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John C. Mannone
2013 Rhysling Chair
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John C. Mannone: The Art of Poetry 
Mushroom Barley Soup: An Invocation
Shira Lipkin
shira.lipkin@gmail.com
Stone Telling #8
http://stonetelling.com/issue8-aug2012/lipkin-invocation.html
for Esther Smolowitz, 1914-1989
When I curse, my profanity sours the broth.
I can’t be too careful –
years of trial and error,
singing like my grandmother,
tripping forth the same mondegreen
(even though I know the lyrics) –
searching for the magic combination
that makes the food hers
makes it right
makes it home.
Each time, the ritual grows more elaborate,
complex –
her apron
the way her socks drooped
the hum behind her words
all of it hall-of-mirrors duplicated
down the years and down the kitchens
until I feel her,
just a wisp,
standing beside me,
stirring
nodding
sprinkling the salt.
Old magic
food magic
grandmother magic.
I try everything –
maybe it’s the bowl,
green Depression glass
it’s not her soup without it –
I try leaning as she did,
toward the end,
speaking half-nonsense
in the Yiddish she hardly knew.
She was born here,
learned from grandparents,
a smattering a scattering
good American girls don’t –
I let slip a modernism.
She slips away.
I restart the ritual.
Wooden spoon
sensible shoes
slow-chopped mushrooms
singing singing
hesitate – there –
and I feel her creeping back.
She was not much taller than me.
Gnarled like friendly old trees
by the time I knew her;
never moved without pain.
I must be slow,
be patient.
My grandfather died when I was ten;
she never made the soup again.
LONG poem:
Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
Sweet Mercy: Her Body An Ark Of Wild Beasts
Ideomancer, March 2012
http://www.ideomancer.com/?p=1741
Sweet Mercy: Her Body An Ark Of Wild Beasts
There are dead who light up the night
of butterflies,
and the dead who come at dawn
to drink your tea
as peaceful as on the day your
guns mowed them down.
– Mahmoud Darwish
My life has been the tin ribbons of a jaw harp,
its bent notes twanging
in the lightless space cupped between my hands.
I’ve tried to make sense of it:
the button eyes of cloth animals,
frayed cotton straining
at their herniated stitches.
The bones of my face are a map, I told you
the plates of my skull fused like petals at my crown
where the Queen’s infantry anointed me in mortar dust
and closed their ranks forever.
I told you the truth:
before I knew you, I lived for years as a sin eater.
Beauty was a charm I would never inherit,
my palate’s cracked seam a cleft between floorboards
in the attic apartment
where we lived before the war.
You never stared at the palimpsest of scrawled transgressions
that I was sure still etched my body.
Once you took my hand
and pressed it to the shallow depression in your skull
where you told me famine had wracked you while the bones were still soft.
Trepanned from birth,
your fontanelles like spy-holed fingers
never quite closing
over the keyhole to a locked room.
As a child, you told me how you used to wake sometimes
to see a wax museum of saints looming above your bones’ cradle
the dark haired Virgin standing over you,
her robes a swimming quilt of fish and birds.
Their feathers were cursive, crested
in halved suns;
she pressed her palm to your chest, once
and fear died inside you.
I wonder where the mark of her hand is now
watching hoarfrost bloom against the panes
of a shattered city.
The world turns its black spokes,
and the wind covers my tracks forever.
Daylilies wilt and bow their heads,
blight-palsied stalks
curling, clawed against my palm.
The insult of bayonets will erase you
a limp body left to bear witness
to history’s bloody unfolding.
I am a corpse, like the others
they heap like sandbags
along the edges of their barricade.
I am a man who has blinded himself
painting portraits on eggshell fragments
with a single-hair brush,
touching the clothes you left folded in my room
until their texture no longer recalls your body
and my hands, too are cast into the insensate dark.
In my mind
I called you Lost.
I called you City of Ur.
Your eyebrows the dark arches of Fayoum portraits,
the bones of whales’ ancestors scattered through the floors
of now-parched Cretaceous seas.
The stelae of their backbones rise like buzzard-ridden arbors,
spines whip-stitched, lacing between sun-bleached dunes.
I want the ululations of a thousand throats
to guide me across black waters whose shores I’ll never reach
a ghost of night overpasses
watching the headlights of transport trucks pass through my body
before the dark under the train bridge swallows them again.
I want to open my eyes to see her staring down on me
from the grotto tattooed on your sunken chest
frail and impossible, a hothouse flower
blooming in the nuclear heat.
I have bled, and seen a river fork through this place.
