Off the Shelf Archive~April

Now that the poem a day challenge for April is mercifully past, it's time to change out the Off the Shelf page. I've been wanting to do John Donne for a long time, and am too tired to go hunting for new and exciting poems, so I'm posting an old favorite, in my opinion, perhaps one of the three or four best love poems ever written, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. 

You'll find it here on the Off the Shelf  page.



Meanwhile, last month's Emily Dickinson selection is below for a final read:

Three Short Poems by Emily Dickinson

To Make A Prairie

 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—  
One clover, and a bee,  
And revery.  
The revery alone will do  
If bees are few.

Wild Nights – Wild Nights! 

Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee! 

 

The Heart Asks Pleasure First

The Heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;   

And then, to go to sleep;       

 And then, if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor,

The liberty to die.

  ~ all poems by Emily Dickinson

Image:Bumblebee on a Flower, by Adam Freidin, on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Moon Sign

Moon Sign

I look to the wobbling moon

for a sign, foolishly waiting

as if love ever held back

from showing her face

when she wanted something.

Too easy to drop 

a hand on a still knee,

a smile for a stiff word

a melt where no word

means much.

Any of these things

can be done without thinking

without the ungainly moon’s say so

if not without regret, because what

love really wants she takes.

What sits unclaimed

doesn’t need  to look

or wait.

April 2012

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Open Link Monday

I've used another of Mama Zen's photographs from Sunday's Photo Challenge for illustration, as I had a hard time again picking a single one. Thanks, MZ.

Photo: Moon, © Mama Zen Photography

Used with permission.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Witch's Broom

© Mama Zen Photography

Witch’s Broom

This is the motherland that once

raised outlaws, took in

orphaned indians,

hard dry land glad to get

hardluck sodbusters, mail
order brides, snakeoil
salesmen,abdicated gamblers
lost cause gunmen,
backslid preachers

all desperate some determined

to settle down;

but the blood never settles.

Wild it was

and wild it is,
thick and crazy

in mazed veins newborn

to the task of casking it.

Faults crack her red plains, 

bootleggers become

meth labbers, outlaw thugs
gladhand politicians, medicine show 
preachers preach tea, believers
still empty bellied, indians ground

fine as powder still fighting, and 
always the rule of the gun.

Prairie grass in plumed heads flags

the verge of wheel ruts schooners cut,
now blacktop well oiled where

each growth is history and testament, 

some strong and taking, upright
shadows bible black,

some bent, twisted, killing 
slow, curling into oblivion.

The body settles but

the blood never will;

each generation throws out

its witch’s broom anew

dark spores spit careless on the wind.

April 2012

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Sunday Challenge: Photography of Mama Zen

Process Notes: Witch's broom is the name given to various diseases causing deformity and unusual growth in shrubs, woody plants and trees, often showing a distorted fanned out shape or drastically tangled, contorted appearance. I've stretched the definition by applying it inaccurately to grasses (and humans) here. 

Header photo: Horses, by Mama  Zen

Used with permission.

Footer photo: Ziziphus microonata, By Rotational (Own work) [Public domain], 

via Wikimedia Commons

Lena

Lena

I remember Lena

grey crone powdered corpse white

with smeared cherry juice lips gone

wrong, unthickened, loose and 

puddling in her flat pieplate face.

She pushed the stroller

round and round the estate circle drive

talking to the dead doll

cradled inside, stopping to pull

the shade further forward

over its face, crooning a sing song,

mumbled pieces falling

like rotting leaves

on its face.

Lena was always cold

and so was her dollbaby, in two

ragged red sweaters reverse cross-buttoned

one to the other muffling and protecting

in the high summer sun she

walked round and round avoiding.

I watched from the coachhouse window

holding my son she was not supposed

to see, because she might, they

said, "do something." Round and round

her breastsacks clutched to her ribs

carried empty in her stick arms

never suckled but once

by the child that died.

