Red Woman

Red Woman

By Stephanie Mesler

I see you, a dismal speck of grey, washed over with the red that is myself.  

You are withered and infinitesimally meaningless.  

You bring nothing to my world…

or your own.   

Without my blazing energy, you’d disappear altogether.  

You stand out, because you are framed by me, surrounded by me, lucky to be seen at all in a tiny bit of the glow from my spotlight.

I allow this because my flame cannot burn bright without twigs to keep it stoked,  

I smell smoke as it rises around me.  

The ground is scorched beneath my feet and the sky is murky.  

The bravest of firy men try to tame my power.  

I toy with them.  I let them think they might  shine brighter than I,

but, even the hottest of them, bore me after a short while.  

I brand their thighs, take in the smell of burning flesh, before sending them on their way.  

I pretend not to hear you cry at night,

when I let my fire turn to embers.  

You sob for lost warmth and the dullness of my glory, 

But I need rest and your sniveling, your needs, have come to mean less to me than when you were a living oak tree.  

Still, I listen and I remember a time when I wanted you to be whole and alive.  

I dream of singing with you - two full voices filling the sky with song.  

I taste your tears - or maybe those are my own.  

Either way, the saline makes me thirsty.  

That is when the rain comes.

It is dangerous for an inferno to drink freely of the falling rain, 

but that is what I do - I stand tall and I drink.  

The water is fresh and tastes of a time before I was made of flame.  

You are awake, too, and I see you stand, for the first time in,,,I don’t know how long.  

You stand beside me and together we drink deep drafts from a puddle that is forming around us.  

I feel water at my ankles, and then, my knees.  

It stretches out before us, as we stand in the deepening lake, now up to my waist.  

Where you were once bare and grey, dull within my burning, you are now coming green.  

Buds appear on your branches and I feel the first shoots of your rebirth when you put an arm around my waist and whisper, we’re back.  

Before long, we are floating in a great sea of blue, 

You are fully alive and I am no longer the color of fury.  

My red has faded to fuschia.  

We are specks in a wide, wet world.   

And we sing in harmony, of our new beginning, and of a future that lies somewhere beyond the horizon. 

Red Woman is © Stephanie Mesler 2024

Villanelle On The Loss Of A Friendship

Art by Blue-eyed-girl-23

By Stephanie Mesler

The greatest pain is caused by friends,

who turn away when you are not your best.  

They know the way to turn the blade.  

When all is well, your brightness transcends

above their pain, above all trials and tests.

The greatest pain is caused by friends.

When they are lost, your hand extends.

You lead them home and let them rest.  

They know the way to turn the blade. 

Real friends are true even at the ends

of predictable circumstance, even twisted and stressed.

The greatest pain is caused by friends.

They rip at the seams, the violent gash your heart rends.

They open you up and empty you out, leaving a cavity where once was your chest.

They know the way to turn the blade.  

You lie down alone, wanting to make amends,

but that job is not yours. Still, for restoration, you’d take on the quest.

The greatest pain is caused by friends.

They know the way to turn the blade.  

Villanelle On The Loss Of A Friendship is © Stephanie Mesler 2023

Blue Woman

 

Early Morning Rain Stops The Gasps (a Clogyrmach)

By Stephanie Mesler

Early morning rain stops the gasps.

Like cotton wrapped around a wound,

it softens and dulls pain.

It works like valium,

not healing,

but hiding.  

Early Morning Rain Stops The Gasps (a Clogyrmarch) is © Stephanie Mesler 2023

Love Soothes (A Fibonacci Bell Curve Poem)

by Stephanie Mesler


0+1=1 Love
1+1= 2 Is not
1+2= 3 as easy
2+3= 5 as it seems in books
3+5=8 or in romcoms on the tv.
5+8 =13 Love is not even as easy as that first sweet kiss
8+13=21 or the long anticipated burst of passion that felt like you’d found home.
13+21= 34 All that is just the start of a journey no longer taken alone; Now you’re in a rowboat steered by two people with their own sense of true north.
34-13=21 Unison rowing can result in dizzy circles; At times you’ll row alone, feeling
21-8=13 like the labor of love buries you under heaps
13-8=5 of untended wounds.
5-2=3 Then a touch…
3-1=2 or smile…
2-1=1 soothes.

