Begloved

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I have three gloves left

Each a different color

For only two hands.

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All rights reserved.
This was my first and only paper publication, in April 2009, selected by the local newspaper for national poetry month.  Hee Hee.  So there you are.

Sunday 160

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Musing
What I know

Giggles grow

from

babies being

cousins cuddling

children spinning

teens teasing

women wine tasting

grandmothers gifting

logs lighting

spouses spooning.
-
-( write a short story, ?poem? in 160 characters and spaces exactly, let monkey man know: http://petzoldspracticalprose.blogspot.com/)

California Winter

Bright winter sunlight
Bounces outside the window
Boys with pogo sticks

Haiku

Adore Your Son
born Christmas morn with song and
teardrops for my own

to those we have lost

Live With New Clothes


Take threads from the flannel shirt he wore,

The plaid one you remember, the favorite.

It has anemone-edged holes which let in a cold draft,

Its red and grey pattern too faded for beauty.

Keep the velvety pieces of solid weave,

With a trace of fragrance of flesh, musk and oily hair.



Search the earth for strands of jeweled color,

Threads of carbon strength and unvanishing length.

Collect them egg-like, carefully and separately:

To keep them from rashfully tangling,

Losing distinction to your eye or usefulness.


Weave them mindfully together with the old patches.

Sew even seams between yours and his.

Cautiously line up edges without ridges,

For a whisper-smooth, sigh-soft wrap,


Barely felt at all,

But warm, so warm

That cold cannot enter.

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-
(today's post is for Mona, I wrote this last April for a friend who lost her husband in an accident a year ago)
All rights reserved.

Sunday 160

Warming light
Solstice lacks
Deep under

Greying white
Shimmers black
Waking longer

Crows fight
Fires crack
Hearts ponder

Frozen tight
Hands slack
Find wonder

Thawing night.
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-

55 Flash Fiction Friday

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And Then There Was That
-
We had a lunch date.
You pushed it back 15 minutes.
Was that just to shorten our time together? You were late!
I wondered, when would you ever get out of the bathroom?
I really didn’t think you were interested anymore.
Then I caught the look in your eye,
watching me unobserved,
through the doorway.
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----(photo here and on profile by Jillian Standish)

Desiccated vines
hang rusted across hillsides
over greening earth

Rain is good, but sometimes...

Summer began after long drives through passes
glistening with new grass, after she withered and writhed away from me.
I re-learned to dance in the sun, drenched with sweat from the light-play through leaves,
unstoppable, in a little excess.

Anticipation of the forced end
of summer walks, morning rides, and evening jogs,
keeps me in bed, nowhere to go, no dry path ahead.
With a little attitude, a little rain or not.

This winter cold makes me feel old,
and stuck in the bed, while a light rain is taking hold
of the pounding ache in my head.
A little cold, a little rain or not.

It’s reverberation is impossible to ignore.
To move would be to give up
the pelting percussion outside my French doors.
A little rain never stopped anyone.

Before the rush, the arguing
over the line to the bathroom,
and the news blaring one notch below the rhetoric,
Oh to hear a little rain a little longer.

So here, halting the day, hidden away, without a contingency, without an elixir,
Without the mix of light in the expanse,
A little bit away a little while longer,
A little rain never stopped anyone.

(Epilogue:
So if you reach out and I reply with a long furtive hug,
or if I only heard the question the third time,
while looking past you to the grey curtain, remind me,
A little rain never stopped anyone.)

-
-
(from a dark day 1 year ago, now I love the rain, the changes, the clearing of the excess, the new growth of all life sprouting ...see the Haiku to come....)

Hoar Frost

Hoar Frost

First frost snaps bare white.
Awakening aged viewpoints'
Transient jewels.

Sunday 160

Happy Birthday Dad

Daddy’s little girl
fought into her teens.
After college, she said upon parting,
“Love Mom, you don’t know how long you have together.”
It was a heart attack.
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Friday Flash 55 stronger than...

We took him off the ventilator yesterday.
He put a toothbrush to his teeth, for only one stroke.
“Weak as a kitten.” My standard response. “You’ll do better tomorrow.”
Standard, until kittens knocked a glass brick onto my toilet tank lid.
It’s broken in four pieces.
“Be as strong as a 150 year old tortoise.”

