"lintel" poems
when thou hast taken thy last applause,and when
the final curtain strikes the world away,
leaving to shadowy silence and dismay
that stage which shall not know thy smile again,
lingering a little while i see thee then
ponder the tinsel part they let thee play;
i see the large lips vivid, the face grey,
and silent smileless eyes of Magdalen.
The lights have laughed their last;without,the street
darkling awaiteth her whose feet have trod
the silly souls of men to golden dust:
she pauses on the lintel of defeat,
her heart breaks in a smile—and she is Lust….
mine also, little painted poem of god
7.6k
God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid
In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show.
But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
Through his lantern-lit
Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door
To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
With a penny slot
For thrift children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
About to be
Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling
In a parsley halo;
Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
Mire-smirched, blowzy,
Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-
cruise--
Bloat tun of milk
On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies
Shrilling her hulk
To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
Brobdingnag bulk
Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black
compost,
Fat-rutted eyes
Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood
must
Thus wholly engross
The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
Helmed, in cuirass,
Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
By a grisly-bristled
Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.
But our farmer whistled,
Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
And the green-copse-castled
Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
Slowly, grunt
On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape
A monument
Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
Made lean Lent
Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
Proceeded to swill
The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking
continent.
6.5k
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
6k
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages ***** and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Jun 13, 2016
Jun 13, 2016 at 11:31 AM UTC
You choked on chariots raw. Red egg yolk suppers, churned of the milk oceans this morning you kept.
The lintel of stone turned toward dusk. Some great dynasty of submissive spirits catering your morning
Out on a cart of muse, forms of heaven cannot even hear you. You are a soporific knot in the tale of your Old womanhood. In this infinite Tuesday morning your small black eyes, like an oil tanker toppling over The intense azure sea- shipwrecked, and lost.
Departing from your childhood you slurp Coca-Cola from a silver straw. From the corner store and inside Winter yawns. There is no face, only strikingly beautiful black hair. The body under you is at home in all
My hand's fingers have to fill. All the clothes that you could carry for the two-way adventure. There are
Never enough bubbles between your lips and the glass bottle you have. Only the score of the whistleblower. And the poor symphony you had prayed for into the dial-tone phone, the deep Wilderness, that stiff forever-ago budding from your coffee cup. Neurogenesis lifted from your Fingerprints and emblazoned into this lump of human ingenuity. The hopeless octave that cut us all short.
Every short story that was left untold. There are the brief deaths recoiling in your spiritual architecture. The ****** of morphia has bourn me awake. Inside you are often unscathed, vanishing as some of Tonight's parts assemble you, on you blue is a beautiful color. The sweet retreat that gave you life or the bountiful deaths that counted you too cutely by your side. You are the sun in my black coat. Here is my sea, your sea, you'll see.
Apr 26, 2014
Apr 26, 2014 at 5:34 AM UTC
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
3.5k
The horizons ring me like *******
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.
The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their ***** wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.
I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.
The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.
3.3k
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed,
refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the
terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and
grumbling
And running away, and wanting their
liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the
lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns
unfriendly
And the villages ***** and charging high
prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all
night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a
temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of
vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in
away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with
vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for
pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so
we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment
too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say)
satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I
remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had
seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their
gods.
I should be glad of another death.
2.9k
The horizons ring me like *******
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.
The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their ***** wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.
I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.
The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.
2.9k
young lovers enthralled
in a passion that can
melt the deepest
Alpine snow cap
announce an intention
to join as one
till death do you part
the elders smile
at the audacity of
your grandiloquent
proclamation
youthful optimism
expressing pollyannish
sentiments born
of wistful hope
yet to learn the rules
of the vows of matrimony
and the endless sweet labor
required to keep it alive and well
thus i pass on this sage advice
when the baby cries at night
when the car won't start
when the rent bill is due
and you find yourself
a bit short
i wish you love...
