Mask of Aphrodite (Repost)

 

 

 

Wolves, © Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

"There is no cure for love other than marriage." 

~Irish proverb 

 

 

Love's an old wolf who howls when she pleases,

her black lips drawn back in mock of a grin.

She's made me her meat for chancers and losers,

to open the locks and let anyone in.

 

Her yellow teeth are blunted with winters

but her fevers burn bright as melted brass.

Her eyes are flat-white as Attic marble

rolling behind Aphrodite's mask.

Her promises drift like leaves in October.

Her vows of fidelity make the stones laugh.

There's never been one she ever was true to,

only the lucky who died too fast.

Since I was that child who was used as a woman

since I was that woman who thinks like a child

I've run with her pack. The crows find my dinner,

set the price we pay for being born wild.

I've never whored for playthings or money

but three times three it saved my life.

I've never lied for the sake of loving,

only to play at being a wife.

I never was called to be a drunkard,

but ever I've been every drunkard's best friend;

and I drop the mask when I see it coming,

 

the black-lipped snarling

bitter end.

September 2023

Lightly edited for repostng

July 2026 

 

 

 

Head of Aphrodite, via Brittanica

 

 

 

At The Hospital

 

 

 

 

 At The Hospital

 

 

Pendants of light

reflections reversed

bent on slick white tile

random voices

in chained rooms

living out their untold

fortunes. Are fortunes told

or are they read,

written in a book of days

all numbered

not visible except

through curving crystal?

Or are they droned

the same tune every time

inside the skull,

mortality's earworms?

I am indifferent.

The gypsy broke my cup;

my tea leaves spilled.

 

 

 

 

circa 2019, rev. March 2022 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #131

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sun In An Empty Room, 1963, © Edward Hopper   Fair Use

The Fortune Teller, 1933, © Brassai            Fair Use 

The Little God

 

 

 

 

The Little God

 

 

 

 On,

into the soft-gelled 

distance of a gentled day

after dreams of storm and blood

where war gods walk the night

 

opening every door

eating whom they will.

But it was you, belly-up

who turned the knives

to scraping in my brain,

 

your suffering

that is an offering;

a worship

I can't watch

to a little god

 

who cuts up hearts

to sew his cap 

and boots

and the black mask

that shades

 

his razor smile,

your ever-burning

icon.

 

May 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend

 

 

 

 

 

also using words from qbit's list

derived form the poetry of Anna Ahkmatova

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personal note: I've been having a dead spot, but I miss reading everyone's writing and will be around soon to catch up. Thanks to all of you whose support keeps me putting pen to paper.

 

 

Images: Gentled Day, ©joyannjones, 2016

The Return of the Flame, © Rene Magritte, 1943     Fair Use

Aubade Of The Scorpions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aubade Of The Scorpions

 

 

 

At night the little scorpions come down

to watch us playing at our poison kisses

to study from the dustbath where we drown

 

the sting that sinks the deepest when it misses.

I found flowers once where you had touched me;

black poppies sown in moon-distempered hisses.

 

Now the sun is crawling through the ivy,

its dawn a flickered fire burning wishes.

You're a green ghost spitting from a tree;

 

promises float away like silver fishes

and Love's a child who suddenly confesses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets:

Meeting The Bar: Aubade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Crustaceans c.1873 ©Raimundo Petraroja    Fair Use

The Evening Gown, 1954, ©Rene Magritte     Fair Use

 

Daisy

Daisy

Awakenings these latter days

seem sullen, straining for

a gone green music, unprepared as

the day that lumbers up,

tripping its way through a

zodiac of sticks like a clumsy thief,

 too old to run but still wanting to steal.

Hours revolve in a maelstrom

of ferns, once fresh for morning

now a parable of crackling

 brown loss drying back to some point

of unknown where its powdering tides will

drain down earth's fissures,

intimately gone; I'm just another

torn membrane losing the lie,

spinning down the dark drown.

Still I pull all the architecture

of my ruins--the folly, the narrows,

the knot garden, the rockery of

a thousand dead alpine desires--

forward to find

a station of cleared space

to stand in place for life's moment,

asking eyes shut, seed face

blind and upturned,

 sunflowered on my stem

for one last hot meal

of yellow light;

being a daisy,

being a dream.

April 2020

posted for Kerry's

Skylover Word List for April

Note: April as always is poetry month, and though I will be writing as much as I can, it most likely will not be a poem a day. Nonetheless, I will offer to those who are the Friday 55 each week for their use if so desired. So see you here on Friday if you need a meme.

Images: The Old Tower In The Fields, 1884 by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain
Still Life With Four Sunflowers, 1887, by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain

Bitter Cold

Bitter Cold

Even in the bitterest cold

your body snakes itself

away from mine

to make its own wallow

shivering but uncrowded,

so that in this stranger's chair

in the decembered black,

I have only a thin sheet of paper 

for warmth,

and you 

a rucked bed, too strait

for touching.