G-man Gladness

GLAD you are on this planet today!

two sides

Cold Hills

Grey hills fade away
Cold noon sun withholds color
Hearths lie smoldering.
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all rights reserved

Inspired by the moon blues

Lunar eclipse 2-20-2008

The orb humbled itself
to the shadow of the earthen goddess
bloody and bowled
a beacon

Smiling
it blazingly grins at the star,
daring her to dance with delight
in liquid love’s light.

Cold grey shadows
anchored silently in the mists
long for the heaven’s cacophony
and to sing with the croaking frogs.

They hold the pale blue light
fueled by flesh and blood and rhythms
eclipsing the day and opening the night
to the sanguine surges of love and life.
-
- All Rights Reserved
"It was on this day in 1972 that astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took a famous photograph of the Earth, a photo that came to be known as "The Blue Marble."
quoted from:
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor | After Psalm 137 by Anne Porter
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Photo:geos.ed.ac.uk

160 Sunday Challenge

In and out
again moved
an irresistible urge.
She had to move
with the rhythm,
the breath,
and the motion.
-
The kitten
came close
enough to bite
the party blower.
-
-
-
-The Sunday 160 challenge is to write something in exactly 160 characters, including spaces.
-
The place to check out for the rules is Monkey Man

I wear my loves

I wear my loves
Do not cry
Do not cry for me
I will not cry for you

I wear the sky as
opal on my skin
keep it shining

Do not cry
Do not cry for me
I will not cry for you

I wear the sunset’s
vermillion and ash
fleeting in my blush

Do not cry
Do not cry for me
I will not cry for you

I wear the fields’
lime-light carpet
walk in them

Do not cry
Do not cry for me
I will not cry for you

I wear the oaks’
writhing crackled bark
remember to touch them

Do not cry
Do not cry for me
I will not cry for you

I wear the grasses
Fuzzy tips of saffron
feel them in my hair

Do not cry
Do not cry for me
I will not cry for you


I carry music
in my fingers, toes and loins
hear it, touch it, feel it.
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You can hear my voice, and enchantedoak, on this new podcast from last week on our local public radio station. http://kcbx.org/mp3archive/eoa091202.mp3 Hooray for local poetry on the air!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

55 Flash Friday

Half a Life
He staggered into the half-occupied kitchen,
poured half a glass, "We're out of orange juice! Again!"
drank, belched, "The nectar of life."
-
She would have nuzzled into his neckline,
arms under his, pulled him to her chest....
-
Is an unreturned hug
half empty,
or half full?
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-
Sorry guys, this is rather angry, from an old poem but...
If you want to know more about 55 Flash Fiction Friday, visit G-man
http://g-man-mrknowitall.blogspot.com/

The gift of art

Painting 5-23-08

I want to paint a tapestry
Plaid with lunar-young vines waving
Disorderly fingers too high.

I want to paint a pottery
Of brass-burnished grasses
Zen-raked by hands with plows.

I want to paint an etching
feathered with cloud curls,
to tickle your eyes.

I want to paint a dance
undulating silhouettes
of hills against the sky.

I want to paint a poem
with the spark of a solitaire
pinning the early night.

I want to paint for you an image
which catches the heart
in your unrestrained sigh.



To those who wish to hear my poems read aloud, gulp,
in 2-3 days my poems Melody Evolution and this poem, Painting, will be on a podcast of our local public radio station, KCBX.org, 90.1 FM in San Luis Obispo California, achives of Ears on Art, 12-2-09. I have done this twice now, and am having so much fun. I hope you can have the live poetry reading experience this way with me, without having to fly here.... LIVE is always better: music, theater, poetry ...personally.
Love my poetry family,
Dianne

Not For Sale

Reunion

I woke It up.
It was resting and waiting,
Empty for so long.
I opened it up,
Gave It some air.
It breathed.

Thinking I was alone,
I caressed each room.
It startled me
By playing sounds of life,
Frightening me into the certainty
I wasn't alone.

Taking it apart
brick by brick,
(might as well be)
Erasing personal clutter, & worn foot-paths
So that strangers will
Assess It's worthiness.

Even when we'd taken back everything,
It birthed up more for us to cradle.
Out of the farthest corners of rusted-paint-cans, rat-crap,
chewed-cardboard-beetle-beds:
Grandbabies' photos, wedding planners,
Hand-made Father's day cards, a favorite uncle's watercolors.