I have watched lithograph smoke
spill from the barrels of silenced guns
to curl in bows and lariats
around her heart-shaped face;
fetal buds pushing through cracked asphalt,
the bones of plowshares rusting
in soil too anemic for even the grass to anchor its roots in.
Somewhere, a revolution is happening
that will never be broadcast.
Somewhere, the sun rises on a world
no longer drawn as if by some hand
enamored
of human pain.
Other 2012 publications:
A Chorus of Severed Pipes
Goblin Fruit, Winter 2012
http://www.goblinfruit.net/2012/winter/poems/?poem=chorusseveredpipes
Stone
Goblin Fruit, Autmn 2012
http://www.goblinfruit.net/2012/fall/poems/?poem=stone
Three Poems
Counterpunch, July 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/three-poems-by-kelly-rose-pflug-back/
Jenny Blackford
Their Cold Eyes Pierced my Skin
Two years ago, my reputation was as clean as yours.
It wasn’t safe—
a woman’s name’s not safe until she’s dead,
sometimes not even then—
but it was safe enough. The young men of the village
and their tender peach-like buttocks
never moved me, nor did the girls,
however soft their hair or bright their eyes,
nor the worn-out husks of older folk,
tired from scrabbling out their lives
on our unforgiving stony mountainside
far from Mycenae.
But the two centaurs who hunted in the valley,
the year I turned eighteen—
oh, they were different,
alive and free.
Their hair curled down their backs like wild black waterfalls;
their cold eyes pierced my skin.
My fingers ached to comb their tails,
to smooth their strongly-muscled flanks.
I told no one, of course. Who could I tell?
My virtuous ever-weaving aunt? No.
I could not even whisper at my mother’s grave,
sorrowing her ghost.
Two years ago, as I have said, my name was clean. These days,
the gossips in the street need only point
at the spring grass under the trees,
and the boy child who frolics there: my son.
But they don’t know the half of it.
I succumbed, not to a local man or youth,
but to the lure of shining hooves
and glossy hides. Of course, there’s more:
for any mountain girl who’s ever milked a ewe or two, perhaps a goat,
has seen the ram or he-goat led to her in spring,
his huge balls heavy in their leather sack.
My centaurs were the same: formidable.
I loved them both, inseparably, as they loved me
And one another.
So, for a time, I truly lived.
My centaurs hunted hare and deer; I tickled fish;
I learned their summer songs, and danced with them, and drank their wine,
lolling on soft sweet grass far from my father and his farm—
but autumn came.
I saw the two I loved watching the birds make arrows in the sky
as they flew south;
soon my horse-men must go,
wild things that they were.
They stroked my hair and kissed the rounding mound
low on my abdomen: our child.
I cried and sulked, and was a fool.
They sang me songs of long-ruined palaces,
of stars fallen to earth,
of queens who wept gold tears.
I would not go with them;
they could not stay.
My lovers galloped south. I lingered for a month,
sure they would return for me—their love—
but I was wrong.
When winter came, I had no choice.
I walked the bitter path, stony and steep, back to my father’s house.
Despite his threats, I would not name the man who took my honor.
How could I have?
The priestess shook her head, when in my fear
I asked what to expect: a foal,
to turn my father’s world completely upside down? A boy?
The goddess could not be second-guessed, she said;
children bring joy and pain.
I had not hoped for much;
her own mind has been hazed with sorrow,
since the night her daughter went to the naiads’ spring,
and did not return.
After my longest day and night of pain, my aunt held up my baby boy:
ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes.
No curling mane, no swishing tail.
Life would be easier for him that way, I knew.
But when I closed my eyes
and touched his feet,
I felt not baby flesh but tiny hooves.
I smiled a secret smile.
My boy. Our boy.
I weave and spin, as women must, and look out from the door
as my son scampers on the grass
under the oaks.
Is that a tail flicking in the sun?
I blink and it’s not there.
I blink again, and smile to see
his shining hooves.
(“Their Cold Eyes Pierced My Skin,” Pedestal Magazine #70, August 2012)
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=22713
Dennis M. Lane
Grandfather
As a child he was supposed to have been my protector, ‘Pops’ I called him.
To the world outside he was a smiling, kindly man; always the first to offer a helping hand.
But I knew better…
Late at night, when mother was at work, he would come to my room.
Tell me how much he loved me.
Explain how I could show that I loved him.
I was just a kid, what could I do?
After too many of these nights, I went to my mother, stood there trembling…
Finally, I managed to spit it out, the filth that I’d endured, the horror visited upon me in the dark.
