poetryrepairs #235 v17.03:028

RALPH MONDAY : 'Bergman's Island' & Other Poems
Self-Pilgrimage
They Sing
Through This Glass

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Self-Pilgrimage

This was a pilgrimage of sorts, unconscious, that she did not know, only felt like the river turned to glass beneath the bridge, beneath the humming tires. She crosses the asphalt toward the peculiar momen t behind her the bowl of sky splashed out as petroglyphs long forgotten, like ancient sailors who thought they would fall off the end of the world. The light on her was a despondent thing—when she slept her ex haunted her as death sauntering down the street dressed in coat and tails. The rusted metal roots hated by wind and rain press down upon her—pounding dead memories that she never wants to resurrect, yellowed bones fermenting in dirt. In the North Carolina mountains a Cherokee shaman gave her a red-tailed hawk’s feather from his hat saying you need vision. She dreamed different tales that night— diverse shadow women that came to her narratives floating from their mouths like bursting poppy seeds: matter cannot be transfigured into wine, rattling bones tell the story, the rattler always sleeping in rocks cold frozen from the winter. Have red hair not blonde stay away from Roman statues with broken off noses—that’s where the demon lived. A man in the form of a swan or bull is not to be trusted. Fertility masks are wasted if you belong to a tribe ovulating for nothing. Know that all is a degenerate floating parable you like us walking within covenant ground away.

poetryrepairs #235 v17.03:028





They Sing

They sing, you see, those who embrace brothel’s providence whether with a whore in a backstreet alley or within the shelter of heresy. They would know heralds to test their mettle with woman or god or man—reason narrowed they see in a chalice of uncertainty windows sigh, optics decompressed by desire. This is a nightmare of intellect, no fruits bloom whether on tundra or the haven of weeds. With their songs they have made of the earth a courtroom of disorder, truants hunkered down wishing to change, to be telepathic waifs. The modern long discarded they would deconstruct memory’s attic, scrutinize the eighteenth century nursery of suffering that brought them here where clouds sew and stitch together the burial shroud, make of reason a lost graveyard, preshrunk, centrifugal energy long spun out, not even a cairn left to mark the spot. Their songs burnish, meld, solidify that which is believed to be an eyestrain—pirates of their own past, intoxicated by desire to destroy what was, they mimeograph a tundra of oppression, sweep away like weeds the last final traces of a closeted majesty as leaves blasted by a newly created dissonant eyrie.

poetryrepairs #235 v17.03:028





Through This Glass

The coffin lowered into the wet earth Like a seed sleeping through winter The way of the father in life as in death Dust to dust ashes to ashes I never knew him, not really. 56 years and we barely had a handful of words, maybe only when he was sitting under a tree, whittling, sun on his face. They will rest from their labor for their deeds will follow them Walking away through the bare winter trees, tombstones static stone texts marking the now nothing that was something, that is nothing—his house empty the bible the black bible that he never comprehended lying on a side table, mute, empty. The body that is sown is perishable; sown in dishonor, sown in weakness His face framed behind glass in the hallway eyes Norse blue of fjords driven by a weathered moon that had tasted the steppes haunted moors and they followed me like gently praying eyelids where darkness liquefies freezes over the masked frost on glass time of sleeping of unsaid evening prayers. Though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children Alone alone I build the fire in the woodstove the way his bony black fingers from the mine would set flame mind-bonfires licking like the blaze from a burning bush as god speaking bible messages. who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire Stripped of all reason fall on the floor saying words I do not know I breathe life into his still image where he comes down off the wall and goes into the late-winter naples yellow evening behind the thin pencil dark trees. Rise up and shine, for your light has come where he comes from the glass drives on the wet dark roads through hollers the almighty father photograph breathed life riding again through the long night while wife children huddle wait for the nomad time of desert women in thin silks hunted by the plucked word from moonlight moonlight But come here, you sons of a sorceress And he comes from the glass breathes in the scent of bars of Appalachian saloons knows how the moon’s gray eye the will of beasts angels sequined harlots takes one to the mountains to the stale stolid waters running as blood bitter waters baptized by wine where the glass reflects this for a time and the solemn wind brings no song.




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REPAIR: resort, frequent or habitual going; concourse or confluence of people at or in a place; making one's way; to go, betake oneself, to arrive; return to a place; to dwell; to recover, heal, or cure; to renew; to fix to original condition. -- Oxford English Dictionary


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RALPH MONDAY : 'Bergman's Island' & Other Poems
Self-Pilgrimage
They Sing
Through This Glass


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