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

The Music Of Birds And Lions

 

 

 

The Music of Birds and Lions

If I had to say something about it

I would just mention

the way your eyes

moved through me
like fever through a lion,

like the brown-soled boots

 

of a Victorian explorer

walking lightly

with ownership, a dominion

powered by steam

careful always to
keep an echo-

map of the outback

in beige buckram binding

firmly gripped in your mind,

 

referencing pages dogeared

recording the reasons

not to fall behind on

a dangerous journey;

or that your hands

were always sliding in

a slipstream of tasks, were

water, embracing stones smooth

in their blue satin beds,

leaving behind a geologic

 

Alexandrian library

of lithic messages, codes

in languages of a few extinct

species of birds, envoys and diplomats;

that your long fingers on the stops

were your flight feathers,

playing a recital at nightfall

of calling macaws that come to color

the shadow-fronds of sunset palms

with their bright rest;

 

but there's no need to

talk about what you stored
under my skin, or tattoos in birdsong

that can't be forgotten,

so I only strum the music of it

where the lions rise

in the mauve gauze of
the jungle dark.

~December 2014

(minor revisions, 2022)

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #144

(Nothing bubbling up from the cauldron this week, so posting another oldie, one originally written for Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads)

Images: The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Henri Rousseau

The Moment of Truth, 1892, Paul Gauguin

Public domain

Fantômes de Versailles

 

 

 

 

Fantômes de Versailles

(a 55) 

 

 Ghosts go hungry

at Versailles. 'Let them

eat cake,' the custodian mumbles.

Marie-Antoinette tries to bake

but flour falls through her fingers

dust to milky dust.

Marie starts the minuet.

Diamonds drop off the

Shepherdess like old flesh.

'Les riches, she murmurs,

are not quitters.'

In the Labyrinthe,

fables dehydrate.

The custodian

watches World Cup.

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a little historical nonsense

 posted for

Word Garden Word List:Ghost Eaters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Marie-Antoinette and her waiting women often dressed as Shepherdesses and played at being country peasants in the elaborate gardens of Versailles. 

 

Regarding the Labryrinthe, or Bosquet de la Reine at Versailles: 

"In 1665, André Le Nôtre planned a hedge maze of unadorned paths in an area south of the Latona Fountain near the Orangerie.. In 1669, Charles Perrault – author of the Mother Goose Tales – advised Louis XIV to remodel the Labyrinthe in such a way as to serve the Dauphin's education..Le Nôtre redesigned the Labyrinthe to feature thirty-nine fountains that depicted stories from Aesop's Fables..accompanied by a plaque on which the fable was printed..in verse..; from these plaques, Louis XIV's son learned to read..[C]ompleted in 1677, the Labyrinthe contained thirty-nine fountains with 333 painted metal animal sculptures. The water for the elaborate waterworks was conveyed from the Seine..[and used by].. fourteen water-wheels driving 253 pumps.. Citing repair and maintenance costs, Louis XVI ordered the Labyrinthe demolished in 1778. In its place, an arboretum of exotic trees was planted as an English-styled garden. Rechristened Bosquet de la Reine, it would be in this part of the garden that an episode of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which compromised Marie-Antoinette, transpired in 1785..."~wikipedia

 

France is defending champion for the 2022 World Cup. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:  L'Entrée du bosquet du Labyrinthe, © Jean Cotelle le Jeune (1642-1708) Public Domain

Marie-Antoinette Queen of France 1775 ©Jean Baptiste Gautier Dagoty

Chimera

 

 

Chimera

When I left all I asked was peace 

of the starry void, that

every shrewish hope be finally silent 

yet after me you sent one white bird

only marsh cloud singing,

too soft, too frail to fly far.

I dreamed of you last night--

did you call me?

No, it was just my broken eyes

wanting to see the old calligraphy

strong and alive on the blank page but

that will never be again.

You were dream's pale clerk

troubled, frowning at the paper

on which many things were written

none of them my name.

I stood by your shoulder;

you turned, walking through me.

Waking, I couldn't say which,

you or I, was the ghost.