when the cupboard is bare
and the desire to satiate
swelling hunger pangs
is overwhelming
i wish you love…
when you find yourself travelling
through roads that are
unfamiliar and foreboding
when you are hopelessly lost
in the darkest reaches
of the Black Forest
i wish you love…
as you grow as individuals
straining your relationship
when in laws become outlaws
and the pulls and pushes
of family and friends becomes
unfamiliar and misunderstood
i wish you love…
when resentments and insecurities
conspire to undermine trust
when greener pastures
pose a mirage of better things
i wish you love…
when oversight and neglect
leave you empty
when the luster of the
edelweiss bloom fades
when exasperation melts
the Alps greatest glacier
flooding everything you have
when the untended furnace
doesn't fire and the last
log is consumed
be patient
be diligent
be expectant
be kind
hold on to it
believe in it
practice it
trust it
may it bind you
in a perfect circle
and all your fondest
hopes and wishes
will be yours
i wish you love…
Stevie Wonder
Signed Sealed Delivered
Salutation for
Engagement Party
Maxine Lintel and
Glendon McCallum
Munich
11/29/13
jbm
Nov 30, 2013
Nov 30, 2013 at 12:09 PM UTC
foam floral caps, work of wet hydrangea,
or pulse of caucasian lilacs in a sky-relieved frieze.
cambric pennons swag reconsidering
margins of wimpling burn,
wherein the stars…twiring stars,
the declining stars, moon and planets
turned--
purchase light with morning-hands:
green-bedizened;
amber trammeling bud.
absolve qualm suffusing tyre,
violet’s violent leniency--
and feel, o’bask! in velvet
flume of veins,
as beams of conspiracy raise
to post and lintel,
crutching a young god’s legs--
and feel, o’supplicate! bathe in
day’s anatomies,
til greave deposit in lacunary sleeves,
and a genuflecting sun bow eternally--
Jul 25, 2018
Jul 25, 2018 at 6:38 PM UTC
shapes of yr many most favorite possessions
people looming in the lintel browsing through the pockets
yr posthumous stare chisels down the bark
280 & Alpine
taking out the post
east alto, west alto
sandwiches and snickers bars
let there be pizza
where beds happily move
and there are no swing sets or cell phones
let there be pizza
eighteen year olds swinging from the rooftops to the pool
no music played to remember it by
yr handlers are too many now
lost in the green lasers and spotlights
there are only two hands to make this memory
the quiet dark does not take it, new mouths do not take it
old words tearing off the night
Oct 17, 2015
Oct 17, 2015 at 12:10 AM UTC
Stranger than me, or too much alike
some wrangle upon toilet papers
plastic cups out of place or lost time;
peering past, another wanders on.
Tinkling wires and rainbow faces
hearing, seeing, perchance aurific speaking
the namer among ten-thousand petty things
or squinting upon the verge of time, espy a sequal.
Step by step to round the universe
or being fell-swept away in cubboards
seem or act unseemly, like or dislike
played to the order in the round, circling about.
Why so familiar these drabbed tones of ant trumpets
or wineskins grown old to leak and sputter?
Tis the wish and will, holding like ****** to the ropes
great gales n frothing nothingnes storming on.
But We, blown upon the Aether of the Soul
a great conquest of rousing dignities;
here, under nooks, behind secret doors
or bounding past, lightning speed, relay some wonder.
Shock of waking, or dulcet tones in the Alarm of life
our shadows twist, there on the lintel of private hours
our care, held through the Night kinder endearments
then danced over reeling waves for sweet inspection.
Here unalone a look, a voice and laughter ring the ears
a crying out, or trebled inward sigh, too close to trembling-
Who is this Sojourn Friend?
Perhaps our best of self combined
no more allied to faithless days nor dark an empty smiles-
strange wastes some carelessness invents to wrack the hours.
But We, no stranger to the Sojourner's faith, Are One.
