For One Shoot Sunday

Please scroll down for One Shot Post.

Photo:  the practice of Sutee.

Indictment

To the memory of k.v.

Diasporic flame on flame, she rose from the floating pyre

Flying up like a black swan with a mouthful of embers.

She had danced with the heavenly hosts of the long euphoric

knives; she put the child to bed in the Armageddon of

Afternoon. She lay in the red tide with him, her hands gutted

Fish, the wrist of the child awash, the bleached small body.

What did you see then, looking within- thou demi-god,  in

the neon tunic, the beads of luck and love, lifting your heel

On the starting line like a runner in the Olympiad.  You,

Wavering like a neon Vacancy sign on a back highway.  O Gran Prix

Bearer, o puer aeternis, exonerated, absolved, shattering away

like a porcelain plate to the mausoleums of the infamous

You did not see. Had your will already failed?  Were you wearing

the quotidian’s day-blinding mask of the accolade? 

You left her alone in the house with the boy.

To see the beautiful photo leading to this piece, please visit One Shoot Sunday at One Stop Poetry.  

At a Village Well in Arabia

I do not know that one traversing the sand toward me, toiling against the wind, weighed down by robes of fear. I do not know that one watching me. 

But we meet at the well in the détentes of thirst..  Man, woman, friend or foe.  I will not trespass my way through your pride; I will not break the door of your village down.  Nor the door of your heart, even as the heat-waves of your rage force me back. 

I only see that we are swaddled, to hide our wounds.  We say it is commanded or God’s will or that in the garden we saw that we were naked.  But our skin was burning there in the sand; we lay dessicated, crawled to the oasis, attiring ourselves. 

Take my flask.  Take what I have and I will pass through you and you through me.  Only then will we have the knowing beyond language, as if war had folded up like a scarf of shadows, the moon singing on her threshold within us.

O Ada

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 

A Poem for One Shoot Sunday...

I've actually written three poems for One Shot-- most recent first.  xj

Resurrection

Laudamus te, glorificamus te.

I put the Eucharistic wafer, the soporific

Under my tongue.

I mouthed the Credo of the Bach Mass in B Minor

And I focused on the crucifix on my wall.

I filled with light and transcended myself. I floated

Out of the wheelchair as a sound wave, a Sanctus

Traveling bed to bed, my lips against their lips.

Pauline sat under the clock asking the time

I rubbed her thin shoulders in their cashmere sweater.

Rose wept for her engagement ring

And I held her in my arms.

Julia pined in a high and indecipherable voice.

Kay read at the window at the end of the hall

At the end of the line, in her Scottish woolen skirt.

We shared Brie and crackers, and laughed.

I painted dolls and placed them

In the laps of the lost and forlorn.  I sang

O Holy Night to a demented soprano

Who smiled at me at the end,

“Beautiful,” she whispered.

One day I ambulated the hallway

Dragging my healing leg and Julia 
held up the sign for the wet floor:
"Cuidado: Piso Mojado."  

The hours trailed their damp filaments 
over us like golden rain

And the coiffed and broken migrated 
to dinner and succor,

Opening their mouths for the aides

Like unfledged sparrows.

I was home again.  Among my lost parents.

They were all there in triplicate, my mother

In bed talking about her Indian jewelry.

My father watching a football game.

They were mine.  Mine own angels

In the cloister of forgetfulness.

We loved each other in the profane night--  
I held Irene to my breast, her wig 
on the bed-stand.

I sang to JoAnn, my uncertainties 
melting away as she flapped her arms

In the death-throe,

A swan primed for flight.

xx

Fiat

For Kay Elliot and the other angels of Golden Peaks Nursing Home

The old woman has forgotten to be ashamed.  She watches Lawrence Welk

again and again, joyfully incontinent.  She greets all in her Sunday best each day of the week, in her Queen Elizabeth purple hat, her clean diaper. 

It is not a bad thing to be old, bent, and to forget.  Forgetting is freedom from the past, with its divorces and its chihuahuas killed at the corner, the child who overdosed on heroin.  The aged are beautiful in the way of platinum and polished family silver.  Our heirlooms and their loquacity.  They prattle at night;  their secrets spill out like white moths from their mouths.  With their sighs and gestures they relive the making of cupcakes, the planting of roses.

A wheelchair universe, often wordless, with its roamings and dreamings and rollings away from the disdained.  A demented old woman has manifold imaginary orgasms and the aid speaks softly to her to quell her cries.  But she is beloved.  When she dies she is surrounded by her kind, those beleaguered sisters who only hear her when they are asleep, her breath-caught humming of worn folksongs. 