The cold is so big

it chills fresh-boiled coffee 

in the cup,

stiffens each bone it meets

with the old ache. Yet here

in its stone room

I am warmer
than tight in a futile quilt

for this paper I burn,

set on fire

with a script of bright flames,
giving

the wink of a true eye

the stroke of a seeing hand
opening

the buried door that leads

 to the summer country

and every song

as you bear winter alone,

deaf in the slack tide

of your darkening sleep.

~Dec 2014, 

revisions April, 2015

posted for

 National Poetry Month with Magaly Guerrero

Day 2 Challenge: Creativity and Pain

Magaly is generously throwing her blog and her creativity into the ring for this year's April insanity, and providing a prompt a day to help us along. Today she asks us to : "explore creativity as a healing salve, as a shield, as a weapon, or as a negotiation method to use when dealing with physical and/or psychological pain"

Process notes: "The moment that the tidal current ceases is called slack water or slack tide. The tide then reverses direction and is said to be turning.."~wikipedia

Images: Cabin Interior, ©joyannjones 2014

Footer: Summer Bedroom, by Jacob Yanek, Fair use via wikipaintings.org

The Unlikely Summer

The Unlikely Summer

It was

an unusual summer.

The heat left town, embarrassed

after a bad opening night.

Sparrows and hummingbirds broke

union rules and danced in the same line-up,

decorating spotlight sunflowers like seeds of glass.

At night, significant rabbits with pocketwatches

came to the back door in top hat and tails, asking

the way to wonderland, but time jumped

upstream wild and fast as salmon in a silver river

and they were ~ always ~ late.

I dialed the broken wheel on the landline

till my digits calloused, to speak long distance to

the empty place where you had been ~  always ~

I got the machine ~ always ~ noncommittally polite

and willing to take a message, but

I knew I'd never hear back, even though

every flower in my garden bloomed

out loud for you in that

unusual summer

where secret thunder on the east

met the lightning climbing out of bowls

of blue cloud, hollow, vast and tortured with swell.

Everything rained and turned to tatters.

I opened my heart to the storm

and it came in,
like Jesus filling a canvas tent,

and the blur and the flicker

fell into my fingers until I became

~all ways ~
dangerous, until

I wasn't safe for birds or rabbits, until

I could touch nothing
alive,

nothing at all.

~July 2013

posted for     real toads

Challenge: Friday Night Raw

Corey Rowley (Herotomost) asks us to dig deep into our toolbox as writers and use technique, different devices and styles to engage the reader, to access and convey the intensity of our emotions. He also mentions some bat guano. I think I got that part down. 



This is also posted for my friend Karin Gustafson's prompt 'a body or bodies of water,' at      
dverse poets 

(She said a rain drop was acceptable, so...)

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Images from Fick'r Creative Commons. Hover mouse for attribution, or click on pic to go to the photographer's flick'r page.

Dreaming of Light Equipment

Dreaming of Light Equipment

The best sex

I never had

was in the little room behind the

redneck bar.

You left the greenhouse early.

You said Charles could do your work,

your feral smile crouched in the

shadow of your black beard.

Under the faux-chenille covers

our bodies barely touched

as you put

the machine in gear.

I was bracing for your

spring-loaded kiss

when the boy came in

with his little dog,

opened the window through

fluttering american flag curtains

and sat on the sill, talking and looking

feverishly for the clown car's coming.

We couldn't make him leave.

The father, in  brown-pintoed apron, sidled

through the door that wouldn't lock and said

since the cops had done the bust

the boy had lost control.

It took hours to get rid of them.

I checked--the door still wouldn't lock. 

I flipped a living mobious strip

of light switches,

watched one bulb

die as the other came on--

a  machinegun monotony of annoyance.

I couldn't find the plug to pull

on the radio--talk radio--and the

woman's vulpine voice victimed

on and on--

but your body, Mike

was more beautiful than a silver trout

in a midnight blue creek,

I do remember that

shining with white inviolate light

in the uncontrollable night.

I wore a flowered halter--

you stood behind me in the mirror

and slipped it off,

your hands as smooth on the straps 

as on the levers of your skid loader

where you routinely would drop

a dozen pallets on a pile

as uniform, as aligned

as a stack of pringles in a virgin tube

Every so often as

you measured my length against yours,

hydraulic waves would flutter my lids

and my eyes roll back involuntarily,

an ecstatic irritant because

I badly wanted to see how it was done.

O Mike, if I'd only known

how smooth, how hot your skin, how deep

the sanctuary

under the camouflage, the

erasure of your work clothes--

I would never have

married that loser.

~June 2013

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Image: Castle of Pallets, by Marc Samson, on flick'r