sky pilots

 

where alpine oxygen is scarce
blue phlox taproots through the talus
for nourishment… a bare existence;
the air is iced and once ached my breathing
of the urine stink of dense flower bloom
no matter…its common name is sky pilot

and chaplains who pray over airmen flying
frightened into battle are tagged…the same
along with  those…you’ll have stars in your crown
pie in the sky holy men preaching more in poverty

and Greek sophists…if ever there were sky pilots
rarefied…planting pure idea…insinuating soul seed
piercing blue sky fancy through rifts in adamantine…
oh…implications of a nothingness chill me to the bone

 

Bonnie Marshall

Painting by Marc Chagall
“Le Ciel Bleu”

thoughts for the color blind

 

love is shade movable as shadow;
it is scintillant brightness;
it cannot be defined as if it were
a color described to someone blind
as orange…azure…emerald… a
dainty pink…a blood deep red

its thinking etches or erases like
lace edged sea foam on a beach

it is invisible as gravity…sensed
like space between tick…tock

no spell is implicit in its sounding
for its spelling is not sacrosanct…
it may as well be evol…olev…velo

enough…for we think of it as warm
or chill or thrill or pain or ecstasy…as
literal as pinch…sustaining as if breath

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Thomas Pollock Anshutz

 

 

 

prophecy slipped through

 

prophecy slipped through
open windows…born on a
west-wind  fragrance of pale
ocean to agitate her white
curtains…disarray letters
on her desk…speak to her
in the scrape of gold red
autumn leaves dropped so
carelessly upon her porch,
in sunlit torch-ed flutter
imaged on her ceiling wall

a scrying need changed
currents in her blood…
changed direction of  a
subtle weather vane within
her brain to mediate faint
polarities of thought

a water thirst rose underneath
her tongue… a drowsy scarf…
a need to compass steps across
a room…she pinched her palm
for focus…for holding of a golden
thought against fading brevity
of  the pregnant light

 

Bonnie Marshall

Art by Andrew Wyeth
“Wind from the Sea” sketch