I remember feeling

sorry for her

till the day she hissed

and showed  me her

bloodstained teeth.

April 2012

 Posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Blue Flute is hosting today, and the prompt is Vampires.

Pub doors are open till midnight Sunday EST. 

Open your poetic vault, set the Undead loose and join us.

Process Notes: Based on a true story, (though 'Lena' was only insane, and not a vampire) from a summer spent in haunted New England many years ago.

Image: Conjuring Owls, by Max Kimber. on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Embracing Bohemia

'France Embraces Bohemia,' Alphonse Mucha

Embracing Bohemia

Bend your head my love

with its tangle-curls in anarchy

all concealed

under the perfect fool’s rabbitcap

and kiss the spot

where the religion left

for brighter colors,

where it runed itself

to carmine sheets and mica nights

pandemics of poetry and laughter

ékstasis on a cross of commonality

where soul passes light to soul
through its thinnest wall

osmotically less to more towards

the forever lost it seeks 
and never finds.

Let the loop in your right hand be infinity,

tying us to the gypsy coloured wheel

flowered with dark eyes, reading and riding
the tarot of caresses, hoops extravagant in our
bell deafened ears, bleeding only the stigmata

of sighs, lotus-drunk on windfalls
of heaven’s too high fruit.

Drop the cord from your free hand

and loosen my boundaries

all the ties that scour and pinch

their rawhide demands.

Paint every line incarnadine

with the flourish of the faun,
all coverings shed white

as evening snow drifting

through the temple doorway.

Blue night tattoos with shadow

the nakedness shown to us alone
where there is no longer 
even a skin to separate

the woman on the cross 
from the stone.

April 2012

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Fireblossom Friday Challenge: The Art of Alphonse Mucha

The Czech artist Alphonse Mucha is mostly known for his stylized Art Nouveau depictions of women in illustrations, advertisements and set poses,(in fact Art Nouveau was originally called Style Mucha) but he also painted other subjects, including archetypal allegories like this, and a series of twenty large canvasses depicting the history of the Czech and Slavic people. His poster-style work is so well known I wanted to chose a painting a bit off the beaten track, and this one definitely brought out my Bohemian tendencies. You can see a broad range of his art at the wikipaintings.org link provided below.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: France Embraces Bohemia, by Alphonse Mucha  c. 1918, oil on canvas

Public Domain, via wikipaintings.org

Viking Funeral

Viking Funeral

I haven’t seen you since

the viking funeral when

all the boat was burning and
you were the dog at my feet.

The wind is in the east

and my old wounds ache;

the line of scar across my

fingers, almost severed

when you drew on me

for touching,

won’t stop throbbing, and though

they were embossed on my shield

against my will

the ice age, 

the broken lands

are now my own.

I drowse when I can in the sun 

outside Sleipnir’s stable, 

where Ceridwen’s cauldron

leans ready against the wall, 

deaf to Loki making 

a bloodwar fuss over Sif's shorn hair 

the yapping liar's mouth

unfaithful, untrue.

The memory of heat

on still red scars

soothes, burning all

alike to ash, 

black bones of deceit,

the cur at my feet.

April 2012

 Hoping this will 

Meet the Bar at dVerse Poets Pub

where Victoria is hosting a prompt on allegory today (Thursday) at 3:00 PM EST through midnight Friday.

Process Notes:Ceridwen is a Welsh enchantress with a sometimes calamitous cauldron of poetic inspiration. Sleipnir is Odin's eight-legged horse on which he rides to the other Worlds, and Loki is the Norse god of deception and trickery, who in one of his escapades stole the golden hair of Thor's wife Sif to make trouble. 

