Poesia Nuova-- Meditazioni del Giorno, trans. Signore Marco Giuffrida, Vicenza, Italia

DAY GATHERING

MEDITAZIONI DEL GIORNO

Mezzanotte, primi di agosto
ed è tempo di riordinare le Cose,
lavori delle mani, creazioni della Mente.

Per portare la giornata al seno
come fiori piegati
o morbido tessuto fresco di bucato,
è l’unione di piccoli oggetti
con altri della stessa specie.
Sale con il miele. Gusci d’uovo
con i fondi del caffè,
scorze d’arancia e frammenti d’osso.

Poi, alla Chiusa il corpo chino,
a togliere il sudore rappreso
per il pomeriggio febbrile,
così come le piogge hanno donato
il verde, con generosità,
ai giardini nella fine estate.

**

E’ l’ora
di piccole verifiche:
come la casa sembra apparire
in fondo al viale
fiancheggiato da pioppi ricurvi
o come il vecchio canile, all’ombra,
ora vuoto,
senza le ultime dorate cucciolate,
o per il crescere di teneri alberi
che coprono la vista del torrente
che circonda la casa
al pari di una folla di Gheise
coperte da fruscianti manti
di seta verde,
la stessa casa in una cauta serenità
si abbandona, dondolandosi e chinandosi,
alla pioggia e all’umidità,
verso la Terra.

**

Si fa davvero poco
per mettere ordine,
ed anch’io a mezzanotte, adagio,
mi abbandono  all’interiorità,
Donna sola,
chinandomi e riflettendomi
nella Danza delle Nutrici.
Ancestrali paure dell’Esistere
mi afferrano per un braccio
trascinandomi semincosciente
verso compiti più semplici,
forgiando un’alleanza
fra un’ora e la successiva,
tra il consumato per il piallato delle tavole
della panca dove noi ci sediamo,
nella ciotola cobalto del tramonto;
e come i deboli venti grigi del Tempo
noi rendiamo le cose lisce come cote,
cuscino fra noi e quel Paese lontano,
al di là del Miraggio,
di verdi campi infiniti.

Jenne' R. Andrews, trans.  Marco Giuffrida

Inglese:

Day-Gathering

Midnight, early August
and it is time
for the centering of things,
hands’ work, mind’s drift.

To gather the day to the breast
like the folding of flowers,
the soft fabric of the laundry,
the reuniting of small objects
with others of their kind.
Salt to honey.  Eggshells
unto coffee grounds,
orange rind and wishbone.

Then, to sluice the body down,
rinse away the dried sweat
of the fevered afternoon,
how the rains have imparted
a green generosity
to the late summer garden.

ii

It is the hour
of small recognitions:
how the house seems ever
appearing, at the end of the long
lane flanked by leaning
poplars, how the old kennel,
barren now of gilded litters
in shaded runs,
belongs to the overgrowth--

of advancing leggy trees, each year
coming in closer from the creek,
encircling the house like a throng
of geishas in rustling green silk,
house itself in a circumspect quietude,
yielding to the rain and damp,
rocking back against the earth.

iii

Little truly gives itself
to the making of order,
but even as I freefall inward
in midnight adagio--
woman alone,
bending and reflecting
in the nurturer’s dance,
old fears at existence
pulling at my arm,

this half-conscious way of giving oneself
to plain tasks forges an alliance
between one hour and the next,

between the wearing away of the hand-planed
boards of the deck where we sit
in a cobalt bowl of twilight--

and how the low grey winds of time
hone us like whetstone,
bearing us on toward that far country
beyond the mirage
of infinitely green fields.


Jenne' R. Andrews  August 2014

New Poem: My Mother Carpets the Stairs -- for Magpie Tales!

My Mother Carpets the Stairs

She, one of three sisters,
was the first to carpet the stairs with a true

Lavar Kerman with bound

edges--spending its carmine
"open field" on heaviest treading,
so that over the years the center of each

swatch unraveled, became worn

from her nightly treks 

to and from our basement lair,
weeping. 

Such rugs graced hand-packed sand

floors in the villages outside

Tehran

and as Americans
discovered them
in their way of waving the desultory
hand at the market in Marakesh,
rendered the more elegant,

the towering homes fronting the lake—

our specimen wide and luminous, 

central incarnadine flower, fading,

thick pile superbly shorn.

I remember when the starter castles

sprang from the mountain,

their front windows tricking geese

into impact and freefall.

We shouldn’t so colonize

the remaining wilds, that savannah
where the Bonabo

washes her face in the stream

after making love,

tail still kinked with pleasure.

