Winter Window

Winter Window
by Gideon Burton

I have been watching at the window, still
enough for tides of moonwash moistening
the cooling glass, the slowing hours, the still
arranging silences. I'm listening.
Above in bloodied trails hot comets score
the flimsy fabric, screaming light. But no
unwintering, no auguring the core
of cold, no pause against the piling snow--
this flow of every evening, evening
to one, to waiting at a window framed
with stains of weary wonder hovering
in something said, in something pure and named
and washing me or watching me or spilled
and spelled with mercies tendered as He will.

Image: Creative Commons licensed through Flickr - Randy OHC

Escape

ESCAPE
by Gideon Burton 

Forget the atmosphere, it is a skin

Of moistened molecules, a slab of heat

And dirt that hems you in, that slowly pins

You to the muddy surface where you eat

The wan pollutions and the heavy breeze

Of broad decay across the tribe of breath

Who chomp and puke and ever cough and wheeze

Until they cloud their time with signs of death.

Remember just the cleanliness of space,

Beyond that sticky sphere of sweat and gloom,

Where nothing heaves its germs into your face

And all will find such distance, blessed room.

       Escape the bounds delimiting your role.

       Into the vacuum launch your tired soul

Photo: flickr - colinjcampbell

The Wanderer

The Wanderer
by Gideon Burton
after the Old English Elegy

Who lives to know my fate, the frost-cold sea?
But I within my breast chest seal this sorrow.
The ice-locked waves divide my friends from me,
no treasure-giver, mead hall, joys unborrowed.
So winter-bound, unlike those feasting days,
near counsel and the gift-throne; friendless now.
No hall companions thaw the binding waves,
and wisdom waits through winters' foaming plows.
Time-blasted, buildings tumble, soldiers pass
Creator wrecks the walls of each enclosure.
So many ancient slaughters, lives of glass.
Where are the brave ones, left to time's exposure?
     Slipped into nightfall, joys in fleet descent
     The rider, prince, the giver, shadow-sent.

Photo: flickr - Nick in exsilio

Not Infinite

Not Infinite


by Gideon Burton

It isn't infinite. I've touched the edge,
the outer boundary, its fraying threads;
I've plumbed the mud that eons couldn't dredge
and found the fissures' fissures where they spread.
Can one abyss enfold more darkened mists?
An ocean's wrapped a cosmos in its flow;
the galaxies enclose in bulbous cysts
beneath a skin so vast one cannot know
the limits circulating, network red
returning down the corridor, benign.
How cold to hold the dryly caking mud,
until a golden thread expands its line.
     We spin, we spin and turn our heads on cue,
     unable to confess the mess that's true.

Photograph: flickr - thelastminute

Moon Woman

Moon Woman
by Gideon Burton
after Kenko, Tsurezuregusa ["Essays in Idleness"] #32 (below)

One night I wandered out to view the moon,
and in a garden thick with chilling dew
an evening breeze delivered faint perfume.
This home must hold some recluse that it drew
into this garden with a spell.
And as I gazed, I heard the door creak wide.
She too would know this moon, and know it well.
Could she have sensed I watched her from outside?
A gentleman, my friend, had walked with me.
Had said we ought to stop to see this place.
But he has stepped aside, has left me free
to watch the moon, the watcher, each their face.
     I wondered, when I heard that she had died,
     if she had joined those moonbeams, cool and wide.

Image: flickr - prayerfriends

Kenko, Tsurezuregusa ["Essays in Idleness"]  #32

About the twentieth of the ninth month, at the invitation of a certain gentleman, I spent the night wandering with him viewing the moon. He happened to remember a house we passed on the way, and, having himself announced, went inside. In a corner of the overgrown garden heavy with dew, I caught the faint scent of some perfume which seemed quite accidental. This suggestion of someone living in retirement from the world moved me deeply. 

In due time, the gentleman emerged, but I was still under the spell of the place. As I gazed for a while at the scene from the shadows, someone pushed the double doors open a crack wider, evidently to look at the moon. It would have been most disappointing if she had bolted the doors as soon as he had gone! How was she to know that someone lingering behind would see her? Such a gesture could only have been the product of inborn sensitivity. 

