To Go

To Go

There were no candles

at our table, angel child,

for we were in a place where

no fire would burn, no light shine

except the sickly phosphorescence

of the unquiet mind.

The love I talked

came out in tears.

The anger in your eyes

spit out my pointless words.

After you walked out

and left me burning there

the waiter brought the check

and took my plastic coin

in the profound silence of

the servant's protective tact;

I stumbled in a mist

of dread upheld, too slow

from sour cream and salt

on the still-full glass,

but remembering to

fumble up at the last

the greasy bag of

leftover hate to go.

~March 2015, 

revised November for

Fireblossom Friday: Dread

 

Images: Greasy Takeout Bag, author unknown, via google.Manipulated.

The Pink Candle, 1910, by Henri Rousseau, public domain via wikiart.org

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


(reposted for The Tuesday Platform)

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

Walking Summer

Walking Summer

I've been here before

too long ago, too short a time--

encircled by this walking summer, 

where song is never done, where walls

are built from air and touch, where invisible

love strolls in, the unexpected fragrance

of mimosa thrown like gauze across her face,

pollened with invincible yesterdays,

intricate and insubstantial as

the manual labor of a rose.

I know this place

so clean, so far, so obvious--

this moving room where nothing

was ever allowed to stay, yet a

wayward welcome whistles in the

nag of wind that blows my steps this way

to thin path's end, where sun is made

and broken in a day,

a dropped brick like me, once high,

ruined in a cobble of clouds.

These skewered eyes

so still, so heart's-desired when

I stole them from the chimera,

open starry wide at last
to blink up the mist, the mazed

particulate of missing pieces that

mortar so well with tears the

pressed-together whole, and I 

wonder if there soon could be 

a granting of what's needful;

for I only hope to find the lost--

the tilted corners of a child's smile

the absence of regret, the cost

of walking summer that clings

like mimosa gauze to

the shifting faces of my ghosts.

~November 2015

posted for     real toads

The Heart's Desire

Photos:  Mimosa, © joyannjones 2014 

Rosa 'Nearly Wild,' © joyannjones 2015

Time, Far Ringing

Time, Far Ringing

Time has taken my sex 

and snapped the tongue
from its stringent bell;
my heart no longer beats a wind

that blows to own the night,

but trips and

flutters

as if my breast

were made of falling feathers
drifting in autumn light

white among the scarlet leaves

like the airy swirls of mist

that pass for thought,

a stutter

as I deadhead my rosary

of each exhausted memory. 

The astringent nyx of 
Novembers remembered
slides her turquoise lips

into a smile,

flattering

a naiad singing still

beneath the thin blue ice

of forsaken winter,

and over the wet south wind

I hear the name she calls

her fingers fitful tapping;

fluttering

feathers of snow

above and dropping
notes of softened cold that
tumble down

tickling an invisible ear

with distant music:

Time far ringing

the tiny
clamorous
bells.

~November 2015

posted for        real toads

Weekend Challenge

Nyx: the sister of Erebus, associated with night in Greek mythology, also: nix, nyx or nixie,(Germanic) a shape-shifting water sprite.



Apologia: Karin was kind enough to share some of her thoughts for this challenge with me early, as she knows I do not write well spontaneously. Therefore, this poem (and the writing exercise on 'I remember'  that birthed it)was started well before the misery and horror that took place yesterday in Paris --I apologize for being so out of sync with that here, and feel that I should write something on that subject instead, but I just am not as yet up to it. 

Images: Observatory Time: The Lovers, 1936, by Man Ray. Fair use via wikiart.org

St Cuileain Bell*, 7th-8th, 12th Century, via wikimedia.org, by Jononmac46, Shared under a Creative Commons License. Manipulated.

*For those interested: "The Bell Shrine of St. Cuileáin or Glankeen Bell is a mediaeval Irish bell shrine found near Borrisoleigh in County Tipperary, Ireland. [It] was made in a number of phases. The inner iron bell was made in the 7th or 8th centuries AD. The more elaborate outer case was produced in the early 12th centuries AD...The enamelled and niello inlaid crest of the outer case is decorated in the Ringerike style, which reflects the influence of the Vikings on contemporary fashion."~wikipedia

Another Country

Another Country

'Thou hast committed

Fornication: but that was in another country

And besides, the wench is dead...'

~Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

The sickness came that night

the fever, the youth-slayer.

I can't remember much

except he spoke to me

in the sighing language of skins;

the one that I speak best. Then

contagion came to make its harvest home

as he hollowed out my shell

and I knew nothing more.

He is in another country now.

No use to call his name

yet so I fight to do

where this midnight binds me

with its corded silence.

I see his marten's hair

gone grey, his imp's eyes

smoked  by cataracts

though his face I'll never

see, nor feel in my cold grasp

his sunbrown hand again

that played all night and day

with fire--his means

to such a different end

than my desire.

~November 2015 

posted for    real toads

Capturing Thoughts

Image: Ophelia, 1852, by John Everett Millais  public domain via wikiart.org