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

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

Two Shadormas

Kerry O'Connor of Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, presents a twin challenge this Sunday, both form and photographic, and in that spirit, I've written two poems inspired by two of her daughter, Jaime Clark's delicate, 'extreme close up' examples of macro photography:

Spindle

Struggling

on a spindle's point

the heart bird's

blood whispers

out blown like a misty rain

turning her last song.

Drops

Bright needles

move from sky to ground

threaded light

binds the twins 

ever unlike but the same

together with drops

~August 2012 

Posted for   real toads

Sunday Mini-Challenge: Shadorma/Macro Photography

Images by Jaime Clark

Used with permission.

 

A Poem and A Progress Note

Lemons

Even lemons tart as a forced smile

will leave your fingers sticky

when you squeeze them dry.

How many more acidulated drops

left, invisibly inked and slow

to leave the pen

only browning

to sight in a certain sparse heat,

not enough to burn, barely enough to warm

sour on the tongue, pale on the paper of

the one who can’t even write them out loud?

Hold me like the fire holds the flame,

lick these salt and bitter words away

take my breath and keep it warm for me

till I need it,

when tomorrow makes me pay

for all this lemonade I threw away.

February 2012

Progress Note: As many of you may know, I had a rather nasty fall last week dodging a car which took a blind curve behind us while my husband and I were out walking the dog around our normally idyllically deserted neighborhood. I ended up severely straining my left knee and taking an acre (or so it feels) of skin off my hands, elbows and knees. After undergoing some tiresome procedures and a regimen of anti-inflammatories, antibiotics and mild pain killers, I haven't been in much shape to write or return visits. I am improving greatly, however, and am up and around now, no harm done, just healing slowly and a bit dazed still. I hope to be able to return to participating in all my normal online activities soon. Till then, I've put up a poem from last month to reassure everyone I'm still alive and kicking.

My sincere thanks to all who've come by here to read and commiserate, or contacted me to offer their concern.

Image: Header Photo:  My lemon, by Smaku on flick'r

Footer Photo:  lemons, by chotda on flick'r

Both shared under Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Something Small

Something Small

something small

faceted, refracting, chucking

hot white splinters to wince the eye

winking from the country of the dead

where no light stumbles except

to be changed changed changed again
in that crystalline splitrail corral

something small

a silicant irritant a tiny mote

gets under the skin encysts

insists itself and carpenters

its own infected radiant bliss

taut ruddy and inflamed the setting

drops the pearl

something small

crawling flat to feed

glossy grey and many legged

inserting its needle nose into the skin

drawing out what makes it fat

to bursting, obscene itching resistant 

to removal except by fire

something small

a point of steel a tiny blade

hard as the trickster’s heart

so thin, so almost invisible at the cut

except for the drip drip drip

of ruby it leaves in its voiding 
wake of words

April 2011

Photo: Bug on Lacebark, by joy ann jones 2010 

The Still

The Still

The heads of grain are waving

   under the sickle sun,

     the sun gathered and brought

across the hill to the shed

    hidden
in the deep woods.

A copper pipe above a boiling vat

  where sun dissolves into a heady spirit. 

Siphons tube it drop by drop each drop

and carry it from fire to air

to throat

to float the head.

In the deep woods

  a root wanders out from the trunk

  beneath a mat of leaves of self

       wanders on and joins itself upon the next

'til every tree in the forest is one

and breathes with one breath.

The autumn and the spring rain

is falling, cells growing

 pebbles living under streams of drops,

   seeping into cracks and flowing

   drop by drop each drop

until they are the sea.

Heat and time

  draw forth the drops to puffs

      to chains of vapor

to clouds and fronts and cyclones

   and fog and mist and

rain again.

Two eyes gaze at two others

   mirrored back a thousand times

      and forward ten thousand

eye by eye. Tongue by tongue

a voice is singing in ten languages

   a thousand same songs.

I pick up the instrument

  and you play.

     A baby sleeps a child listens a woman smiles

and an old man sings along

with feathers on perhaps

or a cigar.

Drops distilled of flesh and spirit tubing

  from one life to another

     back far into another drop of being,

forward far and down, dropping down
to where we stand quiet

 waiting to drink.

    October 2010

Posted for One Shot Wednesday at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

To whom much thanks for featuring me today, and thanks to all who've emailed me, tweeted, or come by to check out the site.

Image: Distillation, by Roxy Paine, photo by Sheila Griffin, courtesy wikimedia commons