I heard that she died not long afterwards. [source]

Sinking Metaphor

Sinking Metaphor
by Gideon Burton 


The ocean like a ragged fabric scrapes
the passing vessels, coral-clawed and cold.
It's just a running metaphor that shapes
the currents of my thoughts as they are rolled
from stem to stern, at odds with what is level,
with anything that's docked and roped and sure.
Oh, I could try another one less beveled,
and it would work until its edges blurred
into cliche or quaintness. Look, the storm
approaches (outside, inside, both). Am I
prepared to leave comparisons so warm
with frigid drownings, whales and birds and sky?
     Whatever freight of figures sinks inside,
     you grapple it for all drowning ride.

Image: flickr - Lrn2Go

Say Anything

I wrote this sonnet some time ago when I was feeling blue. I visited with a friend recently whose own mood reflected the tone here -- and for whom I posted yesterday's sonnet, Toward Hope.

Say Anything

by Gideon Burton

In time the seasons seasoned, thick enough

for sediments of sentiment to swell

and harden, thickened with a mud as tough

as easy distance made them in the spell

of unforgotten and avoided faith.

Who knows what healing, what relief or grace

might well have settled, quiet in a place

reserved for friendship thorough in its trace

of due alliance, cobbled in the past

and worn to supple leather in the task

beyond this mere suggestion, slowly fast.

It isn’t wise to question, nor to ask.

The yestertime evaporates away;

say anything, the edges start to fray.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - sparktography

Proverb

Proverb
by Gideon Burton

Three things unhinge the firmament, and four
Return creation's bounds to chaos grey:
The bleeding constancy of dark dismay;
The body breaking, growing ever poor
In time's economy; betrayal dark,
The love of brothers turned to oily stone;
And water dripping, dripping in a drone
of rusted plumbing. I have seen a spark
Of moonlight sizzle over rippled waves,
And with an hour's silent music bled
Myself of what was pale or weakly red
Along my veins. These are the sharpened staves
       To pierce an afternoon, to curb the mist,
       To solemnize the breeze, the evening's fist.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Sarah Julianne.

Rejection

Continuing my week of depressing and moody sonnets (don't ask!)...

Rejection

by Gideon Burton

As heaven’s rivers overflow, cascade

In shearing cloudbursts gray as coal and cold

As wet and naked skin by wind betrayed,

A tumult of the elements grows bold

As timid earth its muddy meadows shrugs,

Then coughs in thickened rivers till their seams

Unweave fresh powers that with forcing tugs

Uproot the oak, bring down the trusses, beams–

So I have been a passive party, mute

In elemental resignation, calm

As nature’s fractured skies or hungry brute,

As ribby children holding up a beggar’s palm.

     As weather will explode then ebb and slow,

     The fury comes as sure as it will go.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Roby Ferrari

Bad Memory

Bad Memory

by Gideon Burton

Forgiven, like the scab of closing weeks

already healing over months of heat

and anger, time digesting trim and neat

the vinegars we tongue with what we seek.

I have a story and its little threads

unravel every telling just as though

the gyroscope of fictions hadn’t set

the terms sufficiently. And though I bet

against myself the thickly kneaded dough

of memory supposes all is dead

that isn’t present, tea leaves steeped in blood

and hatred swilling in a local Thames

some tributary of my lost amens

alive to drying ruts along the mud.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Silent Enigma[w.a.c.]

Without Measure

Without Measure
by Gideon Burton

The birth of water, all that's hard and smooth,
The breath of stars, and all the winds of night,
Whatever heat lies sleeping in the grooves
Of glassy rock. Whatever moans in weighty might
Beneath dark oceans restless in their mass,
Across the folds of time unknown and lost,
The jungled eons stripped of all their past,
The desert's patience and the speed of moss,
More soft than shadows resting on our moon,
The rhythm of a billion breathing souls,
Too much, too late, too long, too far, too soon
The fire ebbing, smoldering in its coals--
    The vistas mourn, contract their awesome span
    As mornings measure me, again, this man.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Iván Cabrera

