#richard scott

[havingapoemwithyou]

Love version of by Richard Scott

[almoststardust]

[pumpkin--pirate]

It's taking all my maturity not to vandalise this library book

[priorybear]

Trainee Priest at Rochuskapelle

Saint Sebastian stands covered with the hunger-cloth – a hooded detainee from off the seminary television. We must give up the sight of him to focus on the bare Easter altar. Good Friday I will lift the veil, search his face for a clue of agony. I don’t believe the sculptor’s lie, he cannot be at peace. He is like me, young when he gave himself to God. While the priests are diluting wine I would have him tug off his sack, step down, walk… I will lie him across my lap, pull out the cock-feathered arrows, wash the holes in his body, sew them up with my mother’s darning needle, ask if I will be forgiven for wanting his delicate blood on my fingers. But Sebastian is carved, I have traced the chisel’s evidence with my thumb. I know my thread can’t heal – he and his arrows are of the same body of Milanese oak. There is no stop where either wound or weapon begin – our devotion is a perpetual hurt. I am like him, young, bound for a lifetime of suffering behind cloth.

RICHARD SCOTT.

[heavensickness]

I think about this poem everyday

[thesingingknives]

Protective stone, keeper-away of evil spirits, where were you when I needed you? His touch was mantle-hot and ruinous; intrusive, extrusive.

—Richard Scott, from "Peridot" (Poem-a-Day, January 3, 2024)

[dwellordream]

"I am always looking for a new frequency—hoping to recover some peridot shard of myself in this lapidary of broken things—but I can only translate what is already here and not transform. Hats off to the crystallographer who is watching chartreuse ions precipitate into livid rocks, I am toxic—petrified ectoplasm—luminously bonded to my past."

Richard Scott, "Peridot"

[ukdamo]

Peridot

Richard Scott

after Arthur Rimbaud and Wyatt Mason

O for a few more of those pre-trauma days, when life was as dazzling as a piece of raw peridot and all my hours were grass stains and beach glass and sycamore leaves glinting and shifting and iris spears shooting up, up, up! And lime cordial, molten peridot, thick and gloopy as time in the bottom of a glass—sliding, coating. And a fresh bruise when a bruise was just a bruise and could fade. And the gloaming when even the gloaming was green—pear-green and freckled sky, mustachioed wisps. But he is here too—fission-green flaw deep within the facet—giving off his own glow, blinding, disorientating. A crystal kind of man, polymorph, because he still has something to teach me and I don’t know if I will ever truly learn it. Protective stone, keeper-away of evil spirits, where were you when I needed you? His touch was mantle-hot and ruinous; intrusive, extrusive. I am always looking for a new frequency—hoping to recover some peridot shard of myself in this lapidary of broken things—but I can only translate what is already here and not transform. Hats off to the crystallographer who is watching chartreuse ions precipitate into livid rocks, I am toxic—petrified ectoplasm—luminously bonded to my past.