New Poem for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond....

Revision.

 

You

This memory or another, this brief picture
sunbeam on the shriveled and frosted leaf
a world of selves trying to remember the self
before the idea of self is lost –

    Time in the Rock,  Conrad Aiken

Something far beyond tenderness

like a feathered cloud caught

in the broom-stiff treetop

returns without invitation

so that remembering
like the rainfall, washes

over, under, through;

something you might call

amor, its semblance

appears in the shadowy doorway

of my heart.  I reach

for you, terrified when

I see the porcelain hands of 
the fractured clock

Wildly spinning;

I reach for half-lucid desire,

the memory of your mouth

moving and moving like the sunrise,

the kiss of the opening rose

over my skin.

Was that our moment, we two

star-crossed, afflicted, virulent

like two splinters born onward

in a cascade?

When I could not reclaim your touch

nor find your hand,

I swam on, a snowy egret 
plummeting through

cold starlight, unrepentant
and undone. 

xx

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Poem for Magpie Tales Monday and Beyond

Thanks once more to Tess Kincaid for the prompt at Magpie Tales meme.  Other new work of mine follows this post.  xj 

The Way We Were....

Redemption

How strange

That we should then be laughing in tall grass

Listening to Brahms

Grief smoothed from our faces

Sophisticated seraphim, in our shirt-waist

Dresses, seersucker suits

We read the censored works

Of the Lost Generation unaware

Of a delicately timed demise: that we had each 

Gone to sleep among the tapestries

Of indifference and obligation

Stepping out of line in the human parade

Selected for our earlier vigor and remade

Recast in a play, a vaudeville,

By the prima danseuse of an opaque oblivion

In heaven’s heaven—

A deuced coupe packed with flowers.

copyright Jenne' Andrews 2011  jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

New Poem for Saturday: Roy McBride In Memoriam

On July 29 the wonderful black  poet Roy McBride, so beloved by the Minnesota writing community and beyond and forefather of spoken word poetry, succumbed to a long illness.  Roy and I used to talk for hours on the tin roof of my studio in St. Paul that overlooked the Mississippi.  He was love incarnate.  There are videos made by the wonderful Mike Hazard available on You Tube.     Many thanks to Lorenzo Lapislazuli and Ruth Mowry for the combined Chagall painting and Rilke quote from A Year with Rilke.  xj 

The House with the Green Eye  - Marc Chagall

Three Little Poems

To the memory of the great Roy McBride

  

Who knows: eyes may be watching us
from all sides. Ah, only stumbling toward you
am I no longer on display. Growing into you,
I am forever set invisibly
in the darkening shelter of your heart.

Rilke, The Shelter of Your Heart,   Uncollected Poems

          

i.

Tal Vez - Maybe

Perhaps, you thought

As you lay in the dark

Encased in white plaster

You could make a beacon

Of your new body

Your iridescent shell

Could summon

An angel from the shadows

Someone prescient

Well apprised of the ordeal

It was to have been swaddled

In a blanket that turned to stone.

It is true.

You lay in the dark all in white

A bride of silence

Invisible, vestal, pure as flame

On the altar of the bed.

Voices were far away

As if the family

Had gone on 

The butter knives of their paddles

Slicing mile on mile

Down the green Rio Grande.

  

Ii

 Little Adobe

Little house you claimed my heart

With your peeling blue window frames

How you were cupped in the density

Of the autumn cottonwood trees

On Guadalupe Road.

The red hollyhocks sang of morning

The meadow larks sang back.

I was safe there

In my darkened room

Branches whispering against the glass

Comforting and half-muted voices.

This was before the Dark Time

When she was taken away

And I didn’t know

What to do with myself

Except with my small hands

To dust the stopped antique clock

With my toy broom

To sweep and sweep

The cold flagstone of the patio.

 Iii

The Unnamed

Everywhere

Are children in a plight

No one sees.

They hunger or they pine

With great eyes

From a corner

In a country so far away

We don’t know its name. 

Let us be invisible with them.

Let us join them in their meaning

Nothing to humanity

Even to those who come upon them

Too late, the wounds of their open mouths.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews

all rights reserved  jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

New Poem: Abend Lieder

Abend Lieder

Slowly evening takes on the garments
held for it by a line of ancient trees.
You look, and the world recedes from you.
Part of it moves heavenward, the rest falls away...
And you are left, belonging to neither fully...
 -- Rilke, Evening 

Left, done in, concluding human

You belong to neither

World.  Not the green one

Alfalfa’s redolent windfall

Stretching off to the Wyoming border

Promising enough-- enough for all.

