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

 

Ballad Of The Earwig

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ballad Of The Earwig

(a 55)

 

He was the earwig come up through the drain,

she the rosebud ruined in rain,

 

she the actress losing her looks,

he, strutting hero of unreadable books;

 

they a brainstorm dying in rage,

they, two monkeys shaking a cage.

 

I am the pony who runs with the storm,

you, blue fire that burns without warmth. 

 

 

April 2025 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Earwig, metal sculpture, artist unknown. via internet   Fair Use

Blue Fire Wallpaper, artist unknown, via internet,   Fair Use

Two Triolets In September

 

 

 

 

 

Two Triolets In September

 

Bright wasp-stings of light, yellow afternoons

that summer has given, October soon takes

with her quarrel of grackles and pale hunter's moon;

a wasp-sting of cold on a yellow afternoon.

Ferry winds will carry the gold leaf-wing soon.

Forgotten the spinner, the empty web breaks

with a wasp-sting sigh on a yellow afternoon.

What today has given, tomorrow soon takes.

 

 

So came the soft touch so soon to be lost

that folds poppies' faces to green nodding skulls,

sealing their seed-thoughts til the first killing frost,

in that last soft light so soon to be lost

where I dance alone with a fluttering ghost

with summer's warm vices consumed and annulled,

with scent of soft smoke so soon to be lost

and the red poppies' faces turned to green skulls.

September 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Word Garden Word List~Autumn

at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Oriental Poppies, 1928,  © Georgia O'Keefe

Poppies in seed, via internet. Fair Use

 

Inflection

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inflection

 

 We drew the breaths 

of butterflies in high June,

beings never still

whose feet are small

as whimpers in our sleep,

light as the gauze of

a first-hour dream

until it falls,

a blood-splashing guillotine.

Butterflies

know nothing of blood

except the blood of flowers and that

is what we sipped, flitting from one to

the next because life must

spread or be stilled;

we never thought we

could ever be stilled

for we had no thoughts,

so new, so insubstantial

and ingenuous were we, certainly

not one that whispered

"Here is the starry inflection of

Love's extinction event," as we deep-

drank our liquor from the meadows

drying beneath us, even as the vapor

of your breath closing to me

dried on my lips

 

in a sigh, tenuous and bright

as wind-floated pollen,

your mouth soon withdrawn

to suckle the next flower's mouth

until flowers and memory and all their savor

 too were gone.

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Tipped at

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled(Landscape With Butterflies) 1956 ©Salvador Dali

Butterflies ©Odilon Redon

 

Walking Summer

 

 

 

 

Walking Summer

I've been here before

too long ago, too short a time--

encircled by this walking summer, 

where song is never done, where walls

are built from air and touch, where invisible

love strolls in, the unexpected fragrance

of mimosa thrown like gauze across her face,

pollened with invincible yesterdays,

intricate and insubstantial as

the manual labor of a rose.

I know this place

so clean, so far, so obvious--

this moving room where nothing

was ever allowed to stay, yet a

wayward welcome whistles in the

nag of wind that blows my steps this way

to thin path's end, where sun is made

and broken in a day,

a dropped brick like me, once high,

ruined in a cobble of clouds.

These skewered eyes

so still, so heart's-desired when

I stole them from the chimera,

open starry wide at last
to blink up the mist, the mazed

particulate of missing pieces that

mortar so well with tears the

pressed-together whole, and I 

wonder if there soon could be 

a granting of what's needful;

for I only hope to find the lost--

the tilted corners of a child's smile

the absence of regret, the whim

of walking summer that clings

like mimosa gauze to

the shifting faces of my ghosts.

~November 2015

posted for desperate poets

(" finding comfort in the beauty around us, whether it is as vast as the sky or as small as a dew-covered spider-web, on a cornstalk by the back fence in the early morning.")

Photos:  Mimosa, © joyannjones 2014 

Rosa 'Nearly Wild,' © joyannjones 2015

The Long Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Long Love

 

 

Love is a function

of distance. So I wrote

when your touch was too near;

but what long love we

have close-held in us,

to live for the work

for the planting, the sprouting;

for the quick fruit, which

only ripens to disappear

 

forsaking the night garden's peace

for what its voyaging shell protects,

wind-used and earth-taken,

passed and used again as

many times as trees have leaves,

as grass has planets of dew

silvering in summer light

reflecting wild deer eyes

untamed to our desire.

 

 

***

 

 

Everything shifts

in this new age.

