Sunrise, #2 RED

put a guy & a bible in a desert

and a Moses girl is bound to appear

it turns the event over

in something sexy; there is a kind of

magic in the red, worn out setting



outside floods the west wing

wall behind my solar

hills. See that

point of disappearance

see that blind spot of decreation

see that hero’s mound behind the

screened-in house of life― i



can’t see myself letting go here;

need the wing with the

making action in the soul of red

outsider girls draw blood

to that


i.e. enliven

bleeding and beating

in the death of a totem dye

a kind of magic

is red



a turning power is the bird

gathered in all those parts (except one)

brings life with humor

to life without



unheard is the little minute

in all (h)ours; don’t mistake this

for something



emerge



©2010 Sunrise, #2 RED
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

Ad Mortuos

...and the dead came back to me when they'd heard I'd found it

sitting on the rock sunning itself, a coiling unpinned


thing, a wing, burning and glowing
chorus growing in the water there on the rock like me
a loaded knot like me
unknotting suddenly and green; ascendant
in amphibian sing
coiling unpinned plopping
down (like me)

betrayer, she (betrayed the rock)

my night of madness in a drop
forced back by death
and calling

surely some tremendum is at hand

a night of madness in a drop
teetered there and clung to stone
until what shook began to rock
in rocking splendor terribly the moan
through frogs and toads and tatter
garment torn; belittled and dismembered spot
smaller, weaker, harder to believe
raised itself still wet and shorn and dressed in
wing (and of its own accord began to sing)

here is where is still the growing tree

her bright spot glazed in christic night
and in betrayer too, the wing eternal
danced das ding

O Sing! O shadow word (but just this once)
of that to which the lord of frog and toad relies
of that to which the dead return with rage and cries

the unperfected stillness

in the speech
of man; O
shadow, slur this speech and stir

bright
love

her death
came back to me and when it did
athanatoi came too;

the whisper full in emptiness
and sign; a glowing
darkly burning yet divine

This poem first published ...©2008 En Kata Poetry Series Ad Mortuos stephanie pope mythopoetry.com



Writing For Ghosts

the best episode

of Buffy
brought together
in solution
the slayers of all times
& formed them into a
timeless series
gathered at once
to muse upon &
doing as they do
you and I will too

to touch this new meaning
the wounded image used,
we imagine our stories
the way ghost writers do

when what they do
is write for ghost bodies

how, in newer poetry,
timelessness moves
a timeless story along

ghost ritings
honor virtual things having
no futures & are not passing
anymore for things;

not things
they
shape the way
haunted blood flows

I loved the fiery tongue
of that final Buffy season
suddenly torched by the
wounded fate in a
divine female form
offering the bodiless fleshed
slayers to paler font; the

little minute― the many
on fire at once
made this talisman



Moon Wings

Everything in the orphanage

belongs; stars are fed and fed

to emptiness, the

dark space

not empty, buoys

a girling in between;

an in between that

is not ―Alive!

***



The moment light fed here

‘is not’ began to be-long;

it longed and moved

movements twy-formed

in being-so; nothing
came first

these movements

swished & swirled

in twirling swishes hissing

where no one wanted to be
starry movements in ‘once upon a’

timed be-long still not anything

& life’s conception thrice prolonged

noticed there was a girl-tale in it and

the holiness of it.

***



The fire, what fed there, had its

own weathered reasoning.

Nay! Two, at least!

Subjectivities already without subjects

knew no riddance; rhymed and reasoned

why a world weight upon it.
T’here came Death; it entered on cue.

Love, his brother came licking his chops, too

and you and I entered like they

star-flung tales tailing creaturely sire.

Nowhere swished feathered rivulets t’here

almost successfully

***



Once upon a milk bond is make-believe

Light, growling is too, in substances tis true

which knew no riddance. So, too

did a reflection likened unto a girl

enlivening a crèche of stars with a tiny God.



And, the story says, he placed her

in the belly region

along with the enlivener, not filling

a creaturely sire who’s tail feeds ‘there’ t’here.

