A Rhyme for Halloween

 

Happy Halloween!

 

 

A Rhyme for Halloween -  Maurice Kilwein Guevara

 

Tonight I light the candles of my eyes in the lee

And swing down this branch full of red leaves.

Yellow moon, skull and spine of the hare,

Arrow me to town on the neck of the air.

I hear the undertaker make love in the heather;

The candy maker, poor fellow, is under the weather.

Skunk, moose, raccoon, they go to the doors in threes

With a torch in their hands or pleas: "O, please . . ."

Baruch Spinoza and the butcher are drunk:

One is the tail and one is the trunk

Of a beast who dances in circles for beer

And doesn't think twice to learn how to steer.

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.

Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.

No time for the martyr of our fair town

Who wasn't a witch because she could drown.

Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark

At the vision of her, bobbing up through the dark.

When she opens her mouth to gasp for air,

A moth flies out and lands in her hair.

The apples are thumping, winter is coming.

The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming.

By the caw of the crow on the first of the year,

Something will die, something appear.

Plant and Phantom

 A slightly creepy rumination on the mortal condition. 

 

Plant and Phantom - Louis Mac Niece

Man: a flutter of pages,
Leaves in the Sibyl’s cave,
Shadow changing from dawn to twilight,
Murmuration of corn in the wind,
A shaking of hands with hallucinations,
Hobnobbing with ghosts, a pump of blood,
Mirage, a spider dangling
Over chaos and man a chaos.

Who cheats the pawky Fates
By what he does, not is,
By what he makes, imposing
On flux an architectonic—
Cone of marble, calyx of ice,
Spandrel and buttress, iron
Loops across the void,
Stepping stones in the random.

Man: a dance of midges,
Gold glass in the sunlight,
Prattle of water, palaver
Of starlings in a disused
Chimney, a gimcrack castle,
Seaweed tugging the rocks,
Guttering candles, the Northern
Lights and the Seventh Wave.

Whose life is a bluff, professing
To follow the laws of Nature,
In fact a revolt, a mad
Conspiracy and usurpation,
Smuggling over the frontier
Of fact a sense of value,
Metabolism of death,
Re-orchestration of world.

Man: a riot of banners,
Bulge in the wind, a prism,
Organ-pipes in the sunset,
Orgy of brains and glands,
Thunder-crackle and the bounce of hail,
Wink of wings and fog’s delusion,
A rampant martyr, a midnight
Echo, a forest fire.

Who felt with his hands in empty
Air for the Word and did not
Find it but felt the aura,
Dew on the skin, could not forget it.
Ever since has fumbled, intrigued,
Clambered behind and beyond, and learnt
Words of blessing and cursing, hoping
To find in the end the Word Itself.

Spirits of the Dead

 

Well it wouldn't be Halloween without the master of morbidity and mystery - Edgar Allan Poe.

Spirits of the Dead - Edgar Allan Poe

 

Thy soul shall find itself alone

’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone—

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

       II

Be silent in that solitude,

   Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead who stood

   In life before thee are again

In death around thee—and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still.

       III

The night, tho’ clear, shall frown—

And the stars shall look not down

From their high thrones in the heaven,

With light like Hope to mortals given—

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever.

       IV

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,

Now are visions ne’er to vanish;

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more—like dew-drop from the grass.

       V

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—

And the mist upon the hill,

Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,

Is a symbol and a token—

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

Real Ghosts

 

' ...but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years...'

Confession: I don't believe in those supernatural entities we call ghosts.  

But I do believe in the metaphorical kind, specifically the kind Sara Teasdale so succinctly describes here.  Yes, those are the real hauntings - things that never were, but what longed to be.

(This song by the way,  compliments this poem perfectly.)

 

The Ghost Poem - Sara Teasdale

I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
But my heart was full of my new love's glory,
My eyes were laughing and unafraid.

I met one who had loved me madly
And told his love for all to hear -
But we talked of a thousand things together,
The past was buried too deep to fear.

I met the other, whose love was given
With never a kiss and scarcely a word -
Oh, it was then the terror took me
Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.

Oh, love that lives its life with laughter
Or love that lives its life with tears
Can die - but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years. . . .

I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
My heart was full of my new love's glory, -
But my eyes were suddenly afraid.

Voodoo Doll

I love this!

(Yes, and this is by the film master of the macabre - Tim Burton. Illustration too. From 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories')

Voodoo Girl - Tim Burton

 

Her skin is white cloth,
and she's all sewn apart
and she has many colored pins
sticking out of her heart.

She has a beautiful set
of hypno-disk eyes,
the ones that she uses
to hypnotize guys.

