Etched

Etched

Mists of water fall
and fall. No damp squirrel, no
bird, no elm leaf stirs.

Elm leaves and their lean
branches droop, pulled down
by a weight of rain.

In silhouette, sparse
leaves and lean branches etch themselves
against wet grey sky.

a cycle of three haiku

Brilliance Afield

Brilliance Afield

Burning the wild lands, the moon rises gold; gold the eyes of wolves

Running in a rapid crouch up the snowy hill.  Exhaling,

I slip into the aspens, follow their tracks into a threshold of

Light under the firs.  The moon squats fat among them. I

Linger and watch, afraid.  Discard the fantasy that

I could be accepted, that I could be safe, that I could run.  With them.

A screech of owl cries. Wolves sing: close chorus, far response.

Nothing contains the fierce sacredness of this music.  I want to

Call back from this hidden body.  I pluck a tuft of fur from a drift,

Embrace bare branches, moon-bruised sky.  In

A cloud-smudged mirror of ice, shadows flicker, a broke

Face of moon shimmers.  I whisper: elk, caribou, antelope.  Stubbornly,

I reclaim the dream of hunting with the wolves.  Oh folly!  Will I return to this

Evening over and over, sifting through these images, lies and dreams?

Late-night owl calls again.  Wolf tracks fade in drifting snow.  I glimpse

Deer, then fox.  Braid my tracks into theirs.

Notes:
1)This is an Acrostic poem. Acrostics are often used as games or doggerel. I have chosen here to attempt a serious acrostic poem. 
2)I would like to invite anyone interested to "play along" by writing serious (or not-so serious) acrostic poems and then posting the links in my comments section. I am sure you all know that in an acrostic poem, the first letter of each line creates a word when read vertically. It is a fun way to write about love or friendship or any other topic.
3)Poem and art by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt, published in Avocet. I'd love to think all of you subscribe to Avocet and have already read my poem, but I am guessing that is not the case. Because published poems are often read only by those who subscribe, I think I may post one of my published poems, maybe once a week, to share them with you. I hope that's OK.

Botanical Gardens
Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, California
photo by me
click image to view larger

Haiku: What the Heart Feels

by Mary Stebbins Taitt · 32 words

What the heart feels when
anger and hatred are set
aside: love, peace, joy.

Yes, I know this is not a traditional haiku.

And NO I do NOT know what the flowers are, please enlighten me.

Poppies in Rain
Acrylic on Paper
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt

From the Dark Centers of Flowers

by Mary Stebbins Taitt · 129 words

Sometimes, I journey into darkness
while every shadow harbors a malevolent bat
whose wings reach out, sticky as spider webs
to trap me.

It’s a lovely day, friends say, trying
to cheer me. The sun shines; its warmth
caresses my skin, but in the shade, bats gather,
gnashing their teeth as their claws grow pointy.

When I bend to smell the flowers, the bats
ambush me. They pour from the center
of each blossom like flying monkeys,
like a plague of locusts.

When they eat holes in me, I am moth-eaten;
I am Swiss cheese. I am lace curtains
blackened by coal-fired ovens. I am despair.
The sun shines through me.

I am a pattern of light.

Mary Stebbins Taitt
120329-1642-1st

location: Detroit, San Francisco

photosource: me (acrylic painting) (detail from "the Misunderstanding")

New Eggplant Poem (draft)

This is a new poem that I wrote for my poetry class with Dawn McDuffie.  The formatting came out sucky, sorry about that!  :-(  It is a DRAFT:

Aubergine, Solanum melongena, a Recipe

Open your loppers and wield them like the mandibles

of a huge insect. Steer them step-by-step toward the tall rangy plants

that bow with the weight of their fruit.  Swoop and center the jaws

around the fruit-stalk, yank closed the teeth to sever the tough stem. 

Watch the purple, pear-shaped fruit plop onto soil

damp and fragrant from days of rain. Carry it reverently

to the coiled hose, allowing each of your ten fingers

to stroke the rich, smooth skin. Wash the few dirt clusters

from the plump base of the fruit with a soft spray

and dry the fruit on your clean cotton apron. Enjoy the way

the water droplets sink into the fabric and disappear,

leaving only faint and fading dark spots on the paisley pattern.

Brush your lips against skin the color of stormy sunset. 

Inside, place a skillet on the fire, add fat, and turn up the flame.