RITING MYTH : : MYTHIC WRITING

           An Orbit of Understanding; A Pattern of Deepening

      For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the
      wanderer in you the ever distant and alone.     ~Kahlil Gibran

On that hill

under that sky
I saw a shadow
lift its head


in that word
in that way
under that
last light.

…Then,
he said “mould”
but, I heard “mold”
and instantly, “decay”

and instantly
the shadow moved
instantly away.


“Write at that,” he said

till it grows on that hill
under that sky
in that word
its own way
that light. In that

last light
                something new.


©2010 mythopoetry.com
An Orbit of Understanding; A Pattern of Deepening stephanie pope  matter & beauty series

Metamaterials & The Power To See

mythoplokos today
invokes weaving
the shape of things
the state of tensions
terrific tensions
under surveillance
and people engineer
metamaterial when
the mind reaches out
to know a space desire opens

a necessary fiction & pteros
transpire to woo us ―I
don’t know if metamaterials
make better burqas when they
swallow whole how she is
not to be seen although the
work to shift reality exists
where nobody profiles anybody
everybody claims

yet at the McDonald’s
here behind the veil
where someone breast feeds
not illegally, someone
is told to leave policed
out the door scaring the hell
out of the six year old
eating his happy meal;
sowing the body means
sewing the cloaking device
one uses to reach over
such spaces covering them up

some things
really do
point to
something illegal as if alien
in something deeper, something
ill & lethal
as if to insist some mojo
in dark death is to happen,
some autumn-sowing 
of Arizonan margins or
Japanese margins
but isn't this a milk bond
knowledge of erotic things
endanger us   

'as if '  reality says
the ‘real’ happens
in stereoscopy
as if the known and the unknown
align themselves one behind one
 behind one behind consumption.

It is

a retreat into matter,
a retreat in to the soul
of the season in vale states that
uplift images; something―a secret

wish, a blocked eros
is behaving its say  which will
retreat into immanence and ways
to work the shape of things
sufficiently rotted that once
upon a then I thought holy;
sacreds are fast foods. So

get back, Mojo!
back to work back to school back
to providing some real 'nourish'
meant; meaning
each passion holds in suspense
other floating images to
surface things I’m not to see
alas, I’m fooling, too! I see!

So let me offer my own life’s
endings back to themselves
in these shapes of rotting
matters and turn the restless
sure-veiled, surveil lance material
which meta matters, too.
And, if these presences help you
to see you
and will I, too
see in these the soft body organs
and necessary inner knife, we’ll
see separately and together how
a desire in camouflage
fully envelopes everything
in lack ―living psyche

is living immanence is
no body at all. And our
living psyche, an erotic ruse
where tangible, visible bodies
disappear, collect and divide our
passions, too in negative capability

lets our knowing return an absence
space that knows what we do not

such light fools even light

©2010 stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
The Power To See matter & beauty poetry series

Vegetal Spirits, Animal Souls

You know how it is here at the end
the inseparable separation is a necessary one
like loosening from the herd stolen heads
and moving a bit backwards
Or loosening from one’s own head

the unheard, stolen life honey-hidden
in the cave of resonance long ago
there is a reverse metamorphoses in the
mother-daughter reflection a man carries
between his eyes under his hat and
nobody gets in to the ballpark anymore
without checking under his own hat

psychic shadows; both the differentiating
lovely spirit bent on a psyche’s destruction
and the loving one reaching across its own
abysmally painful separations with the
newer, (but still disturbingly) unknown
will to live is no longer a monochrome
of singular reflection –everything  is
contingent on how two go on from two

blue water is, you know, a milk bond
one and many separations at once in a life force;
the power to let go is something bigger
the power to seek one’s own boundary way
in the many ways draws together and separates
drawing and separating inalienable
fluiditities of any two rights
not enough or too much
the same thing

each will
reshapes matter out of love
and hate and the will to risk
what shadows will say
in the roots above
to the roots below

and when you climb into the tree of your
inversion, each picture show will feel

for where the real fluid formation

has reached its lowest level

shapeless blues inform prickly edges

soul fleshes

almost touching in the herculean reach

of precise but invisible feelers

red cows grazing in red fields

A Slow Train to Gwalior

Blogs You Don't Want To Miss!

