The Nature Of Fire

 

 

The Nature of Fire

"The  great desire of a flame  is to continually burn.

 The nature of fire is that it always wants more."

~Corvidus the Elder

Under the wing of the Crow

hides a feathery system of madness;

students burn syllables of darkness

spat into the alembic of sanity,
turning gossip of  metaphysicians
wanly cadaverous by starlight,

whispering quicksilver clues.

The philosopher's stone still eludes them

though they work with the frenzy of madmen

to dry the cold humors of water, push
a natural progression of vileness
to purity using the flame.
The nature of fire is that it's immaculate;
the mourning of fire is that it always wants more.

They speak these glowing desires

in the tongue-twisting gibberish of blackbirds,

court the devilish salvation of  oddity,

vulgarly cawing of victory in the

soothing-sweet chant of the damned.

I cannot credential this lunacy

despite my degree in Catastrophe.

I toast it instead with the elegy

of a memory;

our glasses hold legions of flames' flickered casualties

like ladies lavish with luxury

pile amusements in portmanteau'd  piracy,

 

knowing fire will always want more.

 ~December 2013

 

lightly revised, July 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

reposted for desperate poets

   Woe For My Spurs

Original process notes: Poe prefaced many of his short stories with quotes, and many of them were ones he made up, as I did here with my  excerpt from the works of the imaginary alchemist, Corvidus The Elder.   

 

"The philosophers' stone or stone of the philosophers (Latin: lapis philosophorum) is a legendary alchemical substance said to be capable of turning base metals such as lead into gold... It was also sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality." ~wikipedia   And what deserves an elegy more?

 

 

Image: Alchemy the Useless Science, Remedios Varo

 

 

Flash Friday Fiction 55 Special April Edition #4

It's time to reprise the 55 for the final Friday in April. This time, perhaps because of the current situation globally, I have really been thinking about Galen and his platform and how lighthearted it all was, and yet how it managed to bring many different kinds of people together in all the best ways, and inspire some truly funny and/or amazing poetry and flash fiction, along with all that camaraderie and kickassery on the way. 

So I ask all who were around at the time to remember him today as we play with Galen's meme.

The rules are the same, 55 words of prose or poetry no more no less, and link the url of your effort in the comment section.

The prompt will be live from

Friday at 12:00 AM to Sunday at 4:00 PM

Below you will find a link to a 55 of mine from 2013, including comments, to bring on some nostalgia for the G-Man and illustrate, perhaps, that time. I encourage all who have one

 to share an old 55 with comments as well if they wish. We do need to remember the good times in the midst of the bad.

~ * ~

My 55 from the Wayback Machine:

 

Fleck

~ * ~

Blue Norther

Blue Norther

If I saw you now

blue-sudden as a Norther

borrowed cherokee hair gone snowy

wolfhound jaw locked against

the puzzle in your buckshot eyes

would it be as it was, hard with

love and leaving,

full of the boy who wasn't ours,

of jaguar ghosts, bankrupt sacrifice;

an emptying out, a fumbled
 passing on?

~April 2013
reposted January 2020

55 sharply falling degrees, once for the g-man,
and once more for
 earthweal Open Link

Process notes:  BLUE NORTHER:    Refers to a swift-moving cold frontal passage in the southern Great Plains, marked by a dark, blue-black sky with strong wintery winds from the northwest or north and temperatures that may drop 20°F to 30°F in a few minutes. ~weather.com





Image:Storm Front by Vicious Kitten on the now obsolete flick'r  Fair Use

Carny

Carny

Watching the blue darkness,

mer-thing in a tidepool of dreams,

the sparkling shrill moon is a huckster

passing the hat, glued  with

the glitter of carnival lights,

spotlighting the main attraction

down a littered midway of stars.

 

Slithering through the tents on my scales

I'd be the rube from downstate, more

freakish than any of the acts

in my silver tail and cotton candy mind, 

snaking painfully over the gravel

from stall to stall still

looking for you,

 

not sure just what you do these days:

barker blindfolding the crowd with words,

sad-eyed urchin picking their pockets,

carny lopsidedly leering, milking the bottle toss

or the bored skull-sleeved punk

at the sticky-railed tilt-a-whirl

who'll take my dollar

 

one more time.

Better to stay where I was born

in the dance-dream of turquoise foam,

going home with a breaching dawn,

where sky pours the world

plain, clear water

for the jug of living.

