Remembering the Grapes
senryu
Visiting the Surgical Ward
The Bateleur
Aftermath
In Foreign Fields
Demon Lover
Last Orders: The Movie
The Night Emile's Mistress Turned Into a Cat
nighthouse
several poems in miller's pond, including "Afters"
It's frustrating that so many of her poems are (AFAIK) unpublished, which makes posting them questionable. Her "Studying Savonarola" poem was actually pretty famous, and there are several links to it online (though they all seem to be broken now), so I'll go ahead and post it, and if anyone objects I'll take it down.
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Studying Savonarola, he considers his lover as kindling
With your amber eyes, yellow and red
of you, sun-sign heart like a blood orange
suspended in a porcelain cage, say you burn
in a courtyard and your ichor drips like honey
on the firewood, on the branches bound in fasces,
flesh fumed in the air, dark as molasses,
but what you are hovers as mist, as the spirit
of water is invisible until steam makes the sky
waver. Say you die, scorched into ashes, say
you pass from here to there, with your marigold
eyes, the garden darker for lack of one golden flower,
would bees mourn, would crickets keen, drawing long
blue chords on their thighs like cellists?
Say you disperse like petals on the wind,
the bright stem of you still a living stroke
in memory, still green, still spring, still the tint
and the tang of you in my throat, unconsumed.
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Here's one that was published in
The Eleventh Muse in 2005.
Sky in the Pie
Two sure cuts open the crust
and release a rush of dark thrushes
with golden beaks, heralding an arc of stars
borne on a rainbow. The spectrum flexes
like muscle, then settles in a single depth
of colour, blue as the powdered lapis
on a manuscript page in a rich book
of hours, blue as a dunnock's egg, blue
as distance. Take your spoon before
it elopes with the knife, and taste.
The clouds melt on your tongue
and sweeten your throat. You can chant
this day across the meadows, and call the lost flocks
home. The sheep and the chestnut cows. The dappled deer
and wild black horses. The wolves and small quick foxes.
All the lost beasts of your kingdom.
Call them home.
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Threaded Mode