BLOGS I ♥

mythopoetry.com has been running a column called "Blogs You Don't Want To Miss" for some time now. Recently, mythopoetry.com on facebook debuts "BLOGS I ♥". This past weekend a new poetry and art blog by the multitalented South African poet, Amitabh Mitra is featured to mythopoetry.com on facebook under the post titled "Fluid Colors". I got the bright idea then and there it was time to share with blog readers of "Mythopoetics In Culture, mythopoetry.com" the full list of links to myth and poetry blogs I love . Along with that I'd like to feature one of
Amitabh's watercolors.  Enjoy!
                                                             Tree In The Fort -Amitabh Mitra





Blogs You Don't Want To Miss!
Amitabh Mitra/South African Poetry & Art Blog
Kris Oster/Mythic Rhythm Blog
Thomas Moore /Barque Thomas Moore
Dennis Slattery /Greening Predicates
Ric Williams/Photo Art Blog
Catherine Svehla/Cultural MythologyAmerican Notions of Self
Leigh Melander /Imaginal Activism
Cliff Bostock/Sacred Disorder
Stephanie Pope /Mythopoetry Blogspot (naturally!)
Blog Talk Radio/Dennis Slattery, airdate 11-10-09
on Jung & Psychic Energy, The Red Book & more!

POETIC BLUES

One of the most popular poems published to mythopoetry.com has continued to increase in activity to the page over the summer. As a result I thought I would blog news of it and treat you to the page link. Enjoy!

Aphrodite Blues



Oh, and if you like the poem consider sharing it with your friends on facebook and encouraging them to become fans of mythopoetry on facebook.

When Truth Is A Dark Light Walking The Land

In the distance I can hear
the tree who is not me
turn over in light & shade
and the wind who is not me
speak in the light and in
the shade using rarified
juices that style its leaves



and in the crawling dusk
who is not the wind nor the
leaves nor the tree
something is speaking
loudest of all nobody, nobody
not even me


one
no—no
not even me
deeper than me, speaks



to the many who think they
hear too, my heart bleeding;
low branching shivers in a
hearted pause; a breeze—
light by extension, wholly
...ghost

mixes greatness
with the big wide wonder
about to settle down
on the back of the crawling

dusk; I know I belong here
beyond this vision not even me
where even in my unbelonging
no, not even then, am I reachable


©2010 mythopoetry.com stephanie pope When Truth Is A Dark Light Walking the Land Matter & Beauty Poetry Series







notes



1. “konx om pax”/wholy ghost/ music, improvisation and Koran

2. Perpetual Peace: Kants Political writings p107 konx ompax

3. “Truth” (alêthei) as both the un-forgotten, ‘un’ eX-scaped AND
the ‘un’ concealed, wholly psyche (Jung, see in conspectu mortis)

Blogs I Love: Part One: The Crescent Moon Bear

a Japanese folktale retold by Catherine Svehla.











wood block print "Woman Walking in the Snow" by Dorsey Potter Tyson



Once there was a young woman who lived in a fragrant pine forest at the base of a mountain. Her husband had been away at the wars for many years, and when she heard that he was coming home, she was overjoyed. She shopped and cleaned and cooked to prepare for his arrival. But when her husband reached the edge of the trees, he refused to come closer. He stayed outside.

So the young wife gathered up the bowls of food, put them on a tray, and shyly carried them out to him. She laid them all out beautifully. But her husband kicked the food over and yelled at her. "Go away," he roared...


And, now...
(As Paul Harvey says) the rest of the story

Barque: Thomas Moore: Moore contributes to book about Renaissance

Barque: Thomas Moore: Moore contributes to book about Renaissance

The Winged Oak, Chthonie

RITING MYTH, MYTHIC WRITING

Every couple years I go after a writer's workshop or gathering around explorations into poetics, depth perspectives or something related to my discipline as a cultural mythologer. This year's event brings together my interest in all three. This year's event is a writing retreat with Professor (and poet) Dennis Slattery held this August in Santa Barbara and sponsored by PacificA Graduate Institute. There are two sessions in August. I'm attending the second session held August 19-22, 2010.

