Poetry Ahead: Liminal

 Oh, the constant back-and-forth in my head about the issue of posting poems to this blog and worrying whether I have to submit them only to those publications that accept 'previously published.'

I just shouldn't care. I should just share my poetry whenever I want, wherever I want and not care about that elusive, unlikely future of getting published.  That's what I'm feeling like today.  And, since I'm doing more writing than making visual art lately, if I don't post  poems, I won't have much to post here.  And now that perennial rant is done & I won't do it again. Ever.

Liminal

It’s space made of a bell rung sixty times,

pieced from the gaudy drama of autumn,

its insistence on being about dying

grandly.

It’s where I’m standing chilled and still

at an artfully peeling threshold, strewn with blue

paint chips, a sill covered

in leaf-fall,  all priorities shed

and abandoned for the wind’s

taking.

Crossing that threshold

is part of a bargain I’m making.

First I draw a great inbreath.

Oxygen silvers my center

swirls down to my roots

splayed hungrily in the earth.

I burrow firmly

into the snug province

of gnomes, the dirt workers, the spirit miners.

Lithic glitter dances from my fingers.

Soon I’ll lie three months silent

in the crystal heart of winter, an inclusion

wrapped in wool, tattooed with dreams,

stitched wth silence.

My jitterbug pulse will slow

and I’ll enter a simple fairy tale

of a crone who appears to be sleeping,

yet crosses a bridge,

wildly awake behind her bruised lids.

                                   -- Zann Carter  12.20.11