as the rain patters on the roof

[i am a placeholder for something greater]

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comments welcome. We're low key here.

Those Ghazal days before April:

Ghazal #1

Trouble grew where the snow flew, and where snowflakes now fall
collecting in piles at the foot of where these rivers fall

and collect into pools of water that feed the trees. When the snow
melts, those trees will spout flowers. They too will inevitably fall.

I love the apple blossoms, knowing they will become
the plump, ripe fruit I imagine tempted Eve before the Fall.

We watch the blossoms flutter to the ground and sit there,
mouldering. It makes me sad to watch your face fall.

So when spring turns to summer, we'll sit on the front porch,
sipping chilled lemonade and watching the sun fall.

In longest days, we run on the aslphalt, melting soles of shoes;
we'll play hopscotch, and I'll promise to catch you if you fall.

As with all things, summer has to end,
and shorter days usher in the Fall.

With the dying of the light, follows thoughts just of dying.
We walk a feild where thousands of soldiers never knew they'd fall.

We walk a bridge over turbulent waters and feel in our bones:
it's a pretty place where empty people choose to jump and fall.

The darkness cloaks us, and you begin to cry,
so I try to find a place where your tears will never fall.

I'll find a place we can dance with deer in a forest clearing
and watch the sparrows swoop like leaves that fall.

Days grow shorter, one by one, as frost blossoms on my window
and gentle white flakes again begin to fall.

I run back to the place they gather. Your tears are welcome,
for this is the place where all the waters fall.

--

Ghazal #2

Mine were the fingers scooping into the peanut butter jar,
and yours were the hands screwing the lid onto a jam jar.

At night you'd tickle me and tell me jokes about magic tractors
that turn into fields and a door that is actually a jar

I read a story about a tiny man who lived in liquid:
he wasn't a testtube baby, but he was born in a jar.

I stepped in a nest of a twilight bird that I heard
they used to call a Goatsucker, but now it's a Night-jar.

You look so comfortable, dozing on the couch,
but you always knew when I had my hand in the cookie jar.

Day 1

Here's to making it out alive

i.
I could make that tired old comparison
about how the city lights look like stars
but I won't.

ii.
I see a bug,
lost in a lamppost's light,
and suddenly it's the most important thing
and I have to sit down with the staggering weight of it.

iii.
I sit on a slab of concrete,
backpack at my feet,
wind pushing against the planes of my face,
feeling like a schoolboy who's too afraid to go home,
or maybe he lost his home long ago.

iv.
The warm air rises
to the top of the stair well.

v.
In the morning,
the clouds have draped themselves
over the mountains
in an ombre of gray,
like vision leaving eyes for greener pastures
and crows fly across the clouds
in the way crows so often do.

vi.
the first of the forsythia flowers have fallen.
They sit like bright moths on the asphalt
or scattered stars against a sky of soil
or fallen stars sinking slowly into the earth.

vii.
we shiver in the chill of an early spring rain,
and I weave my way through a crowded crosswalk.

viii.
tell me a story of the men who searched for the gods
in a landscape of wind
and died in desolate places
their hands still reaching,
reaching.

2

I Am Fairly Sure I Am A Reincarnation Of Guy Fawkes' Hidden Fear of Fire

[removed for contest]

3
(I actually don't know what this is)

Yes, it's pretty bad
when it spews chunks
close to your face
and you feel the heat of the stink
rise to your skin
acid enough to melt metal...
but when it sits like a gourd
in your stomach
or a billiard ball the size of a basketball
when it settles over your mind like a dusty cobweb
when your eyes look and look and see nothing...
I don't think there's a word for it.
I just want to sleep.
Let the dust cover my body.
It will keep me warm when winter comes.

NEW POETRY SERIES: THE RINGS OF SATURN

Spoiler

Phoebe - Bright One
The first ring of Saturn is a fogged up window
that extends forever.
When we light it up red, it's a shock-wave, a crater,
larger than the sun,
7000 times bigger than Saturn itself--
or more, because who can say where these things end?
Earth might be floating in Phoebe.
If she weren't so dim, she'd be two full moons in our sky.

Phoebe the ring is named after
Phoebe the moon is named after
Phoebe the moon goddess
who is the very personification of the moon
in ancient myth and modern poetry.

Scientists call Phoebe (the moon) a lot of names.
Centaur, captured, dark, distant,
irregular, retrograde, trapped.
She was a visitor from an outer system
who got lured in by glowing rings.
Phoebe (the ring) must have cloaked her,
sheltered her in a fog, a sleepy dust
slowing her travels, every speck
a whispered sweet nothing.

