Subtitles of a Nightingale

Sweet lowly divinity, hold out your fragile hand.

Intervention of breathing leaves me weightless.

How bright morning illuminates your twisting halo. Into these arms allow yourself to fall, slowly, drifting on winds blown from the Sahara. Sand dunes have swept across continents, I have tasted their grains ina parched mouth.  Walk barefooted overfields of forget-me-knot. Into my arms I have folded love, wrapped into tissue paperand closed with sealing wax. My thumbprint, my heartbeat.

A body crosses over an imaginary line. Soon the sun willrise from deep heavenly slumber. A cosmos, shrouded in darkness becomes illuminated in heated glow of magnetic flares. Gilt angels slip beneath waves so I can depart. Destination unknown. Cry me a river of salt water and magnesium, potassium. Teach me the periodic table until I am fattened on elements. Learn me my own atomic weight.  I should have been happy and bleeding, serving servilities servants.  Butterfly wings caught in fishing nets cast upon dry river beds. Cracked, dusty earth coats feet, settles with an asbestos menace in lungs. Glass slides are coated with saliva and secretions of cellular biology. There is history in histology. We have become (or I) a study of cryogenics, no heat exists in love soured by interlinked genetic spoils.

Amber waves lick the shore, liquid glass. If we stop moving quick sand cannot lay claim to a physicality of memory. Every quiet step leads a dance to a rhythmic heartbeat. No deathly cold glaciers drive nightingales west. Open palms release their spring of remembering. I have not forgotten, but practice the patience of forgiveness. Of the self, or the soul. Galileo counted out sin, to mark mathematically dimension of my cage. On parchment, in numbers he drew my naked body into the stars.

An age may pass, my language seeps through fear until I grasp the sibilance of truth. There exists in vocality the essence of freedom.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

Sealings

A voice becomes hoarse from swallowing gravel in efforts to scour an abrasive taste of words. I do not wish to write of you anymore, for I am tired of living in the shadowy glacial chill of a corpse.

Mourners should have left you to scolding June air. Where feasting infants beating wings could have gorged sustenance from your spleen. Or become intoxicated on your swollen liver. Or worse. No one needs a lesson in patriarchal biology.

My utterance transcends unto this,
a state of silence. You inhabit a pill box casket of ash and littered bone, nameless through expressions of a faceless man. Fingers have beaten stakes of refusal. Of disinclination to acknowledge billowing gusts of air wasted in your efforts to enrapture my soul between your cupped hands.

Love is loveless when defiantly taken and I will, if I must, steal back time and body and blood.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

Heron Wings & Angels

I am not really here, simply a figment of an over active imagination that sees things in scales of grey and hues of blood red.

When herons roost in tree tops the wingspans of angels lay still against the heat of the sun. Dancers move to a silent music heard upon a spring breeze that lifts rain across open fields.

And as you imagine all these things I slip towards long shadows cast by deep woods, walk back from where I came and leave words humming on your lips.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2012

Regressions: IV

About the room lay the remains of another day
abandonment looms underneath shadows,
toys discarded and nimble hands
sleep now- as fists ,
a mouth sucking them furiously.

My child often displays cannibalistic tendencies
yet the delicacies she shows
are foreign to me,
her father cannot comment
having drifted out to sea
on the wreckage of a marriage,
never made but marred
over two borders long divided.

Dis-ord-er-ed

I am (our) burnt carcass
turning in dim light
of a diminishing day,
my shadow thin-
under nourished
a ring finger bare to the bone.

There is a shift in time
splitting
spitting
I lay
head buried under
a scent of remembrance,
the sickle moon
moves across my abdomen
tracing lines from where she came
and he left an indelible mark.

What am I if not a woman-
a belittling cry of motherhood
rests trapped in a ring box
high on a dusty shelf,
always out of reach.
My fingers are stubs
wrists arthritic,
my skin has turned
to hues of grey-blue.
This heart resent the effort
it
must
undertake
in beating.
The bleeding cornice of thorns-
stinging nettles and willow- sits beautifully
atop a head that hangs limply to the side,
the tide drags out another breath
as I am pulled under -
into a savage unconscious slumber.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2011

Confession: III

It isn't late
only about eight
I'm in bed
avoiding,
propped in position
by a credulous number of pillows
and over-stuffed cushions.
I am not full of feathers
or food
or wine.

The baby is sleeping next door,
every now and then shifting
and I become still
a breath lingering on my lips,
then she settles.
I exhale and cast my eyes back down
towards words
spilling over words.

I am surrounded by sustenance;
notebooks,
crumpled newspapers of the day
books - half written poems,
confessions scribbled on scraps
of paper.
I shall curse myself later
when I realise I threw them out,
or that they have been sucked to death
as I pick the pulp out of her mouth.

Her need to taste the world is foreign to me.

I am waiting for the evacuation
of myself
from myself.
Later...

The clock flashes
through an orange glowing dark,
street lamps bruise the curtains,
I can't make out the time.
My eyes sting
ears straining in case the baby is stirring,
needs milk
or comfort
or me.

I can hear my insides ripple
a crippling grasp of cramp
runs from sternum to pubic bone
and back again.
Ah, here it comes,
a sense of relief
washes over me,
tiredness pulls at my bones
weighting me ,
gravity refusing to give up her possession.

One day I may be weightless
like the woman
who always dreamed she was flying,
I was always jealous.

Here it comes again
my demon and her vengeance,
my body turning on my body
as if it has done itself a terrible wrong.
I regret for a moment
my earlier choices,
before the pain comes
and its reward seems too far away,
a vision on the periphery
of my reality.
Sunrise is hours away
and I never did like the dark.

It's early
too early and I am spent,
exhaustion has crept into the spaces
I have made,
claws at the empty pit of my stomach
irritated and irrational.
We are strange bed fellow
but cannot stop sharing my bed
in our bare nakedness.

She is stirring,
cooing to herself
she'll be wanting breakfast soon,
my daughter sounds happy contented,
practicing her voice.
I listen and smile at her fullness,
close my eyes for a moment
to feign sleep
to drift away,
before setting my feet on the blue carpet,
before walking to her
to say good morning,
before putting my demons away.

Copyright: Samantha Ledger 2011