There are a number of blogs on line you can access to read more about this year's retreat for poetic kinds at heart. Here are a couple and the link to the PGI website.


If you are up for some writing (not to mention riting!) this August, JOIN ME!

Cultural Mythology: American Notions of Self & Country

Greening Predicates

Pacifica Graduate Institute Public Programs

Watermark

The poem marks
a watery realm
a tri via, shaken and disturbed
the poem marks
a de termini for the poet.

The poem is a kind of boundary
marker; the poem is where the
gods came and went
The poem is what the gods left

The poem is where
aesthetic mythoi
in form, an image
dissolves back and in
a transpersonal past
dimension of experience
transcendant ground
soil of Ge
the poem
re
livens the story
of itself
in the gods

The poem is where
images reform
themselves
forward
into personality
and person

a poem changes
the matter
in the
matter

The poem
is a story
a legein
like the one
imbedded in
the peplos of
Athene

The poem is
golden and gold
is the tool
in the skin
and hide of
Hephaistos

The poem
returns gold

The poem is
a woman
changing her cloth
her peplos
her closure

changing woman
herself

the poem reforms beauty
where beauty herself passes
between aesthetic expression
and transpersonal arrest; since

not all beauty is beautiful
in the aegis

the poem marks
this de termini
for the poet;
beauty in being

nothing
be-ing the one property
of all things; the poem

weaves and
what is not beautiful
that disturbs identity
is reunited and
reabsorbed back
into what is

—beautiful!


© 2009 mythopoetry.com Watermark stephanie pope

You've Got To See It!

If you only buy one poetry book this year, mythopoetry.com recommends you buy this one: A Hudson View Poetry Digest Summer, 2010 Volume 5 Number 2. It is a stellar issue!
...
I’ve not seen a collection of poems work so well together in a single poetry volume for a long time.
...
Congratulations to Skyline Publishing and its very fine poets, book reviewer and illustrator for this collective achievement.

The Mead of Inspiration

MYTHOPOETICS

Some time ago I wrote an amazing poem by working with a dream image. The image came in the form of a disembodied voice which spoke the following words: "What is a sparrow to borrow and to marry?" I thought it might be interesting to turn that around and ask the same thing of the dream image. First, what do the three terms sparrow, borrow and marry have in common? And, second, what is the value of that idea? Want to discover what happened next?


You can by clicking this link. Enjoy!

Re: mythopoetry.com on facebook

A Book Review!

The review has a permanent page, too.

Descent Mythos

[excerpt]


Today, in the twenty-first century, our blindness to the underworld appears to have intensified. Our culture’s aggressive denial of death is the complement to our equally aggressive pursuit of instantaneous transformation. Philippe Aries, who studied the evolution of western attitudes towards death, found that it took only 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century to uproot thousands of years of tradition. Death ceased being a commonplace, acceptable and social experience and instead became something "shameful and forbidden" (1974: 85). Baring and Cashford (1991: 159) point out that our attitude towards death had already undergone an enormous change much earlier, around 2500 BCE, when we lost the archetypal feminine perspective that acknowledges death-in-life which makes possible rebirth and transformation. Thus it is that contemporary people regard the slow, arduous journey into and through the underworld not merely as unwelcome, but as abhorrent....

Descent initiates the individual into a new role and a new relationship to life that is irrevocable. In fact, the individuality of descent might be evidence that humanity is moving beyond what Woodman and Dickson poetically describe as “Mother Mud” and “Father Law”—that miasmic and authoritative body of custom and convention that bind collectivities (1987: 181). Descent is a profound individuation process, which Jung defines as “fidelity to the law of one's own being” rather than the law of the collective, and the realization of our individual and unique wholeness (CW 17: 172, 173). It is a “high act of courage” that feels as inescapable as a law of God (175). Because individuation pits us against the collective, leaving us to sift through inherited values and beliefs to find authentic ones, it wounds. But that is not the end of it. To borrow Sylvia Perera’s lovely phrase, wounding creates “separations across which fresh passions can leap” (1981: 80). Trauma and passion are bedfellows.

