The Fishmonger

The Fishmonger

Last night the witchlight went out.

All that was left was a drugstore flashlight

running on green ginger tea, shining a fisheye bulb

of irrational hope netted and dragged

from behind the moon’s peridot dustsheet

over a skinwalker's wrinkled  
tillage of shadowseed fields, where

silence and sleep grow beside

dismembered acorns, and nothing

can keep out the cold.

And so, while Jupiter and Mars

two pissholes in a celestial snowdrift
laser stared from a black sky,

eight times I called out my wares

from the roof of my fogbank hood,
hair wintered strings of snowmelt dripping

while I scraped my heart’s hollow clean

with a broken pen, wound the spell

with a cropped limb’s tingle and

threw a fish upon the fire.

It may be that it will never burn, 

that silver son of ocean,

but something within it seemed

to ask to swim the flames

to show me winking from the coals

the nature of

water and heat

and dinner, and at last

the bright chaotic kindling

of a spark.

February-March 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

In the final edit for this poem, I made lavish use of Shawna's Monday Melting word list at  rosemary mint. Thanks, Shawna.

Image: Poissonnerie, by Petteri Sulonen on flick'r

Thanks, Petteri, for the pic and the title,

both of which had proved extremely elusive to land.

Petteri's photostream

Petteri  blogs with exceptional verve 
about all kinds of things at Come to Think of It

Pansies

Pansies

Two variations on a theme

I.

Pansy, turn your bright face up.

Fill the sun up cup by cup,

Shine your dark eye through the snow.

Pansy, come where hope can’t go.

Make the crocus dance your tune.

Make the violet hang the moon

from your whisker, and daffodil

blow your song from the hollow hill.

Be the bridge that spans our loss.

Be the badge for those who cross.

Pour the spring out cup by cup.

Pansy, turn your bright face up.

II.

There is no real winter

where the pansy grows,

green beneath the ochre leaves,

folded beneath the giving snow

that melts in the next day’s sun.

I hid her there when autumn stripped the

burning scales from July's red dragon,

snuffed his scorching breath

that bellowed across September. Now the wheel

revolves from bottom to top, and the

goldfinch lights his back sunflower yellow.

The first warm cheek of spring, the first

dithering wind that tickles dead leaves

skins open her amethyst bud

to silver in fretwork rain. She cavalcades

the brightest colors, heaves the strongest sighs

from earth’s stillborning dreams,

and through her rayed mask the answer gleams.

So come for spring’s first willow kiss, 

and lift your pansy face up to the sun.

Laugh under feathered sky with me
until the last and blackest dragon comes.

March 2012

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Mini (Photo) Challenge

Header photo: Pansy 'Jolly Joker', May 2008, © joy ann jones 2008-2012

Middle image: Pansy, mini-photo Instagram, by Ellen Wilson of Ella's Edge 

Unappeased

Unappeased

Appeasement is not immortal;

any stomach will tell you that

there are wastes where shame

never shows her face.

Hurricanes don’t build

however many bricks they pile

one on another as easily as 
on a tree, dog or tomato

or inject into a snarl of wrecked

timbers, limbs and broken glass.

But age is soft snow yes

I know it is

bitter cold, blurring, preserving

as it dances down, and silences

everything except the hunger that

can only be appeased by returning

empty and calling, 
bubbling from the base, the
melted voodoo doll of self, 
suddenly become many

lumpish revolving homunculi, 
misshapen cells

oozing up through the thick blue

boiling lava lamp abyss
in improbable, million-pieced

egg shapes and rhomboidal failures

all eventually defined, potent,
inexpressible, fused or refused 
revealing, merging, 
unappeased;

it's only movement that 
endlessly

draws the eye,
the wax is stiff at first
but still the same.

March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Shawna of rosemary mint is hosting today, and asks us to revisit the year 1999 in our lives; I've skipped on a few years, and found a journal entry from the closest date I could and worked from that, but the essence of what was going on, and the feeling are the same, I think.

