New Poem for Friday Poetry Fest

 Draft written for Friday Poetry Fest-- join us. xxxj 

Poplars in July

I do not know where either of us can turn
Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other.
I do not know how we can bear
The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon,
Or many trees shaken together in the darkness. 

Leave-taking, Louise Bogan

Tell me how the silver poplars

Edged their way in year on year

First along the lip of the creek

Then surrounding the pens

We built for the golden dogs

Sure of foot and deep of root

They planted themselves

And sweep the hours

Dawn to dusk—they recall

The calumnies of the old farmers

Who drove broken plows

Into the creek and left them there

Who it was that shot the beaver

With an arrow through the heart

And dared to be glad of it.

Poplars have I fed you

With the bodies of the gilded dogs

The champion to be and his get

The puppies too small to thrive

The moon has wept over you—

Its amber tears harden

On the roof’s edge

The mutinous young owls

Lift from your branches

One day I will not see you

I will be tucked away

Into the life of the threadbare

The sky drinks your chlorophyll

So that it can stay strong

For we who cling to the earth

We whose gravity pulls like a fever

At summer’s verdant heart.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

New Poem for Saturday - Star-Making

The Arena di Verona at Twilight

Star-Making

Who shows a child his true world?
Who sets him among the stars, and places
in his hand the true measure of space?
Death can do this, the hugeness of death,
even before life has begun—
to hold it gently and feel no resentment,
that is enough.

From the Fourth Duino Elegy

Rilke

So it was that the child saw

The place for herself left by one

No longer present

The absences between and among stars

The far-flung suns

Moon in her sanctuary.

Lesson the first then

Is of the power of absence:

Intent, in her crib

She listens.

Murmurs, down the long hallway

M – Mere. Mother.  First

Mnemonic.

And if the mother doesn’t come

The unfilled space intensifies

To oxygen.

The child’s first question:

Am I alone,

Was I born to be alone.

A child perceives the loneliness

Of the stars, blankly glittering on.

She would comfort the stars

Even the sun

Her hair catching fire

Body’s tallow melting

Little life dying back.

This is how we make a star

Someone wanders out, too far

No one to hold her

So that she drifts off,

To the vast fields of the heavens

A star faintly cries out

Behold, your missing child.

This, we perceive

As half-failed light,
a lucent phenomena
of little use to the world.

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011   all rights reserved.

For Magpie Tales and One Shot Wednesday: Civil War Summer

(thanks to Tess Kincaid for the 1.99 find/photo prompt; join in the meme at Magpie Tales.  One Shot Wednesday link widget goes up at 12 midnight EST on Tuesdays)

Civil War Summer

She reads in the porch swing in her white

Sun-dried dimity dress.

She is companioned by live oaks

Grasping at the sky.

She is reading Dickinson on death.

She is reading Emerson

On transcendence.

A boy next door

Has the new Eastman camera

Asks to photograph her;

She assents.

We cannot see

How a short-time later

She ascends worn oak stairs

To a corner under the eaves

To a desk, an ink pot

A pen with a worn nib

When she is waylaid by a thin cry

From another room.

In the attic of the old Charleston house

A century too late

To meet a belle

Given to poetry

A note:

No news from the Front today.

No news from Jack.

Mother has taken to her bed

Over the War. 

And the photo,

A half-blown rose on summer’s vine

Caught in yellowed light

Her ripe, dimpled mouth

One eye looking out

More invincibly than the other.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

New Poem for Monday: Written to Rilke

This is the latest poem in the series I began last week to the image and quote posted at A Year with Rilke.  Using quote and image together has worked well for me.  xj 

Painting:  A Bedroom at Arles, Vincent Van Gogh

Written to Rilke, Listening to Netrebko

I would like to sleep once with each thing, nestled in its warmth; to dream in the rhythm of its breathing, its dear, naked neighborliness against my limbs, and grow strong in the fragrance of its sleep. Rilke—early writings.

There is the sleep we have with the camellia pink
pulse of self

The sleep of deference to solitude, how a dark corner

Where your head rests pulls you away

From the world, turning your soul inward,

To weave a net for desire.