But Mother would have done well

in Borneo, bivouacking a garrison

of skeptical apes, martialing

a hurried route tree to tree,

the one-arm swinging to take cover--

If she could have brought one thing,

only to the jungle

it would have been the scarlet

Kerman; tucked by now into the crook

of an acacia—nearly indiscernible
as something made by a human hand.

She could not know how it would smell

of civilization and ruin

or in what benign tongue

the compliments of the canopy

would be proffered at a safe remove.

,

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2014

New Poem: Guild

Many thanks to Tess Kincaid for the meme up at Magpie Tales...

Ressurection II 1945, Sir Stanley Spencer 

Guild

Mouthing delight
at the patchwork fervor of September leaves,
piety's handmaidens meet to piece;
giddy with ambition,
they splay the Star of Bethlehem quilt out
with its half-built rainbow of spokes.

Each voluble quilter wants to go to heaven;
stitching, several speak the Word.
Then they break bread,
faces etched with Old World craqueleur,
suffused chatter fading into dusk
like the Tenebrae of dreaming doves.

With their brethren in laity
they throng the unschooled choir
and rehearsing the requiem foreign
to their plain mouths,
whisper enmity at an arriviste--
a young lyric soprano in the front row.

How much they hate her
for the larksong she has bestowed
upon the congregation and the clan!

So it is they put away
their piecing, the luminous quilt embroidered
with Episcopal Women of Hastings,
to be presented in a ribbon-cutting
for the new children’s clinic on Raintree Road.

Spotting the willowy thing praying
alone in the nave,
they group, waiting for her,
fingering the sterling crosses at their throats,
their dark straw hats skewered through
with faux-pearl pins,
casting her out of Babylon
with envy's ruthless stones.


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

New Poem: Dining Car, for The Mag and Beyond.....

Please note that my newest collection of poetry, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, Finishing Line Press, with endorsements from literary luminaries Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick and cover art by John Sokol, may be ordered now; books will be shipped in October. Signed copies may be purchased from me directly; e-mail jenneandrews2010@gmail.com . To read an advance review by the lovely Tess Kincaid, click here.  My new poem follows.

Dining Car

Mother’s old notes say we took the train

to Flagstaff  my second summer—

that we sat in the dining car and I looked out

mouthing vowels at the desert--  

even then in awe of it, the blue seas of sand,

red sandstone buttes jutting at heaven.

She said the black conductor took our tickets,

his face mooney and beaming;

that we had a Sterling service at breakfast

monogrammed RGL--Rio Grande Line—

poached eggs, quartered cantaloupe

for just the two of us.

Father was off in khaki in the woods

at the foot of San Francisco peak,

moving with the others like indolent
ghosts penciled into the Ponderosa,

harvesting them of the dwarf mistletoe

that lay popping in Petri dishes

like fractured pearls.

But it was the train, the thunderous rolling on

like a cinematic dream, wheels

throwing off sparks, long high whistle

warning Black Angus cows to move

or be flattened, out on the Pajarito Plateau

where the tracks lengthened

to a vanishing point--

that a body could be in motion, arise,

float and fly.

That there could be holidays and reunions--

escape, the imagination winging

alongside keeping pace with the locomotive’s

kite of steam,

smelting a mirage of freedom down

to a surging and palpable world.

 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

New Poem for Magpie Tales and Beyond: No Passing Zone

As noted above, my first collection in thirty years, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, due out in October from Finishing Line Press, may be preordered; visit the blog I've set up for it here....

Photo - Steven Kelly 

No-Passing Zone

That winter, cabin fever

drove us out of Albuquerque,

so that after eight hours

on Route 66, we found ourselves

on a half-tarred road notched

into the mountain,

small family grafted to one another

by need and grief

like an ebony four-leaf clover

pendant, pieces that would never

break away from the whole.

In full-blown DT’s our mother

rode shotgun,

young brother with me in the back

of the US Forest Service Chevy sedan

leased to our father

for such forays through high country

to tally beetle-killed trees,

and collect the unwelcome dwarf mistletoe

gleaming in the clefts

of the ponderosa.

We nosed up into the season

of deep snow

on icy switchback shoulders

you didn’t dare pass slower traffic on;

chain-smoking, my mother clung to my father

and I held my brother’s hand on the back seat,

now and then looking down

at the slate drop-off

where buzzards rode the downdraft

in their gyre over mule deer carrion.

