Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

Dances with Death

Pink moon peers through my window
With his longing steals the key
Haunts me with his wanton woeful
Face, he looks on me

Pink moon listens at my door
While I shift and move inside
Opening to be his whore
Wanting to confide

I break the paint and crank glass panes
And open to the night
Breeze floods in sweet smell of bane
And all that pale pink light

And just when I begin to speak
He pinches off the flow
And binds the sweet release I seek
Caressed with voice so low

No, not now he says so soft
I barely hear his words
He winds his way into my loft
And beckons me with chords

That promise holds of pleasure’s pain
The music of restraint I feign
It moves me, minor notes they strain
My brain, I am no longer sane!

Just then he pulls his pink moonlight
Back through the open door
And as he walks into the night
I call out wanting more

From far away I hear his song
While colorless and cold
I lay in pools of longing
My quilts of love unfold

And dance outside my window
Dance bring down the moon
Bring down that pale and rosy moon so low
It falls to swoon

Then suddenly, surprisingly
His hand is up my skirt
Pink light on bare skin dancing
With Death I am the flirt

He throws me down onto the ground
Into night garden’s dirt
And pounds me down ‘til I am found
No longer can avert

The knowing I am Queen of Death
Persephone I die
The little death, exhale the breath
To live again, come, hie!

August 22, 2005
Copyright 2005
All rights reserved

Third Coast Woman

The upper half of her ample body lay stretched for 150 miles from the hill country to the coast where her broad hips sank into the liminal beach sands bordering the gulf, and the wetness between her thighs sweetened the currents of the waters there. Her legs, spread wide, extended out to the deep blue drop beyond the sand bars and formed protective jetties that broke the power of the surf, preserving the land against the sea’s encroachment. Her rounded breasts softened by the years of suckling her many children are the limestone hills that replace, in this time, the once mighty mountain range that was slowly eroded by her rain and wind children. From her headlands pour the rivers, her tears, her laughter, the stories she tells her people by their campfires in the night.

Gold and Global Collapse

Hot and flushed, my heart was pumping hard to do the double task of cooling my body while providing continuous energy to my legs as I ploughed through the scratchy thickness of this south Pacific island jungle. My throat swollen and engorged from my body's effort to get blood to my brain, I struggled to breathe. Seeing a tiny clearing ahead, I slowed my pace for a moment anticipating a break in this forced walk, and immediately I felt the heaviness in my thighs and the weakness in my knees and ankles. A small patch of bright blue sky beamed through the opening in the immense green canopy surrounding and overtowering me.

I sank to my knees, pulled my water bottle out of my pack, guzzled down some of its coolness and poured more over my face to relieve the stinging and itching from the palm fronds scratching against my skin. The only direction from here was down as the broad landscape flowed towards its ending in the narrow crevice where a pool of cold, clear water lay embraced by its mountainous banks. It was on a ledge beneath and behind the narrow thousand foot falls cascading into this pool that I had hidden the gold and now I must, somehow retrieve it and return before I was discovered missing.

On the day of the collapse, we’d loaded up the stash of bullion onto the flatbed, breaking it out of the hole where I had it bricked up in my cellar. We’d taken the bars a few at a time from the vault at work when we realized the end was near. Getting to the edge of the valley of the falls was easy, but getting the gold down the mountain through the thick jungle was another story. John had devised a line and pulley system I won’t begin to describe here, because it is his area of expertise. Together we had sent load after load down the lines we’d poled to the base to get to the pool. Stacking them along the narrow bank, they'd laid in wait of the more labor intensive job of placing them on the ledge underwater behind the falls.