Seedpod

 

 

 

Seedpod

All your cars had names. You could have

called me a knotted whip, waiting just

off the Sulphur exit for Argon to pull up, 

her aqueous sides mottled with Dallas dust.   

When you showed, we were bleak as

strangers till we forgot how lame things lie.

Then, we'd never parted. Hand-fast laughing,

we brazened the blue hole's perilous beauty. 

You picked me the seedpod of a water-lily,

catacomb of caves on a stick

rattling full with brown-eyed pearls.

They watched me from a vase for twenty years.

 

The day was hot as rooftar in the pot,

the wet air a greasy mop

as we deployed, Argon starting

with reluctance--all your cars

started with reluctance--

disapproving of me there 

in her too small seat.

We drove and talked the sun 

up the noon sky, down its back 

in trickles of salt, sat on rocks 

compliant as clouds by Turner Falls,

talking by touch, by feel, 

by nerve and luck, 

words splashed on dry fields  

dust before and after,

your ribs under the blowing shirt

white as nightlights in the dusk.

Radium midnight in the tent;

I didn't know how

I could ever let you go back.

I cursed

what made me fall like water, 

pour out suddenly yes forever, 

cursed what made you fly so high,

the wind that fills the windsock and blows on.

And so, I never found that place again

a quarter mile from the Sulphur on-ramp

bright in the heat-breathing beauty of morning.

I spend instead my pale days waiting

 

empty as the chair I've prepared

with your books and candlelight, empty as a  

dry-rattle lily pod whose pearls

fall one by one on stone.

~May 2014

 

 

Process note: Turner Falls is a waterfall on Honey Creek in the Arbuckle Mountains of south-central Oklahoma..With a height of 77 feet [it] is locally considered Oklahoma's tallest waterfall...Turner Falls and the blue hole [directly beneath it] are dangerous and have claimed people's lives every year. Only experienced swimmers should swim there..~wikipedia

 

 

originally posted for    real toads

Out of Standard: The Poem is a Curse

Isadora Gruye  (The Nice Cage) asks us to write a poem involving a curse.

reposted and revised October 2023

for

desperate poets

 

 where Brendan asks us: "For this challenge, write of DESPERATE BEAUTY. You can use one of Van Gogh’s paintings as a starting point, or you may find all the required colors in another painter or poet or from your personal palette. How does a poem render the beautiful? What hues must it choir? How does strangeness improve beauty? What are the limits of beauty? Where or when does the desperation come in? And why is it alone infinite?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Water Lily Seed Pod, Bobbye Wolfe  via Pinterist

Windsock via google image search, author unknown.

Paul Gauguin's Armchair ©Vincent Van Gogh

Turner Falls, Oklahoma,   via Wikipedia

 

This Year's Garden

 

This Year's Garden

 

 

We wanted, we planned for

tomatoes and cucumbers, okra, too

and three kinds of peppers,

basil for the bees, fennel and dill

for the flower-winged flyers,

so small and now so few.

We planted, and first the south wind came

in the child's light of April, a wild

graceless thing tearing and roaring,

ripping leaf from stem. So we built windbreaks

from old boards and rocks;

life obliged us and held on.

Then came the ruin of heat, four weeks early,

bringing a cloudless sun-blurr of blue

too cruel to call sky, as basil was sprouting

thick from last year's dropped seed.

So we rose every morning at daybreak

to water, a drink portioned by hour

bed by bed, scrawled on the calendar

so none were forgotten

for what is forgotten here dies.

From this we got a dozen tomatoes,

seven or eight cucumbers full

of hard, tough seeds, a thousand pepper blooms

that became a hundred peppers, and okra

past counting, stretching up and swaying

in its African dance while a forest

of basil trembled every daylight hour

with the nuzzling of bees. In August

we planted cabbage for fall cropping

while okra was still king, feeding us every night 

until the first frost came four weeks early,

having learned from the heat.

 

So we ordered hoops and row covers, and built

the cabbage a white room above the dirt.

Now I go out in the biting cold and pull the extra quilt

from their bed so the weak light can stroke them.

I look at the okra, brown poles on the compost,

remember the bees' tourmaline forest of herbs

 

that sprang up like star-wishes never told;

all these treasures whisper me their names,

alive for me under sun and moon,

loaning me breath for one more season.