Layers

Layers
by Gideon Burton

Unlike the coats of paint that thinly stack
their history (the door was brown, then red...),
the layers I've detected won't relax
in mute obscurity. They pause, then spread,
at times like liquid dye that stains the light,
at times like cloth that bunches as it drops,
and other times the layers bind or fight
or squeeze and squeeze until the squeezing pops.
I've seen that layer one too many times;
I've shuffled that one deeper in the deck;
I thought I had unlocked that layer's primes,
Some things I hope that layer won't reflect.
      Like skin that grows acute or dull in turns
      Some layers cool, while others twist and burn.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr -  Ségozyme

Retreat

Retreat
by Gideon Burton


I will retreat to quiet words and few
enough to tender novel names for rain,
for sleep, for islands washed by rivers through
the thin conclusions of this season's vain
recital of the fragment elements.
They shape themselves to moister paths and long
conveyances of sound, the echoes spent
and spent again compounding in the strong
and warming currents, mouths inside of mouths
along these thin agreements, breath by breath,
by any reckoning a distant south
to thought, as chilling in its focused rest
as sleeping burdens waking, fog and mist,
a melding image, tongueless pushing fists.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - tanakawho

Remember all the darkened months of waves

Remember all the darkened months of waves

by Gideon Burton

Remember all the darkened months of waves
against our midnight swimming skin the day
the other moons appeared, their humid rays
invisible, and yet we came to crave
their buoyancy along the breaking planes
of milky starlit water boiling thin
behind our lenses, down the silence trimmed
by intimacies published by the cranes
who stood observing us ascend the sky,
our naked steps uncertain on the air.
We swam, the roping moonlight taking care
to blanch the taste of salt from where we’d fly.
Remember all the waves of dread, of dark,
annihilated by these starry sparks.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - stuant63

Who knows what trances, what pale ash, what tin

Who knows what trances, what pale ash, what tin
by Gideon Burton


Who knows what trances, what pale ash, what tin
Remittances escape in vapored questions,
A marbled weakening along the thin
Allowance embered in the evening, lessened
By azure remnants, scraps of afternoon
Abandoning their grasping tones, and sheared
By capillaries branching hot and soon
Among the aspen summers.  Can the clear
Desire of animals or patient rock
Embalm the ebony again?  Can God
Bring texture to the lands he mocks?
The cubes of oxygen, the evens odd
Along the furrowed waves?  Who knows the deep
Enameling, the place where iron weeps?


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - azglenn

Incisions, crimson, ripple down the skin

I watched a National Geographic show about Angkor Wat, Cambodia with the kids. Mysterious, ancient, eerie. This poem seemed to fit the image of this library in ruins from that strange spot in Asia.

Incisions, crimson, ripple down the skin

by Gideon Burton

Incisions, crimson, ripple down the skin

of western sky, as though the other side

were blood and thunder stanched by timely light.

The remnant moisture glistens in the thin

and thinning twilight. Vapors melt, subside,

relax into oblivions. The might

of sunrays abdicates, the crickets’ fright

is amplified in quickened thrums. The dried

and sullen face along the rising moon

approves or disapproves in measured pride,

and if and when a thunderhead compiles

in thickening stealth, the moment is too soon:

our Amazons are filling full and wide

with tempered salt, with sinners rank and file.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo credit: flickr: stuck in customs

The Stone of Fear

Here's a moody little sonnet for you. Go figure.

The Stone of Fear

by Gideon Burton

Come here and place your hands along the stone
of fear. And feel its cool relief, the breath
of sympathetic coal, of rivers sewn
with threads of night into a salty mesh
of swallowing. The patient nerves explode
in silence, frayed with razored fire quick
and coarse. Remove the moonlit cover, load
each palm with oily pitch, your skin grows slick
enough to ripple in the very scent
of hair, and every felling stroke betrays
the origins you’d long suspected spent
and empty, lacerations in the grey
of graces. See them rising, moon and stone,
each sentence pregnant, visible, alone.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgement of authorship

Photo: "Moonset" by Clive Shaupmeyer