Mar 8, 2012
Mar 8, 2012 at 12:37 PM UTC
no man starts in hiding there must be something from witch he hid
for all the words of love and longing stem from empathy we give
its not lintel are hearts are shattered stone to sand and sand to glass
we feel it best to guard are platter sweet the fruit concealed from pests
Oct 29, 2012
Oct 29, 2012 at 12:23 AM UTC
The day was perforated by a threshold
A distracted post and lintel technicality
All a part of this door I've been painting
It opens out
It opens up
Into joy
But while I was placing tiny brush strokes
In incremental positions
Adjusting for full light
You swung it wide open
Thankfully
You swung it wide open
Let's go!
Feb 28, 2015
Feb 28, 2015 at 12:40 AM UTC
I wish that we’d never found it now,
I wish that we’d stayed away,
Avoided the twisted mansion that
Was fashioned in Cromwell’s day,
But we were just a couple of lads
Out there, and having fun,
We wouldn’t have thought to change the world,
Nor hurt just anyone.
The place sat deep in a bluebell wood
Surrounded by a marsh,
I said, ‘Should we?’ and he said we should,
My friend was a little harsh,
We waded up to our knees out there
Until we reached the porch,
The rooms within were as dark as sin
Till Joe took out his torch.
The house had once been a splendid place
Though the floors were deep in mud,
Of fetes and ***** there was still a trace
Then the fields submerged in flood,
The house sank on its foundations then
No doubt, to cries and tears,
Its noble crew had deserted it
For all of two hundred years.
I raced my friend to the stairway that
Led up from the central hall,
Half of the rail had fallen away,
Was resting against the wall,
When up above in a tiny room
Stood a bureau, finely made,
Inlaid with delicate parquetry
That lay concealed in the shade.
But over the lintel of the door
Was the carving of a man,
His wings spread wide, with the sharpest claw,
He was from some evil clan,
His teeth protruded over his lip
And his eyes were fierce and black,
I caught at Joe and he almost tripped
But he shrugged, and turned his back.
And on the dust of the bureau lay
A long, fine feather quill,
I knew I shouldn’t disturb it there
But I thought, ‘I can, I will!’
And beside the quill was a manuscript
In an old and faded hand,
Calling for the death of a king
That I couldn’t understand.
I knew, I’d read in my history books
That a cruel, evil one,
A man called Oliver Cromwell had
Caused pain for everyone,
He’d raised a citizens’ army and
Had thought to **** the king,
But fell to the King’s Own Cavaliers,
Was beheaded in the spring.
I knew this, yet I still signed my name
With that awesome feather quill,
It seemed to have me so hypnotised
That I quite had lost my will,
So then when a roll of thunder shook
The house right through to the floor,
The man in black that was carved, alack,
Came bursting in through the door.
He snatched at the parchment manuscript
And let out a howl of glee,
Then screamed, ‘I’ve waited forever just
To play with your history.’
I know that you think the civil war
Took the head of a rightful King,
But how could I know the power of a quill
That could upturn everything?
David Lewis Paget
Jan 12, 2016
Jan 12, 2016 at 3:42 AM UTC
Hot breath creaks inside my chest, groans
my slats with pearly condensation.
I am twenty – and I am warped,
with a body bent like shanty shingle, angled
mad enough to slide off sides and tumble into flower
beds of strangers.
My bones – once new, once green – grew
children ‘long a doorframe, climbing swirls of ivy
ink and wispy curls to lintel.
Wily little imps they were that tore their jeans
and shed their sleeves each fall, that slept in mud
and came inside if just to smudge
their mother’s ivory trinkets. Shelf dwellers
in a dusty sea, elephant and whale – bone
more bone than my own ever dared, or cared, to be.
Jul 3, 2010
Jul 3, 2010 at 10:36 PM UTC
The house had an evil aspect as
It hung out over the street,
Casting a permanent shadow there
Where the market stalls would meet,
The first floor was half-timbered, with
The ground floor made of stone,
The windows were made of pebble glass
And the window frames of bone.
No one had lived in the house for years
Til the Robinson’s moved in,
A couple, straight from the wedding church
Where they’d cleansed themselves from sin,
They’d listened to all of the rumours that
The house had its share of ghosts,
But the cheapness of the peppercorn rent
Had influenced them most.