Love
Is not
as easy
as it seems in books,
or in romcoms on the tv.
Love is not even as easy as that first sweet kiss,
or the long anticipated burst of passion that felt like you’d found home.
All that is just the start of a journey no longer taken alone; Now you’re in a rowboat steered by two people with their own sense of true north.
Unison rowing can result in dizzy circles; At times you’ll row alone, feeling
like the labor of love buries you under heaps
of untended wounds.
Then a touch…

or smile…
soothes.

© Stephanie Mesler 2023

Roll Down The Hills With Me, a Villanelle

By Stephanie Mesler

Roll down the hills with me, let’s go home.  

We’ve been exposed to the sun far too long.

It’s almost dark and the forests moan.

Maybe another day, another year, we will roam

beyond this circle of hills, away from their song. 

Roll down the hills with me, let’s go home.

The light slips away now, day is done.

At dusk, we will hear their arrival, the ghoulish throng.

It’s almost dark and the forests moan.

Come with me through the dreary gloam,

Alone, I am puny; together, we are strong.

Roll down the hills with me, let’s go home.

We will land on the valley floor, in the brome,

before night falls, back where we belong.

It’s almost dark and the forests moan.

Together, wrapped in twilight, let’s scamper home.

Let’s be abed before Llyr sounds his midnight gong.  

Roll down the hills with me, let’s go home.

It’s almost dark and the forests moan.  

Roll Down The Hills With Me, a Villanelle is © Stephanie Mesler, 2023

Mother Was Not Smooth, a Sestina

By Stephanie Mesler

Mother was not smooth; she was not genteel.  

Mother was sharp, like a needle in the eye,

and blunt, like a butcher’s mallet.  

Born into a motherless home, she learned early to cope with solitude.  

Alone with a man who had not planned on raising any child, much less a daughter, 

She learned to love silence

Early morning darkness enveloped her in silence.  

Gowned evenings among the genteel, 

away from the home and daughter

that demanded more than just the mother’s watchful eye,

used up all of her sociability, stole her grace and made her seek solitude, 

wherever it could be found.  Her mornings, she guarded with a tone that crushed like a mallet,

“Why are you awake?  Go back to bed,” decreed the mallet.

Don’t you know this is mother’s alone time?  Silence!  

She sat on the sofa, smoking in the dark, surrounded in her solitude.  

Here, she was herself, for herself; bereft of the veneer of the genteel

politician artist preacher’s wife.  In her jaundiced eye,

There was no love for the home, the man, or the daughter.  

I was the invisible daughter -

she, who learned to avoid the mallet -

she, who was also a needle in the eye.

I moved from room to room, through pea soup silence,

cutting through the air, like the well mannered and genteel

cut through societal barriers and silence.  

I learned from the lonliest how to embrace solitude.

My own points got sharper and my tongue grew terse; I am my mother’s daughter,

in the end, so much more than my father’s - he valued the elegant genteel,

even as his own words cut to the bone and his fists crushed like a mallet.  

In a daughter, he valued only bragging rights and silence.  

I was to be evidence of his own value, proof that he could create what was first seen in his mind’s eye.  

Mother looked the other way when he punched me in the eye, 

an event that led to a full week’s solitude.  

I was condemned to missing school, unending silence 

at home, time for my wound to heal, so no one would look at me and see the daughter

of a monster and his mallet.  

I was captive to  that blinding veneer genteel.  

I have grown to be both sharp and smooth, the daughter

of a mallet, who is, myself, a blunt, hard, damaging, self-protective mallet.

I am also capable of gentle, gentlewomanly gentility.  I am needle Genteel.

Mother Was Not Smooth, a Sestina is © Stephanie Mesler 2023

The Prognosis

By Stephanie Mesler

When they say you might (or might not) die,

That you might just be miserable for the rest of your days,

but they can’t say how many days of misery you’ll get to enjoy,

you try on clairvoyance.  

Looking ahead, how far do you see?

Can you see another 25 years?  

How does the next decade look?

Can you see next year?

Next month?

Next week?

Are you sure of tomorrow?

When these questions cannot be answered,

when you look ahead and see nothing at all,

you get philosophical.

No one ever knows which day will be their last, do they?

Shouldn’t we all live our todays like they might be our last days?  

You decide to assume tomorrow may not come again;

You act like you have nothing to lose

And, before you know it, you have built the life you always wanted,

A life you really don’t want to lose.  

