.  I sat up and shook him. He stirred. He sleeps like a hippopotamus, I mean he wallows in sleep and the duvet.

    "Zack!  I can hear a typewriter." I shivered.

    "Billy" he said, coming to. "I mean don't be silly, Luce."

    "No, Zack. Listen." It's not a sound you can easily mistake. 

    "That's an electric," he said, listening now, sitting up alongside.

   "Zack, there's no typewriter in the flat, electric, clockwork, whatever. We have never had - "

    We heard a carriage return. Then the keystrokes sounded again, with pauses, the way you pause when you're thinking what to put next.  Then I knew he was scared and he knew I was scared and we hunched closer to each other.  "I don't like this."

    It got scarier. We heard chairlegs scrape, and the light coming through the part open door dimmed as if someone walked in front of it - once, twice before the typing started over. Only this time just five keystrokes, pause, five keystrokes, pause. And again, always five, typed slowly, as with one finger.

    He swung his legs from under the duvet, pulled on boxers. "Must sort this," he said, but I could feel him trembling.

  "Zack, I'm frightened."  In a whisper.  He patted my shoulder as if seeking as well as giving reassurance.  "Some pillock undergraduate got in scare the crap out of us. Trick or treat us."

    "What," I said, still sotto voce, "Bring your own typewriter?"

    But as he went to the door the light went out and the lounge was as quiet as it should be at . . . one minute past midnight, our little clock showed.  I clicked the bedside light on and said "Be careful, love."

    More light as he switched on the lounge overhead. He was back in only a few seconds, holding a single sheet of A4, shaking his head. He said, "Where do you begin when there's nowhere to begin from?  There's no one there. And no typewriter. Did we really think there would be? But look at this."  He gave me the A4 paper.  In a column of centered text, about 24 point Helvetica, bigger than any typewriter could print it read:

Wrong  Write  Books  Masks  Blood  Bones  Warns  Death

  "The computer's still switched on" he said, as if that explained everything, anything. "And there was this. Left beside it." He dropped something in my palm.
   Slender, white, hard. A finger bone.
   We looked at each other a long time.

Fearless Challenge

Kellie Elmore at "Magic in the Backyard" exhorts writers to be less fearful, to tackle 'taboo' subjects head on . . 


Breathe On Me

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to this -

Your lips, your fingertips be my awaking.

Breathe on my waiting eyes and take your kiss

to the twinned roses where my need is aching.

Breathe where beneath your breath my self is yearning,

where flesh engorges. Breath till your breath like fire

blown into flame, set by the wind's breath burning

fans into life my embers of desire.

Breathe on my limbs, my slopes, my globes, my curves 

Breathe on my secret sheaves, my readied portal -

Now, now, now, now the last shreds of reserve

are cast away, and this joy makes us mortal.

Soft as the nightfall, Love, breathe me to sleep.
Let lips, let fingertips be lullabies

sung as the slow moon past our window creeps,

let the spent dregs of passion close our eyes.

Magpie Tales#82

Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor uses another picture (below) for our starting point this week - Andrew Wyeth's "The Revenant" (1949)

Aftermath

   Time was they were called 'push-chairs'; modern marketing has them as 'strollers.' My sister's had been mine, handed on after years stowed in Dad's garage. I was eight years older than Julia and I earned pocket money cleaning it and then I was the one who insisted on pushing her on family walks or to Gran's or the shops with Mum when I wasn't at school and I wanted to tell everyone we saw that this was my little sister. When she grew out of it I think it went to charity. 

   This before the bad time, when Julia lost her pregnancy at three months and Zack and I separated, since when the stroller has haunted me, though it hasn't been so bad since Julia and I were reconciled. I mean, the dreams are not as frequent, and mostly only when I'm under the weather or it's my period.

   They begin with my bedroom door opening. I'll be awake enough to want not to dream, but I know the dream will happen anyway, and I hear myself or some disembodied voice saying "Who? Who?" I see the stroller coming in. First the single front wheel, then the seat part, the rear wheels, the push handle. The rain canopy is up, the occupant screened. My dreaming mind always hopes someone will be pushing it. No one ever is. The stroller trundles to the end of my bed and turns itself to me.  The duvet is unyielding. I cannot pull it up to screen myself. The dream will not let me not see.

