Cold Planet

That Messenger god, that playful god

I was Mercury whose ankles ferried

the passionate fire of fleshly suns

volcanoed up so long ago in butterflies

of star-candied bliss.

That trivial god I, the firefly,

winged close in wild eccentric orbits

until she pulled me close into her fire.

She unfurled around me through the long,

slow arc of hungry years,

igniting me with bittersweet berries

until I strangled on them and died.

So I blew her fires out

and she folded space to trap me

through long, slow aching revolutions

dusted by angry flares of hungry ashes

butterflying up like moths of coal.

Copyright ©1997 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

All Rights Reserved

This poem first appeared in the Sangreal Limited Edition Chapbook

Ghosts

Time passes, and time leaves ghosts,

ghosts came when the asteroids cooled in early seas.

Ghosts swirled the soup with ladles of molten ice,

shifting carbon and hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen

until single-celled life emerged and matured,

worms and bony fish and plated amphibians.

There are sea-ghosts of squids and lung fish.

Chambered nautiluses drift like spectres.

Forests remember change, distant shaking,

the tread of narrow-eyed, knob scaled kangaroos

and scurrying, egg-stealing mammals,

the meek would one day rule the world –

world rulers can be meek no more.

The skies remembered the asteroids.

The dinosaurs sprouted feathers

and remembered the skies.

copyright (c) 1997 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

This poem was first published in the Sangreal Limited Edition Chapbook

Evensong

No sour note its beauty marred;

I heard the music from afar

And hastened in the orchard night

To dancing candles of fox-fire light,

Where the heavy moon cast silver globes

Upon rings of mushrooms glistening fair

For faerie folk that held court there

Amid the drops of swirling light

In gossamer and cobweb-robes.

Faster and faster the fiddlers played,

Dancing within the enchanted glade.

Round and round the faeries whirled

And in the moonlight madly twirled

To the skirling of their magic song.

The apple trees waved with breeze

By mortals unfelt through autumn leaves

Until, slow-rising there came the dawn,

And with the night the host was gone.

In the orchard’s new-day glow,

I heard the music far below.

I heard the sound of dancing fair,

And wished aloud that I were there.

copyright (c) 2002 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

This poem was first published in the Winter 2002 edition of Fables

Touching You

between us and through

this smoky glass wall

            I thought I saw you

            clearly

clearly it was only glass-

distorted shadows playing god

            with my subliminal desires

            on funhouse mirrors

copyright (c) 2000 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

Cold Planet

That Messenger god, that playful god
I was Mercury whose ankles ferried
the passionate fire of fleshly suns
volcanoed up so long ago in butterflies
of star-candied bliss.

That trivial god I, the firefly,
winged close in wild eccentric orbits
until she pulled me close into her fire.
She unfurled around me through the long,
slow arc of hungry years,
igniting me with bittersweet berries
until I strangled on them and died.

So I blew her fires out
and she folded space to trap me
through long, slow aching revolutions
dusted by angry flares of hungry ashes
butterflying up like moths of coal.



Copyright ©1997, 2008, and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop