We are family, Dytiscidae…

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#AlainCDexter, #bringingbacktheglosa, #thistooshallpass, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, glosa, Spanish medieval fixed verse

~~a glosa~~

Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle
skating across still water in any direction
we choose, and soon to be swallowed
suddenly from beneath.

—“Night”, Robert Bly

~~~

Have you lost count of your senses?
Someone who loves you long ago made certain
you had five on each hand
and five, wiggling, on each prehensile
pinkening foot. Symbolic and prime
you burst from cramped and pensive foetal
with a joyful cry—I am arrived!
And not just to mark time or fulfill
biology. You and I intended joy, full
alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle.

Surface creature, you can smell the deep
and dip your skinny feet wherever taste
and fancies send you, yet a surfeit
skim, some oily practicality, pollutes,
lopping like a fisher’s scaling knife
permitted from forbidden. Vivisection
of the vastness of the sparkling neural
universe within has become the gauge
by which we sniff another’s misattention,
skating across still water in any direction,

frantic, fearing too much clamour and
the probability that all accelerates
toward more of better, more of worse. Appetites
of yesterday, I eschew, convinced through
dimming, wrongly disavowed sixth sense that
someone’s making off with mine & ours. Hollowed
by the scummy years of digging in & digging up,
asphyxiating from de-oxygenated history,
desire, healthy-gilled, moves on. Hallowed
we choose, and soon to be swallowed

this moment and the next, we entertain
dread for sake of conversation. Final breath
the switch that flips dusk to dawn, you and I
enter, one by one, the ark, the mothership.
We all must board that skiff eventually.
Why should I care if the pH of your belief
is pond sludge to my frisky brine? Some
silver, shiny, passing school that’s learned
to count past five will snatch both joy & grief
suddenly from beneath.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Dytiscadae: predaceous water beetles
The gorgeous image of a pond surface comes
from http://www.miriadna.com.

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Inversions

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#AlainCDexter, #bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, medieval Spanish fixed verse

~~a glosa~~

I’ve been chewing darkness for so long
that I don’t know how to relearn joy;
I’ve been walking on lava for so many years
that my feet have lost all memory of fleece.

—Gabriela Mistral, “Nocturne of Consummation”

~~~

I made away today to the blue green
waters, slipping through crevasses of
musty inattention, past the trawling clusters
of opinionates despairing of their worlds
to reach this remnant of an iron age. I used to wait
on people I adored who saw in everything a wrong.
I danced my favourite red shoes off to prove the right
and bled in endless causes. Nearly lost my head
yearning, fruitless, where I never could belong.
I’ve been chewing darkness for so long

the fife bands of the mind with their penny
whistle tweedling, their tinpot repercussion
of past victimhoods march at my heels, wanting
me to swallow pain as good for me, agree to being
ground to ash until my joints and sinews ache.
Nothing tastes the way it did when I enjoyed
life, which qualifies my joining the insipid who bash
their heads against the walls of Plato’s cave. Their aim
is group concussion, so torpid and pointless a ploy
that I don’t know how to relearn joy.

And yet, now that I’m here
with only forward as my guide
and no convincing evidence that death
like the dusty fly-bit reign of Ozymandias
is worse or better than anything else,
I can turn to the cantankerous my deaf ears,
leave one-trick ponies to their sad politics,
appreciate the strides humanity has made,
has yet to make beyond the vale of fears.
I’ve been walking on lava for so many years

they know my name in Pompeii;
Popocatepetl is my winter home.
But for all the pumice I’ve endured,
the present me sees fresh at every turn
and boredom as the only borderlands.
Prosperous, sans alms or palms to grease,
I welcome the agora surrounding me
whose wares and wherewithals are
so abundant, true, intent on peace
that my feet have lost all memory of fleece.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

As you sneak on (pretending to be blind)

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#AlainCDexter, #bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, Ray Bradbury

~~a glosa~~

Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
to detonate the hidden seeds with stealth,
so in your wake a weltering of wealth
springs up unseen, ignored and left behind.

—Ray Bradbury, “Go Panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep”

~~~

Get out ahead, Ray said. He whispered
in my ear from the second tier of theatre seats
where season ticket holders gather to escape.
Your former audience stopped listening years ago,
so why are you still heeding bitter voices
in your head? Imagination does not keep.
It’s manna, fresh dispensed among the tribes
you’re meant to leave, so you can fathom
where the motherlodes of Sheba’s gold run deep.
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep.

Debunkers have their charm. They seem
like hammer-headed moths of vast intelligence.
They flit from mindset to vain hope of possibility,
only to wilt—another failed experiment,
I knew it! Knew what? You would be wise
to ask, but only to and of yourself.
You knew that you would find exactly
what you sought, and hope some future scientist
will prove it? Leave them to their questionable health
to detonate the hidden seeds with stealth…

…and magnify each crystal-studded vein
where economy of thought originates. Think twice:
One. For this I came. Two. For this I surely have
the means. An inch worm dreams of forests,
then, grown wings, discards old measurements.
But what of all those sickly trees you felleth,
gypsy moth? What of them? She will not rue
cocoon or larval path. Shame’s the slimy capital,
concocted and collective. Fly! Propel yourself
so in your wake a weltering of wealth

accumulates, surrounds, and in your seeing
shows itself both spendable and true.
The good you do and will from heights
of first imagined, then believed prosperity
must needs befriend the equally envisioned.
The fallen cannot help the felled to rise. Mind
you, it is true that misery loves company,
but why would you such membership desire?
Expansion is and ever will. That, not of its kind
springs up unseen, ignored and left behind.

~~~

The title of this glosa comes from the sixth line of Ray Bradbury’s poem. Parentheses are my addition.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016