It never stops
creaking, moaning, humming.
Habitation.
(Why should an empty home sound uninhabited?)
-
-
-Holidays make me miss my mom, and seek my siblings
This was written a year ago, july, amidst a crying break in the middle of shampooing the carpets of my old home. This theme seems to be emerging with fellow writers this month. -Peace
-
-all rights reserved, 2009

Good Medicine

You dose out good medicine

As potent as a gust of laughter
unstoppable in a burst of joy,

As calming as palms pressing down unannounced
loosening the weight of my shoulders,

As hopeful as the moment of introduction
of your baby girl into my arms,

As the easing into rest
while you spread blankets over my bed,

As a wicked master of a chocolate slave
who uses it in unspeakable ways,

As a sister who sees my weakness
and a parent who puts it right,

As part woman, part male,
yin and yang:

Life shakes us,
the lines blur between us,
we've blended beyond oil and water,
into the spaces between what matters...

with your unique medicine.

To the Point

To the Point

Fog obscures horizon, drawing close the stone arches in surf
-accept struggle for what it is

Ocean waves crash in a sinkhole, splashing like a creature in a vast bathtub
-take joy in the unexpected

Rocky coves precede a rare virgin beach
-love without attachment

A big boulder cupcake
-fill to satiation

Peaks of petrified pilings
-peaceful

Cracked columns form castles
-contentment

Arched caves of symmetrical repeating doorways
-offer compassion for all living things

Confetti flowered hazel hills
-in afterglow

Leave bare skin exposed on paper to the mountain’s clouds
-cool fever burned hands
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(photo by Jillian Standish)

Flash 55 Friday, early

Cries of terror : "The play structure’s burning down!" In runs the 10-year-old with a magnifying glass.
"CALL 911!”
Two-story high rooftop flames touch 100-year-old pine grove.
Youngest on the phone, 3 times: “........NO! IT’S A PLAY STRUCTURE!"
Three hoses douse it out.
Chief calls in: "Yep, it WAS a ‘playhouse’."

-




Friday 55 Flash Fiction is brought to you by G-man (Mr Knowitall). The idea is you write a story in exactly 55 words. If you want to take part pop over and let G-man know when you've posted your 55.

Moon desire or humor

Crescent Moon Cowboy Poem

Haven’t slept good
since the last moon’s rind
grabbed Venus and I,
unawares, from behind.

Nobody gets
everything I see,
but that horseshoe sure kicked
the feet out from under me.

By the time I’m done cryin’
without you black and blue,
in a fortnight I’ll forget,
by then, you’ll be “new”.

Whoever said absence makes
the heart grow fonder
never felt your bow
shoot their world wide asunder.

-
(This moonrise was taken at Mineral King, backpacking at 9,000 feet, with the setting sun's "alpine glow" on the mountains

My Giving Tree

Only a tree

“I am certain”, the tree said,”you only loved my fruit, and mistook your love of the sweet juice for a love of me”.


-Oh but you only bear your fruit in the fall. I also love your tall, broad canopy from beneath which I picked the fruit.

-Of course those fruit started out as tiny blooms, full of color to blind the sun, and flowing with scents to swim in.

-Or then there are your soft, luminous leaves, glinting in the sun, dancing in the wind, cooling my brow in the stifling blanket of summer.

-Only know that I also love your branches, familiar to my childhood swinging, naked and bare in winter, opening new views to the horizon, uncluttered by old litter.

-Oddly the rough and tough bark, rippled and chiseled, I also love, for its uniqueness and protective tortoise-shell-strength.

-Oblivious to your aging, I admire your anchored roots gripping the ground more deeply each day.

-Obliquely I look at other trees, and recall these things I love about you, my tree.


-
(in homage to the author of the Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein, and the early Christmas references I am seeing in poetry blogs, see The Walking Man)
Photo by Christine McGuire, Bristlecone Pine Tree, California, the oldest living thing we see with the naked eye....

Looking at light

Crystal Refraction:

All points wear prismacolor.

Immutable sun!

Another Fall

fall proverb:
“day=night"
"dark=light"

change comes
short of choices.

birds leave
fainter voices.

leaves fade
letting go.

leaking rain
is wafting close.

arctic lives
are turning white.

terns cry
from season’s flight.

fired sky
harvests light.

aging sun
has harnessed night.

memory seeps
an alkaline musk.

fruit feasts
in fatted dusk.

fried and dried
equinox:

preserving thou and I

in dust.

-

-Since we all can't resist a fall poem! Happy feasting this week in U.S. on Thanksgiving....

Love

Why call it falling?

Roller coaster dream stumbling

down your well of sighs!

-

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have a great weekend!

All rights reserved

Dianne Gross-Giese

Flash 55 Friday

Flash 55 Friday!

Like blades of grass under the blanket
upon which your mind reclines with a poem:
like pulling a guitar string to elevate the pitch
higher to match your scalding fever:
like Carmen’s tango dip,

trusting her partner’s thrusting arm
bridging the vulnerable arch of her back:

Bend, do not break.

For flash 55 friday instructions, visit g-man's blog

All rights reserved

Dianne Gross-Giese

for friends

Here's a happy one for my friends' birthdays:

Walking to the Buckeye


just a puppy runnin’ circles in a race
read this grin bustin’ wide across my face
sweat is drippin’ down my back and chest and neck
a voice is singin’ somewhere in my head
pungent flowers blowin’ by upon the wind
hills are callin’ to continue with the climb
can’t stop searchin’ the horizon for the view
hikin’this path seein’ it brand-new

can’t ache for wantin’ another minute more

I keep wonderin’ have I been this way before?
Walking to the buckeye,

strangest thing you’ve ever seen,
Though it's almost winter,

it’s full of fruit, and bare of green.
They say it’s too acidic, inedible and tart.
Well these aren’t tears of sadness,
must be the buckeye touched my heart.

-

Dianne Gross-Giese 10-2008 copywrite

All rights reserved

Getting over the flu

Ever have the strangest dream, that made you feel it was real, ? somewhere?

Lovers in dumpsters
Escape detection. Awake!
Before they smell us!

All rights reserved

Dianne Gross-Giese

earth mother?

every day I am amazed at the intrinsic role I have created as chief snuggler, back-scratcher and horn of plenty.........

Question arose today: does this blog constitute "publishing a piece"?

Happy breakfast, lunch and dinner today!

The devil is in the details

These sticky layers of cold waxy gunk
coat everything they touch
and never pull apart without a fight.
Do you want some bacon today?

I make the offer, holding a paper towel on an empty plate.
O.K. the boys break from wrestling
with less attention than if passing
a penny on a sidewalk.

I turn to the black cast iron
awaiting a transformation of opaque glue
into translucent liquid salt,
coveted by generations to flavor meats, grits and beans.

I object to its evil, artery–clogging properties,
but my sons’ cravings feed their brains a powerful fuel.
Fighting the urge to finish poems on the laptop
and answer the damp laundry’s bell,

I anticipate the perfect texture, worthy of “Elvis’s “
fried peanut butter and banana sandwich,
brown as stained leather, just a shade from black,
I will give them “God in the details…”

Winter's green sustains life

Green Leaves

Green leaves creep
Beneath thatched winter
Memories.

Overwhelmed

Take time, find a moment to pause, today the sacred cat of the Egyptians is my angel:

Rescued

I like to think it takes an angel.
I like to think it takes an archangel.
I like to think it takes an archangel named Michael
who defeated Lucifer
and rescued the lost with Courage,

To bring me, one more day,
back to the choice to Desire.

It took a
demanding lap-dance
from a half-grown
monkey-faced
stubby-tale
curled up kitten,

And I am saved

Melody Evolution

I cannot write poetry without listening to new singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell is one of my favorites. One new to me is Linsay Tomasic. To all musicians:
Melody Evolution

The audience arrives,

Fluttering from spot to spot, or

Readily planted and sinking in.

Settle the mind, smooth the edges,

And tamp time into the moment.

Wait and watch:

The tools and candor of the musicians.

The artists dig and cull

Tease and tune a fertile sound.

We absorb initial notesPeel open comprehension

Feel the roots spread as

The riff weaves its pattern.

The listeners reach out – out –out

As tiny tendrils leaning towards light,

UntilWe find

A synthesis

Of harmony

Blooming inside

Of each and all

When the

Bud

Opens.

Dating again

Tonight is a rare date between my husband and I, married 23 years, I will carry the anticipation like a cat's-tail tickling me all day....