And the sleeping with something wilder—a dream quick

To scatter into the twilight.  Speaking to that dream

Cautiously, so that it stays, breathes against your hair

And memory.  Memory the guaranteed lover, reverie

The bridge over time, the green creek with its silt of small bones

Beneath the strained bridge.  For the dream come to life

makes the memory and then each one

A white moth pressed against the screen

Through which light flows, as if to say

I am all you have.

c

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 all rights reserved 

New Poem for Thursday June 16, 2011

The Moon in Her Red Dress

There's a lightness in things. Only we move forever burdened,
pressing ourselves into everything, obsessed by weight.
How strange and devouring our ways must seem
to those for whom life is enough.

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 14. 

Lightening a life.  A lifeline to light,

The moon blushing—a tumescent

Hovering and supple moon

A lover’s face, too terribly near

And disconsolate.

Our bodies in their angular

Diffidence displace the earth. 

We pay the bone-tariff for burning through

Yet, the absence of newly

Fledged owls

The viral mottling of the cottonwood’s

Splayed leaves

Where it leans over the creek

An old woman with her string and hook.

O Roseate Moon, pregnant with ardor.

Your father Star, your mother Sea

Inspirare.  Inspire—ignite us!  We flee

The depths of the lair, look out

Into the night

For the possible.  If I said touch me here

And here

What would become of us

Would we freefall from the high wire?

Moon, blood-sister of heaven

Leach our cruelties from us

Come to the window

Lift us into your arms

With your red soldering iron

Burn away our lassitude

Infiltrate us, your spent, time-traveling

Lovers, your temporary employees,

You rouged, card-dealing

Trick-turning moon.

June 16, 2011

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews

all rights reserved.

New Poem for Wednesday

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 want

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

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

we stabbed 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, our

ears pointed forward, as if a 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.

.

1st draft:

Jeopardy

The whole-body ache of profound exhaustion.  Day at its equinox and now grey afternoon.  Embers flare again and again on the heart’s periphery—Last night I saw cheval d’or with a girl on his back.  I had come in over the washboard road, the bridge poised to fall, past ancient trees, wary

Neighbor, dogs milling at her gate.  I have been writing down everything’s bones but today, the body resists. I have been running ahead of a storm of thundering crows for days.  Years.  Multitudes of owls with piercing eyes

and talons.  Blizzards of snow that want to be ash, sky that would like to

Go dark or swallow itself. In his run a golden horse looks out at the newly green field.  We together populate the rutted hours, our ears pointed forward, as if a stranger were working her way to us from farm to farm, the night blooming dusk:  manifold voices speak of the take-out of the

Patriarch terrorist.  The body washed and swaddled on board the ship after the skin-matches and the intonations, the sanguine photography. The sun irradiates a gull as it soars from cliff to white cap to prow.  The body was then placed in a weighted bag.  Unarmed.  They say now-- Does

It matter.   Write to live.  Paint to burn down the wormwood of day. We had a moment of rejoicing; now fire in the streets: rage spills forth in manifold countries.  We are exhausted from sewing one moment to the next, the being of a self-wearing down.  I have a leg I haul through the

World like a dead raccoon swinging from my hip.  I half-skate in the screeching walker and I avoid mirrors. I am a one-woman spectacle of life on the dole, no heirs or heiresses. I am obliged to pull up stakes and get out of your life—what is volition.   I inherited this—body, these eyes that

Look out at the unfolding purple iris.  For a time there is an opiate lift but then you must rest, no matter how lonely. Who will love me.  The priest claimed I don’t believe I’m loved and then my windshield was pitted by rocks and I slid from the dress of my white flesh.    I have a house, not a

Home—a realm of music and light.  Storms find me here and bleach the hours of their color.  This beloved, might be depression, and the weltanschauung of Eliotian weariness.  I sang and sang last night to Handel and Mozart and then we stabbed each other with our tongues. 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 am entrapped by the quotidian, I cannot leave him and my spoons are tarnished—the family silver is scattered—I should not have sold everything

Of theirs: they haunt me 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.  What do they want? I have nothing left for them, no stale bread, bits of

Cheddar.  Give me your tired, your poor but what do we do with them, these dark agents of guilt.  We are left with many questions.  What is appropriate action.  Who knew about this.  For God’s sake, release the

Photos of The Corpse;  give us the risen Jesus, give us our Ambien. I lie in the dark with an imploded brain, murmuring in a private language, and yet you have said you cannot hear me. Wrap me in white linen but do not bury me at sea.

 xx

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Evensong Parts I and II

I

A face is streaked with lightning and then volcanic
with rage.  Whose face.  Whose hand
claws at the light-- someone drowns here.  Drowns

In sorrow over fallen robins and the orphans
of spring.  Someone's word breaks.  It is that person's
face, the face of a liar, a good deed doer, a Christian

And a scholar, a maypole and a martyr, a frivolity.  A stone
black with the guarded water.  A philistine, a shell
arms amputated, love of salt unrequited.

