New Poem, Instruction Manual, for The Mag and Beyond.....

To participate in the lovely Tess Kincaid's Sunday meme The Mag, click here.

Monhegan's Schoolteacher  Jaimie Wyeth 

Instruction Manual

What you look for

isn’t in any book.  It is the song

the body loves to sing

and knows by heart,

where you towel your hair,

nude in winter’s window. 

If you fear

the task at hand, pretend

you’ve unpacked the text,

that the instructions are etched

on your eyelids

when you dream.

Think of it, and the body stirs

in the winter window;

it is not a rubric

but an art--

this bel canto

the body longs to sing.

Apollo

is here—according

to a winter's worth 

of words, 

he has seen

your alert breasts.

He has the fierce look

of desire:

he is poised there

beyond the window

in a nook of shade.

Be woman, be the song,

close the book.

Let him in.

Open

to the tender entrance

of the sun.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012 

New Poem: A Honeyman Cometh

(It's much better now-- revised)

A Honeyman Cometh

And that one put his hands on me

and I arched my back

and there was honey aplenty

for him at the gate—

April sun streamed in and a choir
of whispers exulted in the body's resurrection.

Persephone wiped away Demeter’s

tears and seeking out a means
to come one unto the other,

we shed the coat of hesitation

and like the dappled, surging herd

on Connemara, like the anthem

of rain on marble at Pere Lachaise

or the exultate of sun-white laundry

hung in the salty sea-air at Palermo

there was that uprising of the black swans

that had been landlocked and wing-

clipped in desire's long dormancy

and together we were two yeses 

released and sweat-gilded

in the applauding dawn.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

New Poem: Refraction, for Magpie Tales and Beyond...

Not To Be Reproduced - Magritte

Refraction

Would you say 

that the fact there is only one 

of each of us

is a good thing?

Mirrors tell us nothing.  

But when we slice into the heart,

magnifying a section of loamy tissue 

on a slide,

there is a tiny movie of fleeting days,

someone walking empty-handed

along a dirt road. 

Always, we are evading

when we think we are running toward.

As in how he seared me with his hands

and bent my spine to fit his body,

and I was on fire with questions

when he turned away into sleep.

What is this—does it mean

I am yours?  

He dreamed on and I retreated, 

slipping the diamond-cut

topaz from my finger and tossing it

into the blackbird slough

at the asphalt’s edge.

The back of someone leaving

always seems angry.

Even his raven's wing hair

wears the gloss of alienation.

When I am desperate

for you to see me

I break the mirror, 

say it was an accident:

A meteor or a piano

fell through the roof.

Then you

are all I have for a mirror:

if you wanted, if you dared,

you could refract me 

into a thousand stars.

To participate in Tess Kincaid's The Mag photo meme, where there are always brilliant responses, click here.  

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

New Poem, for The Mag and Beyond...

Photo by The Fox and The Raven

Dissolution

We sit together in a dark solemnity.

The low rebuking wind is back,

its March sweep over sere grasses

lost to the tincture of rain.

We are moving the chess pieces

of argument, my Queen

felling your King.  We are once more

airing the laundry we had agreed

to let time and the sun consume.

This is a tunnel where standing water

spawns the algae of blame.

This is where the gargoyle-embellished

mirrors are hung

where I turn and look at my own face,

to see one eye hanging by a thread, 

underwhelmed by what it discerns

again and again.

Across these pallid, frigid hours

you recede from me,

withering, folding

like a spent poker hand

into the labyrinth of night,

your heart on lockdown, casino  

for the irretrievable.

As before

the dogs watch us, taking note

of the inflection of anger;

no one wins the game,

exulting in her pile of chips.

We have merely fed

the banked fire of dissolution

waiting in the doorway’s seam.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews March 2013

To play chess with Tess Kincaid and the rest of us, click here  

New Poem: Mes Femmes Sauvages et Beaux

Many thanks to Tess Kincaid for today's fascinating prompt.  See others' responses at The Mag.

Wind of History   Jacek Yerka 

Mes Femmes Sauvages et Beaux

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

John Keats, Le Belle Dame Sans Merci

Mother dreamed profane largesse,

thought she should live

at Monticello.

But Winifred’s old Anglia caught fire

and she ran a stop sign drunk,

killing her passenger,

broke out of her body cast.

The women in my family

couldn’t be tamed or kept.

After I left the canyon,

our A-frame caught fire

and no one thought

to save the cats.

A rebuilding is unjust.

Gyorgy had no Monticello,

but his cabin was home;
he died in a tent

on scorched ground

near a smoking cairn of ash.

I couldn’t stay;

I had to leave. When I was cornered

in my wheelchair

by leering owls, I launched

flaming epithets, called a cab,

willing to sport a peg-leg

all my days.

What is the mean streak,

the Irish coming-after-you gene
in the distended carotid
of every diva with our name?

Even Mother rose

from her Garboesque despair, 

disabled the nursing home alarm,

ran to the beauty parlor,

and was cursing me out loud

when her heart shuddered

and the neon filaments

of her jailbreak dream 

went dark.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

New Poem: The Doll-Maker's Insomnia

The Doll-Maker's Insomnia

--for Valentine's Day

If I told you that I’m up every night until break of day

what would you say.

Or that I have shored up my body in black strapping

with Velcro closures, that one leg is an anvil I drag,

that I cannot bring up enough heat in the old oven

while I look out at the citadel shadows

crumbling at the touch of light:

that the inanimate owns me, traps me in my habitat:

the leering poppies without a frame,

the disorienting litter of battered porcelain dolls.

What would you say if you caught a glimpse of it,

how everywhere in fact are little semblances

of personages, little homages to infancy,

small biers of arms and legs, caved-in

second hand heads;

that sleepless, I pounce acrylic wash into vinyl--

redden cheeks, draw hair,

drop varnish into eye sockets to stand in for tears.

Mine are real and they fall from me at a moment's notice.;

no one here tolerates paint-spill, dead glue-gun,

the hours whittling themselves down plaintively,

like someone playing a sugarcane flute--

all for seraphic facsimiles in long gowns and bonnets,

for blackbird-skittish love, its consecrating

and red-badged wing..

copyright Jenne' Andrews 2013

New Poem: A Pattern of Embitterment

A Pattern of Embitterment

I will never be published by the elites:

I acridly muddied the water,

added a vinaigrette du malaise,

said, Did you even bother? 

Were you on the rag?

Now I force eggs and flour

and olive oil and salt

to take shape in my hands;

I make something I can see,

tilted here, on my good leg

in the taut rigging of the shadows.

The fascist male Right

will not keep out of my womb;

they rape, with the rusty awl

of sophistry; they troop in

wool-bearing and on all fours.

I drink the longest drafts of life

in the opaque deeps of night.

That is what insomnia is for.

But, dear editors,  who 

must I service

to make it over the portcullis

of the heart-breakers?

Long ago, so long past,

I was engaged.

I threw a lubricant across the room

and the moon flinched.

The imperious, soul-heisting editors 
so incongruously planted,

their ineradicable roots,

the sperm of their whale.

My pasta dough rests

as it is decreed that it should

after kneading.

At three a.m.

this is the only truly hopeful thing.

I am not resigned.  

I am saguaro-woman

she whose gall

infects the iconic.

Night is a long train

for the forsaken; 

he whom I love, the reticent one,

trudges down dark furrows

and first light opens the casket

of the vanguard blue hills.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013