The Greenhouse

The Greenhouse

"…only a wall of bad dreams separates me from the dead."

~Federico Garcia Lorca

Part 1

Shape without form

bones hollow tubes

delicious conduits for melons of yesterday's light

emptied, love that drips

from fingertips hung over the side

of a dolphin's drifting bed

silver drops of mercury 

running

up my face

hung dangling to the sky,

a root that reaches eyeless

toward a cavity drowned in moons.

My heart still

bleats

beats

once

again

louder than the crocodile in the ivy

clicking castanet teeth in sambas to

a deaf rose

in the greenhouse of dust and wine.

Shape without form,

a dream so badly made

it's no different than waking.

Part 2.

Many of these nights

I dream the greenhouse

bench-full of musky geraniums,

doubled lilies, spreadfinger poinsettia stars,

clay pots of green bay, mimosa, impossible olive

arrayed in some sequence that

confounds Fibonacci

with its lack of gold arab tumbleweeds,

its rote root and utterly unpredictable

prime free knowing,

counting up to its number

of green secret selves.

I pass through the sleepless emerald-lidded city

a tumultuous order

going bench to bench in the humid jade drip,

pressed to compound the hours left to me,

make cuttings of minutes, 

grow them on, to let myself become

the décor I tend and sell

and finally know

the earth's sweet mouth

tumbling unpollinated silk flowers

to bright oblivion

in her kiss.

~New Years Eve, 2012

Images: Header: Greenhouse @ Noordwijk, by wot nxt on flick'r

Shared under a Creative Commons license 

Footer: Geranium, by Odilon Redon

Public Domain via wikipaintings.org

Last Dream of the Snow Spirit

This is another repost, intended to keep the blog on life support while I enjoy a break from the internet. I hope to be back after New Year's. 
Until then, best wishes to all my bloggy friends and readers.

Last Dream of the Snow Spirit

The Snow Spirit is old, psychotic and white.

Icicles hang like devil’s teeth from her soul.

When the black wind rackets in the twelve-hour night

they gnash a rattling storm till nothing’s whole.

She weights down the housetops, steers toy cars to flight

kills birds in the air with breath as dark as coal;

and yet all things old and wretched once were young.

She’s forgotten what she was, or what she’s done.

Was she a blue irreverent river sprite,

who crossed some bitter god with her defiance,

made ice to live a millenium in white?

She seems to see instead a green alliance,

herself a leaf that danced in dumb delight,

ten million sister leaves her full reliance,

woodborn in a place of sun and wind made song.

But she’s old and mad; her memory’s often wrong.

Or didn’t she drip, a lanquid amber mist,

over fields and woods at dusk, all warm wet airs,

a drink for fiddling crickets, a slippery wrist

that washed down idiot mice or hipshot mares?

Perhaps she was the ripened pale poppy’s fist

a wild wind’s daughter whose white and jagged tears

bled the sap of sweetest rest beyond all thought,

punished now for the ignorant death she brought.

Whatever she was, whatever form now lost

and transformed into harsh new symmetry,

she was not this moving famine or this frost

that wracks the world with its frigid ministry.

She imagines her leafgreen soul is what it cost

to pay for this unwanted eternity.

Still she dreams as she dances the sky apart

she’s not a damned storm hag with a stonecold heart.

She can’t see her own mad eyes, her ice-boned thighs.

In  dreams she’s one snowstar with a million more.

Sisters flown like white leaves across the skies

dancing a wind ballet on a cloudpaved floor.

She dreams the sodden snow is white butterflies

with life instead of death humming in their core,

choired clouds of frozen wings who’ve just begun

to live, melting in the early winter sun.

February 2011

 This poem is written in the ottava rima form, each stanza consisting of six lines of eleven syllables rhyming alternately, ending with a differently rhymed couplet. It is irregularly metered, but conforms to the eleven syllables per line format original to the Italian, though perhaps not to the Italian pattern of stresses. English ottava rima is often written in iambic pentamenter (10 syllables)as well. 

Ottava rima is traditionally used in the writing of heroic or mock-heroic work, from Boccaccio to Lord Byron to Yeats.

Title Image: Moonlight Kinetic, by Petteri Sulonen 
Many Thanks, Petteri

Footer Image: Ice Age #5, by Alex RK

The Yule Goat

This is a repost of an older poem just to keep the place from going completely moribund.

Happy Yule to All!

Yule Goat

In December’s dark descent

across crackled breaking sky ice

slivered with dagger snow,

bells ring in whitened night, sharp

hooves stamp on the cloudcloth

shaking pearl dust stripes on

viridian spruces, candelabra arms

turquoise and white pinwheels

circling their wands

of bitter bark raven haunted.

The god of thunders 

pulls the sun's shadow,

flickering hammer tucked

in his brace of clouds,

drives his twin goats

toward the time when day

and night are strait, equals at last

as Odin's wild hunt 

passes damned, mad,

howling overhead

The Snarler and the Grinder

fleet of foot, heedless of fate
run on; tonight's feast, tomorrow’s

feat, killed for meat this starveling
night, raised at dawn.
Spread the skins and 
let each bone 

fall with care so

those here reborn 

race again on the solar wind.

