With a poem in her head, and a camera in her hand, Tina Howard went searching. The inspiration she found came from looking up.

Now, don’t blush, but here’s a poem of mine that decides to take advantage of a different perspective too, a looking up…

The Coming

Muse needed,
I hung the sign at the top of my door.

Meantime, you’d been passing by every morning,
checking out the way spearmint gum
looked different from bubblegum
when pressed to the sidewalk
by Italian leather, white rubber, dragon heels.

Once, I think without either of us realizing,
you looked up my skirt

(it was my fault, really, for getting back
on the step-ladder to fiddle with the flat head
of the nail I’d placed the chain upon, and really
you did it without thinking—but maybe
a lack of thought makes it your fault).

What happened next
cannot be explained except perhaps
by a directional taboo (you must ask Genji)
that turned you away from the bubblegum
and led you straight through my front door,
sign banging behind you. You came to me
in a great rush—no pretense, no pride—
and have been, ever since, unfastening
and opening my skirt.

How about you? Could you find a poem by looking up? If so, post your link on our Facebook Wall by Wednesday, November 16th, for links and possible feature here, at The High Calling, or at Every Day Poems.

News Whip photo, by Claire Burge. Used with permission. Post by L.L. Barkat. Visit L.L. at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.

___________

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In November we’re exploring the theme By Heart, on memorizing or becoming one with poetry.

Poems are everywhere, free for the taking. Yet they are worth so much. I was reminded of this the other day, when an Every Day Poems subscriber contacted me to say, “I love this poem. It awakens places and people in me. Not yet discovered. Waiting.”

For those who participated in our 99¢ Writing Project, the biggest cost seemed to be time, permission to be curious, and a willingness to write about humble things. The poems were wonderful, and I had the darndest time choosing one for feature.

Because I’ve been considering the question of whether poetry is always words, I decided to feature Monica Sharman’s offering. Sandra Heska King’s was of a similar genre (be sure to check it out).

Priceless Correspondence

Now they come at four dimes
and four pennies apiece
in neat sheets, like pages
out of a history volume boasting
of our own, our own brush strokes
and space probes and man around the globe.

They come like syncopated
rhythms of modern bards’ music,
lively bits of conversation
between strings and brass brought
from a mix of New Orleans and Africa
and isles nearby, improvised and styled.

They come like a billboard
listing simple steps saying
how to save the earth and go green.

They come separated by wavy lines
to simulate the old perforations,
like a monument remembering
the way they used to be.

They always come in Love.
I’ve received them that way
and that is how I send them,
a letter on paper, ink from a pen
guided by my own hand
and stamped.

All RAP Participants

Monica’s Priceless Correspondence
Violet’s Regular Please (will also be featured in Every Day Poems )
Megan’s 99¢ x 17 (in which she buys something dear to my heart )
Sandra’s Ode to Yogurt (in which she continues an inside Twitter joke about being cultured, and makes me laugh)
Heather’s 99¢ Poem (in which she makes me catch my breath)

Thanks to all who made Wordles! As I looked at the various word pictures, I was fascinated by unexpected combinations of words that were sitting near each other. They seemed to be begging for the chance to become poems. Like these words from Sandra’s Wordle:

Now find love
gentle sweet,
like blue expectations
attached to grace.

Or these words from Joanne’s Romantics Wordle…

Entirely wild
men poems, like
mountain things.

Or these from one of our T. S. Poetry Wordles…

Shovel burning,
holding Lord Neruda’s
house, milk, songs,
a pomegranate.

Want to try it? Poke through the participants’ links below and see if you can find some poems-in-waiting in their Wordles. Post your poem links to the T. S. Wall, by next Wednesday the 25th, for links and possible feature here at Tweetspeak.

Find Your Poems-In-Waiting at…

Sandra’s Year in Poetry Wordle
Nancy’s Revelations Wordle
Joanne’s Romantics Wordle
Stephie’s Purple Heart
T. S. Poetry Press’s White Wordle and Black Wordle
Karin’s One Shot Wordle
L.L.’s InsideOut Wordle
MaryAnn’s Collected Poems Wordle
Marcus’s Barbies Wordle
Deidra’s Writer’s Block Wordle
Octavia’s Winter Sundays (also featured above at Tweetspeak)

Visit L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone, for more on writing, poetry, art and life.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be…
- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

A tradition fallen out of fashion, I find it a shame we’re not often telling ghost stories at Christmas time. Popular 19^th century author, Henry James’s novelette, The Turn of the Screw opens on a group gathered the night before Christmas. They banter and attempt to top one another’s tales of spirits and spine-tinglers, eventually delving, as a story within a story, into one of the most chilling ghost stories I’ve ever read.

