Where We Live 2

A sun-bleached architecture.
Prairie comfortable, creaky,
chewed as supple as moccasin.

It is an old house
a place for nomads-
for the domesticity
of valley flowers.

A hickory fire
sweet smoky mountains.
You add salt
knead dough
a bioluminescence
for lightning bugs
bread for hobo's.

The moon has gone
to hunt for yeast.
When it returns to our lodge pole
it will be pregnant.
There will be milky cakes-
the sound
of marmalade kittens.

Tree's travel far
to be this near
to the hawk and the sky.
We pilgrims meet in the burrows
of our hands
in the plowed fields
of unearthed visions.

We are favored to be here
unanchored
by charted seas.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Carvings

They are not simply bygone
like yesterday
but are encased in the remoteness
of their other worlds-
other dreams.

Ziggurats, mounds and monoliths,
impossibly long
scratches in the earth.
They reach away from our reality
as if we were only a blur
on their chosen path.

Giving meaning to them,
uncovering purpose,
we slip into more mythology.
New monuments
for the slow turning leaf
to outrun.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Quartz-Inside-Pebble (rocks Like Us)

You can see the labyrinths,
the chiseled cavities,
the concentric resistance 
cut into stoic laminations.

Split a stone
see a soul growing-
whorls and hollow spaces
where the world
seeps through
engraving resonance.

That interiority, that patina,
is an etched labor
It resembles carved striations
but it is a similitude
the way the feathered ears of a seabird
are a similitude for the sea and sky.

We are sculptured
by a fine toothed gravity
of the unseen.
Rocks like us
are whittled slowly into art
by what can be endured.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Baltimore Oriole

You cried out
as if the sun had birthed a child.

We reached-
I for binoculars
you for the camera.

Tangerine buds bloomed
into sherbet fountains of light.

For an instant
we are branded by one vision-

a beating speck
of unbounded utterance.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Hampster

We went
into the garden.
It was late
but we had to do this thing.

I made a little hole
planting a shoebox
with Stinky
into a shallow darkness.

I knew you were puzzled,
you only said,
“Do shoeboxes
ever miss their shoes daddy?”

I thought of all the living
I had walked away from.
Things I had buried much deeper.

I replied, “Yes always.”

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Bookceiling-704387

 
Between the ledge
and the drop
mute flocks fly outwards,
empty perches
tilt precariously
over snowy edges.

One volume is held up-
scraps of knowledge
pecking at my eyes.
A memory screeching
in the distance.

Leathery wings unfold.
Scripture and fable
twitter
in the bound pulse
only to erupt
out of dark mouths
glaring like temple beasts.

Broken doors gape
(heaped and hunchbacked)
through vacant  hinges.
Spines still shore-up
notions,
hypothetical heartbeats
in unlatched ribcages.

This apartment
(at last)
has no space for anything
but the flowing calligraphy
of sunlight on bare walls-
the shadows of hands
scribing  thoughts.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Angry nun

I was afraid of them,
the kind of fear that tastes
of stale milk.

A sour fear
that stayed with me
as we kids churned over
the convent playground.

A new friend-
Jenny, six years old.
One-step beside me
chattering away---little sparrow.

The nuns could not abide
sparrows
or anything unyoked
from a creaking guilt.
A sin they bound
like yellowed parchment
to their parched breasts.

How could we have known
about that dark triangle of theirs
that drove them to watch us
as if we were
small pink bombs?
 
One day our intimacies
were gleefully undressed
by a fervent bride of Christ.

Bottoms were lashed,
thrashed with an ecstatic zeal.

Afterwards
they made Jenny
confess her spilt milk-
but finding none
they curdled her
instead.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Red_wite_+

 

A limping obstinacy

inflates canyons of heat.

There is no milk to be had

from the humid churn

only a hazy slaver

over oily skins.

Clouds evaporate

into factions of light

the air indolent and obese.

The paltry raises

its dry seeded head.

The weather may change

but first

August must learn to breathe

through its pulse

as the throb of each day

decays. 

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Flower bones

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Bedsprings crochet bones together.
His back sutured to dreams,
gripes still stitched to gummy joints.

In the toilet avoiding the mirror
humming softly
shunning conversation with himself
the ceiling drips a sump of oily memories.

The park--- Frances revolves confused
“I don’t understand"
-a phrase with self-winding words.

A slight miscalculation
a turning away at the precise moment
she turned towards him.
An error of timing really.

Time whittles cavities with calcifications.
Softly the spine of a storybook breaks;
where one stitch patches a sorrow
a spur prods and rips.

When he listens to the hollows
between the long dark vertebrae of his life
he hears a theory crumbling away
under slow grinding teeth.

(C) Eric Ashford August 08

Black_white_erotica_sexy_25_f

You return in parts
like a movie once seen.

I recall scent and texture.
My senses turning to
drinking birds.

Your golden triangle
the opiate of drenched blooms.
The smell of soft moments
astride driving passions.

Not seeing your face
remembering only glances, flexures,
dimples of shade.

Your hands pointing through time
to this older man
who looks up at the screen
from a now empty back row.

(C) Eric Ashford July 08