Nest of Flames/"Miscarriage"

The poem "Miscarriage" (No, it's not a sad poem) that I put in Nest of Flames was already illustrated here:

Follow the link and keep going to Next> to get the whole story.

Dialogue #1

Alarmed by arousal, overwrought but alert,
we awkwardly terminate arduous touseling.

This morning
across the parking lot
you swim through October sunlight

And clamber to the island of your closed arms.
One spicy code calibrates our responses
though, damaged by teasing, we pretend distance.
But we swing when you laugh at the leaves on my sweater.

(italicized stanza by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #8

Play with the truth and with trusting simplicity;
the abundance of faith makes beauty efficient.

An abundance of beauty makes faith unneeded.

Your glut of gracefulness is incredibly cloying,
an engine of played-out, unctuous ploys.

The smell of rich earth.
I lie among hollyhocks
watch the soft white sky
ignore dissatisfied men
their circling, caustic words.

(italicized stanzas by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #7

With domestic links removed from my loins,
I left ruined sequoias for the river-quest.
My few chattels with their faint enchantments
decay in my satchel like sad excuses.

Yes, I am the river
and often you have dreamt of me.
My silver bubbles streaming through your fingers.
You return to land before childhood.

I loot the banks, burrow for philology,
But otters wound with unanswerable words.
The rapids construct parentheses that stream down
to where I meet my match in the muck that yields methane.
Can I learn my mouth's own language and remember
my self out of the circle of animals?

Yes, but you must swim under the mud.
See my markings
the snails, the starfish under my skin.
It is not pleasant
When the black muck fills your throat,
your lungs.
But you will survive
to crawl onto the rippled sand-bars
where the sunset
forms towns and washes them away.

(italicized stanzas by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #6

Provoke a frolic, vie in affronts;
Turn phony shyness into shocking fun.

Is your mouth as warm and soft
as it looks?

My dry uvula, like an adroit yo-yo,
joins in enthusiasm for your joking thigh.
The hot underside of an oral hunch
puzzles modestly to a mossy puddle.

(italicized stanza by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #5

To be in love is to live in bondage
Where honor and discipline are redundant oddities

She carried a blue-gray bag of pearls.
One by one they fell on the sidewalk.
If leant upon
you fade away.

With a mouth full of chalk, I choke modestly--
no protest to the militia boy prodding me along
But fastidiously I kept your antique clothing
splendid-- no larvae, no splotches, no leaching,
and searched underground for a palisades or a grotto,
paid off the bouncers, stole a burning palm tree,
I cling like silk as it climbs to your side,
Sputtering in the showers at the spot your shadow was,
Prophesying in a puddle the pangs of the proud.


(italicized stanza by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #4

When the blood pools heavy about your heart
smarminess, kowtows and smells must be cut
-Ephesian sucklers must fire the city
of nematodes massing to annihilate mystery.

The hour is unknown
I tell no secrets.
Like gardenias mushrooms glow
larger than fists of men

The peppery tradition of pageless dirges
is a fit of nerves that is never fatal.
Don't worry, I irradiated the rotting wood,
The nameless shock of sugarbeets is nourishing.

Your mother plays the piano, the orchids admire her.
A small loss clutches to climb into her lap.
This harried child seeks hollows like a church.
Legato gliding like blown glass called the girl.

Kiss the baby, slap the baby, put the baby down

Around her metal breasts
flies spiral.
Milk splats on the floor.
Like a puppy the baby laps it up.

She plants her babies
among the mushrooms in the cellar.
Under the black soil
a city of children's bones
(matchstick thin and white).
Towers, tunnels, bridges.

(italicized stanzas by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #3

Sullenly beachcombing, with sick biorhythms,
a frustrated trickster tries to get free,
finds hope and scissors to sacrifice a horseshoe crab
for a return to the civilized tangle of Soho.

Your sullen trickster,
let him go. Have him leave
my honeysuckled cliffs
pebble beaches
tidal pools
where life is ordered,
rhythmic.

The rough ocean oscillates its ravages.
The law around his ankle is lonely and insular.
He dreams through portals, stripped pink, away from drumming,
And a million trees that trill against the marching.

(italicized stanza by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #2

Carving itself, acceding to capture,
the heart with its nebula heals the fanatics.

White hot teeth, razor lips
shred slips of flesh
suck yellow-jackets
from the apple blossom

The dust forms a macrophage, a dark mesh
that makes weapons as blunt as blacktop where it wanders.
Old memories of delighting in marshmallows release
the quieted dead end, throwing quartz ovals.

You've never
fooled me.
And your violence is not hidden.
It shines from you
like sweat on the trees
in the heavy summer dusk.

In the dialectic of laws, speculations and delusions,
pause to taste the pure tones,
the harmonics of wisdom in well of moods,
that temper the unwritten toxic rules.

To check if I deserve the disease or the chatter,
metallic pizza is the perfect test.

(italicized stanzas by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #17

Use “feminine” means to demolish fiction,
that meagre holiday that cements the hideousness.

Lace ribs on spit accordion style,
and secure with holding forks. Ad-
just on rotisserie above drip pan.
Let ribs rotate over slow coals.

(italicized stanza by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #10

It's time to really taste the root--
The night can chew through nacreous cheeks.

The Root of All scares me.
I want the sores on my face
to be soft roses hanging in the dark.

Press ointment through your veil to your vesicant ego.
There is no warehouse of seeds, no soil for this weather.

Hazy grey, this August night.
Attendants asleep in the hall
I'm clinging to a sound:
smoking moon through barred window.

(italicized stanzas by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Dialogue #9

The laws of figures bend fatuous lines
crawling down highways to a crash with history.
From ardent insomnia through slow arrogance
Foggy boldness farms embarassment.

I don't care.
I sit alongside the foggy highway
where wineberries ripen and fall among columbine.

Red lights swept the swans along.
Pines won't mention why the pigeon mourns.
You may be strong-armed away to a street with walls,
shot in derision, unshaded, unwreathed.

(italicized stanza by Moira Scheuring)
circa 1990

Cherry Trees

Cherry Flower

Cherry Trunk

"This picture says it all."

Prompt for Long Island Poetry Collective Workshop, May 8, Huntington Library, 7pm.