The Shine Journal

 

 

Night Music

 

 

 Photo by Skyro

 

The quarter moon rests in telephone wires,

a twilight clef sign. Jupiter aligns

with Venus, sounding solo notes.

With the sun offstage, other stars emerge

playing the music of the spheres.

 

Windows open, a car passes

an airborne song. Radio waving,

I slow dance in the high school gym

fifteen again for an instant,

but that tune’s now light-years distant.

 

[Originally appeared in last winter’s Astropoetica, an online publication.]

 

 

 

 

Great Chain of Being

 

 

 

Blueprints surround us

but do we know how to read them?

Self-anointed wisest, highest, best,

we borrow ideas from the world beyond us.

 

Breakthroughs occur now and the

when we witness, listen, attend.

 

The caddis worm, larva of the caddis fly,

lives in and drags along a silky case covered with debris,

glittering with sawdust and leaf shards of emerald and ruby.

To take wing, it must leave its case behind.

 

Germ and paramecium:

We can also learn from them.

 

{Originally published in Autumn 2005 Orbis, a U.K. journal not available in the United States.]

 

  

 

At the Blood Bank

 

 

 

 

 

Clench, pierce, pump:

out flows a hot, dark pint.

 

Before I make a deposit,

the nurse checks pressure, heat, iron,

questions drugs, sex, travel.

How little a no or yes tells.

 

A plastic vein transfers saturated memory,

richer than my medical history:

remembrance of every song the Beatles sang

craving for ice cream and chocolate bittersweet

preference for Graham Greene and Edgar Allan Poe

delight in snapdragons and swimming

abhorrence of foie gras and caviar

fondness for spaniels and basset hounds

experience with Iowa winters and West Coast earthquakes

 

Every few months, I gain unknown relatives

eating dessert, petting dogs, singing of love, looking for clues.

Mingling talismans, blood sisters/brothers,

somewhere out there, my secret sharers.

 

[Originally appeared in Fall 2007 flashquake, an online publication.]

 

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My Bio: Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in iota, the Aurorean, red lights, and other publications.

My Motivation For EACH Work: I think the poems are self-explanatory. I have utility wires outside my kitchen window and have seen "Night Notes." "Great Chain of Being" comments on our assumption that the world is made for us, and yet we often ignore its lessons. "At the Blood Bank" suggests that blood carries personal characteristics. As a donor, I've wondered where my blood ends up.