The gift of sleep

is taken back and I sit staring

at the wrinkled day, at walls falling

in this helpless place of the dead

where I've washed up,

already chewed by the chimera

stung by the manticore,

wondering what white wings will come

out of the siren darkness, 

what ghost bird is left.

 

 

June 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #143

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Chimera, by Gustave Moreau, 1884, watercolor

Public domain, via wikipaintings.org 

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

Lion And Ravens With Unsettled Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 "..It is a wheel, the rays /around the sun. The wheel survives the myths/The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.."

~Wallace Stevens

 

~  *  ~

 

Lion and Ravens With Unsettled Sun

 

Two ravens circling in a spotless sky

on a warning wind with fire on its breath

soft but dangerous as a lion's hiss,

in dead grass gathered to burn a phantom's past

that now in turn burns us.

A feast of the senses is just

another place to die among strangers

hearing the hiss of lions trapped

in a body devouring itself

in camera, the dark heart.

Best to fall to the sudden sharp sword

of the god's divine panic, danced to dust

under his dusky foot, his pipes hissing like a lion,

a screech and flutter of ravens at the window.

Light is sliced to crescents dazzling at the edge;

nothing but the sun survives the myths.

The lion has no wheel behind his hiss.

Ravens flow in the tempest and its drum,

dark lettering spelling out the ride to come.

November 2022

 

 

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

and

 

 

 

earthweal's

Open Link Weekend # 142

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The Word List this week is taken from the works of Jim Morrison. He has always reminded me of a lion in figure and impact, though perhaps a bit more prone to roar than hiss. I've been reading Stevens again lately and somehow he got tangled up here, with more of a sun king's than lizard king's flare.

 

 

 

[lyrics begin at 1:12 mins]

 

 

 

Images: Lion, 1492, by Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Samhain Night 2014, ©joyannjones

 

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

Beneath a dead leaf my love lies hidden

with a rose pearl and a starling's feather

where the dark forest unties Her ribbons

 

where night rides as black as robber's leather

with a bagful of moon's most starving hours

in a forest where leaves are falling forever,

 

whose balefires paint meteoric showers,

whose pale sprites teach old lovers to dance

and sew up their wounds with threads of flowers.

 

For grape never saw the wine She decants,

a vintage that ripens with dissolution

aged in a song, sealed with ash and chance.

 

Under the starlight's silver infusion

asleep as a bee in the fading thunder,

 which is volition and which illusion

 

when all that's left of life is to wonder

or lift the leaf that love is under.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal

where I am pleased to host this week's challenge,

First Poems: Door to the Wilder Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fairy Dance, © Arthur Rackham    Public Domain

Spring Beauty © Andrew Wyeth         Fair Use

The Howl

 

 

 

The Howl

 

 

Deep into the night-abiding trees let free the howl

of my heart(that false doppelgänger, that unreliable narrator.)

Course it there, where darkness shakes down her hair,

fleet where the small hands of rain stroke my cheek

lightly,lightly, not so bitter as kisses, not so salt as tears,

til it comes to a stopping.

 

There's a fire panting to light up the hedgerows,

to make wilder things writhe from shadows bending,

those fetches the old gods make to beguile us dappling the void

the new ones provide, movement alone frantic with silence

save for crackle and spit and the skin drum's thud

that still beats in my wrist.

 

Each day dawns with feet cut off, limping,limping,

in the year-turning dark. Willow-wisps glow

in the grove of dancing,coming to draw the light

from the road, off to the flicker where worlds rub skins, 

to flames and fetches, to what's kindling now

where heartwood was riven, heat banked in

 

each unlit log is given to the season of time burning,

of leaves crumbling and forest dreaming the hand I'm holding, 

dreaming and singing in the sough where rain-wind 

ears the night. Can a child born to houses ever discern it

where all that runs in smoke and mist is changed

and confounded, rounded off without logic

 

to fire that howls in my skull

what it won't let me know;

it's my own fetch that's come

to dance in the hedgerow.

 

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #142

 

(and inspired by Brendan's Kindling in the Forest of Light and Shadow

Challenge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dancing Dryads, 1879, © Albert Pinkham Ryder  Public Domain

Wolves,(detail)  © Andrew Wyeth   Fair Use