And she refused to believe.
With dead eyes, eyes that could not meet mine, and with lying lips, she said that I must be mistaken. That Pops was a good man, and he loved us both.
Years later, I realised that mother knew; that she too had endured visits in the dead of night.
But that could not excuse her.
She knew, and she could have stopped it, but fear, or shame, stopped her.
And so the visits continued.
When I was old enough, big enough to wield a knife, I dreamed of cutting off Pops’ head; like that of an ogre in one of my storybooks.
But, deep down, I knew that the death of my grandfather would not take away the pain, would not end the nightmares.
I was broken, my soul could not be mended, and so I devised a plan.
Despised at school, ridiculed for always having my head in a book, I kept my head down.
I studied and I escaped the town that had been my prison.
Years passed by; years in which I rarely saw mother, hardly ever saw Pops.
As colleagues went home for the holidays, there was no smiling family at the fireside for me.
I stayed in the lab, working, and the pieces came together.
Until, one day, the test rig disappeared!
Years of suppressing my tears, of not talking, came to my aid.
The test rig disappeared, and I didn’t move, didn’t shout in triumph.
I just smiled to myself, sure that my plan was near to fruition.
Pops was long dead, mother was in a home, my fallen arches were a testament to a youth long flown.
But Pops still haunted my dreams, still caused me to wake up crying.
And he always would.
A long weekend, the laboratory empty as I assembled the components, parts of a machine that I had conceived decades before.
The other researchers had no idea what they had been working on, all those years.
No time for tests, no need for goodbyes, I set the dials, engaged the flywheel, and blinked out of existence.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
The machine brought me here, to a familiar street.
I stand outside that house, a building that, to me, has always been full of darkness, and I’m surprised by how bright, how new, how clean it looks.
The comforting feel of the knife, smooth and cool against my flesh, reassures me as I walk up the path.
Theory talks about the Grandfather Paradox, but I don’t believe it, what can the universe do?
Strike me down with lightning?
Propel me back to the lab?
I have travelled through time, and no theoretical restriction is going to stop me.
I walk up the path and past the apple tree, strangely small, newly planted by Pops, then I slip down by the side of the house and into the always open back door.
As I enter the kitchen Pops jumps to his feet.
I pull out the knife and he stops.
Unusually for him, he has no words, no slick excuses.
Words fail me too: not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about what I would say, how I would accuse my abuser; but now, here, there is nothing to say.
Before he has a chance to move, I strike.
The blade sinks deep and his face goes slack, the way mother’s face went slack, that day so long ago (ago?)
When I told her (tell her?)
What Pops had done.
The young-faced, smooth-faced, two-faced, abuser, slips silently to the floor; blood pooling around him.
As his heart flutters and slows, I feel my own heart fading, like the propellers of a plane struggling to bite on air too thin.
I wonder if, in that far off old people’s home, mother’s heart is also fighting, straining to beat just one last time.
My blood drenched hand seems to phase out of existence, flesh becoming transparent, while, on the floor, Pops gurgles once more.
And, as three hearts beat their last, I know that he will not touch my unborn mother, that he will never come to my bed, to break the child that I was.
And, in that last instant, before all is remade, I… smile.
Grandfather (Long – 821 Words) was first podcast in the Poetry Planet section of StarShipSofa Episode 229 (Grandfather, http://www.starshipsofa.com, March 2012)
http://www.starshipsofa.com/2012/03/14/starshipsofa-no-229-m-john-harrison-3
First printed publication was in my collection “The Poring Dark” (Grandfather, The Poring Dark, September 2012)
http://www.terrandreamarchive.com/#/book-store/4568755853
Audio Version: http://dennislanebooks.com/#/grandfather-audio/4564366356
Sandi Leibowitz
(“Crimson-Hooded,” Niteblade, issue 21, September, 2012)
Crimson-Hooded
Approach, approach.
Not what you expected, eh?
My, what big ears I have.
They hear the mice stir under the floorboards,
the snail’s lurch, the prowl of the five-mile-distant thief,
your teeth chattering loud as doorknockers.
My, what big eyes I have.
They see that you’ve traveled forbidden paths
and still not learned to judge
what’s wild and what’s to be trusted.
My, what big teeth I have.
That’s for rending wolf-flesh and the meat
of little girls unready for the red hood’s mysteries.
Yes, child, it’s me, tucked in my nightie,
not a wolf disguised as me
for I am my own disguise.
