Ghost Priest

A sliding haze

in dark-webbed branches



     wavering gauze-edged, inhabited

     by a voice furred with frost,



a haunt of gilded questions.

love gnaws me


     a phantom

     grace             splits from that pale mist.







*Illustration of erasure*


An erasure of Sylvia Plath's Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest

Sleep

Out here,


             It is dangerous.



mad men inhabit the blue hour,



glittery fictions glide

In the crevice of shadow


comfortless as firedogs in the wind.


here,

heat-cracked crickets

creep into our hair.

 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Erasure of Sylvia Plath's Sleep in the Mojave Desert from Crossing the Water

Wicked Expeditions - a found poem tribute

Wicked expeditions

   seizing
 
        wild   bitter greens

the blistered brine     still lives in me.

I praise   wild

   bristly chicories.


I linger lost to blossom,


sap & seed.










Thank you, Dana Tommasino, for the essay at Narrative, Primal.

As if from the Shipwreck we returned - A Neruda Cento

Climbing vines murmured as we passed.

The gray stones knew us - the wind

in the shadow. Between you and me

a new door opened.


All that we learned was of no use:

we emerged from the ocean

as if from the shipwreck we returned.


Everything carries me to you:

aromas, light, metals,

boats filled from within with black light,


there too I would like to let my blood sleep

against the devil's webs,

     against organized misery.



You have seen the same sky each day,

the same dark winter mud, the endless branching

of the plum trees and their dark-purple sweetness.



Night has fallen for you.

Perhaps at dawn we shall see each other again.

 
 




Cento Source Text: The Captain's Verses Pablo Neruda , 1952
Image: Fisherman at Sea by William Turner

Erasures

Follow this link to construct your own erasures online.

Bonewhite light - A Plath Cento

Something else hauls me through air——


Listen: these are its hooves:


A bonewhite light

behind all things.

The low smokes roll from me like Isadora’s scarves.


A life baptized in no-life for a while,


the spirit

escapes like steam.



Tonight it has receded like a ship's light.


I can't get it out of my mind.





*





This is a cento constructed with lines from Sylvia Plath's poems from Ariel: Ariel, Elm, Fever 103, and poems from Crossing the Water: Insomniac, Last Words, The Surgeon at 2 a.m., Zoo keeper's Wife

Smudges - an erasure

The first morning:

those first disquieting hours

trying to distract myself,

wandering, listening, wondering how

we still know less than nothing.



I never realized

how everything is permeated,

the heavy noontime air

alive with shimmers and mirages.



However much we didn't want to,

however little we would do about it,

we'd understood: we were going to perish

of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon,

then someday.


I remember

starlings beneath the eaves,

carats of nightfall,

every sidewalk scribbled with hearts.











Source text: Tar by C.K. Williams.