Firs only sleep when branches are draped in white.
Frigid arms droop, then fling upward when sun passes through them
Like a mood; never knowing to swing a bitter heat to pat down the ground below;
Dense and trudging.
Firs only sleep when concrete skies close over like a lid.
The sky only yields to a cerulean day hue,
Leading to twilight sapphire skies, peppered with stars and Luna
Until the spring, when they are free.
A Daughter's Wooden Fable
"Make a mucky mix with dirt and a stone.
Pray rocky slides scratch your thumbs".
It was at the forked post -- a heifer's tit,
Where she didn't know which wood to use.
Father's broken hands would spread well --
Rows of femurs she'd sowed on the Aramac chain
Where red dirt chews rain, and rain licks grass, teasing in its globules.
Antlers poking through the mire, interred five years
Before hot-streamed piles of wood were crafted for irksome saints.
Wood he drew like his cheroot, sucking and grabbing, air to gulp,
Smoke to breathe, whims to flaunt, scotch to swig.
Eats his words, weirs and capsules -- anti-inflammatories, laxatives --
Any old drug to tickle his gut, spicing his innards so they'd splay like possums
On sad charcoal roads never leading anywhere.
The boxers stood at her lair with squashed mouths.
Puffy snouts halted, not limpid like spaniels --
Stiff lips above barrelled chests,
Smooth pads under paw reminding her of soft stone.
Not glossed like a schoolyard stonker.
More oddly rounded like
Matte river pebbles
Dried upon land's edge
Knots of gull shit
White peaks, white noise.
Each paddle attached, but separate -- quartered with a thousand
Shapes and junctures, while dogs in the offing scratch dirt,
Salving on a wet garden, baring bloodied teeth; their eating bones.
Shackles at the post, manacled to a foul wooden copse.
Eager to be plucked, kept on uneven mantles with hands older,
Knotted with ganglion, winged paper knuckles, buckled and bulbous,
Moist from sweaty gloves. Humidified skin pressing down on a keel,
Desiccated blood on oars that never move neither plumbed nor wet.
"The indignity of death waits for those
Who saw through woods of time lost."
One might find that cure for jungle fever
With a witch's hat and velvet tongue.
Seeking revenge from a snake's lobe
Wearing a lollipop flavoured smock
From grandmother's musty closet,
Strung with wire pegs, rusted from
Laconic tears and shapes from a virgin womb.
So with that velvet tongue and witch's hat,
(orange, it must be orange),
Find the mulberries before worms
Lick leaves and trunks fruitless,
For there are cures for drunk girls
Like you with your wincing face --
Wilting eyes slit with sticky complaint.
Lips rucked up all violet; cheeks a ruse --
An artificial cause of caring where your face crams
Puckered voids of skin like fissured moon craters.
"Bones intersected by a dying river spread
Themselves thin, breaking the keel of the eventide".
Ruffles, gilded guns --
I never saw guns,
So removed am I.
I plundered, plucked --
Seafarer hands like my father's.
Veins in my legs, blue velvet ropes --
That grainy icon of him, dead and lacking.
Grey eyes sinking into some stale brain,
Where all it took to hollow out a skull
Was a barbed shank, naked hands and grubby feet.
Held high. Held tight. Thrown down.
I watched the feathered wheel with a motley eye --
The other buried in my father's laboured hand
Winched from his milky face.
Stigmata on my own face where
Roots of moles were webs under glass slabs.
Wood of the table rotten, sort of threadbare
Like that dying blanket everyone has.
The Garden
Stops his ears and
Closes his eyes,
Looks into the mulch of memories,
Spacing the burrow where the orchid will die.
Marigolds work well with hay
While bougainvillea's thrust through plastic pots
Out of the earth, and up to the terrain
Biting their nails and crowning their thorns.
Picks at the stones that pull the roots
And ploughs his senses
Like a father would, one daughter short
And a pair of size five boots that sit by the helmet
She wore on the horses with
Her jodhpurs and reins,
Trotting around barbs and cantering around the source.
She's gushing from her chest, barrelled with blood.
He remembers her teeth being stained red
Looking like humans do when we bleed from our mouths.
Thoughts of her hold him to ransom, and he
Squats in the garden with no moments to give away.
The father picks at the pitiful soil,
The crumbs of humble pie
And the sheep that has no mother
Strides by him for good measure.
Dusk now, and he stops picking at stones.
Flicks the lighter, and the cigarette offers hope among
The darkness of a western sundown
Where he dismisses the loneliness and balks at a sitting crow.
Birthing Stall
Calves with eyes like moons,
Mother with angry mouths and snouts --
Wild horses with jersey hides and bull rush tails.
Jilted bovine pride,
They're wearing down the hands of time
While a jury of vultures sit on the fence
Wondering when the placenta will pass.
Sow, sweet thing, sow.
Slingblade
Mother, Father,
Two sisters and one.
Rooted in stone,
Moored to soil.
It is well my eyes are sealed for what I have watered.
Bald eyes green mounds where
One ink spot foils the account and
I am level headed.
A grove rooted to the gravel, sprinkled with the dusts of dawn `til dusk grace.
Sparrows.
Tails and heads never idle,
And a sheep, just one who
Screams for her mother.
Arbour across from the weeping willow,
Thrashing its verdant way through old telegraph posts,
Though more like a rambling; a mellow lashing.
The calves scourge and scream for their mothers too.Their faces, their milk.
Tagged, tattooed they are terse,
Guttural cries their mothers can hear,
So they scramble into fences
Knowing what their babes of brown are in for.
Stiff bodied alive with rigors.
Calm before the blade taps their downy heads
Ripping through the mound of bone that is horn.
Blood on beige pants,
The sandwich press move north, south, east and west --
Then the next.
Scarlet butchery splatters the soil,
Glistening and alive.
But no longer is she of the smile and the eyes.
Inside granite,
Strapped to the earth,
I sit by a cold hearth,
Whispering much, showing nothing,
Beseeching her rebirth.
Poem © 2004 Carly-Jay Metcalfe, all rights reserved
