The Same Stars

The Same Stars

Caught crisscross before the moon
my eyes climb through the boughs to see  

the same stars that rock me in their cradle

now rock you and so will rock the spangled void

for every lover, past the time I'll need their cover

when I am stardust in no one’s eye.

The same stars look down tonight

on every face I held like saving grace

candled in the sky lantern of my palms.

Though every matchstick light I tended

is long blown out, the sweet smoke pools

a shadowed incense in moon's dark garden

for when the spell is wound up,

and three whippoorwills call to the crow

outside the windowed midnight all in a row.

Then my last kiss to you will be

the first newborn thing

the same stars dream

March 2012

Yi peng sky lantern festival, San Sai Thailand

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Photo Challenge: Laura Hegfield 

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Header Photo by Laura Hegfield

Used with permission

Footer Photo: Yi peng sky lantern festival San Sai Thailand By Takeaway (Own work) 

via Wikimedia Commons

Zombie

Zombie

Excerpts from the Journal

 July 2, 1995

...but telegrams from ghosts are unnerving...hard to somehow extract the essence [of the past] without ever wanting it back..

I shed bitter tears for ____ at the funeral Friday, went back to work, came home to crash, woke to screaming nightmares of his corpse pulling me up by the hair ...

mourning for the flame that burned so fitfully but so pure; I go in fear of the black hand that extinguished it….

After I ran away I dreamed

and dreamed of you dead

and now you are
buried in your overalls

laughing brown eyes blanks, rolled up in your head

ivory as  unnumbered dice

the way the whiskey always made them

so dead for you is just another high... 

July 5, 1995

Nearly a year on my new job. Slept too much. Crazy dreams. 

of ______ once again, this time wearing another’s body, but retaining his own insane unfocused brown eyes, ranting at me, holding me by the shirt and shaking me, starting with 

soft words, words that my new lover says to me, 

[‘It will be better, it will all be better soon’]

but always that mad look increasing as I start to know, finally screaming at me;

what, I can’t tell, 

because I too am screaming...denials, guttural cries of child's terror...is it his unforgiving ghost, coming to me in dreams, to finally show what was bleeding and real under the plastic wedding cake cover...

or guilt's last hidden gasp.

...the old dreams from when I left him, that I must fight his corpse--fattened in the otherworld, malignant and mad with unholy life...

now I dream it all again, the headstone so uneasy on the man I knew, careless kind, silly, ineffective, weak and

 [full of the ability to destroy.]

what I feel I deserved to receive / 

or what I actually / behind the masks / received…

 

it’s all too far gone from me now... 

it's always sleeping beside me now

where I'm afraid I'll have to look at it,

don't make me touch it

turning turning in a winding sheet of

strangling nights

blind afraid 

to look and see that those empty eyes 

[there in the dark]

 are staring back and I'm caught again

as of course they always are, and I always am….

Journal entries from 1995, revised and extensively messed with, March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Poet Stu McPherson is running the show at the pub today, and his prompt is to explore the nightmare edge of our dreams. This is a bit of a departure for me, more prose than poetry, and taken from life ( or more accurately, death.) I've redacted names

July 5 1995

Images © joy ann jones

Flash And Thunder

Flash And Thunder

Flash and thunder can’t break the panes in

the hothouse I keep at heart's core    

where you’re centered in my cells

moonflower on fire

where no careless-shut

door can let in

a flash of

killing

frost.

Frost

curdles

as sure as

fire consumes

or flood waters drown

but who wouldn't plead for

quick burning over a soaked

sponge of lung or the long white death,

stiff in winter's numbing arms alone.

March 2012

Posted for   Fireblossom Friday   at real toads

where her challenge is to write on a topic, er... embodied... by some aspect(s) of the physical body.

This is a more or less a nonet (or maybe two) a syllable counting form of nine lines, beginning with nine syllables and ending with one. I've arbitrarily introduced a second stanza and reversed the form, going from one syllable to nine. 

Image: winter time, by micmol, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License 

Harem Dance

Harem Dance

The harem girls dance

in turn, daily nightly

evanescent bubbles in the hookah

of his pleasure.

They serve their finest dishes; tender

quails trembling with ginseng, coriander buns

redolent of cinnamon, to tempt

his failing appetite.

Each day brings another exhibition

trapped satellites of a heavy sun

turning only the loveliest warm face

outward under his needle gaze

but behind hides the cold hemisphere

of darkness, pitted waste of light's

rejection. He ponders the pale moon

breasts of the new one from Tangiers.

In the tamarisk each night

whichever one performs

the blue nightjar snaps moths and sings

straight through to the dagger dawn.