And that’s when it happens.  

The Prognosis is © Stephanie Mesler 2019

Moot Goodbye

I used to believe I would say goodbye.
I would stand before you, an equal, unafraid -
and tell you that I forgive what I could not tolerate.
But the day never came.

You died, bullying to the last, surrounded by strangers paid to tolerate your vituperation.
Somehow I knew you were gone, though no one bothered to make the call.
Googled the proof; seeing is believing.
Confirmation stunned me for a day before grief descended.

I wasn’t sad you are gone; that was a relief.
I was sad I never got to play out that scene I had imagined,
The one where I stand before you and say goodbye,
The one where I am stronger than you,
The one that gives me the upper hand.

I was sad that the Daddy I loved was not to be trusted,
That the relationship I imagined was never real.
I was sad for the childhood you destroyed
And the fear you built in me that I carry with me still.

I am sad for the love you gave up when you drove me away,
Sad that you were on your own at the end, among people who had no stake in your redemption.
I am sad for what made you what you were;
You were a victim first and a monster second.

I wish your life could have been different,

So that my life could have been different.

Goodbye.


Moot Goodbye is © Stephanie Mesler 2021

Golden Mourning

 

Golden Mourning was created as part of a Writing Workshop in Second Life.
The prompt was this picture from Debra Kelly Makeup Pinterest page.

Golden Mourning

by Stephanie Mesler

The sun invades too early, changing sterile white to blinding gold.

My own pale hands, yellowed in this light --

The spot next to me vacant a year to the day,

loss ferments in my gut, so much virulent anguish.

How to commemorate the day that dares to start with saffron glory

when it should have been the day the world ends?

I have prepared to face this day assuming it would rain,

that the sky would be black with clouds and the streets filled with dirty water.  

But here I stand, looking out the window toward the hill where you are buried,  

naked except for this unnatural auric glaze.

© 2021 Stephanie Mesler

Coming Full Circle

Written July 6, 2015

Coming Full Circle

By Stephanie Mesler

There are constellations I would not see and cries I would not hear,

had I not learned to live with my insides always turned out, 

exposed and bleeding, open

to life and experience, to knowledge and pain and joy and fury.

You made me who I am.  

Sometimes, I think that’s a good thing.

You were the daddy who built swings and filled my sandbox.  

You tied my rubber raft with rope so I could not drift into waters above my head.  

You made a chicken wire playpen, so that I could crawl on lush bluegrass 

while you read the world’s great books, sometimes out loud, 

and sang me opera and spirituals and talked with passersby.

You were the unpredictable dad, who sometimes went AWOL,

who was quick to rage, impossible to please.  

Sometimes, you hit.  Often, you bullied.  

You were competitive for me 

and against me.

You were the father everyone envied

because I did not tell them what might have made you look less than…

I tried to be one of your accomplishments

It was never enough.

You did not love 

the daughter,

the girl,

the child who could not be molded in your image

I tried to get it right,

dated men like you,

men you mostly hated.  

You saw yourself in them and could not look in the mirror without flinching.

That is, I suppose, a sign of...something.  

Through the decades of my life

I have fallen again and again into the trap of happy memory,

allowed the danger of relationship to be outweighed by shimmering, gooey, optimism.

Last time ‘round, I said I was done, and I am.

Now, we do not speak --

having hit a wall too high for me to climb again 

(I’m not young anymore myself, you know)

I slammed a door shut behind me so that you can never again walk through uninvited.

When I think of you, it is mostly in shades of yellow and blue, happy thoughts that tell half the tale:

the Christmas of 100 books,

singing together from a balcony,

watching live ballet,

the way you cooked white fish in red sauce when Mom was away,

how we made up fantastic stories about complete strangers to pass the time on long trips.  

I remember the charm and humor, the intellect and art.  

There are dreams I would not have,

stories I could not tell, 

songs I could not sing,

had it not been you Mother chose, though no one will ever know why she did.

You will be dead soon.

For better or for worse, that will bring relief.

Then, I will dispel the somber murk of darker memory and 

create a vast and glowing void to be refilled with more of what made you Daddy.  

In my fantasy, it is safe to be your child,

safe to open the door one last time before it’s too late,

safe to say goodbye, face to face.  

I will one day write that scene, though it will never happen.

I will give myself the gift of coming full circle.  

© Stephanie Mesler 2015