Last Fire Of Winter

The Last Fire of Winter

burns in the hearth. The last

strabismic look from the demon's eye

wanders in its heart,

where jumps and lurches my little man of fire;

the blue grey imp that dances

on the crackle of eaten logs.

He was there when I made dinner

making a display of himself, only a devil's hellbrat,

cackling foolishly at the dogwhistle silence of

vegetable agony as I peeled aubergines and salted their flesh.

He doesn't know my unspoken name or all the secrets

buried beside my bones, my graveyard face,

beneath the coffin boards of my floor. 

Still, he smiles that same

laudenum smile as his comely master,

happy to be the go-between

who brings the goatskin missal

where my incubus writes me

all the brimstone news from hell.

But he’s not the one who can read the answer

I throw on the flames that hold back morning,

where the last fire of winter

burns in my heart.

March 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Image: Fire, by smenzel on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Broken Fix

Broken Fix

A diddler and a dabbler

a putzer and a fiddler

finder and discarder

a fixer of sorts

but he's learned never

to love anything so much

he’d have to care

if it stays broken.

He can spend his money

for seeds the weeds overtake.

He can hitch up the come-along and crank

till the sagging fence sits up straight for awhile.

He can read the fine print

as long as he has his glasses,

but  can’t see today, see her sweating

on the tractor under the griddle sun

hawkcircling where love cuts like a razor

blade from stem, crop from soil

days from years

one from the other.

He doesn’t remember much

from when they met years ago,

when she smiled and said, one woman’s trial

is another woman’s treasure,

how she told him 

if he took all the hippie out

there’d be nothing left.

Now she stands with arms folded

propped on the fence post, watching

the old blow in to stay, knowing

hers is the first name

he’ll forget.

 March 2012

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Sunday Photo Challenge: Shanyn Silinski

Both photos  © Shanyn Silinski via Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Shanyn blogs at Sunflower Poetry

Used with permission

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Speaking of the old blowing in, Shotgun Willie sings some Dave Mathews and shows he still can make the hairs on your arms stand up with that voice

Faerie Tales

 

 Faerie Tales

Once upon a time

a nightingale

pressed her breast upon a thorn

trilled her last liquid song

to stain for a fool

one perfect rose red.

Once upon a time

a mermaid renounced her tail

trading eternity for

sea foam so her faithless

love could sleep

in his new wife's arms.

Once upon a time

a princess with bleeding hands 

sewed for seven years

seven shirts of stinging nettles  

to break a spell of swans

but seamed a curse

and once two spirits blent

under knotted boughs

buoyed by infinite air, flower eyes

green barked limbs entangled,

and someone said, Hold tight

there is no bottom.

But that was long ago

and most days

no one remembers

how it ends.

March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Claudia hosts this weekend, and her theme is fairy tales.

First stanza note: The Nightingale and the Rose, By Oscar Wilde

Second stanza note: The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen

Third stanza note: The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen. I had remembered the story this way: A princess has seven brothers who were turned into swans by a wicked witch, and to return them to human form she had to weave seven shirts of magical stinging nettles in seven years--she had finished six, and all but one sleeve of the last shirt when the time was up, so her last and favorite brother was left with the wing of a swan, and died. But the actual story summarized here at wikipedia is a bit different, and does have a happy ending, though considerably more trials en route for the princess.

Image: Gorgonzola Flew Off On Her Dragon, illustration  by H.J. Ford

 from Heart of Ice, in  Andrew Lang's The Green Fairy Book, 1892, publlc domain

republished 1965 by Dover Press, my collection.

Far

Far

So far, so far your heart

so deep, so deep the dark

so far the star

traveling on the bullet train new age

music of the rails still a harpy's song

rattling out each harmonic dissonance

that parts us, incessant glissando

clack and clamor of canned confusion

ricocheting off unmalleable ore drawling

the angle acuter, the fundamental ever 
smaller parallel to a paper point of no return 

and none desired. Beneath, just a small

click and the engine shoots itself

down an altered course toward

a receding destination halfbent as

the bow that launches the arrow

of an indifferent archer

physical skills to punch it home

never there and now

no different as it veers hopelessly far

from the tracks after what runs faster

than any train can catch, thinner than any

arrow can pin, feet fluid as a deer

jumping the rails and flickering fences,

dry rivers future and past, heading for the green

deep heart of the woods where it feels safe

where its thicketed death is hiding.

so far so far your heart
so deep, so deep the dark

so far, so deep, so dark the star

March 2012

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Laurie's challenge: Perspective

Image: So Far, March, 2012 © joy ann jones

Yes And No By Moonlight

Yes and No

 By Moonlight

You wrote on my lips

the summer’s ending

stitched dry leaves

across my lids

in the cooling dark

and I said Yes.

You poured the moon 

for my thirst

brimful with loss;

I still remembered
summer's
melon taste.

In the dream

you bought me,

time stands still

no matter how often

I say No.

March 2012

55 drops of ice cold moonlight for   the G-Man

Image: Moonlit Landscape, Camille Corot, oil on canvas, 1874

Public Domain, via WikiPaintings

Too Much

This is a response to Charles Miller's Meeting the Bar prompt at dVerse Poets Pub  which was to annotate a poem to 'fill in the gaps." I don't know if I'll be entirely successful, since I'm far from sure exactly where this particular poem really came from, but here goes...

This poem has been sitting unposted in my files for several months because it troubles me. It has been difficult to rewrite it, or re-direct it in any way. Many of my poems come in the form of dreams, or as the ashes of a dream unremembered except for a few words. This one came fully clothed, all in one piece, extremely detailed, especially the smells described, and the sights were cinematically real. 

It was so much like an interior documentary that I feel I should be able to assign names and faces and dates to the events in it; yet I’ve never been anywhere near a war, or part of a medical team, or indeed, in any crisis situation where someone else’s blood was flowing. At the time of the dream, no one I knew was ill or dying. I can only say I feel the characters are functioning as archetypes representing a sense of profound loss and disjunction with expectations, due to some personal family events, none of which involved death or physical trauma, shortly before the dream’s occurrence. I think sometimes our psych interprets emotions physically, and that this is a case in point. 

That said, this was on the nightmare side of the dream world, and there are some graphic descriptions here, another reason why I’ve not posted it, so please, if you are squeamish, you might prefer not to read further.

Too Much

I don’t know who you were

who came to me last night

a dream of a time of war

Your uniform was grey

the sky was grey

the ground a mud turned red

that never came from clay

I only know you loved me as I loved you

as we both loved

the shattered form before us, frail on

the blood slick table, close to death.

Hard hours we labored to save it

hard hours in sweat and battle’s filth, bathed

in the halitus of mortis, lapped by the slosh

and reek of the charnal house

till at last we looked up across the boards

and shared an uncertain smile

before you dropped down screaming to the dirt

your gut wound angry, pulsing out a fat grey mile

your hand to the blasted side kept turned from view,

and then I cried out over the stench you threw,

This is too much , too much,

too much

not you, too.

January 2012

Image: Untitled [antique surgical kit at International Museum of Surgical Science] 

by Jeremy M Farmer, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

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