The painful and forced separation of Demeter and Persephone is, of course, the trauma which sets the Hymn to Demeter in motion. We can see that Demeter’s hymn is the story of fresh passion created by two deep wounds, abduction and betrayal. Hades abducted the maiden but Zeus and Gaia were complicit in his action, Zeus by giving Persephone to his brother without Demeter’s permission and Gaia by “growing the narcissus as a snare for the young girl—a flower herself, as her mother says—instead of supporting Demeter against him, as might have been expected” (Baring & Cashford, 1991: 383). There is another erotic wound that is implicit in the Hymn, too, one that goes unmentioned: Hades’ longing for a consort and queen. Eros is a potent force throughout the Hymn; the visible passion of Demeter and the invisible passion of Hades are just two of many examples. Here, though, I will turn my attention to an even more ambiguous and possibly “invisible” force of Eros in the myth: Persephone’s passion in the underworld, as I first imagined it through reading the text and then as I danced it in a ritualized enactment of her journey.


To read more of this essay click here.


Excerpt taken from Embodying Persephone’s Desire: Authentic Movement & Underworld Transformation by Elizabeth Eowyn Nelson published to Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine vol. one January, 2010.


Professor Nelson is core faculty
PacificA Graduate Institute

©2010 mythopoetry.com

To My Daughters On Mother's Day

The Patio Maidens
The little one in the nursing
felt poorly; knew what scared was
scarred was; it didn't
feel good and nursing
mattered… it's

mattering now.

Nursing for the home
at any stage
where is that
other side?

Several weeks ago a
quail of Artemis laid an egg
in my geranium pot on the
patio and something like a stone
began rolling away beneath me.

Next day she lay
and laid another and then another
and the next and the next
till finally on the seventh day
she rested.

Meanwhile
Aphrodite's dove in haste
built a scanty shanty
in another corner of my patio
on the backside of a
potted cactus living atop
the bookshelf where
I have no book left unread
and a seashell
where still I sit sometimes
and dream...

I was lighting the grill
and got the salmon
half-way done when she came
and lay laying two eggs
then left again.

I water the geranium
from the underside now
putting an oversized
iron skillet with a
flat bottom underneath the pot
which, by the way
I had to set atop a chimenea
to keep javelina from eating its
blossoms the night before. Indeed,
some ways of nursing seem odd…

yet, the little ones in the nursing
have me by the heart and I
feel like I'm all the way back
to where I come from. Something
holy has come over me;
I am fierce about life again
which has started something else
laughing

Picture it! The eggs got laid
one by one in a frying pan
to incubate and hatch
while I must water the frying pan
to feed what fires the geranium
and all this sits atop a curvy
chimenea where Hestia
apparently and presently
keeps safely life's eternal flame
tending this fire by keeping up dis

appearances; nursing for the home
(at any stage) in deed
is unseemingly odd. Yet, presently
and even though
they will come and go
these little ones in the nursing
have made it feel like home to me
again. In your nursing…

make it feel like that.



©2010 stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
First publication mythopoetry.com May, 2005

The Call

no longer her nor here
A cry―Oh!

the outpouring word
more sound than word
yet, both―Oh!

i don’t want to leave you
you said, then
left me

without
alone
along the edge. It was

the end of the season
& the sound inspired
beginning

beginnings over & over began
without symbols or centers―Oh!
darkness fell
in my throat and felt
delightful memories & squeals
& what was soft copper
beaten and hardened
banged on boxes of your things
gestures in what we

lived
loved
lost

shared together;
each rhythm sucked in
never held the sound

i exhaled & intoned
but oh never vanished
& then the fear―oh! my god!
you left me (forever)

i confront your absence
everywhere & over & over
my loss grows larger and larger
(but never in a larger word)

in the distance
in the discourse
broken like a vessel
lost at sea―Oh!

i is loathsome

in a word
a sound
a thing

unloveable & left to sing
a blue and spotted in between
put off, put on―Oh!

