La Parola Vivace

Poem: Paraffin, Posting for DVerse Poets and Beyond...

2012-05-29T05:22:00.001-06:00

To participate in the weekly DVerse Poets Pub meme, click here.
Feel free to check out my poem A Rumor of Uranium, first antiwar poem I've written in many years. xj

Eva Braun as a Young Girl

Paraffin

We are troubled that our cheap candles burn down

so quickly. There are many lamps in the house

but we for sometime now have preferred candlelight

not one side of your face light, one dark. Then we both

go dark and it is too hard. I need at least to see your

outline, that of the window and the cats lumped

and dreaming on the bookcase. Old love should make

a spontaneous flame between us or kindle us within

but it cannot. Finally you dig out the red buffalo

kitsch candle from twenty years back, Sears in Boulder,

when we ran a horse ranch together, rarely slept

fought in sandstorms and I watched you on the green

tractor off in the distance. On match-flare then I see

what is temporal: Easter night. Our hands, knotted.

the years in such velocity the breath catches when

we speak of it. The buffalo has been behind glass for decades

and now within minutes is sway-backed, a flame wavering

in its shoulder. I tell of you of the auburn bison that came

in spring, dotting the fields on the hill overlooking

the alabaster Never Summer Range. And of the wings in the dark

rising up in front of the truck on the dirt lane. And of the mule deer

in the front yard in the heart of town. Now we are reminded

of the demands around us, the yellow cats, the dogs. You

pull formula for the lagging kitten into the eye dropper.

I had thought to hover here, in the darkness of my old room,

but abruptly evening wicks down to midnight—so it is

that you were there, I was and then the verging tide

of half-lit tallow, the final minutes of our imperiled

choreography, when we are wax defectors

from a Russian ballet poised on the sea-cliff’s edge.

New Poem: Spent, posting for DVerse Open Link Night ...

2012-05-21T12:24:00.010-06:00

Photo by Francesca Woodman, via Tess Kincaid.

Spent

Against the delectable Pearl Fishers duet

A luna llena in the window

I stepped toward you, transformed:

my stiletto boots,

inner soles reading Milano,

my thigh-high seamed silk stockings

clipped to the black garter belt,

the black push-up bra
tucking the bread of my breasts

beneath my neck, cleavage

like a cradle for the abandoned.

My hair was down and dark and flowing;

Open that whore’s heart of yours,

you whispered to me,

caressing my legs.

Now let me have it: you didn’t

deserve to lose your teaching job.

Pretend I’m the chair of the department,
that douche from Harvard.

Whip me; humiliate me. Take my money.

In that nether world of candlelight

and black lace,

I deployed the whip, my mouth

and hands

and soon we lay spent from a vertical

frothing rut in the moontide.

Later I fed the shoes and bra

to the fire in the woodstove
and made love to myself

in the peony dawn light,

biting my lips until they bled.

New Poem: Eggplant Lullaby, for Dverse Poets Pub and Beyond....

2012-05-14T00:54:00.009-06:00

Eggplant Lullaby

From the village above the sea, the sunset’s wound, red as

birth, bleeding light. Here, the matriarch Maria emerges;

she had thought to take the steep path down to the piazza

for La Festa di Mama but instead, worked on in the kitchen’s

embracing cloister. Now the teeming garden has called her

into the dusk. Above all, the melanzane, eggplant dark and

heavy on their bushes, each oval fruit twilight-colored. She

fills her basket and steps to the chair on its driftwood

slats under the lemon tree. The night bird begins her lullaby

and Maria rocks in the adagio of the sea, as in the blue boat

years back with Arturo, honeymooning beneath Orion,

making together their first-born, tiny Lucia. She remembers

the first enrapt swaddling, the pinning of the blanket with

a San Dimetrio medaglia, from the ancestral village Mosorrofa
trove. No one to see her; no one ascends the rocky trail.

She muses over the melanzane, redolent and glistening. She

wraps the smallest in the square of linen folded in her apron.

Guarda, figlia mia. Guarda la luna incantevole,” the night

lark sings. Luminous green lemons, first piercing stars, piccola

melanzana wrapped in linen, pressed to a dreaming breast.

Maria's Dream

notes: medaglia is the word for medal. the lullaby translated: look daughter, look at the enchanting moon. piccola melanzana means little eggplant. Mosorrofa is a township/section of Reggio Calabria, city at the toe of the boot of Italy, dating back to the Greco-Roman period.

New Poem, Volley, Revised, for DVerse Open Link Night

2012-05-08T11:35:00.001-06:00

To participate in the Dverse Poets Pub Tuesday meme, click here.

Volley

Van Gogh wakes in the grave, leaning into a green

cemetery silence, listening with the tuning fork

filaments of his residual ear. Insomniac ghost, he sees

everyone running, whispering “Je ne sais quoi!”

into the dark. He billows off, the hem of his shroud

trailing in the bend of the voluble Seine, looking up

to see a luminous ball on the tip of the Eiffel Tower:

great sentinel moon rebuking all of Paris. Now Sartre

and Toulouse-Lautrec gather at the foot; it takes all three

of them, Van Gogh calling the plays, their white wrists

extended, to spike the ball loose; in unguarded awe

they watch it make its way east through molten skies.