Eyes keener, ears larger, teeth sharper
than when hooded in that shapeless bag,
that familiar granny pelt.
Just me, awaiting your curious questions and
the end of your naïveté, one way or ‘tother.
The woodsman? Why, down in the cellar, dear,
what’s left of him, fattening the rats.
They’ve gnawed him down to gristle,
use his skeleton for playground.
Who needs an ax when you’ve got nails
quicker ‘n scythes?
Step past the wolf-rug draped across
my rocker’s lap and creep close.
Closer.
My nose twitches at the whiff of your fear,
your copper-and-cinnamon blood.
Did you dare knock, little girl?
Did you dare question?
Do you dare lean closer?
Here are my questions:
Are you ready to earn the crimson hood,
stitched by your granny
with thread seeped in her own blood,
worn by me and my grannies too
for generations agone?
What’s that you simper–
does your mama know?
She wears it, too.
Why do you think she sent you to me
off across the woods
we two hooded hunters share,
with such a warning?
We had to learn if you were only
obedient pup, fit for the whip
and the newspaper smack on the snout,
or wolf enough to sniff your own way.
In this world there’s only room for bold or bolder,
and those whose heart’s blood grows colder
soon find that icy soup slurped down.
So now I ask,
do you choose the crimson hood,
the musky primrose path, dusk’s
bone-strewn way past grub-munched log
and leaf-mold under cave-black canopy,
or remain a pretty posy-picker,
a goodling meek, a mumbling daddy’s girl?
Will you be devotee or devourer,
priestess or prey?
Ah, that’s a good girl,
slip the hood back on,
red as apples and sin-bought roses.
Crouch at my bed’s feet.
Don’t beg but snatch, girl, snatch,
at this treat, this wolf’s heart I offer you.
http://niteblade.com/home/september-2012/2012/09/01/crimson-hooded/
John Philip Johnson
“String Theory” (James Gunn’s Ad Astra, 2012)
http://adastra.ku.edu/string-theory-john-philip-johnson/
Thank you for reading!
I’ve posted my poems from 2012 in a post at my blog. Please leave a comment there if you’d like me to email you a PDF version (where the layout will be more accurate)
http://shellybryant.com/2013/01/23/487/
The Horror at Fox Hollow
Fur prickled, pulse in a stutter, Kit turns off
the highway onto country roads. The woods
gleam between the fields—each gap a soft
unsettled mood shaped by walls that have stood,
stone-faced, for hoary decades. From time to time
she slows to squint at her notes by dash-light. Good
that she’s alone. Her husband and son would team
up to tease her for resisting GPS.
But she won’t get lost: Kit has print. Her beams
pick out the signs—and a sly possum, and a mess
of dead doe gnawed by a dim thing that scurries away—
so she follows her lines to Fox Hollow School for Girls.
An avenue of trees. Each raises a splay
of dead fingers where blossoms should be. A guard
in a bright-lit hut, clean-shirted, a scribble of gray
combed over his scalp, limps out. “Katherine Rennard,”
she tells him, “here for the Poetry Festival.”
He steps back, rings someone, then waves her forward.
Belated panic thrills her. She could roll
up her window, hang a quick K-turn, and go.
A reading for two hundred teens? Too brutal.
But now she’s trapped. There, under the glow
of security lights, waits the spunky teacher,
scarlet with enthusiasm for his not-too-
famous poet: tomorrow’s special feature.
Tonight, just listening. She’s come mid-event,
the Student Slam, and ducks into the bleachers.
No one heeds her; their whispery heads are bent
together, in rows, at tables, in the furtive
poses plotters take when poised to torment
their sisters. It’s a secret. Don’t want to hurt
your feelings but. My god what is she wearing.
Not aimed at Kit but it’s easy to revert—
sneer down at her own wrinkled self, her timid bearing.
Still the odd one. Masked. The teacher’s pet.
It’s not a true slam—no one scruffy or swearing,
but all are keen, straining the leash. That edge.
Two half-grown, trembling girls, their meter poor,
recite a piece together, giggling, and get
off the stage before they hear the abysmal score.
Someone still in riding breeches shakes
her auburn tresses and declaims a more
successful paean to her horse. She likes
to wring the cheers from slender throats. The winner,
toothy, bites off an ode to midnight snacks.
The scene is gothic. Kit knows this tale of horror:
a stranger comes to town. Folks seem normal—
too normal. She suppresses an improper snicker.
As it ends, a meager fog descends, miasmal.
Kit’s brought to a vacant guesthouse for the night.