Not the world light sears

With her very hands

Calling us toward each other

Out of our scarecrow sleep

Then belonging neither

To summer nor to light.

You know your true home

The evening, the crepuscule

Where each thing is taken up

In the slow-motion

Onslaught of night

See where the horse stands

Before the frieze of elms

Looking out at the dusk

Now, see her vanish

So that we by faith

know that she drops her head

To crop the dry July grass

Soothed by evening’s hands.

Oh yes, meine Abendsliebe

My notte d’amore

I know you

You rescue me

From my world-weariness.

You give me the compline

Of the palomas

In their dreaming cloister

You dress me

In a waterfall of lavender

Take into your star-laced body

The cooling stones of my fear.

 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011.  To enjoy a Rilke poem each day visit A Year with Rilke hosted by Ruth Mowry and Lorenzo "Lapislazuli".  I have found these posts to be wonderful prompts.  

Poems for Friday Poetry Fest - Rubato

Join us for Friday Poetry Fest-- Link Live Now.  

Rubato

All things are the body of the violin,

filled with murmuring darkness.

There, grieving women lie down to dream.

There the resentments of generations

surrender to sleep...Rilke

  

And I am the cello of the goodly dark.

Play me then

Night, with your bow of memory

Make me quiver

With reminiscence

Strike my taut string

With the glancing blow

Of the renegade moonlight

Sheath me in the follies

Of the braided light

Hailing from distant stars

Rondo, capriccio

Largo of Brahms

O Wood, body of wood

Body of love

And her lover

The robust

Sinfully glad night.

ii

Night, improvisation

Is thine

Thief of the ordinary

Grave-robber

With your proletariat

Of  plundering owls

It is night that makes me anew

Night that cloaks all sorrow

Out of the silver membrane of the night

We come, spending the sleek body’s 

In the surge and suckling

Of the tide,

in a mating display 

Of fanning golden feathers

In the midnight ardor 

of the swordfish.

*When the word rubato appears in a musical score it means steal—as in take a little liberty with the score here.

Bonus Poem --

Treachery

how did this come to pass

bird with a shattered wing

foal with a club foot

that which enters the world

with something wrong.

Who laced the cell with toxins

who murdered the wheat

so that it goes to dust

carried away by the blackguard wind.

Who has defamed us

so that we are afraid to live

and cloister ourselves by day?

Who is the perpetrator

the thief of good will

the prosecutor without a case

Who made of me an indigent 

barren, alone, alone

Who tightens the noose of trembling stars

Around the shimmering earth?

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

email permission requests: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

A poem for Magpie Tales Monday

Thanks to Tess Kincaid for yet another quixotic prompt at Magpie Tales.

Endeavor, Lino Tagliapietra, Columbus Museum of Art

On Waking to Flying Fish

I am descended upon by myriad wings

At break of day.

They want me to rise, to attune myself

To morning.

But I love the dark

With its absence of forms

And order

The deep dark clay

Of the night

Like the hold of a ship

A womb caught

Between day's end and dawn

Why should we submit

To the confusions of light that assail the eye

The stimulae of the diabolical protozoa

Sailing through the air

Like a contagion

The assault of color 
that is the sunlit world.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Poem for Solstice Week and One Shot Sunday

Bear with me while I work with prompt photo.  In the meantime please enjoy this photo and poem posted yesterday.  xj 

Photo: for NASA, Duane Hilton. 

Solstice Moon

Such is the amazing play of the powers:
they give themselves so willingly,
swelling in the roots, thinning as the trunks rise,
and in the high leaves, resurrection.

Rilke  The Book of Hours

This year the solstice moon rode high and briefly.

A mere week ago the lilacs

Broke from their silken sleep

Before that the last unfurling

snows of April.

Why so much time lost?

We cross the bridge no one has thought

To rebuild although it leans and sags:

A risk, like lifting our eyes

To the mute heavens.

ii

Once I had a mare I kept back in the shadows

Of an old blighted cottonwood.