the sound for you
grows thin in i
the you the way you wanted
without and

not within
dotted blue
the oh begin

again an i
& i in you
my spotted flesh

my earth and loss
not living her
in me unheard

hears the call
in naked cry
to me to trust it still

tied to the mast
the work
the word


© 2010 mythopoetry.com
The Call stephanie pope

Mermaid Singing

her singing like
splintered tree-waves

has timbre
an earthshaker’s

wastebasket
attribute

spectrum &
envelope

a timber sings through him
with rings of mythical

things tied to the mast
er tied to the shore

keep your pant-legs
rolled

her wisdom is brrrr
aching where you cling

for titans
in ancestral strum

are
playing

sax a
chthon

the mythic images
each to each

that do not ground
& the ground

gives more between
our gods au naturale

you see, Poseidon paid
we still let him



©2010 mythopoetry.com
Mermaid Singing -stephanie Pope
Matter & Beauty Poetry Series

White Stocking Tale

(the pornographer's daughter is gifted)

...in a dream he sat discussing
the nature of the real...ahhh, brilliant work!
but, what do I do about my loveliest daughter...




The Prologue


Here in the southwest there is this... pattern


it's called the step-pattern suppose you
take it in steps...nom-mon
where antimony steps en route
anti nomos = antimony

The first step: annihilation
get naked; greatness feels into every thing
zer- Oh's as close as it can get
to the real mystery god in the pubic zone

***


The Body


to take on the god you have to enter death so
descend like Inanna
(meat on a hook[er])
stripper
take it off
take it all off

her language
hung limp like ours now
in the air, the very air
where it vanished...let's say,
like ours now, in Duchamps...
and like a porn camera lens
zeroes in: we zer-0h hard core
but, before
stepping down
step first a step back (step two)


the steps conjugate negation
(1-1) in negative forms
supernatural object abjection
gets rid of the solid core
no body has what it takes
it (the objective psyche)
zer- 0h's i.e. targets the value
a value within lostness


mmmmm! Gone South! [*]

see? it takes the two to tangle
(as in maid + maid = mades to mis[s] con-strue)
kekropids (like sparrows) get sold in pairs & cons for far-things

(meat on the table)


...will it take away abjection (1-1); does it supply the repetition ???


sex
zer- oh's
is as as is and there
the absence where's her scarcity as stockings

how the horror of an emptiness draws us in
0h! how the dark sex draws us

do not try to see into it
try to see as it sees; step 3: tertium non datur


see like a bird that is no bird
where no zoom-in lens will matter cause
the faux con cannot here the fauconer
(& keeping hope requires this suspense)

for the greatness is not achieved
in the fullness of time
the greatness
has nothing to do with time
the greatness (suspending even hope)
is presence underfire; presence not here
but, coming
and in its being
lives be-ing as is
in the eros

leaving the gap
positive

& so
as is is as
a word with vapored wing
shot from the slow zer
0h in the myth
the language (of sex)
is being
and it
hangs in the air
of the animal

the mystery
hangs
in the coming language
poetry hangs in the air, Step 4

***


Epilogue

& yes to leave the matter
...................Hanging



say yes, &
leave the matter hanging


© 2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved

[*]The poem is inspired by the wonderful essay of Craig Adcock, "'Faucon' or 'Perroquet'? A Note on Duchamp's Morceaux choisis d'après Courbet". Duchamps' bird is a pigeon but it turns out to be a pigeon that is no pigeon for he calls it a falcon. To complicate the plot even more, his 'falcon' is no falcon either. (He's punning.) The falcon, faucon in French, is a faux con. It looks like a pigeon but not quite. To paint his 'pigeon' Duchamps moves between two paintings by Gustave Coubert one of which is "Woman In White Stockings", 1861. Needless to say, they wear scarcely more than stockings! Looking and not looking; looking and perceiving; looking and the manipulations of the viewer's gaze are not a direct encounter with the woman, herself (wearing the white stockings.)Duchamps' faucon 'parrots' something, something that involves the viewer's inability. The viewer is a dupe, a 'pigeon', one who can be made to misconstrue a faux con, according to Adcock's point of view of Duchamp's presentation.