The rest of this poem was inspired by a scene from the 1939 movie Beau Geste, starring Gary Cooper and Ray Milland as two brothers who join the French Foreign Legion. Here's a link to a youtube clip from the film which about 1.5 minutes in, shows a child's version of the bowlderized concept of a Viking Funeral(later to be played out in a more bloody context,) where 'a Viking always has to be buried with a dog at his feet.' In actual custom, the 'dog' was more likely to be a thrall(captive/slave.) The Viking leader was placed in his ship, generally on land, and surrounded by grave goods and sacrifices of thralls, wine and horsemeat, the ship was set afire and the ashes were buried.

Image: Photo of a Viking galley, burned at an Up Helly Aa fire festival in the Shetland Islands, by Anne Burgess 1973 [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], 

via Wikimedia Commons

Redemption

Redemption

On the other side

of the wildest blood

stilled and pooled

in a chapel of decorum,

I would love you then

as much as when the moon

drew out your howl,

as much as when the sea

could not hold all your tears

in all her rolling bowls

and hidden chambers.

For the sake of all you

paid and pay for the

clutched and crumbled

ticket home,

I  love you immutable

or crucibled, then

or now, wherever

you stand

most alone.

April 2012

Posted for   real toads

Challenge: Ella's Edge

 Circles of the Inner and Outer Word

Image: Adam and Eve, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1533, wood

Public Domain via wikipaintings.org

The Coalman

original photo by Phil Roeder on flick'r

The Coalman

A political fantasia

The coalman is

darkness; his dust sticks to

the hands, corpse of a snowman

black in three balls

rolled from loose night, up and

down slopes of the motherless void.

He wears a bent hat

on the small ball at the top

made from the skin

of the last living poet, his

iced buttons slick fingerbones

of extinct honest men.

His flat eyes are stolen

red swelled and sullen

winking and swollen
sucked from 
wet cheeks of a child

lost at midnight.

His nose is blue steel
hollow as promises,

the cold narrow barrel

of a murderer’s handgun

buried in lies but dug 

from the grave

and his mouth

his rotting black mouth

you don’t

want to hear

where

he got that.

April 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Image: Art & Blue Sky, by Phil Roeder, on flick'r

This is a photograph of an original work of art by Gary Hume

I have cropped and lightly manipulated Mr Roeder's photo as permitted

under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

The original work can be viewed here

Fusion

Fusion

After the fire has

almost burned out

low as the grate

in your velvet voice

heard nowhere but my mind’s eye

a single teal flame

unlikely, match small, foxtrots with the sparks

as the chimney’s percussion fades and

night settles on my shoulders,

my shawl when the sun dies.

A heavy stare is all I have to bring

that fragile blue flame-atom nearer

to fill the hollows where love's

narrow bit has cored every bone

with light and left no marrow.

I seek an unbearable density, in heat

burning bright at the forge of tomorrow

pulled from the dark hearts of seventeen stars

curved in a constellation of fired glass

that jewels the black navel of a godling

as finite and feathery as

Einstein’s eyebrow, swirling a spiral

benediction with his cape of the worlds,

whispering in velvet

from the deep blue dark:

Love like mass is fungible

and can neither be

created nor destroyed.

April 2012

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Open Link Monday

Image: Hubble telescope picture of T Pyxidis* from a compilation of data taken on Feb. 26, 1994, and June 16, Oct. 7, and Nov. 10, 1995, by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Public Domain via wikimedia commons

* "T Pyxidis (T Pyx) is a binary star system in the constellation Pyxis estimated at about 1,000 parsecs (3,300 light-years) from Earth. It contains a sun-like star and a white dwarf. Because of their close proximity and the larger mass of the white dwarf, it draws matter from the larger, less massive star which causes periodic thermonuclear explosions to occur. T Pyx is a recurrent nova and nova remnant in the constellation Pyxis." ~wikipedia

The Flowers of Dorian Gray

Flowers of Dorian Gray

The richest harvest always comes they say

from blackest earth deeptilled in hard worked fields.

Still there’s a freedom in the tumbleweed

the dry unworked and feckless desert yields

or blowing dandelions, golden in the clay.

