She sang to me, all about
moonbeams and evening,
.
and what’s more we danced;
the coffee cups rattled applause,
their good old brattle –
……….. terpsichore! terpsichore!
.
Someone wrote our names
on paper, folded them together;
she burned this, saying
that clinched it –
.
we laughed like a pair
of wind-shifted bushes,
danced again, more applause.
.
.
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
.
.
.
.
.
You unbuttoned my waistcoat
and laid your hand on my ribs.
.
For warmth, you said.
For the moon, I replied.
.
.
.
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
.
.
.
your adze dipped
into my heartwood
.
where tree was
became your canoe
.
by cunning hands
.
.
.
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
preach it
I see across to
your even brow
you have access to me
you’re green in winter
my watercourse
look to your own moon
that’s you
my only skyrock
do I detail you?
I sip your light
I sip you
am I your lair?
I see across
to your even brow
preach it
how my hand’s a wave
that parts a kelpfield
I’ve preached how
your hair’s my blessed night
breathe me
dawn you
oh I preach
.
.
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
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.
.
She sleeps symmetrical
her limbs parallel her eyes
and mouth closed to colour
I kneel with a stone of philosophy
and try it to her cheek so
that when she wakes
and the sun bloodies us
we’ll be gold to each other
.
.
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
very moment of sand, every tiny flame that kisses, or burns when the wind snatches it, each word taken away, she’s a second-to-second savant, and looking at her lover the girl thinks (it all being too loud to say): I don’t give an Etruscan toss where she started, just that she’s here now, hair cut out against the sky, look bold, smile stealing up a flash wolf, a thousand million therefores, brittle in my arms, sharing the wearing away of the sand though sometimes outpacing it enough to excuse me for the breathlessness I feel anyway, hidden, revealed, true, a game, a deadly seriousness, the found beryl in a box of cheap glass though its setting is base, a sip of a new and sharp alcohol with each wary buss, my fingers ploughing her hair to delve the shape of her head, wand, knife, an arrangement of cryptic objects on a tray, the sole plant that grows its own slant in my garden, she wrests my sense from me and with it an entire vocabulary but no matter because she brings a new one filled with sly promise, sly, sly and high, sly and high and salient fit to murder my old and birth in my beginning
.
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.
__________
©Marie Marshall
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.
.
.
.
.
.
this young woman
her skirt misfolded –
a broken china cup
.
.
.
.
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.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
.
Fullmoonlight
falling on that rock,
all my squares are circles,
circles squares.
.
You’re seeing with me
and my head’s full of you,
you sudden fullmoonlight
on my rock.
.
Let’s leap the rock,
red day and black night
made white and
fullmoonlit.
.
Oh, our dance, hold me,
you, square my moon,
circle my rock,
sudden, fullmoonlit!
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall
.
.
Myself was lathed, convex
and smooth where needed,
slender, grooved; once done,
myself stood straight and hard
for you when needed, as long
and until; now myself thanks
you for all the weathering,
the cracks, lines, patina are
all myself’s owned wood.
.
.
.
.
__________
©Marie Marshall. And while I have your attention, please visit my old, Gothic poems (from 2006):
“In the Echo-Hall of Randomstone”
“Old stones that lead from heaven to the sea”
“The Crystal Ball”
“O Darkness, be my friend”
“The Marseilles Diligence”
And keep your eyes open for one more before night falls on Halloween.
.
.
What if I leave a keepsake or
a little treasure on a gravestone,
perhaps this blue gold scarab
as a possibility, as something
sacrificed, and it’s thieved
within a day, and the thief
nests it with her other swag?
There’s already been a life
and another life, journeys
like when you opened your door
and said “Dying be something
you do for other people,
same as living, the whole song;”
but then you always were
my Atlas, weight-carrier,
you rainbow-in-a-stone.
__________
©Marie Marshall
