The Creative Obrst

Poetry, Criticism and Commentary by Leo Obrst

Home » poetry » Page 3

poetry

Plain Stick

by

She lies again in lineament, white accenting pink.

If she had crossed her heart, she could not have been

More truthful, at least there, at the beginning, when

I introduced you to her, and she grasped your hands

In hers, two sets of veins throbbing, harmonizing,

A nod, its far distance reflected in four corneas, eyes

Otherwise seeming to consider the other well. Ahem.

 

We were spendthrift. Marble should have been pine.

Talk and oozing ounce of eyeful sorrow should have

Been sorrow. The choir edging us all in should have

Been one plaintive soprano and a saxophone’s hoot.

The dozen upturned drumsticks at the post feast

Should have been a slight expanse of sliced tofu loaf,

Slathered with a vegan barbecue sauce, carrot shreds.

 

No padre should have talked about my father. No nun

Should have stood behind him and nodded amen, amen.

Children of children should have danced up to the altar,

Dressed in scarecrow clothes, cornstalks in their collars,

Spat upon the floor, dislodging stalks as they tangled

And chanted in a sing-song hopscotch talk,

That Johnny had a plain stick he hit his big head with.

Memorize Me

by

Darkened sky escarpment photo

Gray sky lies low on my new flat land.
Dark birds jostle others in the scratch
arbor out the window I view the scarp from.
It rises to surround the horizon of the world.
Some toil, a little pain, pangs of anguish
as new weather washes my tongue.

My friend’s memory is better than mine.
He remembers the time now long gone.
He remembers the perforation, paper,
chads that littered the floor, the lasered
pages I printed past years of the tales I wrote.
He remembers stories not true we told

each other, back when we were younger,
when we intended to be much more
than we ended up being: clear knights
who went into battle with avarice,
lust, engaged with blood, sorrow,
lived to renounce yesterday, tomorrow.

Suddenly I’m Not

by

Lightning photo
Credit: Ian Anderson

Suddenly I’m not,
And never here, lost
As if I’d never been,
Not even shredded rags
At the bottom of thunder,
Not a blue light
Circumnavigating
The planet, not even a rock.
I wish I could wonder
What I had been here then,
Before you never knew me,
And after you hadn’t known,
After you hadn’t memorized me,
The tip top of your hat
With nothing forever under.

My Ilk

by

Credit: Ruth Hartnup (Flickr)

I am ilk, an s removed from silk,
a bitter pill for my stalwart fellows,
Leviathan who’s left Eden for a pillow,
a smile on my forehead like the clove
foot of a fleet beast evading bliss
which had been its tendered firmament,
a sibilant shush to quiet dying turbulence.

My savior flies through the skylight
As I pray splayed on the floor below,
arms outstretched for the warmth
they seek, find little of, since I fell to earth
billennia before yellow, green, and blue,
my color only red, red, red, black red.
Lift me through the glass to incandescence.

How would you have found my face, if you
hadn’t seen its light? Triangular
signification was seared into your sight,
as I sought to seem isosceles, not pyramidal,
since I had limited bricks to bulk me out,
but the hypotenuse obscured my image:
Illuminate the right declination.

Since the only holy now is metaphor,
the concrete beast creeps to suburban
Jerusalem on cat feet, nimble nubs,
claws too abstract to bloody up much,
excruciations wilting, hidden behind
the obscure de rigueur mortis of simple
city streets, their dead cell agriculae.

Trotsky got killed with an ice pick. You
weren’t killed, but the image sticks there,
an occipital jab that blinds like curettage
during a lobotomy. You will no longer
need to counteract rationality with feeling,
given the disconnect. Your science can
grow as if stalks were planted in liquids.

I stuff celery on Thanksgiving with cream
cheese. When you eat it, eat olives with it.
Remember the sensation, prepare it again
for Christmas. Somehow add hot pepper
to it, as if flesh were added to soul
constantly, accrued around it, as if you
fought for justice even if they killed you.

Blood Rose Red

by

Rose photo
Credit: [email protected] via Flickr

Once you believed, before you were hurt,
in the resurrection of the rose from the dirt,
when we raked its splayed stem at the crush
of season, its glow withered, into just mulch.
Only the living are lonely. Churned petals, thorns,
if burnt or not, lying under dirt, won’t mourn.

The sheen of the living, resilient skin pressed,
smudged easily, darkening blemish caressed
as you follow its spread under flickering tips,
seeking to sever flesh into pieces brought up to lips,
to kiss or taste them: pink to red, then carmine,
a cochineal for turning into crimson, then maroon.

Deep in black corridors where desiccation occurs,
tendrils still coherent loosen their segments, slur
their words, former phonemic skin giving way
to dissolution of color, sense, preparing for a day
that may never come: rebirth, becoming new again,
blood rose red come winding up to watering air.

Poem

by

Credit: Arseni Mourzenko

I will follow single file all my dogs
Through their deaths to Valhalla
Or to final immolation into ashes,
Not to be scattered haphazardly
But placed amid the dead roses,
Along the line of blue spruce
Christmas trees we planted for
Their lives when they lived and
Wandered along the thin trunks and
sparse foliage, needing seasons.
I will go into the darkness or light,
Whichever they found after breathing,
Be with them forever in cold or warmth,
All sinless, eager, stripped of lovelessness.

 

Spider Art

by

Spider + Web
Credit: James Laing (Flickr)

Whose fine filament wavers in the wind
Outside my window? Some spider’s life.
The black arachnid (nearly all except for
The blue and red peacocks, the rainbows,
The irradiated ones, dull browns) spins
Its tale in the corner of the door, its spring
Avoided since it breaks twice a day or night,
Leads to overwork, disharmonious patterns,
Song changing from enticement to avoidance.

I was wounded back then, two of my legs removed
To allow me to walk unimpeded forward, backward,
If not around. I remember the syllables of the joints
Of the web, the intersections where a fly might catch,
And the tremble as I walked along my web home,
The glistening of my lattice on mornings after rain,
When the little wind stirred it, and ants fell from sky.

Now I am a contorted black clot wedged in pebbles,
And no one can spy me out as the grand designer,
My desiccated flesh no food for any insect, flower,
Awaiting only the acidity’s breakdown of carapace
To dissolve onto the basin of the garden underneath.

Old Yew

by

Credit: Weirdobelle (Flickr)

The wind wearies the tree in the yard.
It’s stood there now for fifty years.
I remember laughing at it when you
Climbed catlike up its branches, yowling
At the nicks of thorns on your skin, your
Insistence that to no mere wood would you yield.

We separated for forty years, the yard
Grew wilder as ownership passed beyond
Crisscrossing squirrels to wide canyons
Of time, erosions of roots, a coyote
Dogging the old dogyard, beyowling
Now the rain and cold, the sun unyellowing,

And you are no longer here, but yonder
In the withered nests, bespattered yolks.
The tree wearies of the wind’s yawing.