Persistence of Notion

Persistence of Notion

It's a long walk

away from yourself

from your carefully assembled

hands and feet

from your chalkboard smile

into the heat

where things form and break

in the suncradle crucible

rocking, melting

joining of grains, of drops

shifting towards

then away

from themselves.

It's a long trip

away from the past

walking shapeless sand

with sacked shell-shatter to carry.

When it's finally laid down

spilled out, you can't stop

looking back at the pieces

pulling together,

pulsing, alive,

waiting

to regrow smile

and feet

and follow you.

~May/June 2014

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Sunday Challenge: Avant-edge

Kerry O'Connor gives us the ultimate avant-garde challenge--to write as if there were no challenge at all. So, I've fished this one, written on a whim, out of the cauldron and revised it today.

Image: Shell and Rocks Arrangement, 1931, by Edward Weston (photo)

May be protected by copyright. Posted under fair use guidelines via wikiart.org

Not Love

Not Love

Laying in our single skin

eye to eye amalgamate

sewn together aggregate

to float the amniotic sea

waiting to be born

you couldn't use a word like love

so small, so ego-ish, presuming choice

of masks, of roles, all fantasy

too many strings, obscuring voice

of one silence-shredding scripted  horn.

No, more a centaur mythed to be

living dual without control

hooved with chaos black and gold

unrolled, unroled, itself the work

unfolding terrible and bright

as the amaranthine dancestep

at sun's core, but purely animal

the way that flesh and fur keep hurt

burnt deep below the liminal

too-knowing glance, the sharp white bite.

~June 2014

A contrarian  ten-line stanza form I just invented, and a poem for no prompt whatsoever. 

Rebel rebel--my hair's a mess.

Image: Struggle Between Woman And Centaur,  circa 1905, by Odilon Redon

Public Domain, via wikiart,org

After The Fever

 

After The Fever

The south wind knows I'm not the same

since the fever, re-shaped

from smoke, flower-dust and partings,

lust drowned, all melt and gape;

never

been as strong, forever

starting

at sounds inside the wall

a clatter fox-foot quick that came

when things began to fall.

The east wind knows I've never had

any man who turned me 
in his hand like the fever, but
the breath that burned me
leaving,
how it came out cleaving,
so cut
the mind  to clarity,
so scoured clean both good and bad--
that is a parity.

~June 2014

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Play It Again Challenge

Kerry unearths three excellent former Toads memes for us to play with this weekend., a revisit of one of Izy's photo prompts, a particularly excellent Fireblossom Friday, and, for me the one impossible to resist: one of her superlative form challenges, the Robert Herrick Stanza. As always,Kerry, this was a challenge in every sense.

Photo: Eyelid to Eye, copyright joyannjones 2012-2014

Octaves Under A Full Moon

Octaves Under A Full Moon

The moon hadn't come past the chimney yet

slow sailing the night like a laden ship.

An unquiet woman worked to forget

the line of a leg, the rock of a hip;

no rind's so empty as that of regret,

no cup so full into which it can't slip.

She drank, she sipped green leaves and December,

tried to forget, or hoped to remember

till the moon came over the chimney at last

till wind combed her hair from front to back

till night had its way with today, with the past.

the stars snuffed out, the clouds gone black,

the white hot spotlight marked over the grass

its honey and lamp oil, fancy not fact,

dust storm desire runs ravenous red

not to blow out the fire but flare it instead.

~June 2014

posted very late, a short ottava rima for Kerry's  Sunday Form Challenge: Yeats' Octaves

 at    real toads

 Images: Moonlight, The Old House, 1906, by Childe Hassam
Landscape of Ruins and Fire, 1914, by Felix Vallotton
Public domain via wikiart.org