On a Rocky Mountain high she lifts off, crossing the moon’s harbor, ship of bones in a wedding gown, making her way.

To read about photographer Greg Laychek please visit One Stop Poetry.  


Another Poem:

To Be Read

It is so utterly hopeless, as the stars are hopelessly

glorious in their uncountable numbers, the relentless unfurling

of light across heaven. Hopeless in the way of a marriage

withering by candlelight.  As in litanies of the barrio and the surfeit

of weeping before a crucifix draped in black crepe.

Hopeless to stutter into black space and be heard or forgiven. 

It is a crucifixion a death sentence, a rune and a conundrum:

this compulsion to discern. To need to devolve from the evolving,

anything astute, memorable.  What folly.  It is useless to put yourself

out into the void with the others dancing to the same tango.  To strike

gold you need an orchestra, the best violinists of Germany.  To be heard

And considered and your pages turned, you must be a book, but books

cannot make themselves; they need our help, the butterfly kingdoms

of dialect, the wine-laden epithets that come back to haunt.  The black 

bark smelted to paper.  A campfire of light-filled tongues, a night

inhabited by only you.  Only you so that you may shine out over all 

the seas and the seas weep  at the beauty of your words.

xx

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Poem for One Shoot Sunday

Photo by James Rainsford  (please take a look at Nightfall in Verona)

In Praise of the Feral

What lies in the irrigation pipe, trembling at the scent

Of the wary hare, looking out at the bars between herself

And the green day.

What trots in at dusk low to the earth, her belly empty

Off in the ditch bank, her lair and its small voices

Whose paint-brush tail trails away in tall grass

What comes and taunts the cats away from their kibble

What vaults the fence when we look at it

And scampers through the garden disturbing not

The sprouting seed

What causes the furor of the squirrels in the poplars

The kittens to run under the house

The moon to rise and sing

The wind to dance

The gypsy ghosts to join hands in the meadow. 


Vixen, you have my heart in your mouth. 

          

x

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2010

One Shoot Sunday Challenge

Please note that I'm putting up my memoir, Nightfall in Verona chapter by chapter on its own blog-- great fun, a number of satisfied customers.  I'm so proud of my web design 101 efforts in Blogger...xj

Scroll down for One Shoot Sunday piece-- thanks-- Jenne'

Photo by featured photographer and poet James Rainsford.

Academic…

Beneath this lamp, a door. A door

Into a foyer and then a corridor

And then a room

Where a fire is laid

And someone sits, dreaming

Who stumbled in high

On Armagnac and holding forth

On the Romantics

His hand on a student’s thigh

An enamored girl.

He babbled on the night long

And all liquored him up

To hear half-remembered Coleridge

And tangled Shelley

And his own meditation on the door-lamp

In its tarnished sconce.

I am that lamp, he said, I am the light

And I am the reflection

Of the light.  Now everyone was confused

Like Plato they said

The real/ideal. 

God hates a fool

He said:

He let the orange syrup

Linger in his mouth

And snake down his throat

Mais oui.  This is the great theme

Of all of literature.

That we cannot have the one

Without the other.

.

Shortly, Jenny Wren

His student, in pursuit

Of her own sort of romantic education

Finished him against the tree

In the park, his long fingers

Fumbling under her skirt.

He came in ragged profanity

Whispering then “The child is father

To the man,” saw her to the train

Sorting his keys beneath

The world-weariness

Of his last good lamp,

Lust-emptied, spent.

Jenne' Andrews 

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Poem for One Shoot Sunday...

Alone in a Motel Room with an Old Royal Typewriter

Always some reassurance when you break out
the old Royal
when you hit the return lever you've completed something
like Woolf says you have to do
you've unburdened yourself of your meaning

Managed to take the gags from your mouth and unstop
the cotton plug of your tongue
that hung itself there after you looked out the window
at midnight
where lovers  copulated
against a parked car
then walked away from each other

This moment
on the scrim of time,
that you witnessed it
meant something, you were sure of it
and so as is your habit
you wrestled it into words, something derivative
like "two lovers diverged on a wounded road"..
banging the return lever again
with a musketeer's flourish
and to make the sound of an exclamation point
in the very air.

