The Life and Times of Alice Maude

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Songs From A Suitcase

by Leslie Smith Dow

© 2015 Leslie Smith Dow

All Rights Reserved

POEMS

 

Silver Queen

Monet Hesitates on the Japanese Footbridge

Prayer for Two Voices

Girl Lost on the Ice, 1914

Brown Trout

Looming Under Nyiragongo

The Eternal Forest

No Mayan Epic

Egypt

The Amazon River

Sweet Edie

Lily

Everything

Fairhead Soul

Manitouk

Margaret’s Road

Labyrinth

To Whaleback Shoal

Green

Dharamsala

 

 

STORIES

 

The Lake

Bless the Virgins

Real Estate

Unnamed

Water

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POEMS

SILVER QUEEN

 

Thirty days I walked her shadow

following her rocks her streams

hills of silver are what I seek

flecks of it in her jet-black hair

 

Spokane is mountains behind me

only Raven knows the way

dropping sticks in my path like totems

to great deeds remembered, left undone

 

Too far I’ve been lured by fortune

my hammer divines for home

the ashes of my fire scatter

at the apex of this last day

 

Down I lay under

her full belly of shimmering dreams

a witch’s moon, rising magic

twilight mountain-wrought

 

I am a hundred dreams of silver

dusty hooves and clanking metal

men digging the earth into a deep blue sky

I heard the mule train rumble by

 

Into stillness I woke

bathed my fire in icy starlight

streaming water of silver and gold on my skin

she’d hung my clothes to dry

 

Her gifts were berries and salmon and sun

wrapped in Raven’s fur and shining dawn

I lay in her arms like beauty

 

Deep and deeper into dreams she wove me

through forest-deep days and nights

she carved her riddles on my skin

 

The cottonwood groves sung her words

sung them up high as a hymn

how hard I believed on this lost path

I’d found my way

 

Only on later clouds did whispers start

rippling across the ice-cool lakes

her voice called endless through the pines

deep and black as thunder

 

On the edge of wonder

she has bruised me

under her shadow and twined

me in her web of forest sleep

 

My mouth is a trout on her twisted hook

her face is the rising moon

I am the howl of the midnight wolf

her voice is the Raven’s wing

 

She rumbles like an illness

sifting sandstorms running through

Silver Queen she calls to me

I only want what’s mine

 

Two times I saw the rainbow

two times it ended at you

 

Monet hesitates on the Japanese footbridge

 

Uncertain footsteps over the Japanese footbridge

looking into water black as eyes asking the question

which holds the true light and form?

followed by the deadly pause I cannot see

On canvas the colours grow:

the brush on weeping willow leaves

that’s my sign of anger

the one name that dares describe this bending pain

 

And here is the Grand Allee at midday

nothing but blazing passion under a sun

a sun I held inside

as darkness became

 

Light remembered on hemerocallis

crushed where I lay

waiting for the earth to receive me

this is what you must look like now

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