E - Echo and Mathematical Constant
The second ring of Saturn is made of icedust
spewed from tigerstripes of Enceladus
(a moon that was named for a hundred-armed Giant
now buried beneath Sicily.
How he was pulled into orbit
around a real gas giant, I do not know)
E cradles Trojan moons
that have moons of their own:
Telesto, Calypso, Helene and Polydeuces,
Greek myths whose names mean
Success, Conceal, Torch, and Sweet.
E holds these moons close,
covering them with caring kisses,
coating their craters with bright ice
that sparkles and smooths.

Alkyonide Arcs - Pallene, Anthe, Methone
Alkyonides: Wintry, clear blue skies in Greece, or
the seven daughters of a giant.
I like to imagine them, in white dresses,
the youngest sucking her thumb,
holding hands before they throw themselves
into the sea. Grief over their father's death.
Poseidon's wife, in pity, seeing the drowning girls,
white dresses looking so much like wings,
transfigured them into beautiful white birds--
halcyons, a type of kingfisher,
whose name also means "happy times gone by."
They are thought to nest on the ocean itself
during the calm time of Alkyonides (the weather).
Then, the Alkyonides (the daughters)
must have broken free of the ocean
in a spray of foam.

From these facts, I can only imagine
Pallene, Anthe, Methone and their four sisters
loved their father more than life itself,
but found peace in feathers and waves.

The rings themselves are faint.
Mere hairline breaths circling 'round and 'round.
Perhaps those three halcyons
broke free of the atmosphere
and circle Saturn,
imagining their father
is right around the bend.

I don't think I told you how much I like the guy fawkes poem, but I am also enjoying the feathers and waves from the last poem.

you make me fall more in love with space than I already do, admiring with wide-eyed wonder these stories you spin. also, your language? it's beautiful, these hairline breaths that give your words a starry alcove in the sky; your writing is so light and it's breath-taking.

G - Gravity and Enstien Tensor (see: curvature of spacetime)
The fourth (or is it sixth?) ring of Saturn
is a cough of Aegean ice,
with a blink of bright,
and is mostly
forgotten.

Janus/Epimetheus - transition/hindsight
The fifth ring of Saturn is another story of moons
(rings are just moon debris after all)
Janus and Epimetheus are so inseparable
they were thought to be a single moon.
They sail so close, one's orbit
is only 30 seconds ahead of the other's.
Janus is the god of doors, archways,
January, transition, and is two-faced;
while Epimetheus can only look back.
How tragic that Epimetheus's bother,
Prometheus (foresight), dwells a ring away.

Epimetheus cannot look ahead at his brother,
just as Prometheus cannot see
Epimetheus behind him,
sometimes as a silhouette
against the burning
of a distant sun.

<3
I don't know how you do this
These are so beautiful :,)

I love the whole concept of space that you're taking on at the moment and it kind of reminds me of the one time we all got 'Sevens Ways to Reach the Moon' in the spotlight but in a way it's different and I like that. I hope you keep working on this series because dang, girl, it's good, especially the newest one that included the mythology and I'm learning so much!

F - failing grade, female, part of the ionosphere, and the Dominical letter for a common year starting on Tuesday
F (the 6th ring of Saturn) is a feisty one. It changes its looks hourly.
But this is another story of moons.

Prometheus (who we all now know as Forethought)
also brought fire to man, and the Gods punished him
and all mankind. Part of this punishment
was the creation of the first woman.
Her name was Pandora
and the gods loaded all the gifts of seduction they could onto her.
Her very name means "the all-endowed,"
and she and her descendants would torment men
for the rest of time, as a "beautiful evil."
But it wasn't just her mere existence that plagued mankind.
For the gods had given the All-Gifted a gift.
A box.
You may have heard of it.
Prometheus warned his brother Epimethius not to accept gifts from the gods
but Epimethius accepted Pandora. How could he not? She was everything beautiful.
She fell into his arms and opened her box behind his back.
Plagues and pestilence, toils and tribulations were unleashed into the world.
Only hope remained within the box (the poet never told us why).

Now Pandora and Prometheus ever circle around Saturn,
encased together in F, the ring that formed
when they collided.
Perhaps their constant bickering is why F's shape changes so often.

Spoiler

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIA07712_-_F_ring_animation.ogv
a video of Pandora (left) and Prometheus (Right). Prometheus acts as F's Shepherd.

The Roche Division - topographic name for someone who lived by a rocky outcrop or crag
This is not a ring.
This is a place where there should be a ring
but, inexplicably, there is not.
In a way it's a ring of emptiness.
Named after a man who loved Saturn's rings,
it's funny to give his name
to something exactly its opposite.