A Taste of Youth
Transported on the wake of a dream
Into lost, cool twilights of summer
A girl’s first taste of foreign lips:
Watery and fresh.
Novel then,
Now universal.
First drink from the “O” of his lips
A spring-water taste,
Clean and quenching.
Any anxious permit to share
With each boy after
Recalled his flavor.
This girl tasted a silvery droplet,
Barely enough for a drink,
Surely not enough for a cup.
Tonight she found the pool
fed by ancient isolated streams.
At the merging of rivulets
she found his flavor again.

Remembering the Veterans and active enlisted with a heavy heart yesterday and today. My motto daily is, do it, for life is too short not to. "LITSNT"

The Place in the Shade Mother’s Day 5-10-08 DGG

Looking for a place in the shade,
we pile out of the cars
into the hazy, flat, noon sunlight.

I scan for our place among the confetti
of families dappling the grassy fields,
with bunches of children, umbrellas, chairs and blankets.

Between the flowers we search,
measuring a pace
across a stone-cobbled path,
Where the trees are sparsely scattered.

“They must be here.”
as we gaze,
Suddenly someone familiar appears:
A grandfather, a grandmother, an uncle, a cousin, a spouse, a youth:

Robert Lasher, senior: only familiar
grandfather who passed in old age
Cecil Lasher: grandmother
and first matriarch to pass from my memory
Robert Lasher, junior: first uncle
who passed in senior years
Dennis Casey: first cousin to pass
in young adulthood
Dennis Turner, the first cousin’s spouse
lost in middle adulthood
And his son, Mark Turner: first of the great-grandchildren
to be lost in great despair.

We absently calculate
dates from the start to the end
to find the difference of their lives…

while the last matriarch
patiently
leafs through the decades
to tell us
of their sums.

We leave with a matriarch
of the next generation,
and we have seen the place with the shade.

Every day a sunset keeps me hopeful and a sunrise settles me into life.

Horizons Expanding

The razor of light
Slices the strident uncut grass

Revealing an emerald settee
Under the draping grape horizon,

Where deer nuzzle between the
Fuzzy shoulders of the earth.

The blood red brush
Flashes colors to life.

My muscles drive
Under the arching trees

To save my soaring heart
From the expanding horizon.

Good morning to the best sunrise, out my kitchen window. A gift of winter, for the sunrises were formerly missed for their early arrival and northern alignment in the summer.

Cold Hills

Grey hills fade away
Cold noon sun withholds color
Hearths lie smoldering.

Happy scribing!

Glad to be alive

Today is the first day I have felt alive after the flu, 4 days of : sicker than the dead.
I wrote this poem in response to the over use of the word glad in email exchanges with a friend:

Don’t Glad-spam My Email 7-21-08 DGG

"Glad", what kind of word is that?
Unlike it's rhyming antonyms,
Mad Bad Had Sad,
It's a watered-down, skim-milk, transparent-wrap word.
It's like a label put on a card,
A yellow plastic smiley face sticker: “Have a Glad Day!”
It's not even enough to have a double meaning
in our elaborate over-embellished world.
Take “Gay” for instance, charged with joyful glee or homosexual culture.
If it had a double meaning, it's only innuendo
is the increment above ennui
for a 50's housewife stereotype
seeking something to cling to
for freshness from television commercials.
I prefer, if I use it at all, to make it an acronym,
Grateful Loving Attentive Dianne.
G. L. A. D. is a lot harder to write though.

Here I am with my first blogspace and I don't know what to do with it!
The inspiration for my space name Rhythm of the Light is this poem,

The Rhythm of the Light 4-24-08

The rhythm of the light
rolls away, rolls away.

An orange orb bounces
on the road, on the road

Signaling the way to begin
or end the day, end the day.

The strain of my feet
chips away, chips away.

My heart heats up a blanket
which drags down, drags down,

While the rhythm of the light
rolls away, rolls away.

Skin’s cold dark drink
renews my speed renews my speed

In center of the road,
tempting pumas, tempting pumas.

Trees are hiding frogs
croaking song, croaking song

and merge with humming crickets
strumming beats, strumming beats

To Night’s rolling blackness
Infinite, infinite:

The rhythm of the light
rolls away, rolls away.

Have a wonderful wintery week.