Poem for One Shot Wednesday/One Stop Poetry

The Angel of Her Discontent

I  think I could do it now without so much

as a body shudder or a blue-lipped sigh---

fill my pockets with stones and in the inner

weeping of a fallen seraphim

walk into the sea. This is what Woolf did,

not looking back. For I am tempted out of paradise

my dream of recovery worn to opalescence

on the edge of the blue span beneath

the cirrus over the foothills.  I home to those hills;
I want to meld into them 

Where water makes stones, water and wind,

rain and storms and after, we find 

a petrified owl of obsidian, blackly flashing 

from the forest floor.  

In my fever I count the garnets like lark's eyes 

in a box of my great grandmother’s. 

They were some kind of rosary as if grace 

arose from incantatory whispers. 

A friend writes of Lucifer falling into blueness, 

drawn to beauty in spite of himself--. 

if he were only not so made of vitriol but I know 

of that rich, dark nectar.  I am Lucifer 

Or  Lucifer's Lucia, in the gardens of blood-red roses. 

We each need an intervening angel 

yet I would strike even Gabriel with a petroglyph

So that he folds his wings like night and expires

through time, clear and icy black air trying to get my soul

to safety-- it would disintegrate, its fragmenting lost

satellite self, and I with it then.

ii

A photo of Eva Braun as a child on my desk.  Hitler locked her

away but she roamed above the sea with her Scottish terriers

trotting behind.  She poured dark wine into his crystal goblet.  

It was 1939. She must have even been beautiful, 

her hair in damp tendrils

Framing her face,  as she popped the cyanide 

capsule and folded into death like a white silk scarf. 

Perhaps I will name the angel of my discontent Eva Braun.

I ask of this semblance in the corner of my heart, she

who billows softly there in ghostly rectitude; How do you forgive

yourself for hurling the stones of words at someone and striking him

in the temple, sending him into aphasia-- if it had

Evolved to an amnesia but he remembers, and his eyes-- blue, watering,

Disconsolate, maddening you with how easily wounded he is

when you need him to be more than inexhaustible--

. 

Who can endure a stoning.  A woman in a burkah, destroyed

in this manner for love?.  He cannot will himself away, even

from the time you took the Italian shoes and fed them to the stove
and the next day, there were the shoes’ iron stays, remnants
of a fallen Dorothy,  in the ashes.

I am one who has consigned herself to a lair, who roams at night. Fill

my pockets with rain.  Put silver coins on my eyes and sew closed

my mouth.  Think nothing of the thin cries of my bones, the absurd

beating of my wings at the midnight hour;  walk away.

April 13, 2011

xc

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Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews, 2011