Red And Gold

 

 

 

 

 Red And Gold

I.

Under my feet bright bodies

of leaves, mast from the oak, crunch

of all the discards of summer, fire's coming

crackle; percussion accompaniment

to sweet smoke of raked heaps burning

where you stand smiling,

match in hand.

II.

Peridot green under amethyst clouds

the after-storm sun bent the grass back

with sudden heat, as you bent my bones

with one touch, onyx eyes

closing on summer's fire

while the last light left brushed the waterfall's

singing to red steam.

III.

Around my skin a white pelt of

frozen water, my remembering numbing as wind,

 howling hard as a cast-out wolf ten states

from its pack, too old to fight

too full not to cry,

 under a sharp sickle moon

that sees nothing at all.

IV.

Rolling wheels on warm red dirt

over the creek, around the bends where 

trees hide the climb, mask the descent,

 shaking their gravid buds in the rage of air

pushing me, pulling me,

past the point where words

could make me stop.

V.

Every season dies around me,

every leaf, every white-muzzled wolf

in my wilderness, each golden October

burning red under the match

til nothing is left but the journey

I reverse night

after night in my sleep.

October 2021

posted for Meet the Bar: Cadralor plus Nobel

at dVerse Poets

Images: Autumn Leaves, Lake George, NY, 1924 ©Georgia O'Keefe   Fair Use

Red Dirt Road After Spring Rain, author unknown, via internet.    Fair Use

 

The Rose In The Maze

The Rose In The Maze

From night's peak the color-thieving haze

came blowing down just before the dawn

pulled hissing thru a deep brown camel's eye,

desert's shifting face deskinned and drawn

three thousand miles across the sea to daze

anew the eyes already fey, to grey each face,

salting every indrawn breath with lye,

hiding the rose in the center of the maze.

No different than the incidental drape

of caustic fog upon the casement of the times,

another baffling slap to the heart's blind bird

whose only instinct ever was to fly

uncaged, to make her thousand mile escape,

to give her feathers to the wind to break

or hold, to find somewhere a living branch unburned

and sing to the hidden rose no one can take.

June 2020

posted for

The Sunday Muse

Process note: There is a massive cloud of Saharan dust covering a large portion of the southeastern US and other areas at the moment, causing hazy skies and respiratory problems for some. Here is a link to some info, and pics of how it appears in the Caribbean, from BBC.

Images: White Rose in Pink Smoke, artist unknown, courtesy of Sunday Muse   Fair Use
A stylized textile book covering from the Netherlands, circa 1615-1650, depicting a rose  Fair Use

Bodyless Parts

Bodyless Parts

My heart is pale

as the daylight moon hiding

in the pines, trying to be full

with her south end sliced off;

a bent lamp to light

a ghost's foot.

My mind's black as soil

where skeletal leaves fall

from century's last rose, in the

color of memory wisteria blue, or

lavender as lamb's ear in thick sticky spikes

that trembled like your hand

with the loving of bees.

I would tell them you've gone

put out like a lamp, or a moon

snuffed to new;  bees like to know

but they're husks in their hives

with their fat queen's stilled hum,

legs stiff as your lips so unsaved

by sacrifice, or perpetual labor

deep in the rose hips.

My eyes drip a mirror of scarlet birds.

I'll watch through the glass til all of us die

til our pink watery ghosts flow up and fall,

haunts with the bees in rose sunset sky.

~January 2020

posted for Ghosts

at earthweal

Process notes: 

1) It's a longstanding tradition dating as far back as medieval times for beekeepers to go to their apiaries and inform the bees when someone in the household died so the bees could also mourn.  

2) There is currently a worldwide pandemic of honey bee deaths, thought to be caused by pesticides and resultant weakening of the bees' immune systems. 8 species of bees are on the endangered species list, but not as yet the honey bee. Nonetheless, there have not been any honey or bumblebees in my own garden for at least the last three or four years.

Images: Wisteria and Bee, © Ohara Koson, 1930, Public Domain

Weird Sky, 2015 ©joyannjones

Day In January

Day In January

This day

so cold, so grey, its icepoint knife,

its ashen-snowed walk-thru oblivion

where spirit steps freeze on fossil tar, raucous-

haunted by midnight crows, torn curtains of love

gone stiff in mid flutter ironed in sleet

that slants in through the windowed hole,

is a rose-colored palace, mottled red

by Mars, bleached clean by Venus

doored to the infinite city

quarried from stars,

growing up like an oak from

a foundation of rot

where what once lived ripens a

turned-under death for

another month to feed 

the secret green of possibility

with all its peculiar used atoms.

This day

where the ghost steps wander 

like a run-on sentence

under the widening moon,

the wolf moon, the hunger moon

made for the hunt.

~January 2016

Process note: wolf moon and hunger moon are Native American names for the month of January. Thanks to Josh Hart for the picture behind this poem.

Photo © Josh Hart, 2016 

All rights reserved.

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 cost

of walking summer that clings

like mimosa gauze to

the shifting faces of my ghosts.

~November 2015

posted for     real toads

The Heart's Desire

Photos:  Mimosa, © joyannjones 2014 

Rosa 'Nearly Wild,' © joyannjones 2015