Slide the cutting board from its home along the window wall

and pull the thick-handled butcher knife from its block. 

Lay your sacrifice on the wooden altar and slice from the shoulders

to the hips.  Pause to admire the creamy flesh and small designs

of seed. In a low, flat dish pour stone-ground cornmeal, flour,

salt, pepper, garlic, and a pinch of Old Bay.  Blend with a fork.

From the egg basket on the sideboard, raise your piles

of fresh-picked spinach, cilantro and parsley, pausing to sniff

the aromatic cilantro, and lift out two brown eggs.  Thump them

quickly against the edge of the sink, pull the shells apart

and let the wet suns in their small seas fall into a flat dish. 

Mix with the fork. One by one, lay the slices in the beaten eggs,

flip them, lay them in the cornmeal, flip them and drop them

into hot fat. Listen for a quick sizzle and a hiss of bubbles.

When the edges brown, turn them over and watch them dance.

When the slices resemble the sunset gold of the elm leaves

that gather in the tall grass outside your window, lay them

on towels to drain and cool. Arrange like petals of a flower

on Grandma’s heirloom Botanica platter, with sprigs of parsley

and cilantro. Danger!  Don't make these more than once a year

and don’t burn your tongue as you groan and savor

the crunchy crust that clings to the hot, soft fruit.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

for Margaret and Keith

111018-1516-2a(3), 111017-1432-1b(2), 111017-0836-1^st complete,111016 partial draft a

Further instructions, not part of poem:

layer the leftovers with tomatoes and parmesan

and bake. Cut into rectangular chunks and serve warm.

-OR- Place the fresh fruit in the microwave ten minutes.  Cool.  Carefully scrape the soft pulp

from the now delicate skin, add lemon, olive oil, tahini and garlic

and spread on pita, toast or chips.  Wallow then, in the gorgeous glory of baba ghanouj.  

Turn Back the Clock (new Poem)

Turn Back the Clock

I cannot look at the face

of the man who killed Norway's children.

I turn away in horror.

Why? I ask my husband, why

did he kill children?

Why children? How could they have harmed him?

Why did he dress as a policeman, the one person

we teach our children to trust, to go to for help

and safety? Why did he then

shoot them?

Why did he shoot them as they ran, shoot them as they swam

off the island toward the mainland, trying to escape?

Why

did he do it? How could he?

Why? I cry.

And cry.

Fibers of my heart

tear apart

shred

the little strands of muscles part

and all the soul leaks out.

I want to go back in time

gather the children

and protect them.

I want to turn back the clocks

and make them safe.

I want to restore

the lives they have lost

and let them flow forward again

to their own fruition.

I want to go backwards in time

and undo the evil

that made the man

do what he did

before he did it.

"If you want to bake an apple pie

from scratch

you must first invent the universe."

I want to reinvent the world

without that pain.

I want to erase every thread

that led to that event,

unwind it, unravel it

back to its source,

ablate that well of darkness

and set the wheels turning again

so those children run free,

laugh, grow up.

Or I want

someone

somehow

to

save

those children

who can no longer be saved.

I cannot look at the face

of Anders Behring Breivik.

I want to trust the world again.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

"If you want to bake an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan

110725-0900-2a(2), 110724 1st draft

Images harvested from internet, for which I apologize. Click images to view larger.

Two more poems being translated into French

Marie de Montpellier (in France) is translating two more of my poems into French.  She's already done two others.  Her current choices are one from Desire ("Forgetting You") and one from Counting Fingers, Smelting Light ("Remembering Ricky").  I am very excited, pleased and honored.  YAY!  :-D  Woohoo!

First IPad Poem

If

What if, instead of dying flowers, perfume

smelled like mountaintops, like granite

and fir-filtered wind?  Breezes lift our feet

from the rock and fragrance-scented air

buoys us up over golden rows of mountains.

You laugh like a child taking his first step

out onto the taut surface of water

and instead of sinking, we skate

on that tensile surface that quivers

like my heart when you reach

the long pin feathers of your wings

and wrap them all light and tickle

and remember around me.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

for Keith

first poem on Ipad,

1000618-1557-2b(3), 100617

Fool's Errand

"THE SNIPE HUNT" by Mary Stebbins Taitt (click image to view larger.)

Fool’s Errand

Winged as a curlew, long-beaked as a woodcock,

sleep whistles and dives through the shattered night.