In St. Petersburg, something tugs at a Dostoyevsky long

entombed within piling snow and dreams of forbidden love.

He finds himself in his dark carriage, driver lashing

a lathered team through the frigid and dormant city

where, like the face of a vagrant revolutionary, the great

moon floats above the Winter Palace. He summons

the Brothers Karamazov from their peripheral graves; once

more, a determined volley, and opalescent and immense,

broken from its orbit, the moon travels on west, through one

time zone then another, over alpine ridges to Verona.

Iii

On the redolent piazza, dreaming in his mantle of forlorn

pigeons, the Carrera Dante notices an ascendant

luna errante over the square. All Veronese lamplight

is abruptly quenched in deference. Sitting at a sidewalk

bistro table after hours, one expat had been saying

to another, “… but St. Thomas touched the stranger’s

wounds-- explain that away,” and the other person

could not, except to say “We see what we yearn to see—

look: Dante himself comes unto us now, broken from

stone, holding a wayfaring moon by a filigreed strand.”

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

2012-05-06T14:58:00.000-06:00

This poem inspired by two photos and one narrative portrayed in a painting...


Supermoon at the Eiffel Tower, May 2012


River Irwell, R.D. Stainforth

Volley

Van Gogh wakes in the grave, leaning

into green cemetery silence,

Listening with the tuning fork filaments

of his residual ear.

Insomniac ghost, he sees everyone running,

whispering je ne sais quoi in the dark.

He billows off, the hem of his shroud trailing

in the elbow of the voluble Seine, looking up

To view a luminous ball resting on the tip

of the Eiffel Tower,

Great sentinel moon, rebuking all of Paris.

Now Sartre, Camus, Renoir gather at the tower;

It takes all of them, Van Gogh

calling the plays,

Their white wrists extended,

to tip the ball loose;

In unguarded amazement,

they watch it ascend, making its way

Like a ship of state across the molten skies.

In St. Petersburg , something tugs

At Dostoyevsky, entombed within eternal

dreams of infinite snow and forbidden love:

He finds himself in his dark carriage,

driver lashing the lathered team

Through the dormant frigid city,

where like the face of a vagrant

Revolutionary, the great moon hovers

over the Winter Palace in the square.

He summons the Brothers Karamazov

from the peripheral graves;

The volley once more and now the

opalescent immensity broken from its orbit

Travels on west, through one time zone

then another, over alpine ridges

To the piazza where the Carrera Dante,

in his mantle of forlorn pigeons,

Sees it-- ascendant luna errante--

over the Palazzo di Scaligeri.

All Veronese lamplight

is suddenly quenched in deference:

One expat had been saying to

another, sitting at a bistro table

After hours, But Thomas touched the stranger’s

wounds—explain that away.

And the other person could not,

except to say, We see what we yearn

To see; look, broken from stone

Dante himself comes unto us,

Holding a great wayfaring moon

by a filigreed strand.

Jenne' R. Andrews

May 8, 2012

Caravaggio: The Incredulity of St. Thomas

Dostoyevsky's Notes for a chapter of The Brothers Karamazov

*je ne sais quoi -- fr. I don't know what...

New Poem: Compline, Posting for DVerse Poets and Beyond....

2012-05-01T12:53:00.002-06:00

Compline

Candlelight makes a noose around my neck,

pulling me toward you. We wind down together

like two pocket watches in our chairs,

the lopsided candle flickering. We are tallow.

O hour of paraffin, the veering light

with its tiny lyric of smoke.

I try to pry open the walnut of your silence,

for I know that within you have sailed

around the world. I want to see

what you saw; whales, off the coast

of Newfoundland. Christ descended,

in the grotto. Sweet the night's kiss

of shadow. We need a blue bowl

of apples here, some kind of

tenderness.

What a bad idea it was

to exhume anyone asleep

in the graveyard of our history:

now all the ghosts revive, crows

risen in excoriation,

flying up between us

against the throbbing globe

of a summer half-moon,

gilded ship of uncommon vulnerability

taking in water.

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

2012-04-29T14:09:00.000-06:00

To join Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales meme click here....

Image: Manu Prombol

Nomad

My first instinct, when I see that you

are once more immersed in reading

Lonesome Dove for the tenth time,

is to call you to me.

Live, don’t read, I say;

don’t run away from me into that

long and winding story.

Then I remember the years

alone in my bell jar bedroom,

where the hard-bound frontier

sagas were thick oak doors,

their pages a sheaf of jailer's keys;

that I could bandage my wounds, slip out

to the patio,

throw my great-grandfather's Calvary saddle

over the adobe wall and race then

toward the pinon smoke scenting

the indigo distance—

Apache campfire, braves drumming home

a prodigal rider.

New Poem: Misericordia, for DVerse OLN and Beyond....

2012-04-24T12:59:00.000-06:00

Misericordia

Lent has stilled the bell tongues of the town

Save for the burnished carillon of the Catholics

Tolling the hour to the courthouse.

But think not of the dark-robed there

Meting out a facsimile of justice.

Think of the choirs of impious geese

Driven by the unseen to open water

After hours on the flight-path

Over the Continental Divide.

The earth wakes and cares not

Whether the Penitentes

Erect timber crosses in the Jemez.

