THE LUNAR YEAR

Hunger Moon

That’s when the food ran out. The stock

Depleted even the saved potatoes gone

Rotten at the eyes. Our savings cleft

By half, all love foreclosed, the doors

Of home padlocked, the windows boarded.

What else can happen? Weather broods

Over the bleak horizon. This moon is also known

As the snow moon.

Crow Moon

The raven invented the world, now the crow rules

Its lesser partitions. It encompasses

The slyness of politicians, the ruthlessness of love.

It waits for things to die or else it torments

Songbirds, those who can tongue

A harmony every crow despises.

Egg Moon

The lost wax process creates an egg

Of gorgeous dimensions, Byzantine

Geometrics suggesting a rage of contained

Passion. But another egg is pure.

Cool in the palm and distant

As that place where everything begins.

Milk Moon

It is this specialization that defines us.

How we link to every creature

That nurses its young. That

Baptismal drink the Orient refuses

After a certain age. What sort of wisdom

Clinks bottles on a stoop at dawn

Like earliest, beloved memories.

Strawberry Moon

You find them knitting the pasture

With rubies, the wild sort

Whose sweetness is so compact, so perfect

That cultivation seems a sort of sin

Original as the path that led us out

Of infancy to the bloody-hearted world

Wearing its seeds like a cloak.

Thunder Moon

Everything here depends on nitrogen

Of which thunder is merely the voice

As a slap is the sound of forked anger,

The sound angels made as they fell

Into the firmament, the first denial.

Sturgeon Moon

Producers of caviar and isinglass

One richly edible, the other a bonding agent

Like the lust that glues two lovers.

Flesh of temperate waters. The miracle

That feeds a jubilation

Of disbelievers. Cast your net. Have patience.

Barley Moon

All grains were once wild

Uncultivated, there for the reaping

There for the first lively spirits

Fermenting like every wish into

Something achievable, the malt

Of high ambition.

Harvest Moon

Every goddess walks

Under that parasol, her arms

A cornucopia of fulfillment.

No wonder we worship this

Unblemished guise. No wonder

We think no matter how many banks

Fail, how many ships break into pieces

In the coming gales, we’ll still

Have this: how we were blessed

Just as the good times ended.

Hunters Moon

That’s what we do when everything

We counted on has collapsed

And all coffers are empty, all drawers

Divested of silk, all trigger fingers

Reinvested with darkness. Walk

Silently in the tracks of the dispossessed

Ensuring it will not be you.

Cold Moon

Hunker down. Survival is now the key

To your heart, the tone-deaf song.

If you make a fire it is certain

To go out while you’re asleep

You’ll wake with your feet frozen

In a crossroad of bad choices.

Shaking is the way your body

Fights cold like this. Huddle together.

Wolf Moon

They have come back, those predators

Of the prairie, the steppe, the open range.

Protected as a parliament

Of oligarchs. Their guard hairs rising

As they sight you, out there

In your unarmed villages.

North American Review

Poetry magazine well-versed in criticism

Poetry magazine well-versed in criticism

Artists of Exactitude

ARTISTS OF EXACTITUDE: AUDUBON AND STUBBS

The bird that Audubon depicted

With such scrutiny was compelled to fly

Into the static existence of the portfolio.

Stunned out of the bayou,

Each feather a perfection of detail.

Its inanimate spirit a paradox.

The horse that Stubbs bled dry

Pumped full of tallow to investigate

Its arterial and venous expressways,

Strung up on hooks and skinned

Exposing the armature of muscle and bone

Exact as chilled rage defenestrated

Upon the page of science and art.

Obermeisters of observation

Threading the needle of particulars—

Why foil the imagination with diffuse mists

Of oriental peaks or pointillist

Picknickers or watercolored wetlands.

These two seized

The heart of passion, that bloody industry.

To get it right, the object

Has to die

So we can see its

Utterness, its suspended miracle.

Rockhurst Review

Rose Red to Snow White

A dark wind batters the door,
our minds unchink as
the chimney roars and the eaves
shriek in their rusty dreams.

Huddle by the fire, sister,
something is snapping in the applewood
and sparks ignite our nightgowns.
let us save each other.
Let us marry these ashes.