~April 2013 

re-posted for    real toads

Tuesday Platform

Images: Carnival at Acireale, by Jeanne boleyn, public domain via wikimedia commons

The Little Mermaid Dissolves into Foam, by Edmond Dulac, fair use via wikiart.org

Scrimshaw Sonnet

Scrimshaw Sonnet

I am a woman only of earthenware

bare as windy hills if not as pure.

Your every thought to me bore the potter's mark

stark from a god's-eye that's never yet met mine,

fine and barb-hooked as if on a fishing line,

vined in words that pulled like hungry sand.

Bands of ivory cloud meet a starving knife,

life drips enough to wet the driest grave.

Save the lesser light of windflower spring;

bring the lamps of your eyes imagining.

Sing like sheaves of whales under blue-white wool.

Pull from your sleeves the darkness between worlds

curled away in sighs, then suddenly spilled,

filled to the brim before all things are stilled.

~January 2013

slightly revised. 2015 

posted for    real toads 

The Tuesday Platform

revisiting a poem written two years ago... this is in chained rhyme where the last word of every line rhymes with the first word of the next.

originally posted for   real toads 

Process notes: This is deliberately written in a somewhat non-traditional sonnet form.

scrimshaw  — n
1. the art of decorating or carving shells, ivory, etc, done by sailors as a leisure activity

~World Dictionary


Image credits:

Header image: The Rocks with Oak Tree, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Public domain, via wikipaintings.org

Footer image: scrimshaw is awesome, part II, by staveitoff on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons license.

 

Reposts for Christmas #3

In Hel's Hall

It was white-ice morning in Hel's Hall

in the ninth of the Nine Worlds, when

Odin donned the Hel-shoes, cast the runes

and rode to ask his questions of 

the dead. 

Because he was a god, twisted she rose 

from her ashen bed

and by force began to speak  

of what she knew:

So I found, said her blackened lips,

that cold is a serpent that holds, pushing its

ribbon-chest deep into mountain,

slow-cracking the heads of spirits within

for gold to brighten its rippling scales.

Will you hear more?

So I saw, moved her fleshless jaw,

that cold will grow wide and thicken,

dead weight in grey-white armor,

dead mouth kissing every shoulder, 

that the tree it blasts and circles

will shake down a harvest of lives

to grind out all you love.

So I found, rattled her dustdry throat,

that cold will make red daggers, hanging

scarlet borrowed blood to temper

oblivion's poppy snowflakes,

to pierce the heart of hearts

till red and white alike

vanish from sight.

So I saw, whispered the husk of Hel,

that snow will cover fire, 

that the white wolf no sword can kill

will eat desire, that you

are a basket of bones made for wildflowers

withering in a wind of empty hours.

Will you hear more?

Then the One-Eyed shucked his Hel-shoes

jumped back in Sleipnir's saddle,

and fled the Ninth World, 

where words torn from the dead

had frozen on his tongue.

~January 2013
 revisions, December 2014

originally  posted for   real toads

Kerry's Wednesday Challenge: Worldbuilding

Kerry O'Connor has asked us to write around the subject of alternative worlds. Here I've reached into the the realm of Norse myth, and as usual, taken a few liberties with the tales of the Old Gods.

Process notes: In Norse mythology, Hel was the realm of those dead who had not died in battle, and also the name of the female figure who ruled it. It was where Odin the One-eyed, first of the Aesir and god of poetry, war, death, wisdom and wandering, journeyed to raise a dead Seeress to tell him of the future. She prophesies the events of Ragnarök,* the twilight, or perhaps re-making, of the gods, where the children of the antagonistic god of disorder and mischief, Loki, the Midgard Serpent and Fenrir the Wolf, will battle the gods, and the World Tree will 'shake and groan.' 

Hel-shoes (helskór) were put on the Norse dead to walk the road to the Otherworld.

Sleipnir is Odin's magical eight-legged horse.

* I probably ought to add that following the events of Ragnarök, the  völva also prophesies that a beautiful new world will emerge, where men and gods live in peace and plenty. Some believe that this a post-Christian introduction, but regardless, it satisfies the happily ever after need we humans have.

Reposts for Christmas, #2

As this posts, dear readers, we will be somewhere in the wilds of Oklahoma, hiking with the dogs through a strange, season-less landscape hung between summer and winter, with warm sun and cold cold winds. And no internet. Hope that all who celebrate it enjoy Thanksgiving, and also this flashback from August 2013 which I've exhumed for your interim diversion. See you soon, and thanks again to everyone for your support.

