Blown Away

 

 

 

 

Blown Away

 

 

Come look

at what I salvaged

from the breakdown:

 

in this jar is Chicago

with its concrete throat

that tried so hard to swallow me

 

and here is Montana

mountain wild, spruce bending

to save me, painted

 

in five colors on my spurious tongue

that cracked ripe hearts

like nutshells in

the vise of logic. The rest

of what I had sailed in my witchboat,

to a quiet Viking funeral with

 

 no one watching--riddled

seeds, costumes and seven secrets

wrapped in your trinket kisses--

but I kept the beach

at Point Reyes, where the wind

clean off the ocean

is strong enough

to blow away

your life.

October 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (marina) © Zdzislaw Beksinksi   Fair Use

Point Reyes, California, Tomales Point Trail with Wild Radish, NPS/A. Kopshever   Fair Use

The Night Circus

 

 

 The Night Circus

 (a 55)

 

 

You told me

my eyes

were lanterns.

 

You stood them

around the bigtop

while you brushed

 

the clouds into my hair,

then on the highwire,

where you washed

 

in the moon;

but the wind came

and took their fire.

 

The night-circus burned.

 My hair flew up

in silver flames

 

of moon-twisted sun,

 

and I ran.

 

 

 March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Head in the Clouds, photomanipulation © Thomas Dodd  Fair Use

Paysage Orageux, 1901 photographer unknown  Fair Use

Time The Wind The Fire

Time The Wind The Fire

All night I was

the great heart of the wind

that beat its fever-pulse against the walls.

I was the white rabbit-cloud that streaked

across clipped-lawn stars

nose-twitched over endless indigo

for the wet green of missing spring

til I was taken from the air

betrothed to a wasting fire

burning page after wind-turned page

of my book of flesh unread

...the sound of a child's blocks tumbling

smoking in my throat     bare

wild summer feet pounding down a

hollyhock hedged alley

pink and rose dancers            far above my head

flamenco'd to the sinister

July castanets of bumblebees...

So all the night

of burn, blow and running,

all the fever,

became me

the hedge-wife of time

the wind

the fire,

destroyers 

of the pages

of this crack-skinned volume

all its words

all its summers

all its secrets,

all but the waiting

blankness of

this

last

folded leaf.

~April 2018

for Brendan's Transformations

 Images: Landscape of Ruins and Fire, 1914, Felix Valloton

Untitled image by unknown author,, via internet

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

The Third City

The Third City

The orange grey sky,

the maple that reels like a punchdrunk boxer

under the fists of the wind,

the metalpunch that's moved in

behind my left eye,
the icemaker home

in the specimen bottle,

floating in a pious pickle, little pig fetuses

taken unborn from my pen;

this is my city of day

but under my bed is a highway
blurring lights, sleeping

up the staircase green hills

blackened by night and a fogfull sky,

from the golden-gated park to

the golden-girled beach looking for your dark eyes,

deeper than the mines, in the City

that needs no name

nightwarm and whispering California,
curled like a child's fingers

round the hand of my heart;

but in the crosshairs of dawn

my feet greyed with sharded dust

from the madman's white temples, I'm here

in the City vanished, the City made flat

as the infinite Horizon of Aten

by the sledge of centuries

remote as the moon

wiped clean of the gods

and all folly of men, home

where the parch-wind and the murderer sun

and endless night and I have come to live forever
in the dead sky, nowhere left to run.

~August 2016 

posted for    real toads

Challenge: Get Listed

Notes: The City: A term used around the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California to describe San Francisco.

City Of The Horizon of Aten: "Amarna (Arabic: العمارنة al-‘amārnah‎‎) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the capital city..built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten .. and abandoned shortly after his death (1332 BC). The name for the city employed by the ancient Egyptians is written as Akhetaten  in English transliteration. Akhetaten means "Horizon of the Aten[sun disc] "    ~wikipedia

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Top image: dustbowl sky  © joyannjones 2014

Footer: Small temple of Aten, Amarna, by Einsamer Schütze, via wikimedia commons
manipulated

Terra Cotta

Terra Cotta

 "Maybe you'll get a replacement/There's plenty like me to be found
Mongrels who ain't got a penny/Sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground"

~Bernie Taupin/Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 

Heretic's hand that sings

and  howls

hovering so close above me,

radiant with reflected heat

caught in tangled hair,

give me a last devil's blessing

before the waterfall of dawn

tumbles us apart to drown.

I followed the yellow sun

down a terra cotta road

striped over trembled hills

to four wild umber walls:

the house we once built

where plain clay cupped rosemary,

pooled scarlet poppies
to sentinel the door.

The wind that blew there

was neither desert nor sea

like me

like the green wood

or the cat

that kissed its own paw,

grown horns neath the murmuring tree;

inside there might be

hidden, on fire, all manner of feral feel

that we never knew. I walked on,
the changeling cat looking for you

in my next meal.

~July 2014 

posted for    real toads

Challenge: The Yellow Brick Road

Susie Clevenger (Confessions of a Laundry Goddess) gives us three songs having to do with the famous mythic road to Oz and points west as inspiration today. I incline to the one by Elton John, lyrics I'm sure by the incomparable Bernie Taupin.

Images: Tile mosaic, artist unknown, photo only copyright joyannjones 2014
Cat and Bird, by Paul Klee, Public domain via wikiart.org