Charioscura: Dreamtime Women Captured in Poems

A Stoop is Close to a Fall

I

She was never his hawk

None but her own

And preyed upon herself

With talons shredding

No soft hands or arms

but wings spreading

in down swirling push

could not pull her free

To bend the air

Under her and bear,

The weight of death away

To someday when her talons

Were busy with other prey

II

It was the words that made her stay

Words have spaces

leaving ragged canyons

between sounds

Her fury was not enough

To carry her over

Into the next headlong dive

Wings drawn back

She fell not flew

And struck the world

With such a force

As made trees strain and shiver

III

none could bury her

Just let her rise again

Now, she sees all fine, sharp

From the center bright skies

Noting every movement precisely

The rabbit under sagebrush

Quivering ever so slightly.

Her Dark Furnishings

On a naked hill

Above a shamble of bone built huts,

She plays at chores

in a well-lit palace,

open to the dim world.

she moves about in there

rearranging her dark-polished furnishings

in patterns of arabesque logic.

Everyone below watches, looking up from

mud scrabbled ruts

into the bright vision of order.

“Oooh, coffee table tea party

on the veranda, my dear.

Now that’s the way to live!”

A Woman of the River Ocean

I am feeling with delicate fingers

among the eel grass

in the fine white sand

at the bottom of the river ocean

raising dusty billows

in bright airy water

for a part of me I never lost.

There is a woman,

about 40 years old

with long shiny black hair,

moon luminous pale,

tiny shy

transpiring her life

on a shelf

a doll dressed in red.

Maybe a secretary, or a nurse,

or assistant librarian.

now she moves

in a tentative dance

everyone is bustling ’round.

she moves about them

without disturbing

the waters.

My fingers are searching

for her symbol,

her voice.

She is the one who will

speak for me

when I pull her from the weeds

in mind blue waters

and as I ache for breath

She will gasp to life

on the surface.

Charioscura

Splash of angel light,

her face pushed forward,

body leaning, close,

breathing deep magnetic

corruption

in through open nostrils.

The angled spirit congealed, bloody

on her pillow,

one arm raised flame

against obsidian illusion

glass labyrinth working

Through stretch and fold

distortion spread, reflected

transparencies

pile one on the other until

seeming solid prison, Life.