   If it's Julia it's not so bad and I feel the relief even though she is tiny, like a two year old. She says nothing but holds out her adult baby hands as though imploring me not to hit her and doesn't hear me cry out that I won't ever again, hit you, hit you, ever again love, only come home. Come home, Joo.

   If it's Zack he glowers and hauls himself out of the seat and stands at the end of my bed and it would be funny if I wasn't dreaming to see a three foot tall husband carrying a toy panda called Sydney shouting how I'd enjoy having my lezza sister tucked up in there with me, wouldn't I; funny until he gets up onto the bed in his yellow babygro and tries to hold and kiss me.

   But mostly its the foetus, the homunculus that Julia conceived with Zack, that her womb shed too soon for him to live. My sister's blood stains the shawl the dream has dressed him in and his small skull lolls and his perfect hands flex and curl and the half formed lips form something that looks like Lu-cy, and then my own tears save me and I wake. Except sometimes I only dream I've woken, and the stroller is still there, empty and accusing and I shriek.

   Is all this because I blame myself? When I saw that I had married a child - oh yes, what Zack really wanted was a Mother he could get to sleep with - was it my aloofness that drove him to Julia? Was it her generous nature, nurtured by the loving Big Sister who pushed her stroller, that accepted him?

   Or that I might have become aunt to my sister's child by my husband, had not horror intervened? And now - is it that my ghosts are unquiet and will ever haunt the tormented part of me that was glad her baby died?

   

  

Magpie Tales#81

A Stranding

 "Look, Willow - dolphins!" Miss Warburton held the tabby cat to the car window, supporting the little head, rubbing her forefinger behind its tattered ear. "They won't mind the rain."  It streamed down the windscreen where the wipers had stopped.

  The dolphins - she reckoned seven maybe eight - wove around the car nudging it as if it were one of them, and, rising above the surface on their tailfins, knocked against the glass and looked in at her and the cat. The water had risen to the level of her seat, and now her feet, under the water, still on the pedals, were cold.

  "Nothing to be scared of, Willow," she said. "Dolphins are friendly to people. They help. They'll wonder what we're doing here. Shall we . . " She laid the cat in its basket on her lap and tucked in its blanket. "Shall we let them in?" She pressed the switch to open the driver's side window but nothing happened.  "Water in the wiring I suppose", and yes, the water was now rising toward the dash, covering her knees, soaking her heavy tweed skirt. But she could twist round  and just . . just reach the handle that wound down the rear window. "Let's finish it," she said, and turned the handle.

  In a few minutes more the rising tide sent water spilling through the open window. Miss Warburton stroked the cat and put the basket on the dash, against the windscreen, and closed her eyes and felt the cold seeping up to her waist. She waited.  The car rocked, rocked and she thought this must be the tide-rip moving it, floating it out to sea, and she opened her eyes again and saw the dolphins had gone, all but one, whose dorsal fin cut through the water ahead of the car, heading toward the rain-shrouded shore. But somehow the car was following it, and was now higher in the water, and the rocking was because it was surely floating, surely it was floating. And then she knew! The dolphins were underneath it, lifting and guiding it on their lifeboat backs and she made a low moan  and said "No, friends, no. Please no! You don't see. You don't understand." Her eyes closed again. She tasted seawater. Her greying hair floated up behind her. For a while the wickerwork cat-basket floated too, but was soon submerged. The car settled.

 * * * *

  Next morning at low tide a police vehicle drove down the shingle beach and across the sandbars to check out an abandoned car, about four hundred metres off shore.  Two policemen got out, looked into the car, opened the driver's door, shook their heads. Seawater dribbled.

  "This motor wasn't dumped," said one."And too late for an ambulance. Poor old soul. Got bogged down . . "

 "No, she didn't. Sand's quite firm." The second policeman's heelkick barely marked the surface "No sign of  trenching where she would've revved to get free. This motor was never bogged down. Some puzzle this. What was she doing here, for any's sake?" Then they noticed a cat in a sodden basket in the floor well still full of water, and one of them said, "God Almighty."

  The coroner's inquest found that Miss Warburton, a elderly lady who lived locally by herself and kept herself to herself, driving alone and in fading twilight, had drowned when her car became immobilised, although no cause of breakdown was found.
  The tabby cat, it was noted, had not drowned and had been dead at least four days.

(The picture-prompt below from Tess Kincaid at Willow Manor, and ideas from other Magpie posts were the starting point for this one. Many more entries can be found by clicking the link.)