Now dead machines and poison tend the seed,

make food of sorts for swollen city hives.

The soil sprouts up a greensick paper crop;

where lawless gamblers rule mad killing thrives

while dutiful puppets pirouette and bleed.

But here’s a place I’ve made the circus stop

where seeds fall as they will, where time’s own face

is changed into wild flowers of Dorian Gray

where all deeds past with beauty interlace,

where top is bottom and the bottom’s top.

April 2012

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Kerry's Challenge: The Envelope Quintet

And challenge it was. I chose the extended alternate version of the form

abcba, cdedc, efafe in the hated and dreaded iambic pentameter, which has royally kicked my butt up down and sideways for the last 24 hours.

Also posted for   Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Karin Gustafson hosts this weekend, with a prompt entitled Duty Calls,

asking us to explore the realms of duty and obligation.

Process notes: In the famous novel by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a man's evil and dissipated choices are reflected in a portrait which grows older and uglier with each deed, while his face remains youthful and handsome. I've reworked and reversed Wilde's metaphor here a bit.

Image: Flowers of Dorian Gray,

© joy ann jones, 2010, 2012

Roses

Roses

Morning 
brings

a blowsy rose

to pleasure the nose,

bent head tousled from

the rough loving of the storm,

wearing silver

rain beads tiny

but luminous,

skirt of brown leaves

fallen 
round her ankles,

a winter’s worth of death

undressed.

Sorrow 
startles 
out of cover,

a spooked rabbit heading

down the memory hole,

running from the fox

 of your smile.

April 2012

Image: Rosa 'Pat Austin,'  May, 2010

© joy ann jones

Gone With The Wind

"..I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind..."

~Ernest Dowson, Mitchell's source for the final title

Gone with the Wind

I read the book then saw the movie; sad.

I dread the look the author must have had

When she saw her Scarlett on the screen

thin and flat as a paperdoll that screamed.

But still the sets, the dresses, widescreen shots

Shut out the gutted edits of the plot.

In hoops the glittering ladies waltzed like dolls.

In whoops the ballroom laughter, fans and shawls

Made it feel we graced that dance of time

Faded into glitter, forced to rhyme.

Missing sauce, I'm Melanie the meek

Kissing faithless Scarlett on the cheek,

Knowing Ashley couldn’t make his move,

Showing Rhett what women have to prove.

Six hundred twenty thousand soldiers died.

Tricks and love scenes, Scarlett’s stubborn pride

Are what we got wrapped up in 40’s glam;

War and Rhett frankly didn’t give a damn.

April 2012

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Mary's Mixed Bag

and    FormForAll   at dVerse Poets Pub

Framed Couplets

 (Couplets in iambic pentameter where both first and last syllables rhyme.)

Process Notes: I read Gone With The Wind three times in my adolescence, and loved every page of it, not only because of Mitchell's well-drawn characters, but because of all the rich historical detail she included--battles, facts, and thousands of lines about the background and mechanics of the Civil War itself, and through which she made them illustrate that historical period in detail (not that I didn't love as well all the soap opera antics of her main characters.) I was terribly disappointed by the movie--Hollywood at its most superficial, despite the lavish trappings and the excellent cast. But perhaps no film can ever have the scope of a thousand page novel. Anyway, both book and film are deservedly classics, and no slur is intended toward Vivien Leigh, though she never was the Scarlett I saw reading the book. To me Olivia de Havilland was THE actress in that one. And wonderful as Leslie Howard was, all one could do was scratch one's head and wonder what on *earth* Scarlett was thinking when she had Clark Gable eating out of her hand.

Image: Film poster for Gone With the Wind, 1939, By Employee(s) of MGM 

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

Finding the Goldilocks Zone

Finding the Goldilocks Zone

Tell me again

(you don’t have to use those

jawbreaker words,

and instruments can lie)

how much I am allowed to want you

how much is too much

how much not enough

how much a perfect porridge

bowl of just right?

