Before I Go

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Elaine Stirling, poetry

I’m settling, I’m settling
into the blues
and the slow
where the easy comes
and the wild things
know
there can be no paradise
for the low
the blown off
the bitter
or the skin-thin mean
no paradise
no garden place for them
whose noses poke
through broken screens
on porches where
the welcome mat was sold
at some cheap yard sale
years ago
and furnishings inside
what most of us once saw
as good times, party house
though none of us was really
all that happy, more like beetles
skittering and watching
for the shadow of the boot
afraid the day might come
when that big ugly footwear fit…
oh, damn, I lost my train,
where was I taking this?

—the furnishings, that’s right,
the trappings in this house
that seemed like home to me
amounts to little more now
than some broken springs
and gashes on a wall,
early scribblings unread
and stashed in corrugated boxes
thudding time with bats and rain
through rafters redesigned
by termites into sky lights

thank the blues
these mother loving, ever
faithful, forward strumming
blues, the only flow with grit
and heart enough to clear
the rear view mirror, show
me people, times, and places
not as pretty or as close
as they appear once more
once more, before I go

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

The image is of poet Robert W. Service’s cabin in the Yukon. I’m not sure who took the photo. Happily, the former home of one of our Canadian treasures is well tended.

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May Flies

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Elaine Stirling, poems for the fun of it

I’m sifting midges from my coffee,
husky-chows I’ve never met
are kicking sand across the pages
of the shipwrecked poem
I wrote yesterday, hoping on
this beige and torpid morn
to resurrect. One dog is deaf,
the other named for some
Greek god sniffs at my lips, hoping
I’ll expectorate the aromatic
mush of what remains
of pumpkin muffin
he believes far more
entitled to than me.

The coffee’s gone, the muffin et,
I haven’t wrote a sonnet yet.

Who knew that canine noses
could, like truffle pigs, root out,
capsize like raging blues the ships
of men with ambergris and blubber
on their minds, the early warning
signs of ghastly poetry?

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

May the Fourth

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Elaine Stirling, May the Fourth, poetry for fun, seasonal poetry

Be with me now, the means
continuously given
by the millions
through a cilia of ease.
Relax and fan these veins
and arteries with great success
conjunctive to the leafing out
of tulip trees

and when the comedy
of what comes next exhausts
me, when I’m glued like fly strips
to the nearest tragedy, I could
recall what Baal Shem Tov
most loved to say—just blink,
my friend, it’s time enough
for Providence to lay
another basket
at your feet

if this be true—
if this, not that
for betterment of peace
of mind is all I need to choose,
what need have I of floodgates,
sentry walls or cable news?
The ground I walk upon
of all I’ve asked for
and forgotten heaves
and bucks in time—
we are an ocean, after all—
with nesting cormorants
whose chicks with narwhals
are convening to arrive
at optimal, sublime
orchestral entry points.

The fourth is with me now
and you, eternally, the way.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Photograph by author

The Marble Sleep

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#bringingbacktheglosa, Elaine Stirling, May Day, poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson

~a glosa~

Voice of sport or rush of wings
It is a sound, it is a token
That the marble sleep is broken
And a change has passed on things.

“May Day”, Ralph Waldo Emerson

~~~

On this day of revolution
round a distant scarlet orb
the kiskadees of yellow breast
and uniforms of polished sword
light briefly in the quiet plot
where shipwreck, fever, fearsome things
recall me to mortality,
the only sure conspiracy.
From such as these my full hope springs
voice of sport or rush of wings.

I need not chase the waning dusk
nor linger at the splintering fence
that once divided us. This trust
like frangipani wafts unclothed
through dreams and fumbled wakenings,
gathering friends at the unspoken
well where dividends pay off
and debts dissolve, where vows
run free like colts, unbroken.
It is a sound, it is a token

anyone can change, upgrade
to new and better, old considerations
sink like iron hulls. What starved
me once, twice nourishes when I
but take a turn away from half-life,
overlook the contents of this shaken
cranium by ignoring little minds
who mope and claim to understand.
I know, whatever mood they woke in,
that the marble sleep is broken.

Ossicles of what I used to hear with
crunch beneath my feet. Dissolved
to crude uranium, each grain of bone
and sand’s a universe, though not that
interesting. Bolder every day, I know
that Nature shakes but never shrinks,
and neither will she ask of me to be
the less for those who think affection’s
overdue. Joy subsumes our ancient sting,
and a change has passed on things.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Photograph by author