The house was built where a charnel house
Had stood in the days of plague,
Where later a debtors’ prison stood
Though its history was vague,
They said there had been a gallows there
With a trapdoor through the floor,
And the arm of the ancient gallows now
Was the lintel of a door.
But the Robinson’s had sailed right in
With a mop and a whisking broom,
‘In no time, it’ll be **** and span,’
Said Sally, within the gloom,
While Brad had opened the shutters then
To let all the light stream in,
‘We’ll flush the ghosts from their waiting posts
With a broom and a pound of Vim!’
They dusted down the old furniture
Left sitting since George the Fourth,
And turned the old oak table round
So the end was facing north,
‘But still there’s a dampness in the air,
And a tension that feels grim,’
Sally said, as they lay in bed,
And she clung, so close to him.
‘Are you sure that they can’t get in,’ she said
‘Now we’ve flushed them out in the street?’
But Brad was trying to understand
Why the bed was cold at his feet.
‘Why are the sheets so damp,’ he said,
‘And they’re cold, as cold as sin,’
Sally was shivering, fit to burst
Though the sun came streaming in.
They sat at the old oak table with
Their bowls of soup, home-made,
And Sally reached out to hold his hand
But he started back, dismayed,
The soup was thick in the serving bowl
It was still three-quarters full,
When a swirl in the murky liquid then
Revealed a grinning skull.
Sally shrieked, but she couldn’t speak
And Brad had held his breath,
‘We’ve got to get out of this house today,
We’re surrounded here by death.’
The shutters slammed on the windows and
The doors flew shut on their own,
And barring the pebble windows were
The frames that were made of bone.
The people out in the market heard
The screams at an early hour,
Looked knowingly at each other, said,
‘They have them in their power!’
And Brad was hung from the lintel when
They finally broke inside,
While Sally was dead by a grinning skull
In the dress of a new-wed bride.
David Lewis Paget
Mar 26, 2014
Mar 26, 2014 at 6:24 PM UTC
Through forlorn eyes i watched days sit on the window,
Ticking of time slipped by,
Through time and time a seed to vine,
It grew above the lintel,
As days went past it grew so vast,
The ivy grew over the door,
From young to old from hot then cold,
We are born in the morning and pass in the evening,
In the great sunset of life,
We may lie and deceive for what we achieve ,
In the end a pillar of sand,
We all make our circles ,
Some large some small,
But in the end its the beauty that we make of it all,
That will step with us into the gentle last goodnight,
As we close our eyes no pain don't cry,
As i die with a gentle sigh my light will slide into the evening.
Feb 14, 2015
Feb 14, 2015 at 9:00 PM UTC
Like tiny lintel beans full of light your skin shines across the waves of your smile.
Like tiny glimmers of hope I'm captivated by my sensation my intuitive fixation on love.
Like a pirate lost to sea I fall in love with the ocean when I never had sea legs to begin with.
Glimmers are reflected.
Like your taste in music and taste in habits and taste in speech and distaste in me.
Glimmers given false hope to sailors tormented by the sea.
Apr 22, 2017
Apr 22, 2017 at 2:58 AM UTC
Slumbering all night
On the cradle of comfort.
Mixing the oil of night
With the wax of sleep.
Conjuring the day to night.
Protruding womb of the day
Howling for the birth of light
Unfolding the mantle of darkness
Awake from timing slumbering.
Awake from caging nightmare,
Awake from the deadening
slumbering
Awake now Ma'am Jonah.
Conquering gnome of darkness
Standing beneath the shades of
the iroko tree.
Poachers of darkness hunting
for the river's manna.
Mauraders of darkness peeping
through the lintel of trials.
Awake from sluggish slumbering
Awake afresh into the newness of
dawn.
Awake Ma'am Jonah.
Nov 2, 2019
Nov 2, 2019 at 10:50 PM UTC
A machinist
Breaking his parts
Bringing his art
In lintel print
Nov 9, 2018
Nov 9, 2018 at 10:44 AM UTC