Inflection

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inflection

 

 We drew the breaths 

of butterflies in high June,

beings never still

whose feet are small

as whimpers in our sleep,

light as the gauze of

a first-hour dream

until it falls,

a blood-splashing guillotine.

Butterflies

know nothing of blood

except the blood of flowers and that

is what we sipped, flitting from one to

the next because life must

spread or be stilled;

we never thought we

could ever be stilled

for we had no thoughts,

so new, so insubstantial

and ingenuous were we, certainly

not one that whispered

"Here is the starry inflection of

Love's extinction event," as we deep-

drank our liquor from the meadows

drying beneath us, even as the vapor

of your breath closing to me

dried on my lips

 

in a sigh, tenuous and bright

as wind-floated pollen,

your mouth soon withdrawn

to suckle the next flower's mouth

until flowers and memory and all their savor

 too were gone.

 

August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Tipped at

desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled(Landscape With Butterflies) 1956 ©Salvador Dali

Butterflies ©Odilon Redon

 

Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned to live

for very little

to accept what shows however small

however inadequate

to sit with it in friendship

but there is still

 

something else.

There's a light I crave

that shapes mountains and willows,

a radiant mind flaring each morning open

though it paints its gold on all alike:

the long claw of the

 

promising horizon-smile,

the stiffness that

came into your arms

as you held me, the

little dark murderer's bird

who pecks the grains away.

 

It's still that light

sifting bees' wings

across sage to kindle the flowers,

lambent as slanting love itself

in earth's witchwild eyes as she holds

in her unprisoned prism'd heart

 

even us;

 

even our coarse

demanding

insatiable selves

she will teach the one word:

 

enough.

 

 

 

 

 July 2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for desperate desires

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Cottonwoods III 1944, ©Georgia O'Keefe, 

The Thief 1996 ©Jamie Wyeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walking Summer

 

 

 

 

Walking Summer

I've been here before

too long ago, too short a time--

encircled by this walking summer, 

where song is never done, where walls

are built from air and touch, where invisible

love strolls in, the unexpected fragrance

of mimosa thrown like gauze across her face,

pollened with invincible yesterdays,

intricate and insubstantial as

the manual labor of a rose.

I know this place

so clean, so far, so obvious--

this moving room where nothing

was ever allowed to stay, yet a

wayward welcome whistles in the

nag of wind that blows my steps this way

to thin path's end, where sun is made

and broken in a day,

a dropped brick like me, once high,

ruined in a cobble of clouds.

These skewered eyes

so still, so heart's-desired when

I stole them from the chimera,

open starry wide at last
to blink up the mist, the mazed

particulate of missing pieces that

mortar so well with tears the

pressed-together whole, and I 

wonder if there soon could be 

a granting of what's needful;

for I only hope to find the lost--

the tilted corners of a child's smile

the absence of regret, the whim

of walking summer that clings

like mimosa gauze to

the shifting faces of my ghosts.

~November 2015

posted for desperate poets

(" finding comfort in the beauty around us, whether it is as vast as the sky or as small as a dew-covered spider-web, on a cornstalk by the back fence in the early morning.")

Photos:  Mimosa, © joyannjones 2014 

Rosa 'Nearly Wild,' © joyannjones 2015

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

Heartbeat

 

 

Heartbeat

 

 

 

 

The earth is aching where I walk and never learn,

her broad abiding back riven and split

by the wedge of heat and maul-strikes of the sun;

she was never meant to look so desolate,

 

nor the sickle moon give up her soul to burn.

Sere ghosts of a dead storm blow like yellow leaves

to the grassfire hell-combustion at full day's cairn,

bellies swelled on dust and smoke until they heave.

 

But still I see young hawks on thermal towers,

hear the cricket scrape his withered legs and sing,

know it's a fool who digs a graveyard for the flowers

for life is the deathless husband of these things.

 

I am an iron weight that soon must drop;

earth is a heartbeat fire cannot stop.

 

 

 

July 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Note: Temperatures here in Oklahoma are expected to stay between 100 and 110 through July and into August. We haven't had extended extreme heat like this since 2012, and it was awful then.We pray the power grid holds, the A/C doesn't die and just huddle down and try to make it through the wildfires and heat exhaustion, but many parts of the world are seeing temperatures like these where they have never existed before and are unprepared for its force, enduring great hardship. I extend my sympathies. Take care as much as you can; it sucks, and it can kill.

