But I digress...

Any previous statements I may have made about not turning this into another chock-full-of-poetry journal should be summarily trashed. I know I won't be able to make it to Chicory tomorrow, but I do have a poem to share:



Cryptozoology by Mark Sniadecki


You were such a delicate
creature - deer come down
to the tranquil pondside
glade

- carried poetry
in gold strands of spider-
web laced in your
womanly antlers.

You left behind
evidence like bedded down
tufts of grass
and odd shed skins -

Then one day
I accidentally dressed
in huntsman's gear
- crashed aloud,
clumsy in the cattails -

and now I hold only
this tintype
of slender legs dis-
appearing between
trees I cannot uproot.

The Seal

I have the original graphic (slightly larger/sharper) if anyone wants a copy.

The Ballad of Allison Loan

She was some kind of regent
like an orphanage queen;
her blessings had been overcast.
They took her away
in a wagon ash-gray
and a janitor emptied her past.

For seventeen years
she amassed birthday candles
until on a midsummer's night:
a god with a hammer
and one eye for cold steel
layed her out with a peregrine light.

I met her in Texas
in bars rimmed with salt;
I nursed back her last dying coal.
There were tinfoil stars
in the heavenly vault
but none of them paid at the pole.

Where Thursday's wind took her
I know second-hand;
where the alley dogs hunch in the rain.
Some stone carver paying
his granddaughter's rent
will chip out her final refrain.

Fallen

For K, and S, and sometimes Y


Castaway from a heavenly court
You pulled aside a shielded wing
To reveal the darkness
That pulsed through you first, last
When your Maker insisted
Your desires are not worth the Creation.

It is easy for me to advise rebellion.
She is not my mother.
I am not chained in blood.
Still, hear and heed as now I say:
The sin of the tree
Does not rule the apple.
You have sweetness untold.
You are yet a queen of autumn.

Night Visitor (slightly revised)

It was a silverfish on the wall.
In the cone-glow of a lampshade.

They elicit
bad dreams of housedeeps.

A spider, you think a loner.
Execution, then forget it.

A neatly-folded moth, narrow squared
wings is a grandmother's attic.

It's that fishy name,
you think of how they must teem.

In the dark walls
their movements a chaos of crossings
under and over.

Schoolcraft. Skittery hexes.
Lousy with legs.

Having seen one sprint
its wending way down textured paint,
silver-flash
you don't want to take your eyes off.

I hate them.
Please, deliver us from the creeps.

Springtime, all I want to see
are ladybug orgies in the woodwork.

They make you dream
of vaulted ceilings you cannot reach.