Clustered lemon-shaped lights over
the bridge the wide bridge the city built
to distract from its sins.  Dylan sings in China

And the bouquet of faces, in the generations
of obeisance.  A commune and a thousand-year
promise; sugarcane reprisal.  We choke on rice.

We divide the fish among the multitudes; eyeless
we wander in the hills.
I was forced to the roller coaster and made

For terror.  I could not cry out.  In the sacristy
I hovered over the Host.  I took God's body
into me and I retched.  I gave you my heart

And you bent it into a mirror.  You fractured
the mirror and your face splintered.  I rose
up over you a lascivious vindicator.   Die

I begged of you, before the Lippizans performed
their caprioles for the Emperor of the night.

II

I trusted you to feed the newborn kitten and you
did not.  I sped home over the bridge wanting
to atone  for the names I called you  for not caring

Enough about the kitten.  I see that I am
the kitten but what now.  The bright detonating
epithets cannot be retrieved; they melt into

The sediment of the river we are together, how it is
to burn and burn toward one another and then
the scything and cleaving between us that

No one understands.
So it is that I love and fear you, hate
and adore you and want for a time to give up--

Coming back to my solitude licking old wounds
that reopen by default.  Why would I not want
to hitchhike away with the dissipated trucker,

Anyone, stow myself away, melt down
and reconstitute myself as an unnamed element,
not of this world.

xxx
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Poem for Sunday: This Song We Know By Heart-- One Shoot Sunday

(imagining the girl in the photograph by Lauren Randolph  as a poetess...visit the meme One Stop Poetry/One Shoot Sunday.)


This Song We Know by Heart

All of us write the same poem over and over
especially when the wind finds its way to us
in cold derision, prowling around our legs like a cat

In heat, needy, incessant. As if you are safe here
in the window, looking out at time flowing by with its scrim
of wavering budding trees. Sunday and families curled up
suppressing their hatred for each other, pretending
to love the rump roast set on the table with
the glassware and the pewter.

I once threw my mother's prized Staffordshire minute man
down the stairs. What does that make me but a broken
daughter.  I once took my ice skates to the pond
and my father, drunk came looking for me, begging me
to come home, making promises but I sped away in my red
VW bug to the freeways lacerated

By wind from the eighteen wheelers passing me on the way
to South Dakota.  I am caution-prone now, so that even though
my truck is road-worthy I cannot bring myself to shatter away
from here back to some point of origin: where is it,  Chaco.
Corrales.  Ramsey Hill.

The voice of the arriviste drones on and on; yes, we write the same
poems again and again, sing a requiem for the blackbirds until
we know it by heart.  Someone gets a Guggenheim; someone else
hangs himself, not for one instant saved by literature

Although he had been declared a contemporary master. But the wind
dies down.  The stars come back out and the mystery
rewrites itself on the skies of the mind so that then the defended heart
breaks down.  We weep, and gather up our sheets of paper,

the credos we carry too close to the chest.

x
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

New Poem for Weekend

The Innuendo of Owls

for Sam Peralta

Listen, do you hear it?

The sound of owls.

Reveling in their own voices, passing rumor, 

Aspersion, innuendo with each bass note: 

A sinister parliament.

-- from “Owls, after Kotaro Takamura”, Samuel Peralta

If I had the elaborate powers of night

I would do more than blunt day's scything

edges-- I would cloak fear in velvet lassitude 

I would envelope the lonely dog no one speaks to

At the end of its chain in the barrio.  In my arms

it would be safe to weep-- private, no one

to come with a bouquet of blame.

I would be the good darkness

That  laves the wounded heart

with its tongue.  I would close the eyes

of those for whom it is taking

too long to die.

We shake night from ourselves

and sluice down in rain water but even

an instant in the sun weakens us. 

We flee to Verona, the old quarter

Where the rose gardens enliven

the blurred frescoes of war. We wait

until the moon rises over the green silk scarf

of the Fiume Po. At moonrise  Dante

Steps forth from stone in the piazza; 

I love my infamy--

but do not go down into the Inferno.

There is no need. 

Furore.  Ah, Mio Cuore. 

