Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
Today again I saw a gate in the sky.
Streams of pale light trickled through it.
I no longer looked at the sun, only straight ahead,
My silhouette reflected in the ***** tram window.
I looked farther, hypnotized,
sipping words veiled in the dust of the autumn sun.

Dry spaces. Leaves.
Golden bile sparkled,
And no one saw this wonder in the sky.
At the stop, in the crowd rushing by,
An experiment took place:
A man wrapped in copper threads.

He searched for relief while anger bound his soul.
He fought the air, attacked with words,
Like a puppet moving in convulsions.

Hands clenched, anger in his eyes.
“This will pass, this will fade,” I thought,
Moving to another car.

A primal tremor. A change of frequency.
Someone is turning the **** of our universe.
How many more cells of the body will they spoil
Before it is ground to ashes?
Until all ends in colonization,
A reward for micro-souls from another world.

People sunk in their minds
do not hear the hum of strings.
And I plead in my thoughts:
listen, look, be your reality.

Behind the gate a hundred weeks ago,
a crackling gramophone plays.
My calm relieves someone’s thoughts.
Somewhere, thousands of hours ago,
the past becomes the future.

Next time when you pass by me, indifferent,
the warmth of my thought will warm your
Dry, wrinkled hands.

I will never know You, and I would like to know
what you will say when these trembling words arrive on the wind.

In the autumn glow of the setting sun,
Like a gentle brushing of leaves at the next opening of the gate.
I will be there in the crack like a stray thought
that wanted to become immortality.
Hello, Doctor.
Welcome.

What a relief to see your bag.
No, not your tiresome shirts and socks
and your dime novels;
I mean your black bag, filled with the shining apparatus of life.

Follow me up the stairs, if you would be so kind.
Do you like the dark oak?
We find it somber, like a casket.

This is why we need you so desperately.
We have nearly given in!
So used, are we, to the predations and the despair,
that we women wear black, even at Easter time,
and the men drink, and are sick on the front lawn.

I apologize, Doctor.
You've only just arrived, and I haven't asked you about your trip.
Did you have a nice seat on the train?
Were there porters and cooks,
solicitous conductors?
A woman across the aisle, saying her rosary and weeping?
Monsters and archangels in your fitful dreams,
shooting it out like they do in the moving pictures?

I'm teasing, Doctor.
Forgive me for my familiarity.
Forgive me for trampling upon your necessary reserve.
Do you know why I was the one chosen to meet you?
It is because I am the sanest one here.
I am the limb that can, perhaps, be saved above the knee.
I have a nice singing voice,
but can no longer afford the risk to indulge it.

Are you good with severe injuries, Doctor?
You're not just some kindly old hand-holder, are you?
Here, one has to have eyes in the back of one's head.
We form fierce attachments all in a single afternoon;
a glance becomes a kiss becomes a fevered coming together,
and all before the dinner bell.

Don't look so disapproving, Doctor.
In this place, life isn't a game of whist in the stuffy parlor.
We must rip at it, and at each other, as one would a carcass,
or we starve,
gnawing on fear as if it were a rib.

Have you seen our Wolf yet, Doctor?
Were you uneasy, sitting on the box seat on the way in?
As a physician, you know how the organs and sinews are knit together...
did a tremor run through yours, like doomed babies holding each other?
Let me tell you about our Wolf.
After you've unpacked and taken tea,
I'll take you to the graveyard,
where the earth is always freshly turned.

Our Wolf is large, the same off-white as the doilies on the table downstairs.
The hired man we keep insists that there are no wolves here,
the last one having been shot years ago.
He swears it was a bear, or a cougar,
that gave him that ugly scar across his face.
He admits he didn't really see it, though,
and that was when he could still see, at all.
Now he sits polishing the silver, like an Irish servant girl,
fuming under his breath.

I saw our Wolf myself, Doctor,
when I was out gathering tomatoes from our vines,
just feet from the main house.
There he was, standing as still as January,
staring at me from next to the smokehouse.
Something in me shriveled, like a frost-struck bloom,
and I thought, "Cook will have to improvise her sauce tonight."
The fresh red pickings rolled out of my apron and onto the ground
like so many drops of blood.