March 2012

 Posted for    real toads

Challenge: Poem Sketching

Ella asked us to 'sketch' out a poem from a short list of words as a writing exercise, as promoted by poet and teacher Sandford Lyne. I used my own list of these four words below:

evanescent

satellite

coriander

needle

Image: The Harem Dance, by Giulio Rosati 

oil on canvas, Public domain via wikimedia commons

The Problem of Being the Wine

The Problem of Being the Wine

 After reading Robert Hass

A woman who liked me once recommended my vintage

to a folksinger I seemed to love.

He told me “Judy said you have the soul of a butterfly in there

and we must make love if you would like that.”

Being young is such a snare and makes gifts of this nature

impossible to either use or refuse. ( Likewise, being old.)

So I poured for him that quick drink with the flutter of wings before

he left for graduate school and his war exemption.

He wrote he lost his blue eyed music, gave his heart to a restless

housewife, wet Pensacola nights, palm trees and a blonde summer.

Blowing down the road to the dustbowl in your cyclone of winter dark eyes

and skittering aspen-leaf hair seemed the only logical response.

March 2012

 Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Robert Hass is a celebrated modern American poet, post-beat, translator of haiku, and former Poet Laureate of the US from 1995-97. Among other things, this poem is a pastiche of his somewhat laconic style.

Image: Gold, by stephee on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

In the Yellow House

In the Yellow House

In the blue room of the sun

in the yellow house, 

behind terracotta walls

a tossed night is pulled from the bed

and thrown on a pile of other nights

wrinkled, indelibly lorn.

The woman hums as her hands stroke

farewell before it goes in the basket,

remembering the voice in the deep,

how she was loved

with words and lost in silence

far from this landlocked yellow boat

on a prairie sea, ribbed by the

bleaching shipwreck of her life, where 

in the front room she hears

the men say, 

Talk

is cheap.

It takes money to buy whiskey.

Light’s first nod is still a few miles away

across the grainfed graveyard out the window

where Orion sinks in another 

lightening quicksand sky, one foot

on a scruboak branch, both hands uplifted

to the horizon plummeting hawk sure,

hanging on to the moment

before his last fingertip slips past in the fade, 

drowned till tomorrow in star foam,

floating memories, the breaker crashed

ebb of the voice in her dream

softening away away, murmured in the constant

wind rasped fretting of the wheat, sleepless

as the oblivious sea;

so she knows

no wave is ever really gone

no word ever said wasted

no whiskey bought stronger

than what musics her morning song.

March 2012

Posted for    real toads

Today is Open Link Monday at real toads, and I am using a photo from the Sunday Challenge there, which featured Kat Mortensen, late to the party, as usual.Thanks, Kat!

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image copyright Kat Mortensen

Used with permission.

Doppelgänger

Doppelgänger

"That which is below is like that which is above that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing."

~Isaac Newton, 

translating from The Emerald Tablet

Walking in tandem on the mirrored world

shadowlinked foot to foot, fingers across

eyes behind eyes, pressing out sighs

and sights that neither wants to see,

nonetheless hung unerased

on the rack of each broken embrace, 

laughing tears that would bounce

too high against that tired

cracked reflector facing up.

So let the bucket spin down again

down, where it’s deepest black

where dark’s so strong, so long

there’s no feel left for solid or sop

where the only thing that bubbles up

is oblivion. Above, everything still

wanders off, it’s an empty night

with a blackmailer’s eye

watching for when to apply 

the screws, everything to lose

whichever of us is really walking

on this sparkling silver sky.

Oh I can see perfectly why

no one else wants to mix up in it,

this blender of cosmic goo, 

why it's just we two,

staggering in sync, twin spiders

on either side of a plate of night.

There's not much you can tell me

about the mysteries you hide that 

I don't know. I've already learned that

if a woman stands alone beneath

Michaelangelo’s god bedecked array

looking up in awe, it's true

there'll be a man behind her looking up 

her skirt, and who’s to say

who has the better view.

February-March 2012

Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

 The multi-talented James Rainsford is hosting at the pub today, and has brought out some of his unique and always amazing photographs for us to work from.The title of the picture I've chosen is Reflections, and though I gave my poem a different title, it could easily have borrowed his as well.

Image: Reflections, by James Rainsford

Used with permission

Red Flower

Red Flower

I try to imagine the poem

you'd write if you thought

about such things,

what you would say about

a torn red flower or

the racket of the crickets.

I can’t find

a single word.

only the fitful ash and fleeing smoke

of our days, and the

last winter bruises fading

to summer yellow.

March 2012

55 torn petals for   the G-man

Image: A Pot of Geraniums, Odilon Redon, oil on canvas

Public Domain, courtesy wikipainitings.org

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

Posted for    real toads

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

Posted for    real toads

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