The waters will swell and course

And the body will surge and sing, burn

And desire. The soul dies

If we are silenced, made to feel

We cannot speak, should not name

What is seen with our very own eyes.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of

The Big Dipper every night, pouring

Milk over the fields, that Canis Major

Burns on, glazing the mares’ backs

With frozen light. Someone is turning

Over the earth with a great fork

So that air, sun and water come to it

To soften, split and raise the seed.

Mozart tried to finish his requiem

In whispers that could not be

Deciphered. He shut himself away

To hear the callings he wrote down

In a rain of black notes on parchment.

He couldn’t stop or silence himself.

Whitman the same, writing A woman

Waits for me, of waiting and surging,

Manly love and we, we women

Are the takers and keepers

Of the seminal milk--

But we seek diligent assuagement

patience, rapture,

from the lover’s hands, mouth.

I need you. I hunger for you.

As it is Lent, I confess

that I have often terrified myself away

From being filled, released

To my own torrent.

Here then is a sundered dream:

The priest proffers

The Host to me and I open his robe

And take the bread of love into my mouth.

He goes down on his knees, spilling forth

The incarnate.

Later he finds me and spares me nothing,

With his circling tongue

And probing fingers.

I am the bread of life, he says;

She who comes to me will not hunger.

But broken promises—that we will no longer

Make war, that we will be changed, rage on

Like the taffeta robes of the sunset

Even when the sagacious geese that ascend

And call to each other mate in mid-air

In a wanton refueling,

And all the unseen things writhe together

In the dark privacy of the waking brown grass,

And the slugs make their luminous orchid

From the intertwining and strange

elongated glands

That then burst,

So that each falls to the grass, spent.

to participate in the DVerse Poets Open Link Night, clicque asi...

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

2012-04-22T11:29:00.000-06:00

Image: Alex Stoddard

On Dreaming of an Old Lover

My dream of you pulses me

underwater. Once immersed

I can speak to you only with my hands.

Why not tell me the truth now,

you far flung ash, infusion for

spring rye cresting
on the fallow fields: what now

left to lose, or to be overheard

by anyone left behind.

What became of us

the day you sent me away

to the mountains,

their dream-spell and

lavender immensity calling

to the weeping child within,

The hope they would shelter me

abrade away passion--

you, the farm with its rich

dark soil, the coal-eyed, long-haired

daughters all at my back.

What severed us

against our will,

forcing the pretext of forgetfulness,

regrets still burning

brightly as a hatch

of fireflies,

The singular shadow our lovemaking

made on the pale walls

of midnight, moon clearing

the gardens with her scythe.

To participate in Magpie Tales' photo meme, click here.

New Poem: Blackbird Amore - for DVerse OLN and Beyond...

2012-04-17T12:56:00.001-06:00

Blackbird Amore

They manifest

like a sprinkling of ash on the dawn,

congregating motes from a far heaven.

They are annunciations in blue-black

shimmering in the young cattails

with the wing’s red badge

that says, I am of the garrison of joy

and I have come

And I am not Icarus and I am not

a barn swallow,

Nor am I a disconsolate sparrow

with her half-hearted motet,

or the barrio crow clacking for scraps,

or the furtive owl

sitting high in the oak

like a jaded bartender.

I sing Verdi, you sing Mozart.

I sing today and you sing tomorrow.

We are the small and temporal things

appearing in the corner of your eye

when you flash past,

Warbling in our epaulettes,

strafing the marsh

to route the hovercraft

of the dragonfly,

Trumping the laggard lark

with our midair pirouettes,

ballet rouge in the empire of love.

New Poem: Written to a Painting by Marc Chagall

2012-04-15T11:12:00.002-06:00

To participate in the lovely Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales meme, click here.

Red Roofs, Marc Chagall

Written to a Painting by Marc Chagall

At night the woman in red emerges from the ditch bank

To paint the roofs

And the troubadour in the moon strums his washboard

Guitar.

The villas come back to life, listing in delight

From the seacliff. They blush with remembrance

While their occupants dream of bread for all.

Then the adrognynine prince of tides

comes to woo the red woman

Away from her work with his bouquet.

A toy lies on the marble lido at his feet—

A wooden cart and horse, a broken violin.

Woman in red, scarlet outcast woman arisen

like Venus from the deep

Our houses have sagged into pallor

From the weight of the years

Our mariners return with empty nets

No pesce spada leaps in the cove.

Steal the guns from the dons

Asleep in doorways, with their stupor,

their cached opium,

Their misognyny and lust for power.

Stop their breath and restore

Our homes—the old villas

The Calabrese craftsmen made

stone by stone on the terraced hill

Over a coastline luminous

With the phosphor of our husked souls.

New Poem: Sursum Corda, Posting for DVerse...

2012-04-10T13:25:00.001-06:00

Do check out my essay on making a comeback as a poet up at Loquaciously Yours...xj

Sursum Corda

I have my lines down. Step from the shadows

With rouged cheeks, combed hair

My face splashed new with cold water—

Point to the iris bed where diamond-tipped leaves

Shake off the first rain. Speak of beauty.

And the morning to come.

