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

Philosopher By Moonlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philosopher By Moonlight

(A quadrille)

Life is a crinkle in the matrix

lapping at my edges while

ghosts browse the tombstones

eating names. Night covers me

with her firefly illusion

and her singing moon.

At daybreak we fold

like painted fans 

of Shaolin warriors, all

landscapes

and paper-covered blades.

May 2022

posted for dVerse Poets

Quadrille #153

Process Note The Steel or Iron Fan: The Chinese have a saying regarding weapons, “The shorter it is – the more dangerous.  The more ordinary looking, the deadlier it is.”...The steel fan is ...easy to carry and is inconspicuous.  When the weather is warm, you can use the fan to cool yourself and chase the flies away.  When you are in danger, you can use the steel fan as an effective weapon for self-defense because the ribs are made of steel...The fan is considered an “internal” weapon, because it uses the “soft” to overcome the “hard” and the short to overcome the long...”

Images: Philospher Illuminated by the Light of the Moon and Setting Sun, 1939 © Salvador Dali 

Fair Use

Shaolin Iron Fan, artist unknown, via internet Fair Use

Bluejay's Wing

 

 

 

 

Bluejay's Wing

 

 

The first time I saw the sea, its reaching miles

of life and emptiness that twinned,

I was a barefoot child who thought

herself a woman, made of light

and incapable of sin.

The sea is high again today

with a thrilling flush of wind.

 

By day I scan the amber sky and feel

its cheapjack promise scratched upon my skin.

By night I scout the evercoming storm

with my bareback diamond eye

and heart of tin.

The sea is loud again today

with a spoken word of wind.

 

I see now how a palette rich with sun

bleaches out as monotone, greyscaled and thin,

its broken colors robbed of breathing light

as bluejays pale away on cloudy days,

their feathers keeping all the blue within.

The sea runs high again today

with a humming requiem of wind.

I'll never see again the dazzled tide; 

my age is given to the prairie wind

but I won't believe I'll never see the sun,

or the mottled azure delicately brushed in

to point and praise a bluejay's cunning wing.

The sea is high again today

with a thrilling flush of wind.

 

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets Poetics:

Opening Sentences

 

 

 

Note: My opening sentence appears in the last two lines of the first and final stanzas, and is from Justine, by Lawrence Durrell, the first book in his Alexandria Quartet, which I count among my top ten early influences in writing. And some may sense here another early influence, Emily Dickinson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled, ©Zdzislaw Beksinski 

Wing of a Blue Roller, 1512, © Albrecht Durer

Axe, Maul And Wedge

 

 

Axe, Maul And Wedge

 

When you first brought me to the farm, you taught me how to

turn wood into fire. 'To part firewood fiber from fiber, to

 make it small,' you'd say,'you think you need an axe. 

An axe is sharp and  showy; an axe has blade

and bite and swings like the

pendulum of god, but

 

 what you really need to split the wood is a wedge.'You

smiled your wisdom-imparting smile, 'after all a

wedge was the first machine.' Where the

axe falters, beaten, the maul with blow

 after blow pushes the wedge deep

between the weave of atoms

til wood breaks,

 

 forced away from itself, no longer looking like anything

that was once alive, dryads' home, birds' harbor,

just kindling meat. And then is the time for

the axe, flying abrupt and wild as

 a silver moon of cyclone through

 the dry strings of bark and

 heartwood.

 

And when it came time for the

 splitting of us, you might say

you were the maul, she

was the wedge and I

the gaudy axe

 

attacking the last

tough fragments

of what we

 were

 

to provide for

the next

 fire.

 

 

 

February 2022

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images: Wedge, by user Shakespeare, public domain via wikimedai commons Fair Use

Photo of axe via Sunday Muse Fair Use

Hatchet Job

 

 Hatchet Job

 

 

Tricks and teases made a hatchet for the autopsy. 

 

You couldn't

just say it was over, oh no. Too many cows

wanted gingerbread. Too many women

in the cellar wanted more time...