It’s an ancient pile. The rooms are queer and dismal.
She nudges the doorstop aside—a crouched thing, not
quite canine, made of metal—unzips her bag,
hangs up her reading outfit, finds a note
from her son, tries to phone. Reception’s bad,
so the nature-poet draws her blinds against
the mumbling trees, the silent huddled birds.
There’s an oval portrait on her wall amidst
the paper’s tangled ivy: the mug of a fox,
wary, studying the long-dead artist.
Kit finally dozes after testing the locks.
Do the dreams bring on the fear or does the fear
bring on the dreams? A forest clearing. The clock’s
insect tick. She and her poetry books premiere
on a low stage, fixed in the spotlight. She knows
the risers are stocked with voyeurs. They leer at her
til dawn, when she rinses off the helplessness
and hears her host’s horn sound. The handles on
his car are useless from the inside. “That noise,”
Kit asks. “Is it dogs?” “The baying of the hounds,”
he gamely replies. “During these winter weeks
the girls just love a fox-hunt.” He parks, walks round
to let her out. “Don’t worry, they’re sated,” he jokes.
The earth is pocked and fragrant, deeply scored
by hoof and pad and other illegible tracks.
The master leads her on a walking tour
of campus—a moss-veiled dorm, the spiffy gym
for that twenty-first-century tone—and recounts some lore
of miscellaneous hauntings. Best, in the grim
cafeteria, he gestures to a portrait of
the founder, vigorous and slim,
a coil of ghostly smoke floating above
her hand, though the brandy and lit cigarette
are painted out. Finally, at a remove
from the other buildings, the venue. And wild regret,
as always, that she’s agreed to this. Either way,
whether the reading’s triumphant or painful, Kit
will feel chagrin. There’s something about a stage
that alienates a person from herself.
As if, she thinks as she dog-ears some pages,
half-attending to the introductory riff,
I’m not just the fox but the pack of hounds, too.
And it’s time for the beasts to be cast into the rough.
She wonders what she’ll see from the lectern—a few
well-mounted, vicarious hunters, checking her over?
Or slavering fangs? By instinct, she leaps at her cue.
—Here the fragment ends; the contriver
of the ominous verses left them unfinished, unsigned.
I return the scrap of foolscap to its clever
covert: a frayed edition left behind
by some other traveler. In the middle
of a journey, lost in a wood, the Fox Hollow kind.
Lovecraft would find “a hideous cult of nocturnal
worshipers… a revolting fertility-rite.”
Intense seclusion can make a visitor smell
like lunch. But then, I can be Kittish. A night
with no hounds is bad enough. A prep-
school is always grounds for dread: those bright
young flames when I’m halfway to ash; their up-
wardly mobile predation; the descent
into girl-world. Where my courage slips
and I surrender, though, is in the event.
That servile play at status. My will and its teeth.
And no one real—just ambience and scent.
Look up at the window and there she is, past death,
translated, a monstrous shimmer in the pane
where my reflection should be. Flushed out. Both
our mouths ajar. And then, her revenant grin:
no gap now between think and say, want and eat.
Devoured, she’s whole. And listening for her kin.
The Receptionist and Other Tales, Aqueduct Press Conversation Series, 2012
http://www.aqueductpress.com/
***
Also eligible:
Zombie Thanksgiving
Full text at http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/longer-poetry/zombie-thanksgiving/
Fringe 29 (Winter 2012, online magazine)
The Receptionist
Pages 1-67 of The Receptionist and Other Tales, Aqueduct Press Conversation Series, 2012
http://www.aqueductpress.com/
Mary Turzillo
“Tohoku Tsunami
by Mary Turzillo
Taro finds a sea turtle
belly-up, helpless, tormented by thugs:
he rights it, cradles, gives it back to the sea.
Another sea turtle, immense,
as from woodcuts of monsters devouring Kyoto,
walks out of the tide, finds Taro
dumbstruck, afraid.
But Fisherman Taro, doused with sea-spittle,
grows gills.
Come, come with me. The huge turtle
named Ryujin, sea kami,
tows him to ocean’s root:
a palace refulgent
with kanju, chrysoberyls that make the tide fall.
and manju, alexandrine plates that make the tide rise.
The kanju are scales
the manju also
are scales.
The palace is a dragon.
In its deepest coil, Ryujin presents
Princess Otohime. My daughter.
the turtle you returned to the sea.
Otohime’s beauty sponges away Taro’s recall
of fishing and Miyagi, his home.