One night I walked to see her

She nuzzled my hands

Dissolving my wounds in her eyes

I remember losing my fear

Riding high on her neck

Her sharp hooves biting the gravel

If we say the solstice is our youth

Where are we now

our body clocking

Its seasons, chimes ringing in the heart

On the hour.

iii

No more talk of ancestors

Their hunting of mountain lions

Their building of roads.

Let us stand in the sea of almond milk

Poured over us by the moonlight

Like two young horses dreaming

of infinite meadows

Along boundaried miles

Of perilous wire.

 cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews

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

Visit One Stop Poetry and take a chance on the meme-- a good time always shared.

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews, 2011 

New Poem

Please scroll down two posts to One Stop/Magpie poem.  Do read this one if you've time.  Thanks!  xxxj

Cheval and I Dream in the Wind

I braid and unbraid my fingers in the dark

Demanding of that cave where I rest

Why was there never

A marriage or a child. 

 

The dark has nothing to say to me

Except to make a bouquet of shadows. 

Sleep won’t be coerced

And the pillows are heavy and hard

And there is the high-voiced

Tender lance of the wind,

Slicing in from the Wyoming border.

Sometimes I want to flag down

Some jaded trucker

And be taken away

But I am on the highway of shadows

Of impossibility.

As my father once said, in the “twilight”

The crepuscule, perhaps the last decade

If that, or, burning up time as Gallager says,

“like a madwoman eating pearls”

Flour and salt call to me

From the cupboard.

I could lay my woman’s hands on these things,

The butter, the canned peaches

To make something

Where my sadness was

I have given in to the sorrows

That gleam on their strand,

Pearls around my throat.  My loquacity

Is my shield but I burn

And hide

Here in the familiar dark room

I return and return to,

Waiting to be reborn.

  

ii

Worse than my angst:

No one has come to release cheval d’or

From his run.  He dies inside

And no one sees this

But I, the neighbor who comes and goes

In her white beaten up truck.  I imagine

Taking my walker

Down the stairs and bracing myself

To drag my leg with me into the  barn

Unlatching the door to the stall

So that Cheval steps out.

He would look at me with his deep velvet eyes

And nose me to learn my name

And my purpose.

I would tell him that he is to leave

Under cover of the dark

Gathering up mares along the way

As if he would not reach the freeway

Where the ghost ships of the night,

The rigs hauling goods from the edges of the world

Would mow him down.

Iii

Once I sought transfiguration

In someone’s arms.

It was afternoon, two voices

Pouring from the radio

Love scene Act I, La Boheme.

My lover’s kisses

Broke me open.  He parted my legs

And wrote his name upon me

And I shuddered in delight

And then I was alone,

And my sorrow came back.

In a bed born along by a dream-wind

Out into emerald oceans

Reunited with a family healed

My mother and father’s dark hair

My brother’s laughter.

I am not lost, all is not lost

But the well of tears, the dearth

The living on empty-armed.


xx


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
2011

Poem for Magpie Tales 59 and One Shot Wednesday.....

Please scroll down to yesterday's post to read my poem about the disaster in Japan.  The poem for the Magpie/Oneshot memes follows.

An Uncommon Thing Appears in the Garden

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Is my destroyer…”

Dylan Thomas

The bravery of the green leaf

Forcing its way out of winter—

To what end… or because it can

Or bears a coded imperative

In the genes, as we do—in the keeping on

Of all that “returns” in spring.

The searing sun takes itself

Over the hill’s edge

And shadows cradle the tendril.

When no one is looking

The bud is born

And then the silk-soft, rich

Purple tongues of the petals

Laving the light of day--

Voila, violet

And post hoc, ergo propter hoc:

Violet conjoined, sharing roots

By others with close family

Resemblance, quadrupled,

But not entirely.

The courage of the violet

To open to morning

Summon the smaller bees

To drag their feet

Through its pollen.

To then surrender to our harvesting

Breathing color to the eye

Fading, singing in lavender 

For as long as it can from the vase

Before it lowers its flag.

The next time violets appear

In the blink of an eye

At the doorstep

I will leave them

To do their work—

In the mind & in the world:

Semaphores of beauty

Metaphors for tenderness.

Jenne’ R. Andrews

March 15, 2011

Please check out the great memes that brought this poem to bear for me:  One Stop Poetry, and Magpie Tales/Tess Kincaid.   Also up today-- my feature of poet Hedgewitch/Joy Ann Jones, at Loquaciously Yours.