Tesla's ghost was on the radio for years

while the black nightingale sang but hardly

anyone listened. 

 

Too much static fuzzing. Too much 

imitation current clogging the waves...

I swear you gave my ear a permanent scar

with all that dizzy disarray, tricks and teases,

bluffs that bragged with musky electric tusks...

 

Put the body

on the table and have done, I said. I'm through

discussing second grade and your mother's

lonesome eyebrows.You don't care about

the cause of death anyway...

 

just the wonderful way

you can chop. 

 

Bravo!

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Shay's Word List # 8: 

Russell Edson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images :Hatchet, via internet. Fair Use

Moon and Cow, 1963 © Alex Colville   Fair Use

 

The Day Before Gone

 

The Day Before Gone

 

It was the day before gone.
The strophe began on

 a sun weak with fever,

a sky of grey primer 

because plague hit the painters

 before they managed the blue. 

 

The tepid air was fragrant with 

malfeasance, but the dumbshow

never paused.

It was noon on the sea of shadows.

All through the potential zeros

bug-scudding over the whine-

dark waves ran a shiver, a dread,

the sodden fog of the sailor

at the rocks too busy with rum

 and scrimshaw to have bothered

with learning to swim.

 

The sirens and the kraken laughed

in antiphons, tatting the antistrophe

 from the rust-wire wreckage.

It was the hour before the reckoning

but the only text on the wall read

"It can't happen here."

Pulpits burned, preachers prowled

like panthers

among the singed dollar bills.

 

Locusts

ate the hedge funds. Vultures ate

the venture capitalists, and

politicians ate the vultures

til the darkness seethed 

with undigested bones.

Then finally

over the feeble,

failure-fumed pandemonium

Dawn came with her

exterminator's smile.

December 2021

posted for 

Shay's Word List

Images: Both Untitled, by Zdizlaw Beksinski, copyright held by The Histoical Musem in Sanok Poland

Fair Use

Snake Smoke

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snake Smoke

 

 

An eye is a window,

a window an eye.

I can't tell you any more

so don't ask me.

 

A promise is a lie,

a lie is a promise;

curling smoke from my pipe,

a snake climbing air.

 

Chaos the white bride

for a bridegroom of money,

worst man holds the ring.

Priest eats the flower girl.

 

A promise is a lie,

a lie is a promise;

snake smoke from my pipe,

a garotte made of air.

 

A marriage is a funeral, 

a funeral a marriage.

I can't talk now

I'm late for the wedding.

September 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: Yes, it's a cigar, not a pipe. Poetic license.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wind From The Sea, © Andrew Wyeth, 1947  Fair Use

Photo of Lakeith Stanfield, author unknown via internet Fair Use

 

 

Dream Trip

 

 

 

 

 Dream Trip

 

 

 

 

 

 After a pipe dream courtship

he married disaster. Six months gone

he woke up to

a quick divorce. He untangled himself

on the road to Vegas, where lies went down

like a cup of strong coffee

fast and black in the tarry night,

lounge tunes bleeding in air 

sharp as snake-eyed desert light, hope

another bad debt to be written off.

The wind's hand shook

like a drunk croupier, fumbling out

aces and eights

before the martinis, sanding the gas tank,

whistling at graves. The car gave out

before he made Tahoe, when

nothing was left but Jack and shit

and Jack left town. Stars sarcastically

 winked when he put his head down

slack on the wheel and slept

dreaming of her, dreaming of then,

dreaming a toffee-striped lizard

and a stand-up owl

laughing their asses off

at punter's luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

September 2021

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Abandoned Car, author unknown, Fair Use

Lizard © Chernee Sutton-Jurutu  Fair Use

Lightning Tree

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Lightning Tree

When I was a child

pewterblue eyes round

as green walnuts, yellow pigtails

pulled tight in shredded rubber bands

I breathed up a world where I

lived in the storm, thunderheads panting like

mastiffs, tongues lolled over the lake, wind

secret as the monster under the bed

smiling, lightning fairy-dancing

into a forest 

of wild branches;

I didn't blink for the peace of it

covering the screaming, the blows,

cleaning my face

 

of a toy's tears. 