But I am not ready to forfeit

The good dark of March’s fury

And the bowl of love containing me

In the chapels of dust

And Good Friday ash. We are out of candles

And sit in the dusk and the dusk fades away

And there are flickering voices telling

Of a crisis on the Tunisian border

For some reason I say turn the news down

So we can only hear a murmuring,

Like bubbles on a pond’s surface

To know that the fish are gathered

Should we need to see incarnate hunger

Climbing up through fields of ice

To kindle the will.

I say then loose our dogs out back

To trample the already wounded

Orchard grass

Let the winter-killed branches

Sway on the rising moon.

Divide, conquer the light

Before it betrays us:

If spring comes to the pastures

It will hide the scar where we put down

The last mare.

It will occlude the small deaths

Where things stretched out

And fell asleep in the cold.

It seems to me then

That spring lies to us

With its ploy of good cheer

In the ardent drowse of nubbed lilacs

The blurred rendezvous of humming birds

The calling of owls

Surging to their clutch- heavy nests

Season pouring milky light over us

So that we spend our planting ardor

Until we are used up

Seraphim that first appeared

With a message of import

And then came down

With amnesia.

iii

Yes: spring’s deceiving choirs

Come at dawn with their sursum corda

Building cairns to hold the sun’s fire

In cattail inferences of fertility, then implying

The power of flight,

That we hold merciful, inward-facing light

By means of which we may see

Redeem and change ourselves

A sleight of hand within the soul.

Here in the churches of the day

The vixen comes to the edge

Of the fallow patch

That was our garden

Where you scattered yellow squash seed

And I shielded columbines

From the dirt devils rising

Spiraling madly toward us

From the arenas to the West.

No more planting for us, but we love the vixen,

Do we not; she is honest

In how she eats carrion

To feed her kits, to go on. With the coyotes

She trails the foaling mares

She outruns all

Seasons of the garden’s black cycling

How seedlings come and go

In servitude to the frost;

She sniffs the air, calculates

How long to take the bread from the porch

How far back to the lair.

We are out of candles I say again

And you in your way of keeping on

Placating the terror I have

At our mutated love, our aging

Drift off to the store and back

In reassuring lassitude

And I sing a half-willed alleluia

To the high priest of night

Thinking that the wild rose vines

Will assail the window

By morning

Blindly opening their mouths

Salmon-pink mimes of the breaking day

They will warn our fingers

Extruding one thorn apiece

At the stem’s aureole.

Undeterred, you unwrap the lemon candles,

Pinch back the tallow

To make a way for the flame.

I pour myself a glass of water

To take the last pill of my grief.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

To read other poems by dedicated writers, visit DVerse Poets Pub.

New Poem: Lament of the Dark Horse

2012-04-09T12:55:00.000-06:00

Lament of the Dark Horse

Sunday is a bright horse, glad of the early spring

This time, this year, it routs winter

Two months ahead of plum blossom roulette.

Rejection is the dark horse of all the days—how one sends

A sheaf of soul-work into the void

A spark from the torch of perseverance into the void

Where it catches fire in the land of no, not for us.

I ride the bright horse out to the carpeted meadows

Where the mares in foal drop their heads in gratitude.

I ask myself, where did it go wrong

This business of living in the garden of voices

The garden of the satiny red nodding heads

The perpetuity and indolence

Of the red red mouths—

Any man’s death diminishes me.

I am not a man and I live on

In a dimuendo, a fading away.

Still the bright horse waits patiently

For its embittered rider.

You editors, you flatulence on stalks

You spiny weeds;

You don’t know what a voice is.

You don’t know bel canto when you hear it.

In the blinding morning the day horse

The glad one, gallops me away

To the welts of the furrows

And then the dark horse overtakes us

As is its mission

Crowding us to the rail,

But Muse of Morning,

Perilous yearning of afternoon

I will not stripe your gilded hide.

March 31, 2012

Revision: Fugitive - Posted for DVerse OLN and Beyond...

2012-04-03T12:55:00.005-06:00

Please feel free to read my well-received piece on Adrienne Rich at Loquaciously Yours...

Fugitive

I have been running ahead of a thundering storm of crows

for days. Years. Multitudes of owls with piercing

eyes and talons. Blizzards of infuriated snow that ache

To be ash, sky that would like to go dark or swallow itself.

I sang and sang last night to Handel and Mozart and then

we assailed each other with our tongues. On the radio, manifold

Voices spoke of the take-out of the patriarch terrorist, how

the late day sun irradiated a gull as it soared from cliff to white

cap to prow. What is a mortal wound, a hit to the brain by way

Of the eye. Or a blow to the heart quivering in its silver casing

like a Derringer in a cupboard. I fled over the washboard road,

the bridge poised to fall, past ancient trees, wary neighbor, dogs

Milling at her gate. In his run a golden horse looked out at the

newly green field. We together populated the rutted hours

in common vigilance, as if an armed stranger were working her way

To us from farm to farm, the night blooming dusk. Now my jaw is

tarnished, my spoons misaligned. Have you ever believed yourself

to be a mistake. What would you pay for a reprieve? This useless

Chattering of sparrows in the plum blossoms-- who will love us.

does it matter. Write to live. Paint to burn down the wormwood

of day. A priest claimed I don’t believe I’m loved and then

My windshield was pitted by gravel and I slid from the white

dress of my flesh. Our fugitive bodies, washed, swaddled,

“eased” into the sea. Only then, the fields on fire with lavender.