I find it a shame, as I’ve said, because we have no lack of good stories to tell, as you can tell from the flurry of poems this week in Random Acts of Poetry. From Madame Rubies’s unsettling, Dickensian chains jingling against an ankle bone to Maureen’s mysterious muffled mantled figure we are still quite adept at telling a decent ghost story. Make sure to read through the list below to catch glimpses of a wide variety of lingering spirits.

Why I love them so much, I’ll never know. I find them romantic. So close to the solstice, the days are so dark and gloomy anyway; there’s no reason not to add a little eeriness. So, thanks to all who participated in my challenge. It was from a similar (although summertime) challenge we get such classics as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, and Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness,” alongside which I would—if it were up to me—include Jen’s Annunciation, a poem to leave you, as Henry James might say, “sufficiently breathless.”

Annunciation

At daybreak I hear a footfall
In the cold grass,
I feel an immanence, the threat
Of an eclipse, a veil
Over the sky

I step into my living room
Where my small faux tree
Last glittered
With its tiny white lights,
Its heralding angel
Against the gladdened
White walls
Of my own home

There, on Colorado’s pale blue
Morning
An eight-foot Alpine Fir
It has taken hours to trim

There are packages everywhere.
A shining gold bicycle.
A vintage Star of Bethlehem quilt
Folded, tied with a red satin ribbon

Instantly, I reach for my clothing,
My keys, to escape
With the dog to the river,
To let the cold air wake me,
Searing my lungs
But the door
Has swollen shut

And then I see my guest:
She sits with her back to me
In the wicker rocker,
Reading,
From the immense
1870 family bible.

ii

I know this intruder;
I once slipped from her
Turning and eager
Like a dolphin
Lay in her arms
Reaching for her voice

Once she sat with me in the car
driving out to the half-empty
house on the market
Where I demanded
She sort the picture frames
Tumbling
From the walk-in closet

Later, I said to her
on the telephone
to the nursing home
“No more chocolates
The next day she collapsed
In the beauty parlor

After the funeral
At the garage sale
I sold the Limoges china,
The bird’s eye maple desk,
That which she would have
Passed to me
For thirty pieces of silver.

iii

We sip eggnog laced
with brandy
In a snowman cup;
A pine knot crackles
In the fireplace.

We muse over the packages
Hanging a chipped
Gilded angel ,
a hand-made miniature
rocking horse
on the lowest, barest branches

I surrender
to her steady, green-eyed
gaze: I anoint
her bruised feet,
I brush her dark hair.

All RAP Participants
Madame Rubies’s Christmas Ghost
Mama Abby’s Peace Shamed the Ghost
Laura’s A Conversation with Myself About Ghosts
Louise’s Red Rubber Balls & Other Hauntings
LL’s The Promise, The Ghost of Christmas Present, & Spectre
Sara’s The Christmas Ghost
Jen’s Annunciation
Fred’s An Open Letter to the Stoic and Epicurean in Me
Phoenix-Karenee’s Christmas Present
Scott’s I’ll Get By
HisFireFly’s Memories of Redemption
Maureen’s Barchester’s Ghosts
Glynn’s The Unplanned Christmas Visitor
Nance’s poem
S. Etole’s Upon a Night
Monica’s Christmas Ghost
Sandra’s If I’m Still Enough
Gospelwriter’s ghost of Christmas past
Susanne’s Noel Ghost
Emily’s Laughter
my own Dark House

Finally, it was my pleasure to host RAP this week. Be sure to check out Dave Writes Right later today to find out who won a copy of Contingency Plans.

Poems of the Ruby Moon

On Oct. 6, we held our fourth Tweet-Party, or poetry jam, on Twitter. Seven of us participated. The first three jams were similar in how they developed; we veered in a different direction with this fourth one. What was different was that some of us followed the prompts from @tspoetry, and some of us didn’t. No one was consistently consistent in following or not following; we’d get caught up in the words of a particular section and stay there, continuing to tweet for that section, or we’d move on to the next prompt. Or do both, and simultaneously.

It’s great fun. But to edit all of the tweets into some kind of coherent whole? Well, let’s say that was a challenge. (Remember the Wall Street Journal’s definition of a challenge – a problem with no known solution.)

So it’s taken some time, some parsing, some rearranging, considerable rereading and, finally, the understanding that this wasn’t one poem but more like 12. And there did turn out to be a thematic link running through most of the contributions – the idea of a ruby moon. So, below are the 12 poems of the ruby moon, tweeted first on Twitter and then edited for publication here as something approaching a coherent whole. I hope.

All of the prompts you see below in quotations by @tspoetry are lines from Wendell Berry’s Given: Poem (2006).

The Poems of the Ruby Moon
By @llbarkat, @poemsandprayers, @TchrEric, @jazzvigil, @doallas, @necessarywords and @gyoung9751; facilitated by @tspoetry

Behind the Wallpaper

@tspoetry: “We may be living on an atom/in somebody’s wallpaper.”