Header Image: August 2002, Journal, © Joy Ann Jones, 2002, 2012
Footer Image: Lava Lamp, by forbidden snowflake, on flick'r 
Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license

Optional Musical Accompaniment, Playing when Journal entry was written

Freyja Speaks to the Skalds

Freyja Speaks to the Skalds

Now I call you, brother

across the ticking void

Feel my hand in yours,

over the scars and tears.

I’m with you where you sit

milling the weary hours

finer finer into a dry flour

that chokes the heart’s pores

for it’s bitter bread

as I was with you

when you raised the promise-cup

in Midgard’s torch-red halls

and played for swinish ears 

that ragged tune

of stars and battles, destinies of glass

of ebbing tides and the bones

of love’s last child, with

the gods' last dance

there before

we wore our names,

when your hand spiraled

deep in the womb black cave, 

lining for me the ochre herds

wallrunning to fill the stomach

of evernight with life

for all eternity’s migration.

I held you up

in your thin skin boat

of fancy's faith and grief;

I tried you, through the floods 

of high seas’ anchorage,

through the dark blood conquest,

holding the dripping blade. In

the stone-ringed grove

under the crooked moon

I spared your life, 

left you one-eyed, lamed but singing

in a tinsel of smudged neon night

on a winedark streetcorner wave

where every loss collides

in subway clamor or benched

in garden’s dusky still, for you my

pole-circling breath melts and blows
the spice of far Carib, because

I call you brother.

Under threads of silver gold

where seven shed skins make 

a thorny crossroads of your face

still you vigil for the heartsong.

Hear my fade note whisper on shadow wind:

call me, call me, always I will come

but when the sun pours through

white curtains and every

bell is ringing

of course the spell

is broken and

I’m gone.

February-March 2012

Posted for    real toads

Challenge: Love and Affection 

"I write because I love it."

~Joan Armatrading

I've had this one in the works awhile, but this prompt really helped it crystalize and while it may seem an odd choice for the theme in some ways, it is about love, the tenuous, pervasive and demanding love  between the Muse in all her guises and her chosen victims and celebrators, along with my usual magpie mix of Norse and other myth, history and prehistory, some of which I owe to the Celtic and Early/Post-Christian 
mytho-poetic synthesis of Brendan MacOdrum of Oran's Well. 
Thank you Brendan, for Lascaux, the coracles and the garden bench.

Freyja: in Norse mythology, a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, gold, seiðr(sorcery), war, and death. (Technically,her brother is Freyr, per wikipedia, among other things 'a phallic fertility god,...[given] Álfheimr, the realm of the Elves, as a teething present.')

skald or scald:
 —n    (in ancient Scandinavia) a bard or minstrel
[from Old Norse, of unknown origin]~World English Dictionary 

Promise cup: 'The bragarfull "promise-cup" or bragafull "best cup" or "chieftain's cup" (compare Bragi, [god of poetry]) was in Norse culture a particular drinking from a cup or drinking horn on ceremonial occasions, often involving the swearing of oaths...'~wikipedia

Image: Freja, By John Bauer 1882-1918 (www.uppsalaauktion.se) [Public domain], 

via wikimedia commons

Class Warfare

 Class Warfare

A Triolet

 

I watched the day the castle fell,

saw dove and gosling put to sword;

a yowling Vixen rang the bell

and laughed the day the castle fell.

They burned the deer park, sealed the well

unlocked the cage of the talking bird.

She flew the day the castle fell,

calling fools to bring the sword.

March 2012

Posted for  FormforAll~Triolets at dVerse Poets Pub

Gay Cannon has invited Samuel Peralta (of Semaphore)to discuss and inspire us in the triolet form, one of my favorites. I've bent the rules a little here in my political roman à clef, but hopefully I will not be put to the sword.

And those who are counting may notice that there are also 
55 torches and pitchforks present
 for the G-Man.

