Chaos Theory

Chaos Theory

 You 

are human.

A hot light caught in flesh

bound to the necessity of choice,

given cloudy human eyes

and told to make life.

There is no happy

refusing.

The imperative is toward order

so that every fleck

and piece

party to this planet

can cohere in purpose.

Undone it bends the back,

with the weight of chaos

too heavy to fight,

only visible

as a glowing lie 

that slides

quick or slow

towards an extinction

where

the intent to kill

meets the need to die.

You,

you chose long ago.

You know the force that swings 

the hangman’s rope,

the grave that grows the flowers we become.

 You know

the rot that must be cut within the rose

You even know 

how clean to keep the blade,

    every potion to hold back decay, every weapon against waste,

every fire that burns in the winter of the heart.

The need to die

called your name and you refused,

because you know these things

without words.

because your answer

was to live.

April 1991

Also posted at One Stop Poetry   for OneShotWednesday

Lacebark Elm,  photo © joy ann jones 11/8/10

What We Bring

photo by  Andy Ilachinski

What We Bring

The human

bit by the seawind, bleeding warmth

stands on the bleach-grey beach,

walks the line of detritus and empty shells

discarded by the tide

sees the void in her heart magnified

in drops of salt coating the kelp strands

across acres of bleak and endless grey

nothing

and wonders

how the planet’s birthing table

can be so cold

and empty.

The oysters, the clams, the fishes and mussels

the gulls, the algae and plankton by gallons

meanwhile

eat and mate and die and are born,

borne on the same rocking table

living as easy in the shine and the silver,

the liquid cold and wrapping black

as in tomorrow’s

hot red sun.

November 2010

Written for One Shoot Sunday Picture Prompt at One Stop Poetry, 11/7/10

Nonsense Rhyme

Nonsense Celebration

What makes affinity

Is what makes thee thee

And me  me, she

she

And he 

free to be who we see.

Brothers, skin sisters, teachers 

and creatures

of habits and hobbits of chance shires colliding

traveling east south and north, 

up down back and forth

round the nautilus shell,

with a Maydance as well

for marsupial nuptials and manticore riding.

Babies in blankets and cousins with trinkets,

and mothers and uncles down under the table

with the seventeenth gable

set on a roof that covers ten countries where twelve-month millennials

are hardy perennials

that hide from the frost so nothing is lost

but the note of a name, a picture, a frame,

a face or a form,

above the black ocean

but there’s always the warm

calling look or the motion

of thoughts that reflect like suites in a deck.

Ten of hearts, ten of spades

Ten of clubs are relayed,

your knave is my jack, her king knows the knack

of trumping the queen

without any spleen, so the numbers can fall

in sequence and all

to build a card house and shelter a bard mouse

who wiggles and sings

while plucking small strings

'neath a cheese moon of white 

that lights the starred night.

And still in the dream a pink piglet team

pulls a coach made of gourds

to carry the hoards

on their long rainbow bridge above the dry ridge 

til that fey light shines free

for thee, she and me.

October 2010 revised 11/6

The Garden Rat

The Garden Rat

Under an arc of liquid ice,

streaking the window behind,

clashing on the canna leaves,

runs a black stripe of being

fast and blurry as

a faint memory passing and lost

in the midst of children’s calling clamor.

It’s the mysterious

Garden Rat.

Every day I don’t see it

move, it’s just passed me,

disappearing behind the trunks

of the crape myrtle, secret

but

disturbing.

I hunch myself defensively

when I reach to pull a weed.

It’s undefined, yes,

but it’s huge.

(For a rat)

I’m sure it has teeth

bigger than these spider eggs

I’m brushing off my glove,

and sharper than

old quarrels.

All summer I worried

and tried to avoid

The Garden Rat,

dark and diseased,

and hiding in the soft shed petals

of the black-eyed susan and

the weeds I was now

afraid to pull.

Then fall came, and the leaves fell.

The cannas crumbled to the ground.

I went one day to rake the remains,

and from behind the mummy of stalks

flashed the mysterious

black and rapid

Neighbor’s Cat;

The Garden Rat.

Pandora’s Cat.

November 2010

Posted for Jingle's Thursday Poet's Rally, Week #32

Image from npr.org  Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Off the Shelf Archive - October

Each month I post a few poems by other authors on the Off the Shelf page, which doesn't allow for multiple posts or comments. So I've decided rather than have them disappear, I'd archive them here in the regular stream, by month for reference, where people can find them, comment on them, read them again or for the first time.