Peel it away
With a light touch.
Stories within walls
Bid us tell tales, and tall ones,
Tall Tales a Poe never wrote
So darkly
From a hand undone
By drink
On the streets of Baltimore,
A falling down
Caught between a wall
And a hard place.
Feeling all alone,
In need of comfort of tea and onion rings a bell
“Call me if you hear/anything…”
He is as twisted as his tie
And she,
Her twists of another
Sort.
She was laid off and he on a lay over
At the news of one more layoff,
Ineptly done,
Strait-jacketed,
Left cold
On city sidewalk,
A Poe nevermore
To ring the bell.
Forsake me not,
Despite the news,
The gods,
The mantras preaching,
Wait
Within the walls,
Peeling wallpaper back,
Again
A-dreaming.
Even the laid off
Have dreams.

River of Light of the Ruby Moon

The dust motes float
And swerve in the sunbeam.
The sunbeam filters,
Dust drops into pools
Of light.
Motes and cracks,
Mortar breaks,
Wedged between beams.
Smoky aroma fill the air
Gold flecks sifted out
From river of light.
Light pools into golden flecks of mirth
Dancing on walls.
Clouds of smoke pass over the ruby moon.
Daybeam,
Window road,
The galaxy peers in on us.
Light of moon,
Yellow white and ruby red,
Light appearing,
Peering light,
Filtering into darkness.
Headlight
Moth caught flutter;
Dusty wings.
Moon’s ruby-rubbed
And shadowed light
Cast my reflection back to me,
The shadowed light reflection
Showing not what I want but
Giving what I need.

Ripe Pears
You drizzle golden honey over ripe pears
Ruby moon,
May apples,
And you beneath
This galaxy, peering
Light at me.
Misplaced
Heads nod,
Begging forgiveness.
She sips from the cup of corporate blood.
Drizzle me ripe
With honeyed tongue.
I walk in darkness,
Hard-pressed,
Waiting to be undone.
For pears
Over ripe do leave
A scent best left behind in pool of darkened honey.
Pears, alone:
What could be sadder?
Maybe a wedge,
Barely edged
Into the crack
Of a weathered
Beam.
You, unnamed, who drizzle
From your perch
The drops of corporate blood,
Do cap your cup too late.
You pull your cup
Too close,
Spilling ruby red blood onto the moon.
Ruby tweet,
Bloody invitation,
To seat your passion.

Sleeping Dog

Sometimes I’m as happy
As a sleeping dog,
A sleeping dog
Awakened by light escaping the dark,
Filtering into eyes.
A dog alone,
A bell,
The comfort of tea
Rringing me
To attention.
I pat his head
And smile, sigh,
As a sleeping dog,
Dozing on a quiet sunlit stair
While the blossoms of cherry
Offer the scents of spring.
The sleeping dog
Does wake;
Aroma strikes the trail he follows,
The scent of blood-red blood
As magic
Turns this carnival of words.

Umbrellas Up
Umbrellas up,
When turned upside down,
Can catch mayapples
As a bucket catches rain.
Mayapples,
Mayflies,
May rain,
May flowers
Smear the colour across the sky;
Irises open
Stung by
Rising motes.
The night is long,
The stay may be short
But we shall enjoy this time
Of Mayapples and tea.

The Pressure of Words
@tspoetry: “Shall I teach/you the way/of a blossom/the way of a cherry/twisting beneath/her stem/shall I”

Into a path we know not
How to follow,
He feels the pressure of the words on his fingertips.
Eyes eased of scrum of night
Of trails too long and rocky
Dreams disturbed by moon’s bright flash
In woods.
Rain
Smears my face,
Iris tremble-ache
Does break the trembling face
In the mirror,
And rain-tears send the heart skidding
Where no bell rings
Morning’s sweet call.
The touch of ivory keys
Pleases the thought less
Than curved fingers,
Fingers curved around notes,
Notes stuck to fingers
To forsake the getting.
And so the wait
And yet all possibilities.
Breathless,
I accept the ivory pressure
The curved touch,
If only to ease this moonless
Path, disturbed
And empty woods,
Fingers on the board,
Music of the Gods released,
Pleasing to the soul;
Cacophony of sound,
Improvisational delights.
Words’ pressure builds till hands find cause
To type the mantra his therapist recommended
In a strait.
The songs they sing in empty woods,
The notes they play inside their heads,
Ivory pressure,
Perhaps the notes of pianos played over and over,
No merrily piper leads.

Song of the Wild Geese
tspoetry: “How fine to hear through the music/the cries of wild geese on the river.”

But the song beckons,
Not from the main
But to the undisturbed, quiet side
Pulled by the soul of Frost,
Returns the wing,
The cry,
The song passing.