Image:  "Der Thier und Jäger Krieg. "A broadside satirizing ordinary people and their aspiration to gain political power by showing the world upside-down, with animals storming the fortification of the hunters..(Nuremberg, Fürst: 1652)[Public domain], via wikimedia commons

Sweetener

Sweetener

I.

I put you in my tea

tannic with memories;

stirred, they go down smoother

sipping on your ways.

Put on my plate you make

an evergreen presentation,

dressed in rue and fired clay,

so haute cuisine, salad of baby greens

tossed in hope and fear, before

the soup of dreams.

II.

I put you on the moon

sitting where she bends

your cloven feet a-dangle in 

their blurred and slippery stars.

You ease Orion’s belt, give cloudy listening blinks;

I whisper in your thunder covered ear until

you put me in the storm

flying with wings of rain 

where cold front meets the warm.

III.

I put you in my heart

little shop of horrors

cobweb seeded, only one

flyblown object on display but not

for sale. Pressed against the glass

your firefly face winks in the indigo night

where ribboned time slips tight in a lover's knot

and tea is sweet as your blue sky mouth my love, 

sweeter than floating memories dead in the pot.

March 2012

Posted for    real toads

Kerry's Wednesday Challenge, always original, and always really a challenge, was to write a poem in three distinct but united parts, reflecting the concept of a triptych in the visual arts.

Image: Tea Time, by Ellen Wilson of Ella's Edge

Borrowed from Real Toads Sunday Challenge with Ellen Wilson

The Wild Hunt

 Edin Chavez

The Wild Hunt

All the day I ran

to catch you

outsmart you

outrun the rattling feet 

disappeared in the dark,

flown before me.

Crouched in the thicket panting

watching,

learning your ways;

where you are hard and canny,

where a sudden strike might find

the heart.

Under the standing sun
and under

 the dying moon I tracked you,

nosed your faint spoor till I dropped on the rocks,

hot with the calling of the blood, hearing

fever chattering its teeth in the empty night.

Down

in the village a dead woman lies—

so you’ve been this way

noiseless and gone.

In the torchlight her face at last unfocused

seems to smile.

Must I avenge her

 now she's free,

though she was the enemy?

though you and she

are neither real,

live nor dead,

but only running shadows 

where some hellhound passed me

on the grassy hillside hiding.

November 1987

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
 

This is an old poem, written in my late thirties, very lightly revised, originally posted back when I first started blogging here at Verse Escape. Forgive me for all these oldies--I'll hopefully have wrestled some of my current victims into submission by next week.

Photo Courtesy of Edin Chavez

Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved

Edin Chavez Photo Gallery

A Poem and A Progress Note

Lemons

Even lemons tart as a forced smile

will leave your fingers sticky

when you squeeze them dry.

How many more acidulated drops

left, invisibly inked and slow

to leave the pen

only browning

to sight in a certain sparse heat,

not enough to burn, barely enough to warm

sour on the tongue, pale on the paper of

the one who can’t even write them out loud?

Hold me like the fire holds the flame,

lick these salt and bitter words away

take my breath and keep it warm for me

till I need it,

when tomorrow makes me pay

for all this lemonade I threw away.

February 2012

Progress Note: As many of you may know, I had a rather nasty fall last week dodging a car which took a blind curve behind us while my husband and I were out walking the dog around our normally idyllically deserted neighborhood. I ended up severely straining my left knee and taking an acre (or so it feels) of skin off my hands, elbows and knees. After undergoing some tiresome procedures and a regimen of anti-inflammatories, antibiotics and mild pain killers, I haven't been in much shape to write or return visits. I am improving greatly, however, and am up and around now, no harm done, just healing slowly and a bit dazed still. I hope to be able to return to participating in all my normal online activities soon. Till then, I've put up a poem from last month to reassure everyone I'm still alive and kicking.

My sincere thanks to all who've come by here to read and commiserate, or contacted me to offer their concern.

Image: Header Photo:  My lemon, by Smaku on flick'r

Footer Photo:  lemons, by chotda on flick'r

Both shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License