It let me walk away, Doctor.
I've been distracted and unpredictable since.
Some wolves eat the organs first, did you know that?
The heart, the liver, what have you.
Tell me, what is it in these bodies that makes us animate?
Are we just some accident of chemistry, when we hope, dream,
fall in love?
Are we nothing but green vines with red eyes,
dumbly waiting?

Once again, I apologize, Doctor.
You're tired and want to unpack.
Will you think of your wife and children,
or does your head fill like a well bucket with the stuff of achievement,
overflowing?

Come down to dinner when you're ready.
We eat on the veranda,
because we have to keep the big table clear
to lay the injured on.
After dinner, relax a while, enjoy a cigar, read your journals.
Then, take a walk in the evening air, just at sunset.
Watch for our Wolf, though,
and I'll watch for you, from behind the curtain.

Goodbye, Doctor.
I mean for now, of course,
but I wouldn't unpack everything, if I were you.
Don't tax yourself the way our previous doctor did.
I don't think he really understood the things that come upon us here,
sudden and hard,
and always from an oblique angle.
Rest now, Doctor.
I'll let everyone know you've arrived,
except for our Wolf
who already knows.
__
2013, edited slightly 2025
Lady Of Dead Leaves



Beneath a dead leaf my love lies hidden
with a rose pearl and a starling's feather
where the dark forest unties Her ribbons

where night rides as black as robber's leather
with a bagful of moon's most starving hours
in a forest where leaves are falling forever,

where balefires blaze meteoric showers,
where pale sprites teach old lovers to dance
and sew up their wounds with threads of flowers.

For grape never saw the wine She decants,
a vintage that ripens with dissolution
aged in a song, sealed with ash and chance.

Under the starlight's silver infusion
asleep as a bee in the fading thunder,
which is volition and which illusion

when all that's left of life is to wonder
or lift the leaf that love lies under.




October 2022
This poem is written in the terza rima form and inspired by the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.
Little fox,
I've come to confess to you

though I know your church is the chicken coop
and your Christ is appetite.

If there is mist up on the mountain,
it's my spirit wandering.

The rest of me kneels here,
before you in the brambles like an overturned cup.

Alone in my bed, I have wondered
why I hurt my lovers, why they hurt me,

but I think it's because
angels are so similar to layers

especially when a spray of white feathers
in the air is all that's left.

Little fox, here is my spirit
riding wrapped around your slender black feet.

Let's test our hearts and pull a wishbone--
you've got plenty cast aside.

If I win, I'll change my ways and skew to kind.
And if you win?

I'll call him, saying let's try again
knowing what will happen, and how sly my words have been.
2025

based in part on the Russian folk tale of the fox confessor
Today is an old day,
leaking
the passed night's rain,

almost with its dawn already
yesterday,
faded replicant of yet another supplicant.

I'd throw it away, used-up as
a broken comb, a flared match fired once to
light something gone,

except
the birds
greet it with such celebration,

singing their
soft explosions
above the autumn seeds.

September 2025
This poem is written in the 55 form, that is, in exactly 55 words excluding title.
  Sep 17 Joy Ann Jones
renseksderf
Legend of a Feather’s Loop



Follow the gold path to walk the day from mist to glint —
Feather at dawn, Crow at the fence, Fox in the thistle,
Lantern where the conclave leans close, Hill in the last light,
and the Glint that waits for the hand that knows the way back.


Follow the silver path to retrace the memory —
Glint to Hill, Lantern to Fox, Crow to Feather —
until the first breath of morning closes the circle.



.
Joy Ann Jones Sep 16
You said you'd give me the moon
on a piece of toast
or at least the sweet-hot peel
of her cinnamon skin.

You said you'd raise from the grave
my heart, the ghost
to fill with black-burnt warmth
that could begin

a beat to bring horned dancers from the trees,
life to lift me lurching from my knees;
a revenant in red
that's what you said

that night in the glimmering swell
before the Fall
but it was Carnivale.



~September 2014
Next page