The Key to the Lock

tspoetry: “He found a good farrier’s knife,/an awl, a key to a lock/that would no longer open”

The lock lost in the woods,
The key lost in the plain.
Inside their heads are clues to woods
Where dwells the man,
Strait-jacketed,
Laid off,
Howling at the ruby face of moon.
Frost my soul
With your song,
Your cry like a
Crystal-coated
Key, unlock me.
Unlock thee not;
I know not
Who goes by the name of
Frost,
My soul no icy sole
For thee to use on me.
The lock clicks,
Unclicks;
The spring opens
Into a new heart.
Awl all leaves me shot through
With pinholes
With which to thread the soles of souls
Left empty
As locks without keys
No longer work
The thread from which good farrier’s knift
Is slung.
Farrier’s knife
Pinned the lady
Down ’til she cried.
Let me dance
A dance for you.
Sit with me on the grass and feed me sweet, sweet lies.
Tis all sweet lies
Our friend does tell,
No corporate blood
Did run
Through his steely heart.

The Fiddler’s Dance
tspoetry: “Do you remember how we danced/And how the fiddler played?”

We danced with life
Throbbing in our veins,
Love pulsing in our hearts.
My hand
Enfolded yours,
Your smile
Enfolded mine.
Lock
Like a pinhole,
How am
I supposed to
Ease my way
Into your heart?
She was no lady, her locks of hair undone
The fiddlers haunting melodies
Gave rise to memories,
Dances danced,
Lovers loved
By dancing,
do you hear?
By dancing in the ruby light of moon
Among the shadows
Where smile might stay on chaste lips to touch,
To reach into the eye of beauty
To see the holiness of the night
To touch.
We get caught up in hands
And smiles,
Forgetting the business
We first did come,
To bid
Dance on,
Dancing on
Love unbound
By fiddler’s broken strings/and rusty bow.
But broken strings
And rusty bow
Still play a melody of heart.
Let us feast on the music and dine on the dance
Hands bid beyond what pockets hold;
Fiddler rusty must remain
And sour notes to play;
Melody a broken chord.
i smell the smoky aroma of repentence,
an aroma of repentance and the rising song of prayer.

Fiddling on the Roof: An Aside

Tradition! Tradition!
TchrErc is fiddling on the roof
Fiddlesticks! I suppose next you’ll be proposing to matchmake?
But only if he were a rich man,
he was a rich and twisted man
Twisted and searching,
Not realizing where his riches truly lie (or lay).
Hah. The only couple
I ever “matchmade”
Divorced after five years.
Not I, my friend, not I,
Not in my profession.
Twittering tweets do wake
Our laid-off friend.
He fears all the purple prose we make
Match-make.
Our laid-off friend,
You say?
Aye, if can tweet with twitters in his heart
And do hands’ bidding
When words work not.
Tis all sweet lies
Our friend does tell,
No corporate blood
Did run
Through his steely heart
Nor tip his mind to thoughts of matchmaking.

My Hand’s Bidding

tspoetry: “The bow lies/the music breaks me/lays me down/to your hands’ bidding.”

My hands’ bidding
Is to serve
The music singing
In the heart.
The music was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,
Alas, it was the winter of his discontent,
Rich and twisted
Lips he sported;
No music from his mouth did issue
Even in the moonlight,
Even in the shadows.
But music sounded
Within his heart
To sing a silence
Within his very life.
Spring holy
And holy the discontent
Of winter’s last breath,
Angered release.
Ay, be there a priest near
To take confession
On this sorry night?
Not the priest of Juliet
But the priest of the most holy.
Should I confess
The lies,
The sorry smoking
Wedged in alleys’
sweet release?
Minutes before the end does come
The knife he laid on table
Takes up the plot
To teach beauty
How the night might ravage
Even the best of us.
Knifed
Apology:
Can you trust
It for even
A minute?
A knife that cuts to harm,
A knife that cuts to heal
To please my own sense
But to serve a larger sense
Of beauty.
Sweet grass, sweet
Lies and mayflies
Ravish my soul,
My heart.

Farewells to the Ruby Moon

tspoetry: “Because of it you made/the beautiful things you made/for yourself alone, and yet,/ I think, for us both.”

I bid thee a farewell and godspeed,
My thanks to all
An enjoyable eve was had;
Weary souls depart
For much needed comfort and rest.
Feast well on sleep
And ruby dreams
When twittering tweeters play
Out a game
Beneath a ruby-rubbed moon
Peeling back wallpaper.
For both of us
Does bring apology
To forgiveness
And confession
Bold,
A sorry tangle of words
Making no sense
Unless a lawyer be held in tow.
And so another
Twoem
Comes to an end
And then, we did drift away.
Good night, sweet poetry friends.
We drift, we separate
But our little boats
Travel the same stream
Beneath the same moon.
A moon whose beams did light our way
Again this time.
Good night;
Loved this
(even with my migraine).