 

 

 

 

 Images © joyannjones, july 2022

 

Cabin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Cabin

 

 

 

The war was lost, the way

worse. I felt

the tired mare sigh

a heart-green path to

my old lover, the oldest lost

 and brown-eyed truth,

 a place to fold us

peel to apple,

bird to song.

 

I rearranged his

forest home as if

it were mine

 

and so it was

the old mare sighed.

 

 

 

 November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for dVerse Poets

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem has been edited since first posted.

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Illustration for "Vasilisa the Beautiful." 1900,  © Ivan Bilibin  Public Domain

Peasant Girl Near A Cabin, 1895, © Camille Corot   Public Domain

 

 

Earthsong

Earthsong

A triolet on the death of
Chantel Moore

The Mother has come to cover her bones

and Owl to call when the wind blows stars.

White fire, black blood, grey plague of stones;

flowers grow colors over her own.

Drums make a heart, peace makes a throne;

burn for her now and melt the scars.

Flowers will know to cover her bones.

Owl flies tonight to the wind-blown stars.

June 2020

posted for earthweal's

Love Songs For Mother Earth

Apologies to those with certain newer word press sites. Their handling of spam puts my comments in the spam folder. I have commented on everyone's poem at this prompt, so if you don't see me, check there. I keep waiting for this problem to be resolved but it seems like it never will be. Again, sorry.

owl and moon by A.Perry

Process note: The owl is a potent symbol in many Native American cultures, including:

•  "Ojibwe tribes, as well as their Aboriginal Canadian counterparts, used an owl as a symbol for both evil and death. In addition, they used owls as a symbol of very high..[spirituality in their spiritual]..leaders..
• Pawnee tribes viewed owls as the symbol of protection from any danger within their realms.
• Pueblo people associated owls with Skeleton Man, the god of death and spirit of fertility.
• Yakama tribes use an owl as a powerful totem, often to guide where and how forests and natural resources..[can be used]with management...."  ~wikipedia

Images: Borage, Crocus, © joyannjones

Una Fantasía de Barcelona

Una Fantasía de Barcelona

"---Soledad of my sorrows, the horse that runs away

finds the sea at last and is swallowed by the waves.

---Don't remind me of the sea, for the black pain springs

from the land of the olives/under the rustling leaves."

 ~Ballad of the Black Pain, Federico Garcia Lorca

~*~

Barcelona opens herself at dawn

to the wind off the ocean 

so she may bathe in seabirds

as they rise to her through

apricot clouds, as they sway

past umbels of oleander 

from Morocco,

black-red in pale tubs.

In the crimson sun of noon, she rides

a burning bull to the market

peonies flaring his nostrils,

with eyes of yellow wheat; his horns

of sand gore the stone streets
to a delirium of olive trees. Silver bells 

shimmer cries, murdering dusty nothing 

in the corners of the dark church.

Barcelona in the tourmaline night

remembers her gulls, her gannets and

shearwaters, singing sailor's ballads

to the white stucco walls that

crack with the loss of the sun,

songs of the runaway horse

racing blind to the sea cliff, 

where in freedom he drowns,

lyrics of power and terror, of
flying moons and sinking ships,
and the sweet rustle of the one
who settles in the nest.

Barcelona at dawn
opens herself to me on
her bed of shells, solid as sea foam,

womb-warm and fragrant with

her thousand desires; but

my heart is a white petrel flying

far, far over the razor waves, who

never means to land.

February 2020

with thanks to Shay Simmons for the borrowing of her birds

 posted for
earthweal Open Link

Note: This is about a fantasy of Barcelona, as the title suggests (except that oleander does come from Morocco.) I have never been to Barcelona except in this poem. 


For all the earthwealers, in the real world Barcelona, like the rest of the planet's coastal cities, is exposed to the dangers of climate change, and recently underwent severe flooding from Storm Gloria
".. along the east coast of mainland Spain. The worst coastal flooding was reported around the Ebro river delta south of Barcelona, where the storm surge swept up to 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) inland through low-lying rice paddies. In Lloret de Mar and Tossa de Mar, sea foam whipped up by high winds moved inland from the beach, blocking streets. At the Port of Barcelona, waves crashed as high as 7 metres (23 ft) over defenses, flooding coastal properties..."~wikipedia  

Video clips of the foam blocking streets are quite striking.

Images: Green Sky, © Jose Manuel Capuletti, circa 1950-55? Fair Use 

A gull overflies the Mediterranean sea during strong winds in Barcelona, Spain, Monday, Jan. 20, 2020...(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)