She has many different zombies
who are deeply in her trance.
She even has a zombie
who was originally from France.

But she knows she has a curse on her,
a curse she cannot win.
For if someone gets
too close to her,

the pins stick farther in. 

Ouija

 

Sylvia Plath has creepy perfected here in her descriptions of the ouija board.

Ouija - Sylvia Plath

It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
At the window, those unborn, those undone
Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
An envious phosphorescence in their wings.
Vermilions, bronzes, colors of the sun
In the coal fire will not wholly console them.
Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.
The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.
The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

The old god, too, writes aureate poetry
In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,
Fair chronicler of every foul declension.
Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled
His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper
When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily descend,
Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.

He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death,
Her wormy couriers are at his bones.
Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe
What flinty pebbles the ploughblade upturns
As ponderable tokens of her love.
He, godly, doddering, spells
No succinct Gabriel from the letters here
But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.

Ghost Music

 

 'The ghosts of long-dead melodies...'

 

Ghost Music - Robert Graves
 
Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,
Bent-backed and blind the organist.
From rafters looming shadowy,
From the pipes' tuneful company,
Drifted together drowsily,
Innumerable, formless, dim,
The ghosts of long-dead melodies,
Of anthems, stately, thunderous,
Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:
In melancholy drowsy-sweet
They huddled there in harmony.
Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

Autumn Sky

'Come, lovers of dark corners,

The sky says,

And sit in one of my dark corners.'

Today begins my annual Halloween week themed postings.

First up, it's the delectably random and  surreal Charles Simic.
An Autumn sky can contain many things: the golden glow of a Hunter's Moon, a flight of birds,
or maybe even if your eye is quick enough, a witch on a broomstick!

Autumn Sky - Charles Simic 

In my great grandmother's time,

All one needed was a broom

To get to see places

And give the geese a chase in the sky.

               •

The stars know everything,

So we try to read their minds.

As distant as they are,

We choose to whisper in their presence.

               •

Oh Cynthia,

Take a clock that has lost its hands

For a ride.

Get me a room at Hotel Eternity

Where Time likes to stop now and then.

               •

Come, lovers of dark corners,

The sky says,

And sit in one of my dark corners.

There are tasty little zeroes

In the peanut dish tonight.

Watch Repair

 

 

 

When keen observation becomes transformation, that's poetry!

 

Watch Repair - Charles Simic

 

A small wheel

Incandescent,

Shivering like

A pinned butterfly.

Hands thrown up

In all directions:

The crossroads

One arrives at

In a nightmare.

Higher than that

Number 12 presides

Like a beekeeper

Over the swarming honeycomb

Of the open watch.

Other wheels

That could fit

Inside a raindrop.

Tools

That must be splinters

Of arctic starlight.

Tiny golden mills

Grinding invisible

Coffee beans.

When the coffee’s boiling

Cautiously,

So it doesn’t burn us,

We raise it

To the lips

Of the nearest

Ear.

Love in Autumn

 

What can I say? I'm in a lyrical swooning mood....
 


Love in Autumn - Sara Teasdale

I sought among the drifting leaves,
The golden leaves that once were green,
To see if Love were hiding there
And peeping out between.

For thro' the silver showers of May
And thro' the summer's heavy heat,
In vain I sought his golden head
And light, fast-flying feet.

Perhaps when all the world is bare
And cruel winter holds the land,
The Love that finds no place to hide
Will run and catch my hand.

I shall not care to have him then,
I shall be bitter and a-cold --
It grows too late for frolicking
When all the world is old.

Then little hiding Love, come forth,
Come forth before the autumn goes,
And let us seek thro' ruined paths
The garden's last red rose.

Autumn love

 

'Autumn Hug' ~ Leonid Afremov

 Well this is just gorgeous.



Autumn - Garrison Keillor

Here on an autumn night in the sweet orchard smell,
Sitting in a pile of leaves under the starry sky,
Oh what stories we could tell
With this starlight to tell them by.

October night, and you, and paradise,
So lovely and so full of grace,
Above your head, the universe has hung its lights,
And I reach out my hand to touch your face.

I believe in impulse, in all that is green,
Believe in the foolish vision that comes true,
Believe that all that is essential is unseen,
And for this lifetime I believe in you.

All of the lovers and the love they made:
Nothing that was between them was a mistake.
All that we did for love's sake,
Is not wasted and will never fade.

All who have loved shall be forever young
And walk in grandeur on a cool fall night
Along the avenue,
They live in every song that is ever sung,
In every painting of pure light,
In every pas de deux.

Oh love that shines in every star
And love reflected in the silver moon.
It is not here, but it's not far.
Not yet, but it will be here soon.