golden mead

a devotional poetry shrine

[foolishmeowing]

Hold me

This is what I meant, for you to bring me “like the sea” did you think I didn’t mean for God to hold my cunt in His palm “like” under miles and a cold snake calls a hundred thousand years without waiting where it strikes, “like” mountains were built to fall on me, “like” mud coils in Heaven choking on wasted volume in the dark God abhors a vacuum – too much for you to scream less prey than rag

then float, His sweet seeped-into

staring as the stars ripple further

[poetryshrine]

e e cummings: my girl’s tall with hard long eyes

my girl’s tall with hard long eyes as she stands,with her long hard hands keeping silence on her dress,good for sleeping is her long hard body filled with surprise like a white shocking wire,when she smiles a hard long smile it sometimes makes gaily go clean through me tickling aches, and the weak noise of her eyes easily files my impatience to an edge—my girl’s tall and taut,with thin legs just like a vine that’s spent all of its life on a garden-wall, and is going to die. When we grimly go to bed with these legs she begins to heave and twine about me,and to kiss my face and head.

[poetryshrine]

Sarah Messer: Spell to Locate the Unreachable

As no assistance could be expected of the ocean, I turned to the trumpeting tunnel of sky and rummaged the tops of plum birch turning their leaves like coins, then to the tumbler sweating on the porch rail. The sky, the color of whale oil. The wind, a box of uncolored letters. And so I was gris-gris with my lichen hair and moonstone wound around my neck, a raccoon stuck under an electric fence, or a photo showing only one wick at a séance. How to unpin this particular corner of sky? I sing an antler song to find you, but there’s no trace of the sky in the sky. I’ll have to collapse the air to find you.

[poetryshrine]

Alice Notley: The Secret

Nobody knows who one is. Therefore I sought you to tell you who I was though I didn’t know—I keep trying to prove my connection to the soil I stand on. I can’t do that, yet speak to someone of “la ville de mon coeur” for at that moment I am only the one speaking. If reality in all its details were but aspects of a voice it would not be Language, rather, one would be obligated to define voice. As in the voice of the rose; the voice of rue des Messageries. The voice of your continuity in the body of M. The secret is telling me to write by rote—okay I’m doing that— until it speaks. Somewhere along the line it started to. It knows my course though I don’t. It would tell me to speak in French if it cared, it doesn’t give a shit—That’s it talking now. I am more powerful than a president; I am a charmed and desperate poet speaking to everyone.

[foolishmeowing]

You reached for the sword and swore you would make His side, and you danced by the beat of your prayers. You took your fury like His and bared your teeth and scratched – to find Him slick with you, the love of His edge hooked through the root of your yearning, now only the need to lose the rest of your life, that chaos pouring from your mouth, leaning numb into the fur of His collar. You’ve stained Him… and a stain is what comes of you where He once hung.

This is when you taste His hand, eyes clenched, cheeks hot, purple swelling in your chest: You fail before Him, the serpent grinning from your belly now the sigh He takes as the last beat of your heart strains and His lips –

Fading to white before you can dodge the grip in your chest stopping your veins to a cool pond. The whisper of air on your skin pulls away and you almost see yourself, almost float alone with a tear before the current, before the current… but withering is heat, where the world is more than you, and God’s breath makes you His own.

Your ghost caws mocking in a wet place, night’s sap dripping from His branches, and naught else fills you.

[foolishmeowing]

let me grow in you, my want to eat you in lines drawn felt-tipped down your neck, snapped out of it by a finger in your mouth, pulling

fear

stained linen

scalpel

[bloodmachines]

what could you give me? nothing. nothing, like she got for her mercies, her tongue never slipping but dancing round red berries she refused and for what? so a god fresh-drunk can explain death to the knowing? what are you going to do, teach me mourning from inside a wolf’s gut? no wonder you stink like you do, how drunk have you gotten off the bitter storm-surge of my pledge rolling down cold cheeks, lips repeating into my wounds: oh god i smell like you and they know.

it doesn’t matter. i am tired of explaining the movement of our spiral instinct, but not the story of it, who left the words smoking on the mantle whether drowned girls reek like hanged boys why we woke up again. i am paul of tarsus crawling under st. jeanne’s skin knife splitting skin outwards, the tree was gold and i am nothing. the blind increaser of a fool’s ignition– what are you going to offer beyond what you are?

nothing. nothing but a wolf’s storm-pale eye with courtesy enough to invent sorrow in it deft fingers for a necklace tracing apologies between the sinew i’m sorry you know the language the taste of never-always-home-

to know the nothing of your whisper, and more reasons to scream. i know what i want and of course

it’s all you’ve got.