--from the forthcoming collection Snafu .

Do visit DVerse Poets Pub.... many wonderful writers..

New Poem for Magpie Tales Prompt:: Ologisms for the First Day of April

2012-04-01T11:16:00.006-06:00

To participate in the Magpie Tales Sunday photo challenge click here.

Parke Harrison Image

Ologisms for the First Day of April.

Spring comes early to Colorado;

the birds congregate in anxiety,

caught off guard.

Not enough chaff, not enough,

the grackles rasp,

gathering twigs and clumps

of fox-fur in a furor.

Somewhere an ornithologist

studies a nest by climbing into it,

having taken off his shoes.

The canny great owls whose berth it is

to-wit to-woo and circle.

Beware of anything

With “ologist” in its name,

they cry to the doves

preening in the green frieze

along the creek.

My father heads the government car

up the dirt switchbacks

of San Francisco Peak, craning his neck

out the window to appraise the trees;

he is a forest pathologist,

we are his terrified children,

his hatchlings huddled in a Pendleton blanket

on the back seat.

My companion reports that the ospreys

nesting on the transformer up at the corner

survived last night’s lightning attack:

“I saw them; they look o.k.”

We who have weathered every disaster:

foalings gone awry, whelps stuck

by the head, kittens trapped

under the house,

bellowing pygmy goats rushed in

for a c-section,

smile at each other, turning up

the hybrid CD

of the Bach B Minor Mass

recommended by the armchair

musicologist.

The delighted eschatologist sun

pulses closer with

its magnifying glass, in burning

scrutiny

of the kindled spring.

Eschatology....

New Poem: Sursum Corda

2012-03-30T00:48:00.001-06:00

Sursum Corda

I have my lines down. Step from the shadows

With rouged cheeks, combed hair

My face splashed new with cold water—

Point to the iris bed where diamond-tipped leaves

Shake off the first rain. Speak of beauty.

And the morning to come.

But I am not ready to forfeit

The good dark of March’s fury

And the bowl of love containing me

In the chapels of dust

And Good Friday ash. We are out of candles

And sit in the dusk and the dusk fades away

And there are flickering voices telling

Of a crisis on the Tunisian border

For some reason I say turn the news down

So we can only hear a murmuring,

Like bubbles on a pond’s surface

To know that the fish are gathered

Should we need to see incarnate hunger

Climbing up through fields of ice

To kindle the will.

I say then loose our dogs out back

To trample the already wounded

Orchard grass

Let the winter-killed branches

Sway on the rising moon.

Divide, conquer the light

Before it betrays us:

If spring comes to the pastures

It will hide the scar where we put down

The last mare.

It will occlude the small deaths

Where things stretched out

And fell asleep in the cold.

It seems to me then

That spring lies to us

With its ploy of good cheer

In the ardent drowse of nubbed lilacs

The blurred rendezvous of humming birds

The calling of owls

Surging to their clutch- heavy nests

Season pouring milky light over us

So that we spend our planting ardor

Until we are used up

Seraphim that first appeared

With a message of import

And then came down

With amnesia.

iii

Yes: spring’s deceiving choirs

Come at dawn with their sursum corda

Building cairns to hold the sun’s fire

In cattail inferences of fertility, then implying

The power of flight,

That we hold merciful, inward-facing light

By means of which we may see

Redeem and change ourselves

A sleight of hand within the soul.

Here in the churches of the day

The vixen comes to the edge

Of the fallow patch

That was our garden

Where you scattered yellow squash seed

And I shielded columbines

From the dirt devils rising

Spiraling madly toward us

From the arenas to the West.

No more planting for us, but we love the vixen,

Do we not; she is honest

In how she eats carrion

To feed her kits, to go on. With the coyotes

She trails the foaling mares

She outruns all

Seasons of the garden’s black cycling

How seedlings come and go

In servitude to the frost;

She sniffs the air, calculates

How long to take the bread from the porch

How far back to the lair.

We are out of candles I say again

And you in your way of keeping on

Placating the terror I have

At our mutated love, our aging

Drift off to the store and back

In reassuring lassitude

And I sing a half-willed alleluia

To the high priest of night

Thinking that the wild rose vines

Will assail the window

By morning

Blindly opening their mouths

Salmon-pink mimes of the breaking day

They will warn our fingers

Extruding one thorn apiece

At the stem’s aureole.

Undeterred, you unwrap the lemon candles,

Pinch back the tallow

To make a way for the flame.

I pour myself a glass of water

To take the last pill of my grief.

New Poem: The Artifice of Mirrors, posting for Magpie Tales and Beyond...

2012-03-25T12:24:00.000-06:00

To participate in the Magpie Tales prompt click here. xj

The Artifice of Mirrors

Look then at how each unanswered

Question appears in mirrored eyes

I should never doubt you, oval-rimmed

Image:

That you are wordless belies the war

In my heart.

To love Self or not to love her

To hide away, to set her free

From the gilded cage of artifice

Where she sings alone all the nights

And days?

Being shines back

Like the moon refracting the suns of time

I brush my hair from my brow

She follows suit.