In October there were two Off the Shelf poems:

I.

CONCERT IN THE GARDEN

It rained.
The hour is an immense eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?
The world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
I wander, lost in my own center.

Octavio Paz

II.

The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top

The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top

Blood -- blood and torn grass --
Had marked the rise of his agony --
This lone hunter.
The grey-green woods impassive
Had watched the threshing of his limbs.

A canoe with flashing paddle,
A girl with soft searching eyes,
A call: "John!"
. . . . .
Come, arise, hunter!
Can you not hear?

The chatter of a death-demon from a tree-top.

Stephen Crane

The Knife

The Knife

Sharp, gleaming,

cutting to the bone.

The love that’s forever outside

can only enter as a blade

piercing the skin to the heart beneath.

I send it back,

that outside love,

the knife

that cuts the hand that wields it,

as surely as it cuts me,

the blade that enters the heart

that craves it

in such an other way.

But the knife knows only cutting,

and so I send it back.

I keep instead

inside that unpierced globe,

the love that pours like water, that

cleans and floats

the heart, that could

wash the blood

from a hundred knives.

October 2010

photo: Voodoo Knife Block from gadzooki.com

All Hallow's Eve

The end of October has been associated with change and passage--from one season to another, from one state of life to another--across many centuries and cultures. Whether called Samhain, All Saint's Day, Halloween, or the Day of the Dead, whether celebrated with commercialized frivolity, harvest gratitude, resignation or a darker emotion, it evokes the death of summer and the feelings that accompany it. So, in recognition of that passage from a rich autumn world to a bleaker winterscape, a new Off the Shelf selection from Stephen Crane, and also the poem below,  from 1991.

Photo by Ansel Adams, Church, Taos Pueblo, 1942

Revenant

The cool breath of the dead sighs down the hall.

It peels my soul like an old potato,

thick slices of skin and soft woody flesh

dropping in a spiral on the kitchen table of this

tired life.

A speaking shadow stands at the door,

an empty replicant.

A grey curse hangs over him

like the sullenness of unshed rain

blowing past a withering crop.

Huddled in the closed grave of my bed

I compose my bones in paleolithic repose

with dry flowers, an awl of horn,

a broken string of red beads 

       drifted with earth,

waiting for the ending of that next birth.

O I hear you out there,

rapping, knocking, calling

with a mute vibration

begging to come in and have me.

O yes I answered last time and see

See me now.

Roll the rock and stop the door.

Put the holy symbol round my neck.

Only keep

    the shadow

                  out.

March 1991

Illustration: The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones  (1861-1926)
Philip Burne-Jones [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Song of the Lithophyte

Song of the Lithophyte

As the heavy centuries have passed

their light repeating strokes across creation,

flowing the veils of earth at last

from a millennium’s striation

yet working only on the surface of the whole,

so, subtle tireless and remote

the long years have washed you,

put here a line upon your curving throat,

there in your dark hair a mica hue,

but pause now as the work draws near your soul.

A green airy growth lives inside each crack

the weathered rock turns upward to the sun.

The rain that slices inward to the bone

reveals its solemn involuted knack

of being rich in what all else may shun,

thriving on the rind of true alone.

As the hand of man has served

to carve a quicker gore than windblown sand

toward the ore the hillside hides reserved,

so your face is mined by your own hand.

The channels there were cut by salted tears,

and not the wayward miners of the years.

Your face was markless once beside the river

where we lay in harmony of mind.

Downstream the nuclear fire could not deliver

half the power there for us to find.

Firefly light made weedy shadows vast

where the vapor of the meadow burned

with heatless fire.

In the timestream’s flux we put a mast,

round which the planetary sails billowed and turned

at our desire.

As the wheel of centuries has made

chaos out of order, life from death;

as the crags and peaks where Moses prayed

were once the ballroom where the breath

that cuts them now to dust and ruin

was only known as seaweed’s dancing tune,

so now upon your face old thoughts parade

that I would sink deep roots in if I could

and end this lithophytic serenade

with soft sleep together in the green wood

and above us put the timeless firmament

at one with time’s and nature’s own intent.

June 1986

You can find some additional information about some of the elements in this poem here