Landfall

Landfall

(Harvey at Corpus Christi)

Launched from the center

of the sweaty swayback

of the dustbowl

driving to the sea

Texas is endless; brown, olive, bone

hills and beige flats,

griddle hot

a country of dead hours

of creosote bush and yucca

city sprawl, void and suburb eternal

before the silvered rim of Padre

shows hazy in the wave-trough,

a glint in the dead eye of

the Body of Christ.

How many times did we

drag the corpus of our

cross-nailed marriage over the plains,

one desert passing over another,

with what relief to leave that

four-wheeled cell

and feel a living air.

Then, bottle in hand, already lost,

you'd sit in your folding chair on a beach

 so bright and primeval all
such things, like us, were anachronisms.
The boy would run from the war

to the waves, freed and blazing delight

to slip into a salty blue singing that

drowned the sound of failure.

I'd walk up and down, in

and out of the surf, gripping shells'

nacred lifelines, finding a washing of watery
peace, transitory and recurrent

as the sky-swallowing

shadows of gulls cawking above.

I had no god then, and none

tonight,
yet I pray for that country

as the vast weeping Eye crawls across it 

with death and rage in its tears,
spilling blood or toy refineries

to soil and poison that white beach

where grace so waywardly hides 

giving her kiss to all flawed things.

~August 26, 2017

Optional Musical Accompaniment

 

Photos © joyannjones  Corpus, Gull Shadows, circa 1986

In My Dream

 In My Dream

in the style of Emily Dickinson

In bed of rock I laid me down

Time’s sand beneath the sheets

I fled the day through that First Watch

dark ends and want completes.

My headcage swell’d with pricking thought

sown in obsolete hour.

Sleep plowed me with her feeling hand,

Dream bloomed my dark flower:

A message of you, writ on skin,

flared up in onyx  flame:

The solitaire took a woman!

On her brown face--your name.

Dreams are ever a house in pain.

Certainty can’t win back

the vision slain, the drab of hope

is lost to bitter luck.

For there your letter waited--Lead,

envelope crackled blue.

Your words affirmed Calamity

And from the folded pages flew

Two tiny skulls that kissed and kissed,

two ivory figures twined;

where bone met bone and rib hooked rib

two skeletons aligned.

Dawn clattered in, face filmed in doubt--

meaning  I never knew.

Dream twisted the path before us--

death to me, life to you.

original work, November 1986

substantially revised 2011

Posted for  Sunday Mini Challenge   at real toads

Kerry's challenge today is to attempt the ballad form as used by one of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson, without parody, intentional or unintentional. I can only hope.(!) This is quite an old poem, not much of a mini at seven stanzas, but much changed and shortened now from the abab tetrameter eleven stanza original.

Hounds Howling

  Hounds Howling

Hounds howling in the veins, not delicate

Like infant leaves green tattoos,

A finite green of order and plenty,

But violently carved by the sword of life.

The runes upon the soul

These sounding veins,

Raw channels cut by the torrent of

Floods to the heartsea.

These the bearers seem too slight

Tho they cut through flesh to bone,

Too slight for the weight they carry.

Out in the darkness animal eyes are alight.

Animal words sound beyond the line of sight,

like locust voices burring the high summer

under clouds like wounds in the sky.

The heart, the nerves

Regenerate the whole,

Only quaking in the dusk for sign

For folly, for escape from time.

February 1986

Posted for     Friday Poetically     at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Brian's prompt today was to post something written before the Age of One Stop. I hope 1986 is far enough back.

In The Prism

In The Prism

 

In the prism,

quivering in liquid replication,

spangles each wrinkle, wart, 

linear placement of the face’s edge.

Each gleam 

and freshening wink of the replenished eye, 

each refracting facet, each dimpled moment 

bears back another face 

nebulous, repeated.

We meet with yet

another show of force 

striking in plosive shatters 

where face contradicts face,

making soundless endless

divided duplications redivide,

beaming outward

as we enter ourselves like light

into the expanding prism.

This is how it goes here;

units replace and contradict the spirit numbers.

The soul-eyed stag ghosts inside the glacier

but the hunter no longer eats of that meat

though he craves and hunts it 

down the fractured paths both night and day.

Jaws grinding, he peers but only sees

glamoured in the prism

the dolls of his insignificant whims.

But what do we know of these?

We know only the feel

of tight knuckles on the wheel,

the flickering kiss of the pipe,

the unrobing black way 

before us where two lights are one

piercing the night road

into the prism

September 1986

 

substantially revised 

February 2011

Posted for OneShotWednesday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 

Candy

Too Much Candy

I am

too much candy

sticky for love

in quantity

like 25 pounds of chocolate.

All you can eat.

Too much.

I am

stick fingers.

A lit display of nerves.

A graphic run forward and back

at arbitrary speeds;

A green bug

meeting up with a windshield makes

a more solid statement than my own.

I am

fizz

like seltzer, clean and empty,

but full of random effervescence—

a distribution of air mixing with the liquid of events

pricked by fears of

going flat.

October 1986

Song of the Lithophyte

Song of the Lithophyte

As the heavy centuries have passed

their light repeating strokes across creation,

flowing the veils of earth at last

from a millennium’s striation

yet working only on the surface of the whole,

so, subtle tireless and remote

the long years have washed you,

put here a line upon your curving throat,

there in your dark hair a mica hue,

but pause now as the work draws near your soul.

A green airy growth lives inside each crack

the weathered rock turns upward to the sun.

The rain that slices inward to the bone

reveals its solemn involuted knack

of being rich in what all else may shun,

thriving on the rind of true alone.

As the hand of man has served

to carve a quicker gore than windblown sand

toward the ore the hillside hides reserved,

so your face is mined by your own hand.

The channels there were cut by salted tears,

and not the wayward miners of the years.

Your face was markless once beside the river

where we lay in harmony of mind.

Downstream the nuclear fire could not deliver

half the power there for us to find.

Firefly light made weedy shadows vast

where the vapor of the meadow burned

with heatless fire.

In the timestream’s flux we put a mast,

round which the planetary sails billowed and turned

at our desire.

As the wheel of centuries has made

chaos out of order, life from death;

as the crags and peaks where Moses prayed

were once the ballroom where the breath

that cuts them now to dust and ruin

was only known as seaweed’s dancing tune,

so now upon your face old thoughts parade

that I would sink deep roots in if I could

and end this lithophytic serenade

with soft sleep together in the green wood

and above us put the timeless firmament

at one with time’s and nature’s own intent.

June 1986

You can find some additional information about some of the elements in this poem here

Remarks:Song of the Lithophyte

Song of the Lithophyte  was written in June of 1986, when I was 37 years old. A lithophyte, according to wikipedia, is ".. a type of plant that grows in or on rocks. Lithophytes feed off moss, nutrients in rain water, litter, and even their own dead tissue." The 'nuclear fire' referred to is a nuclear power plant located on the Connecticut River that has since been decommissioned, rather appropriately.

Image: Old postcard, public domain