The Gardener

The Gardener

The landscape was empty; bleak
after so long abandoned.
The property needed work
from Cretaceous to herbaceous,
a great deal of work
for only one gardener;
but a job is a job

in these hard times.

So, I began the renovation

of the garden on the moon.

I planted frankincense and jade,

linen off the line, an impertinent patch

of plum-purple zinnias.

I turned the stoned moondust

with a diamond shovel,

raked the bed smooth with

Cernunnos' horns

to sow the bony seeds:

old fears, old loves, old enemies

pulled from their prickling casings,

sunned by litigant stars,

watered with Phryne's tears;

then I waited

for the display.

Summer was a ripple

and a roar of rioting color,

ivory skulls on fire and the smell

of burning roses. Smiling, I sat

on the edge of a crater

eyes dazzled shut,

palms turned up, each hand

an open vein to let

the fertile self bleed out,

pooling around the roots

in the rows of moongarden,

while each zinnia-head

was a purple balloon

in the utterly defeated

void.

The garden is lovely now--

(if I say so myself, rebuilt by

a true gardener and poète maudit.)

We're in splendor this season--even into the Fall

all ready for the owner

who never comes. 

~March 2017

posted for Fireblossom's Incongruity

at real toads

Process notes: Cernunnos was the Celtic Horned God of life, fertility and the underworld, always depicted with the antlers of a stag. 

Phryne "was an ancient Greek courtesan (hetaira), from the fourth century BC...much praised for her beauty...Supposedly the sculptor Praxiteles, who was also her lover, used her as the model for the statue of the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first nude statue of a woman from ancient Greece...She is best known for her trial for impiety...[where she is described] as clasping the hand of each juror, pleading for her life with tears..." ~wikipedia

poète maudit "..​( accursed poet) ..The phrase "poète maudit" was coined in the beginning of the 19th century by Alfred de Vigny in his 1832 novel Stello, in which he calls the poet "la race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre" (The race that will always be cursed by the powerful..of the earth)..." ~wikipedia

 

Images: Portrait of The Gardener, Calvert Richard Jones.
Head on a Stem, by Odilon Redon
Public domain

Fallow

Fallow

So many times

you’ve been the field where

storms hailed the crops flat,

your task to regrow them,

the cold eroded shingle

where fire died,

you with numb fingers

in a night of frost and ghosts,

the rekindler. 

So 

let me warm you now 
for that brief time

that I’m permitted

as darkness presses.

Turn the cup upside down,

let your hard hours spill out

to pool in a bottomless green.

Sleep for a season with all life unborn

you the fallow field this once

over which the placid plough horse

passes unhindered, breaking clods of years'

compaction, earth's old demands arable

and dropping open under a citrine sun.

Lightly, surely the harrow passes

in the long afternoons, a music

on those plains where ever they sing

of planting, of the green to come,

not freezes, not blight, not backs bent,

where my rain falls like ocean. Let

every tall crop there be your own.

Let me in you at last give back

seed for root

right for wrong

life for death

and make life enough

so 
when time is done with us

in the dusk of a long coming gleaning,

there'll be love in the last look back

before we blow away.

November 2011

Vessel

Vessel

When the moon

is winking

like the Grey Sisters’ eye

passed from housetop

to housetop, glassy bright

and wide as a fawn’s

I feel your touch

the wind in the night

cool on fever’s summer,

you who can kiss with the taste

of rain and break the drought,

your look slips my skin

wet and terra cotta slick

as the clay on the wheel.

Run your potter’s hand

across my back

reshape my nights, my days

with lover's fingers

pliant as willow.

Fire me where the blaze

burns white.

Paint me with

bard’s colors

blue as the high july sky

rosy, yellow, crimson

with every flower

then take me to the well

where thirst is quenched.

September 2011

The Graeae: old women", "grey ones", "grey sisters", or "grey witches"; alternatively spelled Graiai (Γραῖαι), Graiae, Graii), were three sisters who shared one eye and one tooth among them. They are one of several trios of archaic goddesses in Greek mythology.....~wikipedia






Header Image: Explore #360, posted by  slokaa on flick'r
slokaa's photostream

Bottom image: Italian Glazed Earthenware Vase, 
courtesy wikimedia commons