"purling" poems
eyes are
quite gelatine
mending bubbly detail
mocking up fact to suit user
/the ears ? crinkled dishes of pinkened veins
robbing blood to probe the gossip
/digits bud on the feed
in polyp growth
******
and ****** a
pepper mill from off the
coffee table/tongue leeches lips
retaining massaged notes from food oils past
/spatting nostrils puncture the air
punching out breath purling
inhale a stressed
report
Dec 3, 2022
Dec 3, 2022 at 9:49 PM UTC
If I knew who I’d be
by the last written line of this poem.
If I knew who’d sway, besotted, beside me
to lean in and catch the last word
of our maundering sobhet;
If this, I’d never have left
my Beloved's company to begin with.
I crawled wild-eyed from the depths
of the inexplicable,
cold embers of abandoned age,
To go there.
To go to the tip
where the flame flickers
and breath burns.
The Beloved is the earth,
my awareness, roots.
If this,
then love is the water
flowing through the rock,
drawn up the vine
to fatten the grape.
This drunken dance
is a fruit harvest
We fools are the wine makers.
Who gets who intoxicated?
Bestami Bayazid said,
*"I am the wine drinker and the wine and the cupbearer
I came for from Bayazid-ness as a snake from its skin.
Then I looked and saw that lover and beloved are one
I was the smith of my own self.
I am the throne and the footstool.
Your obedience to me greater than my obedience to you
I am the well-preserved tablet.
I saw the Kaaba walking around me."*
I say, I arrived in this place two sunsets back
but I did not have to travel to get here.
The earth makes its way around the sun on my behalf.
My journey is both a somber desert
and a purling rain forest
It is my pause that makes one or the other so.
A hungry sparrow hops cautiously through bread crumbs
strewn around a fat loaf of bread.
The feast is on the table, our hands in our pockets,
our mouths sealed shut,
bellies full of hesitation, we circle the spread.
Empty are the stores of those who
Cannot sate their hunger for truth.
The empty belly of a sparrow
sees the universe in a morsel of bread
So of what use is the whole loaf.
Sep 25, 2014
Sep 25, 2014 at 8:57 AM UTC
He was love’s fool
A drop of rain
In a downpour of seasonal shame
A farthing in the fountain
Spent on wishes
Glistening in the fenlands
Of unreplenished riches
A plea, among the rustling
In a vast forest of variegated leaves
Sorrow among garrulous winds gusting
A path through
His wooded pathos
Blazed with love and lusting
Then a tear finds wing
On a falling leaf
Snapped from the limbs
by currents of heat
rockabye'd into halcyon
so misery and his companion
Forge a new coin
Thrown and flipping along an arc
A pinwheel casting solar sparks
Purling hope in a tumbling fall
promises anything can happen
To anyone
Anytime
at all
Sep 29, 2014
Sep 29, 2014 at 4:49 PM UTC
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veiled, while he that reads divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?
Shepherds are honest people: let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime:
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
1.6k
V. the ballad of briseis
my heart is of
the flesh of figs,
and that which
i cannot touch:
grainy sweet
garnet nectar
pretty to behold
but easy to bruise
no god shall speak for me, briseis
for this fig-heart, like the heart of man
craves art as it does god
and though i know you not by name,
but only pseudonym:
blood, words, and love,
we are kindred souls
i'd like to believe that we
are cut of the same cloth
hewn of the same mound of clay
(or cast into the same iron, i suppose
for we became one another's anchor
the day we met)
i once told you, my dear briseis,
that if you taught me symbiosis
i would teach you love
for you found pragma
in philosophy cold
markov's blankets
freud's ego, plato's cave
whereas i found pragma
in alchemy's poetry
chekhov's gun
freud's neurotics, plato's human
it means nothing.
the alchemy lies
beyond the chemicals,
beyond the seed and the egg,
beyond our festivals of atonement,
beyond my prima materia
and your unfulfilled magnum opus
it lies in simple interdependence,
the oceans, the heavens,
the forests, the deserts,
the storms, the famines,
the herds of wildebeest,
the colonies of ants,
the beady dew on the spider web
and the purling river shallows,
our acrid mouths yearning for mother's milk,
the boy who makes us cry at night,
the fiery logs roaring against the cold air,
the hoot-owls and the faces on the wall
(our skeletons never did stay in the closet)
bathed in that slow, hideous wonder
those interplays of love and symbiosis
as i drown and die in reverie once more
pray that the stakes may be forever higher
that i find those eternal elysian fields
so long as our achilles lives to fight again
we are more alike,
than you or i would
ever dare to admit,
briseis
so humor this fig-heart:
hold me and tell me
that it'll be all right
Jan 19, 2021
Jan 19, 2021 at 11:57 PM UTC
We had casted on one evening,
The beginning slip knot
With a tail trailing behind,
Of some color neither of us could see,
Of some length we couldn’t determine.