This poem first published to mythopoetry.com

Once Upon A Yew: A White Stocking Tale

Yew chalks a boundary between death and immortal life; its symbol is I
-Book of Balymote, 1391


Imagine once upon a yew that she still lives and spins anew in maidenhair 
to mend the blue wide avé nous once spun throughout and through the whorl
that thundered through the white hands where the pale maid sits turning just a girl. And when she wheels and spins and moans
into the shad, into the ‘oh’ ness of the crone 
behind the spray and veiled, she weights a thread, thus come

how once she more than realized the tuffet moppet spot she sat upon
beds wet in mid and trough a knotting taut to realize the ‘is’ because
she was and is and calls her metis wove in h’s like a shroud, a cloud

she watched as kings reigned the weave within the spot where she is not
and wore instead a knot -a maiden shadow thrown
to orchestrate king-order in a vast disaster-us-affair, home-grown

the knot full well like ©hair in nothing more than (h)air inherited; begun
in not—no more a king than this, a plot: a plot of heirs who plot in hairs

stranded strands 
twisted twists;
shadow mist

the god-airs stand behind her as she combs and cards the dew; O, she places
in her basket blue; the moon, now full behind them and between them, too

dewdrops fall
threads fall
mixed together in the blue

like complex compositions in the shading of a yew
the moon, her emblem, strung upon a string
spirals through the falling threads of dew no thing


the vault of heaven turns and in the turning light
in dispenser of this burning vortex theme
she drew -O... don't tell me!

the air of Eros in its lust
the ire of Ares in its thrust
insist this composing loveliness still spun of air

for her sheen already forming on the distaff drew
to h'earth in both in both what blew this foam the
thunderhead no longer knew; in downward move

in wave of blue, to heap all loveliness upon a yew


©2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved

Green Energy

poetic sublimation connects the image to its
pain. Raw. Wet. Red; girlhood in first flower
what is primary (flowing & deflowering)
is a certain loss in a certain flowering
which is irreversible (meaning certain swallowing)
because all natural processes are irreversible
and why time flows one way and things fall apart


but not why Zeus in his cunning & in his zeal
swallows the mother of the real; swallows her
subjectivities and then agrees, Persephone, too
must be taken. Eating or sleeping
what is primary in the maternal subjectivities
through the flower upon which the god
erects himself in the name of the father is

did she bleed?

the energy of an isolation will increase in time
& in time, come to matter even more
says the second law of thermodynamics
blood to ink in the use; each phrase
made to order, turning toward the order
to mete
to measure
the moonlight in it

Dis (order) ing carries the deep use of the
figures in speech as if they are real, as if
it is we who control them, although we only
reduce them to specific figures of speech
to draw out the abstraction. Raw. Wet. Wed
but

she never gave birth in our world; instead
she gave insight into our suffering
in conspectu mortis (said Jung)
and

she had a mother (who must be laughing)
right where she passes –especially
where she passes
turning toward

the living time of the story


©2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved

Green Energy
-stephanie pope matter & beauty poetry series


Petr Kratochvil's photo is in public domain. Visit more of his work.

While Looking At My Hands

Always there has been this reach
And its limits
Ringless, jointed, feather-fingered--a hand
Not meant to be kissed or touched
Instead it touches
Fingers curled
Salve for the broken, sweet-teared, salted cheek
A living bandage
Folded neatly, unfolded, folded again


And it appears too often patient
One can see the patience
Filed nails, smooth, imperfect
A cared-for invitation
Patted and plumped, dusted and swept
Surely, a god creates a shape as this
Meant to be cherished---ahh
Man should love not worship
A child often does
But, even more than this
This hand may know
The significance of being made for real
And not for show