Because, goldilocks,

this mind reading act

of mine is not

working

out.

April 2012

Process Notes: Loosely defined, the Goldilocks zone, comfort zone or habitable zone, is the area in a star's effective region where planetary bodies may conceivably have atmospheric conditions which allow water to be present, and therefor, the possibility of life, i.e. not too hot not too cold etc.

Image: Artist's Conception of Upsilon Andromeda D, By Lucianomendez (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Lament

Lament  

Too far too far

you’ve gone so far

too far to know

just where you are.

The way’s too steep

the play’s too long.

The curtain falls

the lines are  wrong;

too far to hear

a wisp of song.

The storms blow in

the wind cuts hard

the new chicks scratch

in an empty yard

too far to cry

from where you are.

No place for thee

on land or sea

No home for me

but where you are

too far

April 2012

Images © joy ann jones 2012

Gingerbread Man

Gingerbread Man, or
How I Got Away

Drawn to the wreck
rubbernecking your

everbleeding heart

your crippled soul, a young

fool still I expected that the vast

disassembly of you, out of control

scattered and laying

in parts, 

could make me whole.

And so you did

if pain itself is a completer

of a circle that can’t

be finished any neater.

So you did 
know the way

to make my heart whir

like a clockwork toy

until time came to pay,

to load the gun, barrel by barrel, 
against a fast sloping night feral 
with teeth. You screamed

like a caught thief

broke like a gingerbread boy

stumbling on your crumbly leg,
button eye glazed with fears

your fingerless mitt, so round 

and soft, 

raised uselessly, too late

at the oncoming bears,

making lovely bait.

April 2012





Posted for   Open Link Night   at dVerse Poets Pub

Image: Gingerbread Man, by Danny Key on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons License

Postcard at the Beach

Postcard at the Beach

Through 

the open window

white sand shines in a naked

raked garden of dreams,

tattooed and ruled beneath the palms in

 green dream energy, aqua sea bordered in an order of light.

 Nightmares quartered and crossed

fill up the black room's cage 

dancing above that tourmaline dream, gliding wall

to wall sleepless, betraying me with

a vaguely pulsing mind

an old and brittle life

too fragile, too cumbersome, chipped

yellowed posterboard not winged postcard

enough to pass

through that beckoning slot,

mailed to the beach

with no forwarding address.

Only a peeled off scrap

[stiff lifted script of 'Wish I was there']

 pulled to that framing of light

by hooks of birdsong,

crams in sideways as shadows play

on a riffing surf, delivering

everything that's alive

outside.

April 2012

Posted for   real toads

Open Link Monday

Susie Clevenger's photography was too good to have just one, so I did an encore with her shot of The Lighthouse at Punto Sur from Sunday's Challenge and hooked up with it here. Thank you, Susie. I see why they call you Goddess.

Image: The Lighthouse at Punto Sur, by Susie Clevenger

Used with permission.

Blue Bridge

Blue Bridge

How is it when

I only see the bridge

made from letters

of your name

the struts that string

the macrame of your steel weave

in a starpoint net

tying shore to vagrant shore

my heart tumbles

my lungs fill in panic

as if I were hung

on the edge of a plunge

sudden, deeper

into blue oblivion

where high on another scale

I hear the hum of traffic the sound of

horns fading to ghosts singing

their roadsongs to each other

inaudible as dolphins save to

themselves and my thrumming ear,

the vibrating membrane all

that moves in a softening organism

going dark,

drinking time's river wind 

sweet on my face,

every traffic

in  metal and noise 

vanishing in a

sudden slap of light and

scent of salt.

January 2012

revised April 2012 

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Challenge: Photography of Susie Clevenger

Many thanks to real toads and Susie for this photo, whose logos helped to bring this poem from graffiti lost in the file to some sort of solid form here. 

Image: Baytown Bridge, by Susie Clevenger

Used with permission.

Thanks, Susie!