 

The Farewell Book

"..High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back.." 

~Wallace Stevens

I always keep the Book of Order

close by my chaos bed, my flag

at the masthead of longing, where

the brush of a half-numb hand upon 

its sleeping lover's cover lets me think

I'm not alone.

The Book has first and last page

but only a hole in the center, infinite,

secret, full of talismans, gauds and baubles,

wrack and whatnots, bones and blood,

astrolabes and artifacts of

someone else's life that is my own.

 

I sang out the genius from the cavity;

a wild shadow marked with your name.

I found for you the kiss long lost

in the dusty centrifuge, and made

the sickle wand that was
all the moon on a stick.

There atop the crease

you were born to lie,

to slither up and slide

your bendable spine into

the hammock of that crescent, to

murmur with flickering tongue

divine

the language of mind to mind,

but when at last I put

my feet to the morning's board,

I felt only the pricking crackle of

a skin shed on the floor.

Still I go on, a lunatic singing apart

flying waves of darkness, hook'd
on a used moon and a hollow book.

~August 2013

 

originally posted for     real toads

Challenge: Fireblossom Friday:

 the book within the story within the poem 
 Fireblossom asks us to think of matryoshkas, to pick a favorite poem and nest it in a story (see above link for a more coherent exposition.) 

I've chosen not one but two of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens to nest here, using various words and phrases from:

The Idea of Order at Key West
(text and reading by Stevens)

Farewell to Florida

(text)

Photo © joyannjones 2013

Reposts for Christmas

Hello again dear readers. We are getting ready to go out of town, and I'm not quite ready or able to come out of my hole, but I feel strongly, as I read your poetry, that I should have something here for you to read in return until I get back. So, I am going to post an old poem once a week or so, not linked to any prompt, or with any expectations. Feel free to comment or not, read or not--just my attempt to give back to those of you whose work gives me so much comfort right now. Here is one from last June.

Incubus VIII

Untitled, by Zdzisław Beksiński

Incubus VIII
(Bloody Hell)

Hell is lonely without my demon--

my personal one, I mean, because

there's no shortage here of devils.

 

Basting on the liquid lava's lips,
I'm alone in brimstone sunscreen,

no ruby pitchfork's flip

 

when one side gets too burnt,

no serpent sapient tail to scale me,

just the brisk popping of my cookery.

 

I thought my demon knew there's no

vaccine for the maenad's bite, that

nothing says forever like damnation.

 

I was killing more than willing

to lie griddled on bloodred coals

and call it love; but I missed his

 

listening kiss in the hissing steam.

Hell is lonely, bloody
empty without my demon.

 

I thought this blistered blaze might power
his blade-heart's forge, and this hammer pain

might twin us bright as living never did

 

yet after the first in-twisting, after

first blood spilled

he disappeared

 

and that is Hell for you.

 

 

 

~June 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ This was originally posted for       dVerse Poets, where Karin Gustafson (Manicddaily) challenged us to write of twins, twining, combining or uncombining. Though I thought I'd finished with him, as I've written many little scribbles about my twin the Incubus, still he seems to linger somewhere at the back of Hell's waiting room.  If you'd like to read the others in this series, you can find them  here.  ]

 

 

 

 

Blue Ice

Blue Ice

"They tell me of a home far beyond the skies. They tell me of a home far away.

They tell me of a home where no storm clouds ride.

O they tell me of an uncloudy day."

~traditonal Southern spiritual

Each year you've been gone

in the last warmth of ten crawling Novembers,

I wrap the roof in blue lights.

Their infant's eyes in the night

open wide over me.

I don't pull the plug

when the slow seep of the sun

lanterns the cloud-muted sky;

they are the ward

the spell that says

as I speak so shall it be:

blue eye meets blue eye

to spark the white moon,

forgiveness will make

uncloudy day,

love given will tune

out the tolling mistakes.

Home is not

it is not far away.

Each year in the dead cold

of eleven Januarys

I take the blue lights down.

They tangle in my hands like

skeins of  blue ice. There's no

feeling in my fingers when

at last they're packed in the attic,

where their blindness shows clear

 Home is not here.

~December 2013

If you'd like to hear a very rough recording of the author reading an unrevised version of  this poem, click below:

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Photos © joyannjones, 2013