O bright black eye

split with too much knowledge

devil’s mask, canting voice

of the abyss, god's bearer, hunger's enemy

come bless us this Yule with your
yellow stare, ignite yourself

against the hag’s winter storm,

flute your flames through a straw ribcage. 

Watch us make the old dance new again

under the reckless stars.

The Gävle goat

December 2011

In Norse myth, Thor was not only provided with his mountain-shattering hammer Mjölnir, his magical, strength doubling belt Megingjörð, but a chariot in which he traveled through the sky pulled by two goats, Tanngrisnir (Old Norse "teeth-barer, snarler") and Tanngnjóstr (Old Norse "teeth grinder") spoken of in the Prose Edda, who could be slain for food at Thor's discretion then resurrected with the power of Mjölnir and returned to the traces.~ from wikipedia: 'The Yule Goat is one of the oldest Scandinavian and Northern European Yule and Christmas symbols and traditions. Originally denoting the goat that was slaughtered during the Germanic pagan festival of Yule, "Yule Goat" now typically refers to a goat-figure made of straw. It is also associated with the custom of wassailing, sometimes referred to as "going Yule Goat" in Scandinavia.' As always, I've taken a few liberties with the letter of the myths.You can read more about the folklore of the Yule Goat here  and the Wild Hunt here.





Images:
Header Photo: Goat watching, by DAV.es,  on flick'r
Shared under a Creative Commons License 
Footer Photo: The Gävle goat burning, author unknown
All copyright belongs to the copyright holder

Still Life Reviving

Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando, by Remedios Varo

Still Life Reviving

A moment

where pain fills then falls

from the heart's high point

draining out from

A flame

that destroys nothing

to build itself,

fluttering cloth in

A wind

circling buoyant,

that inflates without informing,

transports, supports, returns to

A flower

blooming without a pension

to pleasure a bee,

for a flame-juiced globe spitting

A seedspark 

that blows,

sailing match to wick,

no need to know why.

~December 2012

 Posted for    Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Karin Gustafson hosts today and asks us to write to a holiday(or not)theme of presents/presence. This painting seems to me the embodiment of a presence unseen, life perhaps, as the title suggests. Remedios Varo(María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga) was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born in Spain in 1908, died in Mexico City in 1963, making this one of her last paintings.

Image: Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando(Still Life Reviving) 

by Remedios Varo, 1963

All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.

Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present

Ghosts of Christmas Past?

Absurd;

they're never past

at all.

Passed, perhaps,

they linger in the hall

a scent unseen

a sight unheard, a laugh unlaughed

Watching, drinking, playing rapt,

unwrapping revelries they  made

when they had form.

Some were torn

away too soon and swept too far,

still hearing laughing cries not sudden tears,

And once each year

they show their hidden smiles

 smoky, floating, gone but smiling still.

Laugh? perhaps they will,

make a sudden joke, a flame 

leap up, or old remembered song

and then

(perhaps)

a new dance will begin 

free from old sins.

December 2010

I'd like to apologize for some of my extremely depressing poems of late, and thank everyone who has taken the time to read and comment on them, and on all my babblings, for their understanding and compassion. You are too kind, and too many to mention, but in particular, to Shay, Karin, Kelli,  Scott, Kerry, Sherry and all the other Real Toads, many many heartfelt thanks and best wishes. To Brian, Claudia and the dVerse Poets Pub community, and to G-man and the 55ers, thanks for the opportunities to write you create, and the support and encouragement you give. To those readers I have lost this year, Brendan, Ruth, Truly Fool, The Walking Man and others, know you were valued and are remembered and missed. Right now writing seems very far away, but I'm hoping to get back in the spirit in the New Year. 

Till then:


A Very Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year and additional Happy Holidays of Any Variety Not Previously Mentioned

to all my pixelated internet friends and readers who make this world a little brighter with their own 

ability to shine

Thanks for everything.

(Originally Posted for Moondustwriter's Christmas Eve Eve Poetry at the inimitable One Stop Poetry)

Photo:  The author as a young thing, with Santa, 
(c) copyright joyannjones 2010-2012, from the author's files

Extended Musical Interlude

Between back problems and getting ready to go out of town for the holidays, looks like there will be not much going on here for a week or two. I intend to set up some automatic posts of older poems for the time I'm actually gone, but until I get back there may not be any new writing. So, here's a rather disparate array of some favorite tunes to listen to on and off till I return . 

Lost Bear

Lost Bear

Lost bear

collapsed under the streetlight

drunk on smells

of trash and tea leaves

full of cold beans, coffee grounds,

dead things; silent

you sleep heavy, turning garbage-grey,

wishing for berries, silverslipping

riverflash of trout,

white water, winter-wild

repose in caves of dreams;

to wake in warm dark

with wholeness welling,

two cubs pushing,

life scrabbling

in place of

what's forever

 gone.

~December 2012

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Mini-Challenge: Dolls, Revisited

Margaret Bednar brings us more photographs of the amazing dolls created by a group of enterprising and very gifted students. The doll I chose was created by Elizabet Puksto.

 Process Note: I normally don't read others' prompt responses before writing, but today I read Fireblossom's first. Rereading this now, I think I owe some of this poem to her take and original theme. Thanks, Shay.

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Photo by Margaret Bednar of Doll by Elizabet Puksto