Portrait at Faiyum

 

she contemplates a different world
and balances her mind
between hot clamor days
and dark darker darkest tomb

poses for a mummy portrait
needful for her afterlife
artist laid upon a plank
with warm lumined beeswax strokes
catching her alive and pensive

she foresees her body wrappings
redolent with almond oil, palm wine
and pine resin for a sealing

mourns a desiccated body, natron shriveled
bereft of brain and liver…womb
identities … all canopic jarred to ancillary

tastes bitterness at the thought
of priests touching still-ed magic
from the even tempo of her heart

and now her pulse and sweat
and tear washed eyes
and eyes…and eyes

see through from being
and a slipping plane to plane

 

Bonnie Marshall

Artist Unknown
Woman’s Mummy Portrait, 70 AD
Hawara, Faiyum (Fayum) Basin

Impromptu and with Ease

Impromptu and with Ease

Westminster bells
partition through the air
to orient for place
a pacing in the hours

 and cockcrows wake
to first ordain the dawn
with much the surety
of rows of daffodils
unclenching in the sun

it is a gentle doing

it is not blast ordained
like thunder lightning storm
from heavy-lidded clouds
decreeing lines for rain

oh, let us dance…my love
impromptu and with ease
to relegate our days
in measured roundelay

Bonnie Marshall

Artwork: Vincent van Gogh
“Wheat Fields in Rain” 1889

The Taste of Sea in Salt

 

 

Pacific Ocean swash
leaves hints upon the sand
of its nether world below

discards abyssal remnants
for moon jellyfish dissolve
and blue mussel shell wreck
and blur of flea hazed kelp

erases imprint of a barefoot path
mizzles spray soak to a chill
and dims wave crash to a hiss

between our separate range
there will be no translation
no easy blending to exist

only recognition of circumference
where the taste of sea in salt
is faint as watermark

 

Bonnie Marshall

Artist: John Miller

his haiku

 

he shapes juniperus
brevifolia with his fingertips;
eyes closed…he tunes its canopy
pinch…pinch…thin skin needle sharp
to Zen blaze intimation

he shaves limewood…tilia
soft curls peel beneath
his pocket knife
thin…thin to matchsticks
scatter scryed by fingerfuls
on a crimson scarf
stolen…one day…in a war

he writes…fountain pen
black ink on papyrus…

grounded mourning dove;
footprints chaos the white sand
I raked…mounded smooth

 

Bonnie Marshall

Drawing by Andrew Wyeth

Hamlet and the Piraha

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?” William Shakespeare   (Hamlet, 5.2.214)

To live as Brazilian Pirahã
is to be wholly in the present
where mists of past and future
are intangibles of time.

To live with Pirahã worldview
is to have no word for worry.
Dreamtime is the same as waketime…
seamless experience.

To live on the Meici River
is to flow one with the moment
where death is observation
eyes close…breath stops…
and readiness is all.

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Salvador Dali