I breathed it in, petrichor

and the smell of power,

a brew of walking cobwebs

that piggy-backed me away,

a broken-eyed Dorothy doll

searching for Oz.

 

When I asked you to

kiss me like rain, you took me

up high on the lightning tree.

You had a web there, gunmetal strong

and sticky with grief. On the 

edge of those sudden wires,

one foot already caught

 

you don't even know you're dead.

When you fight

to run with one eye blind, 

and feel the tremble

coming closer

 

you learn everything

you lost

 

  all

you never had

 

 and that you 

can never trust

a storm.

 

 

 

~July 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: Comment moderation has been turned on. Apologies for the inconvenience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Lightning in West Texas © Ryan Smith Photography   Fair Use

Broken doll, via Sunday Muse   Fair Use

 

The First Kingdom

 

 

 

 

 

The First Kingdom

 

I dream of

the first kingdom

empire of four

water wood earth and sky

when we knew

 we did not rule,

when a hand outlined

 in ocher

tried to make us real;

when water set to boil

in the round womb of the cauldron

gave magic,

when our skin was honeysuckle,

our tongues fluent in bird,

our hands for making not breaking,

each others' blood too precious to shed

except in the green sacrifice.

 

Now I watch

the black beyond night

billow out.

The poison steam of brittle brains

evaporating madness

cracks the cauldron.

Sacrifice is colorless.

The lie of ownership replaces

creation's light in our eye. This empire

of assassins, where love is only

an argument of muscle and bone,

where the last fires burn and

birds drop dead from the sky

must pass away, its darkness carried

from the earth, before

the first kingdom can become

the last.

 

September 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: in Celtic mythology, cauldrons symbolized many things magical: birth, death, endless plenty and the strongest magic of resurrection. They've been found in many Iron Age burial sites, and later Christianized in the concept of the Holy Grail.  The Cauldron in Celtic Life

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Hand Painting, Chauvet Cave,circa 32,000 BP

Title unknown, by Brooke Shaden  Fair Use

The Wandering Eye

The Wandering Eye

I made you

from a map, a hawk and a flower.

I thought you

clockwork-canny, full of power,

a road-veined eye for

spying the highway hours;

a bird, a map,

a flower meant to be

a fragrance and a passage 

 seeking sea.

But so far away

you flew there could never be

a coming back

despite the lies, despite the slick pretense,

so to see you now

as a morph'd and piddling glance

on a burning

globe of constant transience

is only another

blink of blight and fear.

You tell me this

is the you who's real and clear;

fine words from one

who's broken every mirror. 

August 2020, 

(with fragments from March 2014)

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Images:Still Life with Spherical Mirror, 1934 © M.C. Escher   Fair Use
footer, artist and title unknown,  Fair Use

The Great Grey

The Great Grey

I galloped my mare

on the ceiling all night;

summer stirred in her sleep,

stretched and raised warm wide arms

of red roses. Eyes unopened she died

when the wind turned corpse-cold.

I took down the remains

 with food and blankets to the child

 in his cell. I fought when the keepers

ate it all while he cried, mouths full of

carrot, April and wool. My key cracked

 in the lock. They beat me with laughter.

I watched two moons scrubbed out

by steelwool clouds, scratching paled

 porcelain sky as they streamed by,

chained in a train of tarnished

silver cars rattling out their freight

of snow-melt on my face.

No jumping that train, no escape

on the rails, no escape on

my mare, no summer, no saving,

only this waving grey

where colors are graving.

April 2020

 posted for Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

Play it Again Day 16 Remains

and for earthweal's
Open Link

Images: Horsewoman On A Red Horse, © Marc Chagall   Fair Use

November First © Andrew Wyeth   Fair Use