Lucia, Juliette: non fa niente.

The altar is covered with roses. 

These are night's gifts, my dreams.

I come home through the barrio

looking at the tiny houses

their stillness, I scent their aroma

of tortillas.  I am the night, kiss incarnate

Kiss that soothes the troubled child, guards

the old woman who cannot hear

an intruder. I do not wish to be water. 

I am the barrio owl,  I am the soporific

For the fruitless battle raging

in the desert;  I spread my cloak over

the fallen and quench the lies

burning along the wires of time.

3 a.m.: I lock the car, and turn

and just then, there, the great-throated

voice, il basso profundo,

calling high in the withered oaks.

Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2011 

New Poem

Homeward

I have been reconstituting myself from

Soul-fragments, bits of shot glasses

Shards from the campy pottery of childhood,

The now irreplaceable fiesta ware

We so brazenly threw at each other

I was about to give my heart to you once more

I confessed desire for you, profound

Hunger for your mouth

And your hands—relearn me, I beg of you

But I caught myself and moreover

The wind brought the air

Back to life so that the fatalistic angels

That pursue me when I leave the back way

Dislodged me from the worn track

Of our conversation

I sped off and they followed

This goes far back far back to the salt box house

With the knotty pine walls

And the Brahms and the checked out mother

The sound of her ice in a tumbler of whiskey

The sallow tendons that bound us all to one another

And the swamped ship of fear

And longing she would

Shatter away and be carried off and plugged in

Current running through her brain going dark

And rebooting, coming back to life

A blank space for a time

A tabula raza at their mercy.

Why else would I be afraid of love

I refuse to let them come for me

Even though I danced on the canyon’s green

Inviting lip with you in the candlelight

As if there were no poised rapiers

In the room and no dying

Dogs and cats that neither of us had a fever

Or a tumor at the base of the spine

  

Touch me, end our dearth,  I said once more

And you shook your head. 

Deluded, I imagined it was some involuntary

Movement,  Left-tenant Pinkerton

With your studied reserve, your absence

Of candor—you told me of a belated

Honeymoon in the Pyrenees and voyeur that I am

I imagined you with another woman.

As I said the current running through me

And all goes dark dark I put on the Mozart

Solti in Salzburg, the surreptitious priests

Vested and gull-winged,

Someone assuredly needs to captain my soul

Leaving you there everything

Unresolved, reclaiming the delicious

Late night privacies of my loneliness.

xx

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

A Poem for Thursday, Magpie and Carry On Tuesday Challenges....

Calabrian Garlic

In her window, a basket of garlic reaching

For the sun. She broke off one of its fat cloves

And took the knife to it, using

The flat of the blade to mash the clove open;

Then she peeled off the papery rind

And there it was, sending its quartered objections

Up into the air of the kitchen, disempowered

And redolent.

I sat back in the shadows with my love,

Her son Pepe; we sipped latte di mandorla

And watched Mama in her cooking dance

How she carefully took a beef knuckle

Out of butcher paper,

Put it in a boiling pot for stock, crushing

Fresh tomatoes for the sauce.  We kissed

And longing surged in us 

And my love's tongue was as tensile 
and searching

As the garlic’s green

Inquiring foot

And I dared not touch the tendrils

Of his desire then.

But later, spent and laughing after dinner

I kissed his garlicky mouth

And much later, we wept briny tears of rapture,

Rising to walk the edge of paradise,

The lolling Calabrian phosphor

On the Strait of Messina.

I saw something arc in the air

And he said it was the pesce spada, the swordfish

In rising-moon ardor.  I said

Within myself, with my poet’s heart,

Thinking of Homer’s stunned walk

In this very place, that is the mermaid-gorgon

Scylla herself, exulting

In the tide that forces garlic-stricken lovers

Into each other’s arms at all hours.

Soon I boarded a train away

From Momma, Papa

And the babies lolling in everyone’s arms

At dusk in the kitchen. 

Many years later, there is no trace of them,

Not even anything legible in a book of names,

As if I had conjured all of it 
From thin air, my indoctrination

Into a hard, polished love tinted

By flash in the pan anger,

Like the pink water-laved stones

One finds in the surf--– la famiglia’s

Work-weary and serene

Faces as we walked the garden. 

This is what I remember

Now, all of them cloistered 

In simplicity and resolve

Like the purposeful garlic bulb 

In the window basket--sublimely 
Permanent,

Sheathed in undaunted light.

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011