Living the Dream

Come, let us have tea, you and I,
in painted ceramic cups and bannock
slathered with the hum of bees.

I will set the blanket on the greenest grass,
close to the sea where the surf laughs.
We will tie messages in green bottles
and set them off to foreign lands,
riding on gleeful waves, pretty in a wide blue.
We will pick orchid blossoms from tropical trees,
perfume our prayers with them
and pluck wishes from the coral.

We will ride the clouds of latitude.
longitude and continents, on magic carpets
of women’s wry laughs and girlish giggles.

We will discover new stars and galaxies
and give them names, like children,
after our best friends and once-upon-a-time lovers.

We will sit in the shade with our legs hanging out
in the sun and trumpet on the leaves
to call the tiny bits of sky our heaven
although we be in human place
and we shall laugh at the voices
of the girls we used to be.

Come, let us have tea, you and I,
paint our faces and sun our bellies
and slather each other with joyful life.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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Dance

Like bodies pulled and pushed from me, they dance

Dipping to the dearest breeze
Beaconed by the blow and suck, boneless and fleshless,

They leave their shadows dancing on the lawn
Shoulders and shoeless they whisper truths
Of angels with no wings who have the faith to know

If they were not pegged, so, they would run
From this populated air

I have seen them dancing on the line.

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“Look”, she said, from the sunken hammock
rocking to the amniotic pulse
that hummed through the chain that linked on the hook
that was screwed into the tall pines
that reached all the way to heaven,
“that bird is walking upside down, down the length of the trunk.”

He took notice, though noticing was not ‘normal’ for him.
to her, he seemed a puffy little politician, scrambling for votes
of confidence from crawling ants and eight-legged walk-abouts
who hid beneath the fluttering shadows of spring
as he cocked his head in slightly more than concern.

Was it a he-bird or a she-bird, she could not know,
or where the  mate of the season was, or whether he, or she,
migrated back here from a winter’s sojourn
on some subtle season in the south, or whether they even had eggs yet
to lose, in the winds, or to be taken by nest-robbers.

She decided he was a male, quite filled with caterpillars,
beetles, wasps, bees, a bulging belly and gray mourning coat,
feasting after a funeral, perhaps.  In fact, the rusted curves
beneath his wings, may have,to some, designated him “Doctor,”
with little time to scrub before coming out to check on her.

“How does your recovery go?” he asked between the puff on his pipe
and his interest in something beneath his nail.

“Listen,” she said, “it sings to the babies in the fur-lined nest.
Do you suppose they sing back?”
 
“What nonsense you have become since our trip back from Africa,
sprawled against that jute like a sunburned sunflower, your eyes
black as misery and your belly mapped with the roads of the journey.”

She watched the titmouse, heard it chitter, and knew him to a hawk
waiting to feed on the rest of her.  Her nest was empty.

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The Democratic Popular Republic of Algeria
Wilaya of Skikda
Amouadj Publishing House
The Cultural center of Ramdane Djamel
Skikda 21425 Algeria
Attestation
We M.Ahcene Douas the director of Amouadj publishing house attest that the poet: Carol Dejarlais from Alberta, Canada as a member of our consultative staff has contributed in the successfulness of the house by revising our literary publications and by writing prefaces for our translated books.

the Director
Ahcene Douas

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Someone thought to give him another chance
of pleas, prayers, punishment and manipulations.
So they picked him up from where he sloshed
under the kind shade of the Northern Store
and took him to The Meeting.

Riverside Louis’ head was full of steam,
his clothes and skin full of fruity premature death.
He seemed sullen in the metal bent-framed chair
that left him sliding sideways in his seat.
He’d heard all these stories before, hell, he’d lived them
like a canoe with a lost paddler
slipping through deep waters, over treacherous falls,
roiling in slow eddies that held him and rocked him
until he puked up the remnants of his denouement.

He knew the speaker, drank with him more times
than he could remember, although his memory
was half-drowned, and knew this man felt alive
when he had him under control, for a few minutes
in the basement of the old church, where it was cold
and the decaffeinated coffee was hot and the steam
rose from the cups and drizzled down the sides of the mug.
Making amends for a drunk is easy. Sorry shouted
from the bottom of the gorge can often be mistaken
for a cry for help from the swamped.

A canoe, by the willpower of the surge,
will right itself and carry on downstream.
Riverside Louis knew this, like he knew
how fast a bottle sinks when it lands
in the middle of the channel. They’d rowed
together in separate bilged boats.

He’d say anything for this cool relief…anything,
but, “ I’ll quit my best friend, I’ll stop this dance,
sideways to the brink of the cliff that looks over
into the swirling eddies of something
that almost looks like a long cool drink.”

Righting himself, just in time for the serenity
of slipping to the cement floor, drained
like the bottles he’d left on the bank,
he saw the circle loosen and the wave of gratitude
that they had invited someone ‘worse-off’ to join them
in their courageous rowing to something better than Louis.

They’d collect him again, from his slow canoe to another crisis.
He was their broken branch, along the river, to remind them
where not to travel.

Tags: Poems, Riverside Louis by Shewolf
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