But whose tear is it that runs

The furrow of the cheek?

Have I cast myself

Like a horse caught under a fence

Within the shadows of the mirror?

A reflected and refracting inquiry

Cannot resolve within the mind—

Then turn away; volition

In his long cloak

Has found honey in the garden.

Touched: A Prose-Poem

2012-03-18T22:50:00.001-06:00

Note: someone recently suggested I stop worrying about how my content affects my readers and fuming over the publish or perish issue. I think this is good advice. When I post poems of loss and grief, or that reckon with difficult circumstances, otherwise known as the human condition, I am not looking for psychotherapy or pity. I am posting imaginative writing, formerly known as creative writing. So feel to respond poet to poet...xxxj

Today I tackled the dust I never thought one person living alone could make. Chaff from the unpreserved dried flowers from the bouquet given to me when I traded a golden retriever for a mobility scooter that now sits on my porch, battery dead. Clumps of fine hair from the golden retriever someone I no longer speak to gave me, she who is mythically beautiful, a gilded swan planted in the midst of my life. Her fur and my grey hair, ever falling like hints of rain, commingle in the corners.

Somehow over the weeks I had been sliding back into depression, staring at my own dishabille, consuming things and throwing them aside like a madwoman-- and averting my eyes, turning then to save an overripe banana, churning it up with eggs and sweet milk and baking the whole as a hybrid flan. Where I took pleasure in nurturing the place that nurtures me I began to resent the demands of the dust, the hair, the chaff, the powdering flowers.

How dare everything decay like this.

Meanwhile the worst of it; my own teeth and their wearing down, as if they are tired of being teeth. Terror when I look into my own mouth and see cycle-shaped cavities at the gum line. And the leg that didn’t heal and deformed and the other leg and knee and their strain. The infernal house of the aging body. The demands of the aging body and the rotting of the subflooring beneath the carpet and the wind tearing at everything.

In my bedroom, dolls forever asleep in dust-caked blankets, like little mummies. The nightstand I stole from the Joder Ranch years ago and painted mauve, next to the bed I bought on Craig’s List because it was from the Denver Mattress Company, that sagged already on one side so that I felt betrayed… the vials I cannot bear to leave out because they take me back to everyone’s illness I fled from.. The painting over my bed of mauve orchids on a dark background given to me by an old lover.. a lover who ages among the fallen plantations of the Pacific.

These things that claimed the eye and heart and that own me and that help me believe I am like anyone entitled to exist—and how quickly the talcum powder I sprinkle over my breasts and belly floats out of the bathroom to coat the lampshade, the dark drape over the window.

So it is with a lair; I live in this lair, I dream and weep and touch myself to rapture in this place and close its door against any further re-wounding. Let me count the lovers: impossible.

This is not the age of Aquarius but the age of a resurgence of distrust of women and a laying claim to the wombs of women by pale white men. It is awful. Too many hands have roamed over this body; I have succored a legion of the undeserving as if I were mother to the world.

The chaff is that which is left. That which scripts the hours of a life, littering itself along the baseboards, proof that someone of blood and bone dwells here with the soft-voiced radio and the mnemonic television and the blender waiting with its lucent eggs, for my touch.

Posting for DVerse Poetics ...Reworking of Myth/Fairy Tale....

2012-03-17T20:03:00.003-06:00

A Myth Profaned

The priest’s pallid hands hover over consecrated

Bread. Vested in white flame

Candles flare in the dark nave.

I take God upon my tongue, take Him in

The Puer Aeternis, divine boy, sacred journeyman--

His very body.

I meditate upon this one on the crucifix, reading

Ecce Homo; Behold, the Man.

I kneel and take the cup to my lips--

Consecrated blood, the blood

A yearning for homecoming sheds

Within the soul.

So was I seduced, appropriated,

My girl’s heart won over, my own voice

chanting Credo in Unum Deum, ascending

With the Ave Maria,

Petitioner for mercy.

But Divine Figure—

It is too mortal here in the thorny gardens;

It is all profaned

By the father who binds his girl child to him

In the long and weeping night,

The mothers who turn upon their children,

The dispossessed, who starve in the desert.

I cast myself upon

the ground, for this, penitent:

I return your sackcloth and your ashes,

Your Good Friday and the allegory

Of your rising,

And lay them at your feet. Clearly

Like deer running blind from a forest fire

it falls to us

to free ourselves

from every shroud of barbed wire.

New Poem: Desire Explicated for DVerse Poets

2012-03-15T20:28:00.023-06:00

Many thanks to Charles Miller for a tantalizing and irresistible prompt..... at Dverse Poets Pub.

Desire Reexplained

All my thoughts always speak to me of Love,
Yet have between themselves such difference
That while one bids me bow with mind and sense,
A second says, “Go to: look you above;”
The third one, hoping, yields me joy enough;
And with the last come tears, I scarce know whence:
All of them craving pity in sore suspense,
Trembling with fears that the heart knows of.

--from a sonnet in La Vita Nuova - Dante

All day thoughts of you sprig like crocus,

The photo of your sleek golden body
rising from the Scilla harbor

Like Odysseus redeemed.

You, Calabrese to the core,

Your smile and bearing

Constricting my heart,

Saw me as well in a photograph, my hair gray,

My dog gathered on my lap.

