April Entries

…The house warms with sunlight, baking slate floors and honeying the wood. Atop the ebony table, a lone hyacinth, wealthy in her blue, reigns amongst the petite jonquils. In the yard, daffodils hang their linen encased heads, wilted in a stalled bloom, half opened trumpets, sound a solemn earth deep fugue…echoed in the fate of crocus chalices, vessels of violet and orange, dipping under the weight of Winter’s hold….

…Crows snap pollen full branches from impatient trees, flying them overhead, tangling the wood in the dense dreams escaping flues at first light. One crow carries with her cherry blossoms, pink beginnings that endear her silence, soaring to a sycamore’s height. The moon rises against the push of wind and tidal skies…rain is certain to escape in the last few hours…water that sets life in motion…  

…I can feel the frost of Spring snow to come, it numbs between my fingers, humming and lingering like piano strings along my bones, as my steps keep in time with the flashing red lights from a gaping, dark tunnel, underground rails that ghost a thunder and sing within my thighs…a smile peaks with the thought of you…crawling me and the length of stairs, fire and cedar, fog and salt…above us, constellations pregnant with new life…

{April Entries}

E.A. O'Connell

Evening Observations...

…the sun in a set line…casting evergreen shadows…upon a scorched earth…a paced cooling meters within…secreting the scent of water…water in silt in minerals in worm holes and cicada dens…chlorophyll clover and calcium…it ran the length of me…leaving me in shivers…and when it settled in the chaos of my senses…I had a new define for the nineteenth hour…

E.A. O'Connell

Morning Observations...

Roses, 

electrically charged incarnadine, 

hang heavy curves and thorny angles

Rain, 

laying mist orbs that hug leaf margins, 

slowly slipping the verdigris of hosta veins 

Bare feet following a shaded path of weathered flagstone, 

where starling chatter bounces like loose pebbles 

Gray is deceptive to clocks, 

Gray redirects the earth’s magnetism

The muggy atmosphere feels like anticipation on my skin, 

like a thought cupped in my tongue, 

and time running out

From which sage and lavender commune, 

rosemary blues for the bees,

And coriander breezes reduce me to ash

E.A. O'Connell

Open my eyes to the darkness, I see nothing but obsidian walls, their immensity
storm charges, wind and rain fall, the energy heightens

My head hammers and stars swim, silver sheen on phantom koi, I feel the peak of pain
the skull shifts

The fever builds, my thoughts humid, as my body temperature plummets, goose flesh and tremors
I inhale a lung’s full capacity, exhaling an incantation

The hemorrhaging commences

My weakening

Amniotic fluid, and the still, of a soft violet face

The circle doesn’t break, my body withering outside, clasping fingers about a sliver of moon, from the underbelly of a whisper
I cast: my tongue, my heart, the last energy of this life

Ambient noise and voices fade…silence and her infant face my only vision…and a breath opens..stutters to a cry…a crescendo building, pulling me with it

And the blood ceases its run

I’m weak, but she breathes
we sync, and her otherworldly eyes catch mine
gobsmacked

I read it wrong all along:
I’m not what’s new to her
she heralds the dawning of me

E.A. O'Connell

…my head is screaming…my screaming…screaming… …and the mourning doves grieve above me, nestled amongst black locust thorns… …the blue jays’ throats shriek in time with the vibrations of my tangled thoughts… …the crows bow their heads, lowering their eyes, so as not to see… …my head is screaming…everything is spinning… …the vultures wheeling in eigengrau sky…above my body… …a feral hound, black infinite, submits at my side… …a shallow grave, a vessel collecting rain…scrying…and a deathly baptism… …my head is screaming…my screaming…screaming… …wind chimes clashing…silver stacking…knives sharpening… …it doesn’t hurt to hear my fear… …and I don’t succumb… …my mouth bleeding… …the street lamp flickers and goes dead… …the shadows that come forward, garden my soul…burning cypress and laurel, moss and lichen…smoldering stone…and ignite…the pitch fly’s home… …Fly Agaric spirit rites… …my head is screaming…the voice is smoking… …you’re not dying…you’re dying…dying… …my pulse…drumming, pounding, sounding music…my head is percussive beats… …the voice is smoking… …you’re surviving…reviving…inviting… …the water rises…swallowing my body, my face…taking me under…silently sinking…golden spiraling… …coming out on the other side…upright and dry… …dusted in dirt and sunlight… …the voice is smoking…this is what bone feels like bleaching, disintegrating…your hair loose in the breeze, length and weight, are willow lashes designing…language in the grasses…you’re not there…you’re not here…you’re not dead…you’re won…and one…

{I wrote this and had been sitting on it days before I read a quote from Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成), House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories…but that is how my life has always been…timing…the things I see and hear within my head, colliding with the outside world…it’s happened so often and for so long, I know it’s not coincidence}

E.A. O'Connell

...

Blood: stop summoning me.
star scrying and shadow silence, 
cease.
beneath my flesh, 
crawling fingertips 
along brick and stone, iron and bronze, seizing my breaths, 
thrumming my bones,
feet hammering pavement, 
my brain screaming: fire, 
coming to in pitch, 
fingers to my lips, 
a language I keep
undisturbed.
clouded and heady, 
frisson in the Devil’s Hour

E.A. O'Connell