Slowly but surely, we made
Awkward, new stitches,
Sometimes pausing,
Sometimes constant.
The yarn shimmered rainbow,
Neverending,
Not quite perfect, but it felt more
Intimate that way.
We spent almost too much time on our first row,
Our second,
Our third,
Knitting yarn laced with endless
Memories,
Stories,
Laughs,
And a certain fondness that was new and
Exhilarating.
We pause,
Our hands tired and aching
Through the hard, tedious hours.
We admire the gorgeous cabling of our
Best days,
The ugly, bumpy, knotted purling of
Our worst.
The yarn is crumpled and twisted
From when we had to rip and
Start over.
Wear and tear,
Passionate red and bruised blue,
Stockinette and dropped stitches.
This is what beautiful is.
A scarf that forever winds around us,
Pulling us closer and keeping us warmer.
Feb 7, 2012
Feb 7, 2012 at 5:04 PM UTC
Mosaics in the garden.
Our room for living is pale yellow and full red,
where we may peer towards that rosy garden,
that tiled, speckled, slathered garden.
I see a Chinese bay beyond,
for all manner of junk floats the streetish high-seas
in the again gale of afternoon.
Gained is rain and then asked for is sunshine.
So received is sunshine. Blessed, felt, caressed is sunshine.
Light seems to be the pearl,
purling away from the oysterich air, whose desires to chase
are full of joy;
so I see the game from from this room,
pale yellow and filled red.
So many paths on which to orbit the teeming world,
one that is not worse as folk say
or please to think.
Because I am pleased to think,
of the current calm, which is not common,
found in these
all things....
Of mosaics in the garden
and beyond of ships.
Of light, of rain,
and overall of sunshine.
Jul 20, 2011
Jul 20, 2011 at 1:45 AM UTC
on any hill without a cross, they pause, and the father points.
when they are tired, father and son, they plunk into
then off
the sides of valley homes.
one home in particular remembers thinking
kids these days
roll anything
looks like a tire.
your own father smacks whichever finger lifts without the rest.
says you sleeping don’t mean your epilepsy knows.
in your dreams the father does not point, and there isn’t a son.
just a man on one hill after the other, sunlight purling
into the seeable
dark yarn sea. his eyes leaving his head,
somersaulting,
somersaulting,
godbraving.
Jul 2, 2012
Jul 2, 2012 at 1:45 PM UTC
A cove, one’s own
For hearts, a home
where sky and sea and
cliff sides crawling with posies
meet in places
built from traces
of reassembled memories.
all is quiet, all is tender,
purling waters to remember
sips to come, from cups, were poured
by ocean waves en echelon
by providence and then beyond
by each embrace of pristine shore.
reminding us,
o’ forgotten trust
in things from hinterlands
curves of thought imbued with love
raked into hidden sands
washed away, washed away
by the Beloveds hands.
Sep 13, 2014
Sep 13, 2014 at 10:53 AM UTC
Spring is come and spring is going
and no word from my love is flowing
down the page of purest white
with ink so black as darkest night
winter thaw has finished now
and spring took over with the bough
all dressed in coloured petals all
fit for the hall of a wedding ball
so give me sign that you are there
where the brook is purling fair
in that very secret place
I want to stroke your sensitive face
so well I do remember then
when we sat and watched the wren
sing his song so piercing loud
like a cheering teenage crowd
as we sunk together down
on the grasses golden brown
found each others tender dream
as flowers floated on the stream
ah would that that time come again
so now could be and not a then
the wren he sings but no one's there
except my thoughts as ever ware
time passes like a drifting shawl
across the sky and we enthral
like memories that light our sky
of lying there just you and I
Margaret Ann Waddicor 25th April 2012.
Jan 12, 2016
Jan 12, 2016 at 10:03 AM UTC