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.
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-( 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
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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.)

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(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.
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- 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.
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The kitten
came close
enough to bite
the party blower.
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-The Sunday 160 challenge is to write something in exactly 160 characters, including spaces.
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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."
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She would have nuzzled into his neckline,
arms under his, pulled him to her chest....
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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?)
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-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
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-all rights reserved, 2009