Writing is debilitating.
Dust gathers in your hair
the hours either fly or drag
life teems in the streets below you
storms come and go,
entire seasons,
coffee grows cold in the cup
as a writer's coffee would

You stuff a stale eclair
down your throat
amping up your heart disease
try again, but moments later
heave the old typewriter into the street

You still ache
you are still pregnant
with a late-term  800 page novel very much like
Franzen's Freedom-- too dark to read-
nosing into the birth canal, breaking your water
and then hiding itself under your ribs

You drape yourself in your room's wine-stained curtains
and follow the typewriter
falling piano for words, falling woman,
into oblivion's elated  hands.
,

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Posted for One Shoot Sunday

Please do enjoy my Homage to Sylvia Plath posted below today's One Shoot Sunday/One Stop Poetry Challenge:  Here's my offering derived from the prompt;

Photo by Canadian photographer Sean McCormick...

Lamentation

Of the Abandoned Granary

How can I tell you

I was never a home for you

But a grain-house 
Now gone neon blue

From time's indifference

And prairie cold

I am so lonely here

I’ve set myself ablaze

My guts are a host of flaring embers

The chaff I held

Is scattered where wild mares browse

And plumps the rib-eye

From the thrashing sale-barn cow—

If anyone passes here now

It’s Faust’s ghost or geriatric members

Of the International Workers of the World

If anyone sings O Canada here

They do not sing for me

You come with your unschooled hands

To brace me up with creosoted timbers
to land-mark me for history's sake

You're too late:
Keep Out

I cry with my red mouth

Touch me and I’ll burn you down.

 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews

2011

All Rights Deserved...

Posted for One Shoot Sunday

Photo-- Iquanyin, via One Stop.



Time-traveler

Where I stumbled you see not prints

But raised humps of sand

I had tried to kick the wind

I had tried to swim beneath the waves

And then I rocked in the sky’s arms

I drank a cup of darkness

Resting in the sun

The moon rose; the earth turned

I yearned on

Where I faltered you see not gulls

but doves

I had tried to marry time

I had tried to walk the heather
without shoes 

And then I sang 

I ate a crust of bread

The tide came in, the sea
Wept its salty accolade.

,

Sunday's photo challenge, One Stop Poetry.  

For Sunday photo challenge....One Stop Poetry

quick note:  a few people asked me to clarify some of my silly allusions-- so there's a bit of a parsing after the poem...xxxj




Paree Avec Mon Cigar

You could be listening to Ma Vlast

In a bistro, reading

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Or hunched beneath Notre Dames

Counting les heures before a heist

Working up a heuristic

For the hairless coconut you found on a sandbar

Off pago pago

It doesn't matter

Anyone can say anything here,

Most etiquettes, dreams, and quick bidettes

Are de rigeur and tres o.k.:  oy vey--

It’s Paris.

No etymologies please or epiphanies

No striptease down to the red stilettos

On the deck of the ferry from Marseilles

Just bring poppies

Trifle to the Eiffel

And we'll do the rest

In our bain marie

In the maraveille that is Paris.

In the Bohemian Quarter

She with the cache of ben oo la la balls

Trills a chanson on the skin flute’

There is a riotous hoisting of all petards

In fact D' Artagnan’s here

Bien sur, Stein with uber-Alice and her tender button,

And dear lachrymose Chopin--

Gershwin knew enough to swim

With Hemingway and F. Scott's Nick Carraway

In spite of that foul-mouthed Sartre

Dust of the ages in the wind

The perennial verdure of Tullieres

The goosed foie gras that gives you dysentery

And I may have forgotten to mention

All that phenomenal art

Monet Gaugin Rodin

Too loose Lautrec Manet  The ballet

Debussy Delibes Ravel Faure

And never forget the Perrier Joeut

The motet, the cadet the plies

The pirouette the glissade

The certemente the barrage

You’ll be exhausted

It will have cost you

But you haven’t lived

Until you’ve been done

By Paris.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews

2011 all rights reserved

Posted in response to photo challenge of femme fatale smoking cigar in presence of smirking black companion. 


Update: 


...truthfully, this poem was spawned last week when in a spate of insomnia, my head in overdrive, I heard the first few lines-- the photo challenge helped me firm it up.  


I see Paris as the repository for every character in the world.  Here's a brief key:  Ma Vlast-- a sweeping and vainglorious piece by Smetana-- "The Fatherland"-- it would be odd to be listening to this in a bistro-- on an i-pod per se... then ref to Carson McCuller's novel about alienation and loneliness-- and there you are sitting in Paree being aristocratically alienated, then came thoughts of the numerous heists from the Louvre, the next few lines about the coconut were a bolt out of the blue-- again to generate a sense of the eccentricity of those continentalized souls who might be found any time of day or night in the City of Lights and what their preoccupations might be-- of course one hopes that most of one's poem is self-explanatory but... the ferry from Marseilles and bringing poppies is a reference to the opium trade and the French connection...a bain marie is a double boiler and a double entendre-- Marie's bath, Marie being just about any French whore...hopefully one enjoys the lines about the Bohemian Quarter; D'Artagnan is one of the noble, fleur de lis upthrusting Three Musketeers-- Alexander Dumas-- pretty common knowledge that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were lovers and that Stein wrote a book of love poetry called Tender Buttons-- that Gershwin wrote An American in Paris, that Hemingway too was of the infamous Lost Generation and placed his war-devastated/castrated Nick Caraway/ A Farewell to Arms? there--and I have no idea whether Sartres swore or not-- it just seems that he would have and my metier demanded it.  Ha!  Then, the rest:  the famously gorgeous jardines du Tullieres, that pate' is typically made of goose liver,  artists, composers, the dance, the PJ champagne (I was given a bottle for my wedding) again the list of words that have found their way into English and then the writer collapses, exhausted by all of it.


Confessions #2 and #3-- I have only been to Paree in my dreams, and I don't speak French.  


More Thoughts about Paree avec mon cigar and other matters.


Writing this for me was a break from my perennial seriousness, the strip-mining of my own and my family's past, how I flog myself every day for no good reason to be a better and bettter writer-- which is why I take these challenges.  Apologies and a gift basket of foie gras and d'anjou pears to any francophiles or Parisiennes I offend with my song.


This has also been an exercise in free association and letting myself be nonsensical-- something I highly recommend.


Finally:  before I pulled up this post and its five so far comments today, I was ready to throw myself off the nearest tall building.  I have been feeling that my recent work is very good but that it will never get its propers, as in publication in the "literary" venues, that I made an immense mistake in turning my back on the amazingly great start on a career as a poet I made in the 70's in Minnesota and Colorado and that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to get back in the saddle.  


But as soon as I saw these comments, I took heart.  I value the input and judgement of those of you who graciously take the time to comment on my work.  I return the favor as much as I can.  At this moment I am free of the anguish I am in much of the time over recent rejections from the likes of Poetry, Field, Beloit, and last but hardly least, Greywolf.  There was time when Greywolf, based in St. Paul, was a little less devoted to the already be-knighted, literary elite.  If you look at their list you'll see Tess Gallagher, Linda Gregg, Elizabeth Alexander and other luminaries.  Scott Townsend left and a former New York ed took over and the rest is history.


A few words about the value of community. In 1972 or thereabouts I co-founded Women Poets in the Twin Cities.  One of the young women I mentored was Mary Carr, who had a very sassy mouth, wrote brilliantly and read swinging her long dark hair.  I myself was mentored by Patricia Hampl.  We were there for each other and no one judged anyone else.  We just tried to encourage each other, and validate each other as writers and women breaking out of the lingering idea that despite all of the ground broken by feminism and the counter-culture, a woman shouldn't be a writer.


I co-founded the Smith Park poetry series-- Garrison Keillor broadcasts from the theatre we held forth in now-- with Caroline Marshall; she subsequently took me to Europe, leading to my recently completed memoir Nightfall in Verona (currently on someone's desk at an agency in NYC)-- Caroline went on to produce the NPR series Listening to Ourselves with Alan Cheuse, who is still the book critic du jour.   The point is that you never know what the outcome of our interactions will be. We had a wonderful time in a verdant period, giving readings followed by parties; everyone slept with everyone else, including the never bashful and always outrageous Mr. Bly,  and we all threw our wineglasses into the fire literally and figuratively.


Fast-forward to now and my founding of Poets on She Writes several months ago.  The group has gone from two members to 213 as of yesterday and the site has mushroomed into thirteen thousand women writers from all over the world.  One Stop Poetry is another community I find so very positive and supportive.


Writing is lonely, lonely business.  If you're driven to do it, you can't help it.  Thankfully, we are all in this together and I know not one writer who doesn't have some degree of angst, no matter how outwardly and traditionally successful.  Thank you, all; may our work continue to feed our hearts, minds and souls.  


Jenne' R. Andrews

For One Shoot Sunday

Challenge:  photo of infant w/ dog tags, Katherine Forbes, at One Stop Poetry.  

 
Wake Not Our Dream


"Guten Abend, gute Nacht, Von Englein bewacht
Die zeigen im Traum, dir Christkindleins Baum
Schlaf nun selig und suess, Schau im Traum's Paradies
Schlaf nun selig und suess, Schau im Traum's Paradies"*

Lullabye,  Johannes Brahms

Wake not my dream
my dream in its infancy
of return from war
the last dream a man has
with his last breath
medics loading him with morphine
making the sign of the cross
on bloody coats
pulling out the IV's

It is every warriors' dream
of homecoming, flesh intact
but for the heart with its bruises
from the burial of fallen friends
sequestering
the photographs of their wives
and sons
and daughters

ii

We often save nothing
but memorabilia; we often
must bury chaff
we imagine to have once been human.