Searching, I scrabble through dark swamps

reeking of marsh gas and fœtid with the smells

of rotting fish. My song bursts with yearning,

alternating chipping, burbling and fluting sounds,

like a sparrow held under water. My pleading

tastes of the raw shrimp and crayfish I wave

in a mesh bag. Snipe bait. Muddy ooze seeps

cold through the knees and hem of my nightgown,

black muck and slime cling to my fingers and toes.

Burdocks, stick tights and beggars ticks

burrow in my hair. I carry a snare for the snipe

of sleep, but when the bird swoops by and I reach

to snag it, my fingers pass, ethereal, through

a taunting fantasia of feathers, fog and clouds

of unborn sleep that drifts past, damp, intangible

and utterly unattainable. Snipe dreams tumble by,

hauntingly near but always beyond reach.

They refuse to descend into my wake-parched eyes.

I strain toward the gibbering voices of dream

phantoms. They talk in tongues, whisper

and twitter in mysterious dream-coded languages

and their aurora-colored feathers flutter

around my bed, falling like the warm snow of dreams

but never touching my face. Long snipe beaks

tear the night in strips, shredding it into confettis

of longing. The snipe of sleep will be neither captured

nor kept. It cannot be domesticated. Elusive, beyond wild,

it ranges over the incalculable waters of night. It turns

bedrooms into swamplands and sanity

into shrieking lunacy.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

A snipe hunt is a wild-goose chase or fool's errand. The term originated from a practical joke where experienced campers convinced inexperienced campers to capture a “snipe,” variously described as a bird or animal. The novice campers were given absurd methods of catching the snipe, such as running through the woods carrying a bag while making odd noises (snipe calls). Real snipes, shorebirds with long bills, are so difficult to catch for even experienced hunters that the word "sniper" originally meant someone skilled enough to shoot a snipe.

Perhaps if I could capture the snipe of sleep alive (and release it in the morning), I could finally rest. But if, sniper like, I shoot it, sleep will never come.

100417-1203-4b(12), 100416-2249-3g(10), 100411-1838-2b(3), 8/16/2007 4:37 PM

This and the previous version at the Rolandale Silk Creek Retreat House in the Hiker Kitty Room. NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Month)

Tree Dreams

newer version:

Tree Dreams in February

Under the ground, a dark and perpetual night, almost as void
of life as deep space, presses cold teeth against the dreaming trees,
but the trees sink further into their roots and listen all the way up
the long fibers of their empty veins to owls rustling in their nests,
to small movements inside the eggs, to the first cracking
that heralds these winter babies, these messengers of spring.
Lost in their roots, sunk in depths of the frozen earth, trees dream
of sweet sunshine, of snow melting, of the slow unfurling of leaves
and flowers, of fledgling owls stretching their wings and launching
into the great pale blue of treacherous air. The trees remember
summer nights, owls lifting silently from their branches, occluding
the moon and stars, or hooting to one another from high above
the branches where the little diurnal birds rest in their nests.
The trees dream the smell of summer wind and the wet caresses
of rain. As they weave into their dreams the smells
of their own flowers, the tastes of their own nectar,
the touch of the bees’ pollen-laden feet and gentle tongues,
the taste of frozen earth loses its pungent bitterness.

Mary Stebbins Taitt, 1st, a poem for the unity web exercise.
100213-1554-1c(3), 100213-1013-1st

First draft:

Tree Dreams

Deep in the frozen earth, trees dream
of sweet sunshine, snow melting, of the slow unfurling of leaves
and flowers. Underground, a dark and perpetual night, as empty
of life as deep space, presses its cold teeth against the dreaming trees,
but the trees sink deeper into their roots and dream of summer nights,
of owl flight and the resting diurnal birds tucked in nests in the trees’
safe branches. They remember being awake, they remember the smell
of wind and breezes and the wet caresses of rain. As they weave
into their dreams the smells of their own flowers, the taste
of their own nectar, the touch of the bees’ pollen-laden feet
and gentle tongues, the taste of frozen earth loses its bitterness.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

1st draft just now.

The illo is also called "Tree Dreams" and is a quick "Unity Web," my personal version of Zentangle, which I cannot afford to buy. Of course a quick Zentangle is probably an oxymoron, but I can't help it, I need to go. See more Zentagles here, most of which are much nicer than my quick "Unity Web." If you click on the illo, you can see it larger.

I learned about Zentangles from Nessa here.