Down the other side

Navajo country, the Rez:

and the government cabin

we had provisioned ourselves

for, unpeeled tongue and groove,

hand-hewn and welcoming,

rocking back against red cliffs:

the nearby fields were pocked with lamb-heavy

woolly Churro ewes, heads down

in December’s diffident wind.

A fire burning high with a pinon knot,

a roast leg of mutton

left for us in the freezer by the ranger

would lift our spirits;

we, the brave children,

issue of territorial stock,

tumbled into the cabin’s gloom,

but she, slamming down scotch,

held up for a mere hour.                 

Like the last aspen leaf of an early autumn,

she shook at the hearth, sparks snapping

up the chimney,

clawing at her own arms;

You have to take me back.

I have to go back.

This was every year’s gift,

new ordeal tied up with a ribbon

sangre de Cristo red--

a junket ruined

by her fear, this ungrown thing

we had for a mother

no one had been able to fix,

not even with vaunted shock treatments

at Nazareth Sanitarium

on the edge of the city

so that we could be the children again,

not the parents, not the ones

holding our breath over an ice-slick pass

at dusk, boring through a blizzard

homeward,

my father back on duty

at his other job, putting out fires from

the ashes she left like bread crumbs

wherever she wandered the night long

in weeping disarray.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

The old Route 66, and the Painted Desert Trading Post ruin...

Route 66 into the Navajo Reservation 

Publication Announcement!

Dear Friends:

As noted above, I am in the throes of the pre-publication ordering period for my first collection in thirty years, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, Finishing Line Press. Without pre-publication orders there will be no press run, and therefore I hope you will add this, my offering to the world of fifteen comparatively recent poems, to your library.

My friend Samuel Peralta, a renowned poet in his own right, has paid me the highest of compliments:  "If you care about poetry, buy this book!"

Cover art by John Sokol, my favorite among his mixed media pieces, "Mirage."

Jim Moore, Invisible Strings, Graywolf Press, and Dawn Potter, Director, Conference on Poetry and Teaching, The Frost Place, How the Crimes Happened, CavanKerry Press, have lovely things to say about my work on the back cover of the collection.

Please visit the chapbook's site and click on the link to Preorder Forthcoming Titles from Finishing Line.  I will periodically post work from the collection there and new work from me is coming soon to La Parola!

Here is a poem from Blackbirds Dance...

According to Luke

for Tom Wayman

I heard the angels say

Fear not, but I fear

all things in all ways.

I fear the brittle lassitude

of my hands, the encroaching

frost over the mind,

the dark glass one candle

can’t pierce.

I fear another day, summer’s

greenness, the threat of new

blackbirds,

their garnet wings

among the cattails.

I quake, at night—

my heart’s staccato code to God.

I fear dust, fate, my own face,

my sins,

the flash of homemade bombs,

hollow words,

the imperatives of silence.

I am afraid

for my remaindered dreams,

my lost years,

the knot in my thigh, the lump

in my throat,

that I may never again call out

a name, my eyes to another’s--

I shrink from death,

heights, cold and deep water,

my flagging soul, my art,

my brother,

limping on like a beggar

through powdering leaves,

while all volition fades

to a spent seraphic light

on the far horizon.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2013

New Love Poem--

After A Long Reticence

After A Long Reticence

Because the luminous aging body

is unreliable,

because its stirrings come in the deeps

of night,

we say that we will make love

tomorrow; you will take

our medicinal Eucharist;

Take, hold, devour that one

gathering herself for transfiguration

 in the burning spring.

We say to each other,

it is time again; risen bread has not

forgotten how it was made, the fresh

flour plump and musky with yeast,

the tang of the wild honey:

nor are the old cottonwoods

dormant; they surge, sprout

into leaf—then, gift-laden bees, freefall

of seed, amber sweat on the boughs.

We hold each other, warm

with promise; it will be tomorrow

when I will bury my face

in your neck

and your fingers surge in me

and my hand over your hand

so that I am luminous again,

the seraphic body

with its tremulous wings, aloft.

How is it that winter

has melted away?

Who made camp

along a river

that holds its breath?

We say to each other,

We are violins in the key

of yearning.  Tomorrow

we will be gypsies at a campfire

with half-strung bows.

Your long fingers, your

virile calling to me

even as I cup you in my hand,

as if I have caught the sweet

rain of Spring, as if we are

liquefying pears

or nectarines with melting flesh--

What is this country of desire

where we are now

after decades of reticence,

each one wondering

if there were a bend

in the river and if you took

that bend, would there

be white water and would

the exalted sinew

of the singing body hold.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews June 2013