RED WHITE & BLUE PICTURESKEW (From The White Stocking Tales Poetry Series)

GREW ONE WINTER
     The pictureskew is picturesque
            that knows it is a parasite.  -China Miéville

In foliage on a Texas tree, a pictureskew
"Let it be done to her," said the dream
and it grew in her like mistletoe
grows in winter―parasite
grey winter white
blanketing the tree.

But the tree was willing
& she taught me
that the night's white
grew in her like
mistletoe really grows
in-between
white snow
black branch
red din
blue ruffle
just grows
like the dream grew
last night in me.

Am I not like her just letting myself
do what it wants and needs her to do
knowing mostly it’s not about me at all
while I know it knows the story better
knows just what it gathers just now &
takes what it wants & matters that
into me & into how this night
in me endures it—this night!
(O holy night)

I
go g(rey)
and g(ray),
she
grows heavy
as if divinity
is the disease
and I think now
of the cost
and the worth
in the story.

Am I not like her?
Maybe not
not as certain I can bear it (or should!)
How war-civil old & blue in bark, it
like a branch suddenly remembering
where she, trunked and treed
no longer peoples now in leaves and rust
and must.

Elle at midnight, purpling in fear, I hear
tick slick. What slurs long shadows
against my back slimy? It’s tangle
shocks me wide in wake and panes
dark the holocaust this dreams in sleep
with me. It makes in me so unresolved in it
and only god knows better than it in I
this dream in mistletoe grown. What scars
my skin these shades of bearing it
winning & losing, bluing & grieving towards what union?
I’m bearing it not wanting to (but, it's not about me!) And so,
she lets my own despair closet me in the slim moss cloth
neither me nor mine. Truly, I am guilty! Guilty of letting this
throw arms around me now red in certainties so shallow
these chap in pillow-talk what spirits talk in sex sterile & clean
& religiously right an impotence of image iced eternal, sterile & yet
immortally fertile; although even these insistences slip on my sill come
midnight when

                  daylight

                              will in

                                       over-active
pastel, curl over the slips
wrapping back around the
pink dawn purpling slick
slime-stick shadows these
tick through that deadly
hour while the parasite,
heavy with what's already

                             been done, holds

                         me

      accountable
now
night slips further in-between what matters and what doesn’t.
I

do not have what it takes
god knows
things play take away so
easily with me & I
do not like words that
are not like hers—not
gifted in unsayables;
mine are not like hers
they keep looking for the way
to slip this hold of super-cold
back into its envelope. Let the
messenger slipping-god slip god knows what in-between
this confusa so pregnant in not wanting to until

not wanting to, desire slips growing gray & grey in dream upon
the silver darkness blessing its divinity blue, bee-hiving whiteness
still cloudy in words. The dream mattering clashes and smashes
tick against tock no actual snow but a honeyed overflow. The
radiant light, now blankets small dark desires like
stars freed upon dawn in early new bled light.
Night shines  blue & through, the older fundament
a symbolism of color.

How she burns night as if comfort hides inside the emanation
lives there outside the cold terror’s pretense of purity. We do not
live beyond such having nor live unfree in such doublings the
other this lives now—the thing
in all these greatest things. It lives immanent beyond us
an immortal gold
blue shades
& red knights―things
burning in lights, things eternal.
Royal forms composed & composite & opposite
create life.


O say—can you sing a quickening, par la vie
the way mistletoe in thickening sleeves a branch
where beauty eats beauty and where
no tree warms in any morality; such ritenesses
sing the way its left me at morning so leaflessly
a blue-treed, crux fixation
neither dark & servile nor whitened nor just
nor liberally sieved. Grand silver blues me new a
yearless year radiant in white while the old season of mistletoe
preferences in the same hour a flavor for the
ancient parasite devouring its own soul's skin—and
haunted blood flows. It claims in wrongdoing what innocence
lives no more morally superior than it lives thinned and dead
this thickening stick upon which the colors turn their heads
three ways and live radiant, support remote and shade
like a coat coating beyond slippery, blue-grey silence
what really lives wintering the way winter in certainty & din
gets fed midmorning hints of green.


The tree was willing and she taught me
& the night's white grew in her like
mistletoe grows in-between
white snow
black branch
red din
blue ruffle.


I think now of the cost and the worth in the story
needing some kind of wonder without words
some kind of living light behind the eyelid
clothed & enclosed in those blue-grey folds of organ—hers
a pleasure in soul-making organic to itself.



Even now
I have this deep feeling some wonder without words still lives
ever more remotely to the north of the northern most po(l)led.


©2016 Pictureskew, White Stocking Tale Poetry Series stephaniepope mythopoetry.com  This poem is first published to mythopoetry.com as In-Between Red & Blue



notes

For distinctions between picturesque and pictureskew see Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton and the 'pictureskew'  by China Miéville

THE MUSE HAS HAD IT #6WORDS #MYSTERY

A WOMAN WITH AN URN,  Gustave Boulanger
public domain

AT THE FOOT OF MOUNT PARNASSUS
    If there is no difference in high and low, no water can come down.
                                           - Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, p. 85

vale of tears Apollo
Kastalia gone

©2016 The Muse Has Had It stephaniepope mythopoetry.com


notes

1.  In Greek mythology the image  references poetic genius. For her myth and more see http://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NympheKastalia.html


2. Historically  and for her relevance as a symbol for a misogynistic university see  The Castalia Fountain In The Arkadenhof Of The University of Vienna: On The Meaning Of Great Men

3.  In Carl Jung's 1925 seminar Jung writes, 
Once I had a very wealthy patient who on coming to me said, "I don't know what you are going to do with me, but I hope you are going to give me something that isn't grey."

And that is exactly what life would be if there were no opposites in it; therefore the pairs of opposites are not to be understood as mistakes but as the origin of life. 

For the same thing holds in nature. 

If there is no difference in high and low, no water can come down. 

Modern physics expresses the condition that would ensue were the opposites removed from nature by the term entropy: that is, death in an equable tepidity. 

If you have all your wishes fulfilled, you have what could be called psychological entropy.

see also the Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blogspot on blogger, Lewis LaFontaine