Spring is removed,

remote as a cluster of stars

blurred on the far frozen wheeze

of solar wind. Language 

is stirred in a kettle of nightshade.

Intent is a comic ghost

in the styrofoam west wing

 

chattering to dust sheets

it believes are its mates,

as the void gambles and

pulls and dances and beckons,

reckons us a foreign dark

that is not our own night garden,

falling hard as dead wishes

if our loving days

should ever be done.

 

 

 November 2022

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Tending A Difficult Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Saving the Okra Seed, September 2022

and Okra Blooming, July 2022, both ©joyannjones

Promises

 

 

 

Promises

 

 

 

 

 When I was first a woman,

a proto-woman, perhaps,

I fell into the sin

of promising.

 

A jumbled barter it was

of all I had, masks

and early roses and melodies

too simple to be songs

 

all, all underfoot in the

maudlin marsh of fool's dreaming

with braggarts croaking their

whisky throats like toads.

So, into the desert

hot and clean, clear and cold,

but there again I fell,

into the assassin's bed.

Every night I knew

his nerveless cunning,

slitting the throat of love

as I lay numb

listening to devils

laughing from the killing-stone,

waiting for your call to come

tenacious and startling-sweet 

 

on limpid air

as jasmine in the abattoir;

but in the blood-pool

only sticky silence.

Now that time has taken

all the gods and fools

that made me woman,

I see with a child's eye

grateful to be lone 

with meadow-wren and violets,

 promises of fairies, friend of

crows and stars.

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List: Stephen Crane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Woman with Mask, artist unknown, via internet Fair Use

Faery and Kingfisher © Jean-Baptiste Monge   Fair Use

Season's Whisper

 

 

 

Season's Whisper

(A Quadrille)

 

 

Birds falter

from the sky. Kapitans cry.

Bodies lie,

blind eyes on streets

rubbed down to bone.

 

Still

the season whispers.

 

Living wings fly,

buds swell like grief unbound.

The wilding wind 

knows nothing

of our long drown.

 

The season whispers.

Life is found.

 

 

April 2022 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets:

Quadrille

and 

for earthweals' weekly challenge:

Radical Hope

Note: "..Kapitan is a commissioned officer rank ..in..the NATO officers rank system..[adopted by Ukraine,]used to specify commanding officers of company-sized units..."~wikipedia

Images:Detail of Scene in Bucha, Ukraine, April 2, 2022 after Russian retreat, ©Reuters/Zohra Bemsemra, cropped to sepia,  Fair Use

Magnolia buds against March tree canopy, 2016, © joyannjones

 

Flowers Of The Moon

 

 

 

Flowers Of The Moon

 

 

 

The moon rocked in its cradle

hunched down on its paws

reluctant to rise

 

while the sharpened stars stared

and ice fell like blades

on the night she was born.

 

She wanted flowers,

hands to hold, a round-

bellied pony with liquid eyes

 

but they gave her knives, so

she learned to juggle.

There was plenty of work.

 

 "Stand back." she said,

"I could put out your eye easy

as breathing. I could and I might." 

The moon crept up to

the crossroads.The stars fell asleep.

The knives rose and spun

 

whirled and glittered like

blue ice flying

til one by one they fell

 

from her scarred hands.

"I've no time for this trade," she said,

"where every mistake bleeds,

 

where every hit frightens.

The moon needs a gardener

for roses to grow."

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images; Sunset at the North Pole, author unknown,     Fair Use

Girl Juggling Knives, unknown source via Sunday Muse,   Fair Use

On The Bright Turning Page

 

 

 

 

 

On The Bright Turning Page

 (A sonnet)

 

On the bright turning page of spring's uproar

when the ferry sailed from day to dreadful night

with one upon the deck, one left on shore,

an annotation jotted down in stricken twilight,

I heard the winter laugh like truculent swans,

as white lilies bobbed their lovely idiot heads;

I saw a volume could be made of broken bonds,

the long ballad of peace sent hungry to its bed.

 

The bear brings ash upon its ailing breath

when fire flies from frightened children's hands.

When two forces clash in a quarrel to the death

no stone, no garden wall or house can stand;

 

but awash in azure sky, flowers of the sun

grow wild beneath the smell of smoke and guns.

 

 

 

 

 March, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted  in solidarity with Ukraine

for Shay's Word List #15:

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: many of Millay's poems are sonnets, and she often used the first line as her title. I've borrowed that stylistic aspect here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Lilies, © Constantin Artachino     Fair Use

Sunflower, 1965 © Georgia O'Keefe           Fair Use