Taro, Otohime’s consort now,
lives in a palace. It stirs now and then,
scales as chrysoprase, corundum, coils serpentine.
The dragon
Ryugoju, seabed, origin, center,
coils jealous around princess and fisher.
Taro yearns to see his mother.
Otohime (salt tears) agrees, gives him a box. Do not open.
He forgets to ask why.
The dragon
ready to sleep years, centuries, aeons,
releases Taro.
Taro walks inland,
finds Miyagi’s streets
buzz with cars, light-blaze, women in brief skirts.
He asks
have you heard of Taro, the fisherman?
Urashima Taro? Yes.
A legend. Walked into the sea
to rescue a turtle. Never returned,
but his footprints on the beach were lined with jewels.
Taro asks of his mother.
That was long ago, they say.
She has been dead three centuries.
He sinks down.
All he knew is the dust of burnt offerings;
he is wayfarer in an arid, metallic land.
Bereft on a city curb,
he remembers the box
It will bring back my world.
He opens:
an echoing dragon sea-heart opens.
The dragon’s jewel-scales flex. First the kanju,
call the sea back to the dragon
so the tide sinks,
and folk wonder has the sea abandoned us?
The dragon flexes again
and his belly-scale manju ripple
and the water rushes inland.
All is awash, lights put out,
temples cars people crushed
as an anthill engulfed
until finally the vat opens
where the folk grow electricity,
irradiating Miyagi
with billion-jellyfish poison
and, not having sea turtle shells,
folk tumble, sicken, and die.
The sea washes Taro back
to the palace-dragon,
which coils, then yawns.
The princess closes the box.
But no man
can live three hundred years.
Taro ages and fails, blood staining salt water. He dies.
The princess weeps.
The dragon, flood-weary, sleeps.
(end)
email me at maryturzillo at earthlink dot net for my Rhysling eligible poems
or download them here.
Fallen
By Shannon Connor Winward
http://strangehorizons.com/2012/20120102/winward-p.shtml
When the children ask
What became of Father’s eyes?
we tell them it was the brambles.
It gets easier with the telling.
At night, by the hearth, he knits
caps, blankets, stockings for their little feet
he weaves tales
each more elaborate than the last, each
further from the truth
his hands are nimble as his tongue
he used to kiss me, once
he used to tell me stories, too
our love, undying
my beauty, peerless
his kingdom, gold and sapphires
What did I know of men, then
of love, of beauty, of wealth?
I knew only you, sister
mother, lover, soft and simple
poor within our tower walls
How could I have known?
I was a child in your arms
and childhood is blind
but memory is sharp as thorns.
I see, at night, while the children sleep
when I lie with him, backs touching
only for the warmth
— he would have left me to die.
But I sold my hair, that cold, cold spring;
belly full of bastards, I stole
unformed radishes to survive
I slept on the hard earth
in the shadow of the spire
I cried my voice raw
Gothel! I was a fool! I was wrong!
Damn you and your virgin’s pride.
Like a fledgling fallen from the nest
my scent erased by human hands
I cannot go home again.
Do you know, he gnashes his teeth?
On nights of the full moon, he weeps
and he calls your name.
How confident he was that night
in his borrowed finery,
a fistful of bellflowers
a mouthful of lies
how lean and perfect
striding, climbing, thinking me gone
thinking I’d leapt from the bluffs, perhaps
broken from shame
so arrogant and brutal
hunting at your window
thinking you just another woman
to seduce, to own.
I can still see
his face, under the moon
the stark white of awe
of rapture, suspended
at the sight of you
oh, Gothel
what I would give
to behold you again
to have seen, even
the horrible glory
of you, enraged
a loveliness to outshine
even the brightest of stars
my love, my dearest,
I would rather be blind
then stumble in this dark night.
But I watched, still as stone
as he screamed, as he rent
in madness, in humility
his eyes
as he tumbled from heaven
back to earth, to my feet
the shell of a man
mine to mend.
Your parting gift to me
I know this now: you let him live
two mortals bereft of Eden
what had we to do but begin again?
But do you know, Gothel
he weeps for that last vision
and I envy him.
When they ask now, he says
it was a witch, a monster
that thrust him from the tower
and thorns that took his sight.
He tells us it was
me he sought for
that his intentions were pure
and his injuries the reason
today we want for bread.
I do not contradict him.
Stories are food for the soul
but this is only dangerous
if the listener is well fed.
What did I know of hunger, then
Sister, Friend, my
love, my beauty, my wealth?
It is time that shows us
we do not see what we possess
until it is gone.