How else did you find and appear

to know me—did you plot the cartography

of my solitude?

Did you read that years ago I free-fell

into the arms of someone in that very place

who taught me the Song of the Resistance

and wept when the train bore him away

from my arms?

You call me from Napoli;

You want to see me, to talk.

I make excuses; and where is your wife

I ask you, bronze man rising in ardor

On the horizons of time?

You say in your tongue

Lei non c'e 'or.. She is not here.

But other photos give me details

To remind me of what happens

When I set sail without compass

Or my diving gear

Into the very moon-shot waters

Where desire and myth collide:

No matter the blue joy of the dive,

I would escape with nothing but my life.

In Italian..

Che Ti Voglio Esplicitata

Tutti i miei pensieri sempre mi parli di amore,
Tuttavia hanno tra loro tale differenza
Che, mentre si piegano le offerte me con la mente e il senso,
Un secondo dice: "Vai a: cerca sopra di voi";
Il terzo, sperando, mi dà gioia a sufficienza;
E con le ultime lacrime venire, scarsa so dove:
Tutti pietà desiderio in sospeso dolente,
Tremante di paura che il cuore conosce.
- da un sonetto a La Vita Nuova - Dante

Tutti i pensieri del giorno, come si rametto di crocus
Il tuo corpo elegante oro sale dall'acqua

Come Ulisse redento.

Tu, Calabrese fino al fin, con il quale
Sono affascinato e che mi costringe a
il rilevamento e il tuo sorriso.

Mi hai visto in una fotografia, il mio capelli grigi,
Il mio cane riuniti sulle mie ginocchia
In quale altro modo hai trovato e apparire
di conoscere me; hai trovato un modo
per mappare la mia solitudine?

Avete letto che anni fa mi caduta
tra le braccia di qualcuno in quel luogo molto
un calabrese con gli occhi tristi
che mi ha insegnato la canzone della Resistenza
e pianse quando il treno lo portò via
dalle mie braccia?

Tu mi chiami da Napoli;
Vuoi vedere me, a parlare.
Mi scuso, e dove è tua moglie
Vi chiedo, l'uomo di bronzo in aumento in ardore
Sugli orizzonti del tempo.

Tu dici nella tua lingua
Lei non c'e 'or .. Lei non è qui.
Ma le altre foto mi danno i dettagli
Per ricordarmi di ciò che accade
Quando salpò senza bussola
O la mia attrezzatura subacquea

Nelle acque cerulee d'amore
Nei casi in cui il desiderio e il mito si scontrano.
.
Non importa la gioia azzurra dell'immersione,
fuggirebbe con nulla ma la mia vita.

This poem explained:

Guarda--a certi tempi la fantasia d'amore 'e migliore che la realita… 'e certo. Io so questo. E quanto dovera basta avere una finestra alla amore che amore en braccio. Perche si due facciamo amore a fuori di familia y sangue, si accedere un terremoto di lagrime per tutti. Non voglio essere la una qui 'e la forza di quel destino. Un terremoto io non so e mai sarebbe ancor.... Legge mi poesia en cual ho detto lo che viva ancor nel mio cuore. Niente mi piacerebbe che cominciare il furore di amore con ___ en una notte splendida ma… per noi questo ha il potenza di iniziare un gran sfortuna.

Beware-- at certain times, fantasy is better than reality-- that is certain. I know this. And how much it should suffice to have a window on love than in one's arms. For if two make love outside the ties of family and blood, an earthquake takes place with tears for all. I don't want to the one to be the force of such a destiny. I am not an earthquake... Nothing would please me more than to have a night of truly mad love with ___ , but for us this has the power to initiate great misfortune...

New Poem Posted for DVerse OLN and Beyond...

2012-03-13T12:47:00.003-06:00

Revision. To participate in DVerse Poets Open Link Night click here.

Riesgo II

Today I see footage of rainwater sluicing

down the brick-paved hill of

the Calabrian village;

the wet temples of pale stucco, their intimacy

and privacy, like the Chaco ruins where

I played as a child.

A world away,

the call to prayer from a minaret

on a blood-rich dusk:

dark forms passing

voicelessly in the street.

But, to live above the sea

in the dangerous weather knowing

you could be washed away!

To jettison the load of obligation

the tonnage of fear

that confines you to a shuttered room
where you dance the tarantella

of loneliness!

In Calabria my friend

leans from her window into the rain,

fearing that her small nesting hen

has been washed downhill from the villa,

along with the lip of her garden.

Once I bought a pregnant mare;

The foal could not be delivered;

They lay together on the earth

Like a great orchid

And its sundered petal.

Now, the February Chinook comes in

from Wyoming,

rough-handed lover that nips and bites

and takes at will: the standing snowmelt

In the grass, for its parched lips

and where the mares due in June

stand, tails to the wind.

Look, then: how undone the world

from all the bone-shattering

feats of love.

New Poem, Posted for Magpie Tales and Beyond...

2012-03-11T15:12:00.001-06:00

To participate in the Magpie Tales Sunday photo prompt hosted by the one and only Tess Kincaid, click here...

Die Morganwald

Morning breaks in the wood

her violinist in the clearing

her mocking bird on the bough.