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link #145

(a more literal take on Monday's Tending a Difficult Garden)

Basil Around the Bird Bath, August 2022

Inside The White Room, November 2022 both ©joyannjones

The Long Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Long Love

 

 

Love is a function

of distance. So I wrote

when your touch was too near;

but what long love we

have close-held in us,

to live for the work

for the planting, the sprouting;

for the quick fruit, which

only ripens to disappear

 

forsaking the night garden's peace

for what its voyaging shell protects,

wind-used and earth-taken,

passed and used again as

many times as trees have leaves,

as grass has planets of dew

silvering in summer light

reflecting wild deer eyes

untamed to our desire.

 

 

***

 

 

Everything shifts

in this new age.

Spring is removed,

remote as a cluster of stars

blurred on the far frozen wheeze

of solar wind. Language 

is stirred in a kettle of nightshade.

Intent is a comic ghost

in the styrofoam west wing

 

chattering to dust sheets

it believes are its mates,

as the void gambles and

pulls and dances and beckons,

reckons us a foreign dark

that is not our own night garden,

falling hard as dead wishes

if our loving days

should ever be done.

 

 

 November 2022

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Tending A Difficult Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Saving the Okra Seed, September 2022

and Okra Blooming, July 2022, both ©joyannjones

The Feather Seed

 

 

 

 

 The Feather Seed

(a 55)

There was a feather;

it grew from my eye until

it was my eye.

There was a word.

It grew from my quill until

it was a wing.

There was a seed;

it grew from the soil of

every word decaying, until

it was a tree where 

quilled birds sang

like candles in the dark.

August 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

The Sunday Muse

hosted by Carrie Thackery Van Horn

and 

 

 

Sherry Marr's 

Rewilding challenge at earthweal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In The Tank

 

(SCROLL DOWN FOR THE 55)

 

 

 

 

 

In The Tank

 

 

 

In the tank, watching

the last foam ascend,

no rockets from

this wet womb, nothing

left but the sinking

still

the spirit seed

warm-curled in rainsilk, is

a spark self-shielded,

a voice unheeded

untrained but turning, a

desire piercing

paper-dead husk

with green.

The birth cord was tangled,

the roots softly angled,

a woven squared circle

of sticky heartweb.

There in that secret

float of penumbra

I felt you move.

I felt myself

blowing, unwrapped and golden,

in the tears of the sun.

 

 November 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Artist and title unknown, manipulated,  via internet, Fair Use

Seedling  ©2017, joyannjones

 

 

Daisy

Daisy

Awakenings these latter days

seem sullen, straining for

a gone green music, unprepared as

the day that lumbers up,

tripping its way through a

zodiac of sticks like a clumsy thief,

 too old to run but still wanting to steal.

Hours revolve in a maelstrom

of ferns, once fresh for morning

now a parable of crackling

 brown loss drying back to some point

of unknown where its powdering tides will

drain down earth's fissures,

intimately gone; I'm just another

torn membrane losing the lie,

spinning down the dark drown.

Still I pull all the architecture

of my ruins--the folly, the narrows,

the knot garden, the rockery of

a thousand dead alpine desires--

forward to find

a station of cleared space

to stand in place for life's moment,

asking eyes shut, seed face

blind and upturned,

 sunflowered on my stem

for one last hot meal

of yellow light;

being a daisy,

being a dream.

April 2020

posted for Kerry's

Skylover Word List for April

Note: April as always is poetry month, and though I will be writing as much as I can, it most likely will not be a poem a day. Nonetheless, I will offer to those who are the Friday 55 each week for their use if so desired. So see you here on Friday if you need a meme.

Images: The Old Tower In The Fields, 1884 by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain
Still Life With Four Sunflowers, 1887, by Vincent Van Gogh, Public Domain

Daffodils

Daffodils

Cold fire in spring,

ash before summer,

spirit-gold whims that open unaware,
myth's gaudy self-worship
turned outwards to share.

Drought thins them sparse,

rain's intimacy rots them,

blight comes to devour
banquets of flowers.
Still-swaying, they gentle

the plague-darkened hours,

fragile as never, temporary as breath,

 soft seeds falling to earth

to slap away death.

March 2020

posted for
 earthweal's open link

A 55, to remind everyone that next week's Friday 55 here will not be shut down.

Horticultural note; Plants in the narcissus family can reproduce  clonally, through the production of daughter bulbs and by division of clumps, and variably, by seed.

Photo ©joyannjones, 2013, Narcissus triandrus 'Lemon Drops'