Don't leave the comfort we've found
for that rap on the doorjamb.
God knows who'd be out
on such a night in a blizzard
like this one. Have no pity
on travelers far from town
in this fierce weather.

But you've unlatched us,
let a whirlwind of white flakes
confuse our destinies
and succored a brute of fur
whose snout embeds
in your fabulous hair.

A thorn stabs
my red heart
as you lie down
with the great bear
bringing him to life
with your white body.

How can you be sure
he'll turn at last into something
noble, that he won't always
raid your breasts for honey
or sleep grunting all winter?

Wisconsin Review. Collected in The Lonely Hearts Killers by Joan Colby. Spoon River Poetry Press. Also anthologized in Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairytale Poetry.

White Lilacs

The white lilac has a hundred ghostly fingers.
It points at the first stars.
It points at me
standing in a May twilight
with barbed wire hooking the darkness where
barbs of stars bloom astonishingly.
The cones of the white lilac
shake in a dark wind from the south.
Fragrance rattles
into air, odor of sweet
bones, night-mouths.

All night the lilacs will shudder here
at the edge of the meadow while
stars dazzle the sky's bush.
That black bush of menace.

A ghost
walks over my grave as my flesh rises.
The roots of the lilacs
strive through my skull discovering the holes
I gaze out of. Existence
is terrible. The white lilacs
tremble as I tremble
departing into themselves,
into their clusters of oneness,
refusing to be a symbol,
admitting nothing.

from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve by Joan Colby
Alembic Press

A HEARTBREAK IS A SIMPLE FRACTURE

Nothing ever heals without a mark

The bone thickens

Over the hairline crack

And the skin bunches itself

Like a garment secured with a safety pin

Over the site of a wound.

Fire leaves its red blaze

On the wilderness of the body,

You follow those signs to pain

That ancient thickening

Whose memory makes you wince

Like a scar bereft of sensation

But hideous to look at.

It’s said when a fracture mends

The broken place is stronger

Than ever before. But remember

The stiffening, the inevitable loss

Of flexion,

Small deformities located only

By feeling.

You might seem whole as a vase

Carefully cemented by an expert

In the repair of

Rare vessels

Yet the weather will compound

Old injuries

Auditioning in each sprain

Or broken femur

Whistling along the nerve

Like a northerly.

Examine the eye transfixed

By awful visions.

The lover vanishing down the stairs

For the last time,

The child disappearing

In deep water,

A building on fire with every window

Orange as a marigold

Blooming with screams.

Examine lips

How they blossom with small roses,

How the thorns of language fall

From them like hooks,

How they open dark and sudden

Like the crevice

In which eels lurk

Vicious as tongues.

Examine the heart

How it is pierced with an arrow

In all the depictions of love.

It is a prisoner

In a jail of bone knowing

It can never escape alive.

You can die of

Its breaking. You can die of the callus

That forms when there is no response

To its assiduous knocking

the new renaissance

Crazy Rain

Twilight.
The dull insanity of rain.

Your mother is telling ghost stories
to the wind. Her words are lost
like indulgences that caused the great split of faith.
You remember for the first time in years
the act of contrition you repeated like a charm
before sleeping. You were a child then
with nothing to be sorry for. The rain
taps the glass, its black fingers
burgling your dreams. It is the stranger
at the door asking directions.
You shoot the bolt. Trust was the first thing
you were missing. Then love saying its name
against the crack in the window.
But it sounded wrong. It sounded
like a scheme. Someone was trying to get in.
You nailed the boards
over those openings. Only the rain
swiveled through the fish-scale roof
taking the way
of least resistance. Now it draws
a silhouette of loss on the ceiling
over your bed. Those four posts,
the evangelists. You slept in their
care under the guardian wings
of angels plucked
for your comforter.

You're no child any longer.
The child you were
cringes from this sentence and grows small
as a comma.
Each impersonation of the mirror
frightens you. The bone and ash
of your ancestors. The name you sign.
The ghost
in your head who suddenly remembers.

The rain is unfeeling. It pits the earth.
The earth is unfeeling too.
What are you doing here
expecting to be loved.

It rains, it rains
like crazy.

from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve by Joan Colby
Alembic Press