But what of the rage
that destroys all
and the eyes of All
that wait upon thee?

In the Taliban's cave
men murmur around a fire
they pray at dusk
they walkie talkie to their own
on the far ridge
is my family all right
did you see that drone

A dark haired young father
comes weeping from a bunker
carrying a child.
A wife in a burkah keens
on a grave of stones


iii

I deployed in the night:
In the name of victory
In defense of what I believed
a good cause
I killed a Muslim fighter
a father and a husband
with my bare hands

Then I knew
Gethsemane.
I was one of the despised
I was called no name GI
and spat upon
in the POW camp

In a bright red flash
from an RPG
in the carooming of a humvee
into a ravine
I fell.

iv

Now someone retrieves
my daughter's picture
My dog tags
from the chaff
where I was.

The tags were sent home
as was I, in my cold
flag-draped bed.

I lie in that bed
in the hanger
that warrior, son and father
I had become
dissipating like fog--
where there was a man
a bone cage with a heart

All around me the weeping
of weary angels.
My effects and I are processed
on the assembly line of the dead


iv

Someone prays here.
The Lord Is My Shepherd--
He maketh me
To lie down in green pastures.

What has come to pass
may not be undone
by human hands
and I am not stilled
or comforted.

Weep not for me
sing not one kyrie
at a high mass
never extol my deeds

And wake not her dream.
speak well of me
to her,
The half-orphaned angel
who sleeps

Yea though I walk
through the valley of the shadow
of my sins and indiscretions
I loved her unto the last--
And this is everyone's war.

*Lullaby and good night,
Thy mother's delight,
Bright angels beside
My darling abide.
They will guard thee at rest,
Thou shalt wake on my breast.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
January 16,2011

Photo by Aussie photographer K.J. Halliday--
Poem in response to this photo for One Shoot Sunday/One Stop Poetry visual challenge...

Desire

A hungry heart is infrared

Burning like a cinder

With the weight of blood-bright day

And that patch of gladness

On the blackbird’s wing

The shoes, the scarpi rossi I bought

In Reggio

That blinded the starfish

When it came upon me

Where I stepped

Into the sunset scarlet sea

Thinking of you

That you stood in the doorway

So that I could see you

Give yourself to desire

Oh the bruising ache of it

The blackbird wings of hunger there

I open like the sunset’s mouth

Heart and soul infrared.

Copyright Jenne’ Andrews 2011

All rights reserved.

The Love Song of the Coney Island Mermaid

I wrote the first draft of this poem for the One Shoot Sunday photo challenge-- at One Stop-- be sure to read the interview and see Danielle Kelly's other astounding photos.  Ever since the character/persona of Fabulosa sprang into my mind and heart, I've been entertaining a few revisions.  Hence, the revised version of "The Love Song of the Coney Island Mermaid" for One Shot Wednesday-- Enjoy!

.

The Love Song of the Coney Island Mermaid  


(inspired by this photo by Danielle Kelly, Prufrock and Divina Is Divina by Jack Wiler.)

I hear the mermaids singing each to each...but I do not think they sing to me..."  Prufrock,  T.S. Eliot

Fabulosa goes to Coney because she/he is lonely

And it's a fine day to take the air along the sea

Or peddle an uncommon humanity

Fabulosa tilts her parasol, hidden behind the catastrophic

Confusion of her mammoth chiffon bow;

She is a sunburnt collision of then with now

Her tapered fingers tapping the cadence

She has forever heard

"I am man, woman, waxed Brazilian gaudy bird

Come here to reconnoiter in the throng

I do and don't belong

I know you understand;

Dance with me in summer's sand

Come closer; I'll whisper to you

Of the Bowery nights that drove me mad

So that I am now an objet d’arte, your Galahad

Even, my love,  your Guinevere

But in my New Year's lime chiffon 
Not austere

My home is neither land nor sea

I'm Trinidad's amphibious fait accompli

Moby Dick to your obsession

Let me stun you into my possession

Touch my neon fins

here and  there, and again. 

I never disappoint

I give you shock and awe-- 

I anoint:

Coney Island's a mermaid's town
We deep-six you until you drown

Lift this veil

To start the kiss and tell:

Submerge your weary heart

In my sea green Eliotian eyes.

Jenne' R. Andrews

Copyright January 2 2011

 *Trinidad:  sex-change capitol of U.S...