Canned Tulips

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canned Tulips

 

 

 

There was deep night asleep behind your eyes

black as the moon's turned face that lives

cold and dead behind her shine

but still like her, you smiled the sky.

 

Our vices were soft clinging things

pink and innocent as a child's clean hands

petulantly pulling at the dolls of our virtues,

lead angels falling on their sparrow wings.

 

We drove to Texas for the secret stones

but we only found the hardrock end.

The Gulf rains erased our cartoon faces,

the sharks circled in and ate our bones.

 

When the ambulance came you stood alone

with no can-opener for all the tulips you'd canned,

peeled like an orange to your soft sweet core,

while I cried a pool in the sand's sucking bowl

 

for the sky to come down

in your smile and make us whole.

 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

and

 

 

D'Verse Poet's Pub

Opening Lines

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Tulips in a Milk Carton, 1989 ©Paul Wonner   Fair Use

Sharks, ©Utagawa Kuniyoshi    Public Domain

 

Seedpod

 

 

 

Seedpod

All your cars had names. You could have

called me a knotted whip, waiting just

off the Sulphur exit for Argon to pull up, 

her aqueous sides mottled with Dallas dust.   

When you showed, we were bleak as

strangers till we forgot how lame things lie.

Then, we'd never parted. Hand-fast laughing,

we brazened the blue hole's perilous beauty. 

You picked me the seedpod of a water-lily,

catacomb of caves on a stick

rattling full with brown-eyed pearls.

They watched me from a vase for twenty years.

 

The day was hot as rooftar in the pot,

the wet air a greasy mop

as we deployed, Argon starting

with reluctance--all your cars

started with reluctance--

disapproving of me there 

in her too small seat.

We drove and talked the sun 

up the noon sky, down its back 

in trickles of salt, sat on rocks 

compliant as clouds by Turner Falls,

talking by touch, by feel, 

by nerve and luck, 

words splashed on dry fields  

dust before and after,

your ribs under the blowing shirt

white as nightlights in the dusk.

Radium midnight in the tent;

I didn't know how

I could ever let you go back.

I cursed

what made me fall like water, 

pour out suddenly yes forever, 

cursed what made you fly so high,

the wind that fills the windsock and blows on.

And so, I never found that place again

a quarter mile from the Sulphur on-ramp

bright in the heat-breathing beauty of morning.

I spend instead my pale days waiting

 

empty as the chair I've prepared

with your books and candlelight, empty as a  

dry-rattle lily pod whose pearls

fall one by one on stone.

~May 2014

 

 

Process note: Turner Falls is a waterfall on Honey Creek in the Arbuckle Mountains of south-central Oklahoma..With a height of 77 feet [it] is locally considered Oklahoma's tallest waterfall...Turner Falls and the blue hole [directly beneath it] are dangerous and have claimed people's lives every year. Only experienced swimmers should swim there..~wikipedia

 

 

originally posted for    real toads

Out of Standard: The Poem is a Curse

Isadora Gruye  (The Nice Cage) asks us to write a poem involving a curse.

reposted and revised October 2023

for

desperate poets

 

 where Brendan asks us: "For this challenge, write of DESPERATE BEAUTY. You can use one of Van Gogh’s paintings as a starting point, or you may find all the required colors in another painter or poet or from your personal palette. How does a poem render the beautiful? What hues must it choir? How does strangeness improve beauty? What are the limits of beauty? Where or when does the desperation come in? And why is it alone infinite?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Water Lily Seed Pod, Bobbye Wolfe  via Pinterist

Windsock via google image search, author unknown.

Paul Gauguin's Armchair ©Vincent Van Gogh

Turner Falls, Oklahoma,   via Wikipedia

 

The Foresters

[SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE FOR THE FRIDAY 55]

The Foresters

We gathered wood for

a winter we'd never see;

not to keep others warm

but so each stiff tree's arm

yielding to the saw with a whistling sigh

would sketch a rune of twigs, a ghosted fire

to magic into being our desire.