And will it be an adagio of long shadows

verging and opalescent,

wings graying to afternoon?

Will a pale hand reach down

to rewind that One who plays a caprice

to the point of exhaustion?

We come into morning with a basket

full of the ripe pears of hopefulness

proffering them to the Other;

We see the saluting petals of the trillium,

the coquette pansies opening in damp grasses.

Does faith take wing then, or a sotto voce prayer

in a foreign tongue

crest at the back of the throat?

I would see this Vivaldi of the hours,

this rapturous chimera I imagine,

hold him in my sight

until measure for measure

my own breath fades away.

What /Who I Was Doing in 1999.... for DVerse Poetics

2012-03-10T22:43:00.001-07:00

Boy howdy, this is an entertaining prompt for today's DVerse Poetics. I wouldn't say I was exactly in love in '99, more like having a few last flings...

Bad-Ass

One day in the cafe

the tall drink of water from Savannah

with all the chrome

said the run from Ogden to Denver

hauling the U.S. mail

got to him;

He ran blue eyes over me

where I sat reading the paper--

he had silver hair and long fingers

and still used Old Spice.

In the parking lot a kiss; later a call

and then I went to get him;

call me millennium man, he said

your sugar daddy of the new year.

And he wore a tooled silver six-gun with chamois smooth skin

loaded with an ever-ready cache of warm silverfish ammo

I loved in my holster

where I would yearn and smolder.

Why would you drink me down

Like a milkshake that way

he asked

in the wake of a hot first go

half out of our clothes in the kitchen

nice girls don't do that

Nice boys don't let them --

if they want to come back

my riposte.

How'd I get under your skin, he'd tease

when I played that song

while he suckled me hard

like a neonate Hampshire boar.

He'd go no holds barred

until I was on the edge,

get up and drift off

to smoke;

I'd finish myself off in the dark

with one sympathetic hand

in one smooth glissade, biting my lips,

holding something back

not my heart.

He never thawed or flinched;

I'm your millennium man he'd say,

taking out his comb.

He would dress and smoke

and pace and drive away

and here it is again,

the new year, 3 a.m.,

The horseplay and innuendo

and unfinished business

of our bruised mouths,

small whirlpools now

in the tide of my blood.

New Poem: Intermezzo, Posted for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond...

2012-03-06T13:35:00.001-07:00

Photo, from the Mosorrofa archive shared courtesy of Alessandro Niccolo...

Intermezzo

..e a parlare d'amore mi sforza

un desio ch'io non posso spegiar.

...to talk of love fills me

with a desire I can't explain.

Cherubino, La Nozze di Figaro

I remember walking with Giuseppe

through the streets of Rome, how

he put his hand on my arm,

quietly and proudly stating:

We are a people of scientifici,

artisti, filosofi.

Ma che memoria crudele—unkind

remembrance:

we stood before Vivaldi in the wax museum;

Pepe said we should cast our embrace

in paraffin.

Fountains sang all around us,

sunlight bathed the peeling walls

of villa on villa.

We passed two mute lovers at a table,

their gelato melting, and he said to me

“Due morti,” – two dead ones.

So much tenderness and sorrow

in his eyes that day,

my departure a week away.

But we trekked on, as I thought

I should drink the last Valpolicella

of the Roman evening.

until only shadows tinted

my chalice.

Today a photo falls into my hands

of Calabrese before the war

gathered in the stone-paved street

cut into the dark hills

of the Aspromonte,

on the Festa of San Dimetrio.

Those dark eyes, dark hair,

sepia multitude dreaming

of loaves and fishes--

supplicants of fading light.

I remembered the photo in the train station

that captured l' ultimo baccio—our final kiss,

now lost to me in a move.

I can still conjure his face

but how ancient those hours feel now,

like a Pompeian fresco time

relentlessly abrades—

Our lovemaking that night to Mozart,

the rain of tears in its key

of parting, staccato coda

on the terracotta roof.

to see more of these amazing photos click here... xj

draft

For D'Verse Poetics: Ceremonies for Late Morning....

2012-03-03T12:53:00.008-07:00

Digital Photograph by Walter Smith

Ceremonies for Late Morning

The hands should be an extension

of the heart,

as in the laying on

of love and soothing;

And the heart, a gypsy vagabond

wandering in gardens across

the world,

savoring the breeze from

a Calabrian balcony,

Shielding itself beneath

the parachute of an open wild rose

to view the horizon,

the sapphire sea.

Beauty glitters there eternally,

where Homer made camp

with his storm of shaggy hair,

where since, one adventurer

and then another has made her wary way:

Oh, the gusting expatriate soul.

The eyes must always follow

the heart’s suit

and thus their moistening

upon remembrance,

The hands dancing over biscuit dough

in the crystalline morning.

My mouth cries out in my sleep.

I didn’t know it was my mouth

that formed the vowels of anguish;

I didn’t realize it was my hair

hanging in white tendrils

against my cheeks.

Who carried the records

of lost amore in a bandana

on a stick,

A book of losses colored in

by a child?

Who did I see—

much of me gone

with the low scudding cloud-cover,

The tumbling thickets of thorns

whirling toward the highway south,

in the arms of the vagabond wind.