[poetryshrine]

Robert Francis: Summons

Keep me from going to sleep too soon Or if I go to sleep too soon Come wake me up. Come any hour Of night. Come whistling up the road. Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door. Make me get out of bed and come And let you in and light a light. Tell me the northern lights are on And make me look. Or tell me clouds Are doing something to the moon They never did before, and show me. See that I see. Talk to me till I’m half as wide awake as you And start to dress wondering why I ever went to bed at all. Tell me the walking is superb. Not only tell me but persuade me. You know I’m not too hard persuaded.

[poetryshrine]

Robinson Jeffers: To the Stone-cutters

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained     thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems.

[bodysnatch3r]

He came to me there then, flayed God, mad God, divinity left bleeding, against the ceiling of the room, against the walls of my own skull, broken and bleeding from the teeth and mouth. 

A car crash. 

His fractured spine, his limp leg, his missing eye, his broken raven wings in crimson red. My God is dancing along the ridges of the spine. Too much red to be left sane. To much brokenness to be divine.

Rebirth.

My feet screwed on backwards. My feet hanging from the rafters. He speaks in tongues and kisses me all-riddled-up. The Bible flayed open (made sacrifice). 

Crack of your spine and the whiplash.

The steering wheel will leave dirty teeth on me. The screaming will leave dirty teeth on me. My gods are made of porcelain.

My God is a promise of fragility.

I welcome the riddling madman, I welcome the soft-spoken sage. My God is an exercise in the vulnerable. Car-crash god, bent-backwards Testarossa. Redhead is your brother in the chitter of darkness. Redhead is the blood from your gouged skull. 

Three teeth beneath my ribs, to crack them open.

[poetryshrine]

David Bromige: The Romance of the Automobile

It's dark. But there's a moon. You're lonely. You've got me. You can't stay where you are. You don't give me a thought, & climb inside turn me on, & off we go, me all around you, moving you while you sit still, up & down the ground I keep you lifted from, across the distance that your friends call you.

Though I can't see with these things much like eyes I let you find the way. Let you see what you might hit & miss. Let you feel you're in control. Let you make me go so fast you can't control me quite as well, or maybe not at all. So I get you where you go.

And if it's where you planned, I've sheltered you from what came down, proved useful, helped save a life maybe, unless someone like you got in our way.

You've felt a strength, obeying me while free to think of things along the way. An irritation or anxiety, if something's wrong with me, that is, if I need fixing.

And here we are. You can get out, and stretch, as though to throw me off, as though I were around you, yet I'm evidently not. You've turned me off, locked me up, pocketed the key and left me in the dark. You've got me where you want me. As if I were a car.

[poetryshrine]

A. E. Stallings: Explaining an Affinity for Bats

That they are only glimpsed in silhouette, And seem something else at first—a swallow— And move like new tunes, difficult to follow, Staggering towards an obstacle they yet Avoid in a last-minute pirouette, Somehow telling solid things from hollow, Sounding out how high a space, or shallow, Revising into deepening violet. That they sing—not the way the songbird sings (Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—  But travel by a sort of song that rings True not in utterance, but harkenings, Who find their way by calling into darkness To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

[poetryshrine]

Melissa Stein: How I

Stupidly. Like a dog, like drought flood, like a vole the hawk lifts screaming to its first and last panoramic. Each want sired want and I was drowning in it— but kept my head just enough above the choking to choke more. A dog, I said, or rat pressing lever unto death. May we all die wanting and getting it.

[poetryshrine]

Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

[fluttering-slips]

from Stone: 122 Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you.

I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call you either joy or love. All my own blood is gone. Something strange paces there now.

Another moment and I will tell you: it’s not joy but torture you give me. I’m drawn to you as to a crime— to your ragged mouth, to the soft bitten cherry.

Come back to me, I’m frightened without you. Never had you such power over me as now. Everything I desire appears to me. I’m not jealous any more. I’m calling you.

Osip Mandelstam translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin

[poetryshrine]

Kay Ryan: Criss Crosses

Even how the crow walks is criss crosses as though each step checked the last. No one knows why he advances as well as he does or could expect that laughable croak to work in so many circumstances.

[poetryshrine]

Rae Armantrout: Entanglement

1

"Don't let the car fool you.

My treasure is in heaven."

2

The material world is made up entirely

of collisions

between otherwise indefinite objects.

Then what is a collision?

(Or the physical world collapses

into place

at the shock of being seen.)

3

In the shorter version,

tentacled stomach swallows stomach.

In a long dream, I'm with Aaron,

visiting his future, helping him make choices.