We gathered fuel against a

north-blown frost, thin-sliver shavings

to take the match of want

to a bed of coals where we'd transmuted lie,

fuel for the flame as the flames rose high

from our wedding pyre,

ash on the smoke-rise snapping in the sky.

We tore that chainsaw through a scrub-oak sea, 

worked wedge and maul ignorant of what bleeds

at the quick mistake, at what would fall, 

gathering sticks

for a hearth we'd never be,

any more than the promise

of saw-dusted seed,

the marriage in the trees

dropped unburied in the broken green.

June 2017

A reboot of an oldie never blogged, 

 a twist on Monday's theme of culture and nature

posted for earthweal's Open Link

Images: The Wood Sawyers, 1850-52, by Jean-Francois Millet  manipulated    Public Domain

Landscape with Stump, 1892, by Ivan Shiskin      manipulated                       Public Domain

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

Landfall

Landfall

(Harvey at Corpus Christi)

Launched from the center

of the sweaty swayback

of the dustbowl

driving to the sea

Texas is endless; brown, olive, bone

hills and beige flats,

griddle hot

a country of dead hours

of creosote bush and yucca

city sprawl, void and suburb eternal

before the silvered rim of Padre

shows hazy in the wave-trough,

a glint in the dead eye of

the Body of Christ.

How many times did we

drag the corpus of our

cross-nailed marriage over the plains,

one desert passing over another,

with what relief to leave that

four-wheeled cell

and feel a living air.

Then, bottle in hand, already lost,

you'd sit in your folding chair on a beach

 so bright and primeval all
such things, like us, were anachronisms.
The boy would run from the war

to the waves, freed and blazing delight

to slip into a salty blue singing that

drowned the sound of failure.

I'd walk up and down, in

and out of the surf, gripping shells'

nacred lifelines, finding a washing of watery
peace, transitory and recurrent

as the sky-swallowing

shadows of gulls cawking above.

I had no god then, and none

tonight,
yet I pray for that country

as the vast weeping Eye crawls across it 

with death and rage in its tears,
spilling blood or toy refineries

to soil and poison that white beach

where grace so waywardly hides 

giving her kiss to all flawed things.

~August 26, 2017

Optional Musical Accompaniment

 

Photos © joyannjones  Corpus, Gull Shadows, circa 1986

Brujería

Brujería

I think of you, Tomás

with your witchhazel tongue,

your feet like lost white sheep,

your flyaway mane long and

straight as the fault line

between sense and sensuality--it trips me

like that first stone free kiss

to know you must be--if you still be

at all--old now, reshaped and redefined

as a bare bristlecone pine;

a white-haired brujo with dark

natron eyes, a weather-wrecked scarecrow

whose snake-veined hands still

curl their long musician's fingers
in supple knuckled knots;

you should be a sight to frighten

the plump señoritas your

wicked smile has fetched

but instead I hear them

laughing like pigeons in your bed.

Our glances cross

in the night world--Ay si, mi amor,

it's good to be

a  witch.

~November 2013

posted for     real toads

Open Link Monday

Process Notes: "Brujería is the Spanish word for witchcraft....Both men and women can be witches, brujos and brujas respectively."~wikipedia





Top image: La mirada del "tío Brujo" by Mila-san, shared under a Creative Commons license
via wikimedia.com 

Bottom image: Tracht des Zauberers, des "brujos", beim bolivianischen Tanz Tobas by Awayumania
Public Domain via wikimedia.com I have manipulated this image. You can view the original here. 

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 the way it was, hard with

love and leaving,

full of the boy who wasn't ours,

of jaguar ghosts, bankrupt sacrifice;

an emptying out,  looking away,

passing on?

~April 2013

55 sharply falling degrees for   the g-man

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: Hover mouse for image attribution, or click to go to photographer's flick'r page