©2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved

While Looking At My Hands stephanie pope, mythopoetry.com

from Reaching For The Felt Sense: The Handedness of The Handless Maiden

No Water

Every pore
on certain nights
shines
only that art— Thou


and each of us
awake
become awakened
too, imaginally

and contemplative
more and more
Steven’s necessary angel
like the old moon of yore

root upon itself
and of itself
participates again
in nature here

a way to live
the image held
like the god
or goddess

first beheld
a truth
not a human one
loosened in the seem

poetic
is the bridge between
what they said and did
nothing to imitate

no water
only
that art— Thou
shining

©2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved

No Water stephanie pope
Matter & Beauty Poetry Series, ©2010 mythopoetry.com

Waiting For Zero

I love that ‘lessness’
like now when its
less than flashing
the scarlet
already struck
tell me where
is the neon
life of the
closest bar


oh, there you are
scarlet and whiskey
my two favorite shades
blown and streeted
in sheets of rain
impaled to the pavement

is that less
than a flashing field
of poppies floored in
traffic glued to red
waiting for

the turn
the change
the night

and the point
nine, nine, nine
is making
at the pump

three faces
three gods
one life

and…life
a space
that dreams

©2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved

Waiting For Zero stephanie pope
Matter & Beauty Poetry Series

February Moon ©

once in lying
there upon the floor
a winter frozen
beyond tears
eyes not dead
found February
the same as April

once an icy storm
tore night
limb to limb
tried
to bury it
rent it asunder
& christmas trees
lent the morning
sun
an unbreeze


things hung, life shook, nothing fell
to eyes pretending just then—pre
tending, but they didn’t know this at the time
and so they were pretending themselves dead
and frozen; somehow eyes were this icy, too: ©

not without stillness does thy soul yet make
lying now & always because eyes lied then
although not many i’s can hear the heartbeats
the dead soil on low floors eons long
in thumps thumping like titans of ancestral strum
a dark heart from below this ghost breathes in
the earth-shaker’s snore, his work
seen now in sunlit morning, done

years die again during the night like my friend
who died earlier this year –in waves
& trembling & she who was god then
pays dearly in brideprice to god now;
her life, what’s left of it, shared once with me
in that moment leaves me remembering even now
& god, still feigning death, a breath to life
darkens without reason; life in a death year
fills me to the last with the first…
“i” is not even the absence in this odd
dissimilar of phrase but is calling down
the ice bird in what immortals
whisper still to me neither of her nor of
here; not of the risen up
nor of the half-dead, neither her nor here
a god-spirit hanging in the very air of vanishing

no one is blessed beyond fire where eyes are stung
left undone where no one hangs now
& being is empty & becomes no one again
to fill thy ear not here in everything listening too
who with me like winter waits
knowing where nothing hung, life shook
and not knowing, knows that if i am
possessed or inspired or wounded beyond tears
it is here in emptiness she dies
knowing what she knew then
that she has become the wound
without the woundedness in her
& what inheres in starkness & sigh
through grave and perfect symbol
dies; for she is still pretending
(even now) clothed in winter

& she thinks of April & someone vanishing
wrapped blue & crystalline in linen
with eyes not dead & a hole left
in the sky & right there
where her memory is stung
someone has hung the moon

© 2001-2010 from the essay "Missing The Moon" mythopoetry.com
All Rights Reserved

Beautiful Uglies

A BEAUTY MATTER

sometimes I hear the uglies whisper
in the pent up rage of others
and I realize how loveliness
looks from another point of view

dear beautiful uglies
I honor you today
making a welcome space
for you to share with me
how you came to be this way


©2010 mythopoetry.com all rights reserved
Beautiful Ugly stephanie pope

Matter & Beauty Poetry Series
mythopoetry.com

photo: welwitschia mirabilis, often called the ugliest plant in the world

Beauty Matters

where
no one was
looking for
answers and nothing
was found
a find of nothing
then found
beauty
where
no one
carries it


© 2010 Beauty Matters, stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
all rights reserved Matter & Beauty Poetry Series

painting of the aurochs of Lascaux
Upper Paleolithic Art 15,000-13,000B.C.

Mythopoetry Scholar

mythopoetry.com is pleased to announce the publication of its premier issue of Mythopoetry Scholar: Annual Essays In Depth Perspectives. The ezine published January 2, 2010. The theme of this year's annual is Health & Well-Being.

Click on Mythopoetry Scholar to go there now. Enjoy the read!