SWEAR NOT

Swear not by the moon,

or green cheese, my love,

that these irreverent fallacies

we nurture tenderly

will live in myth,

for shadow moons within the water

still haunt our dreaming eyes.

The moons, lies, dreams,

reflections and impious roots

will blossom some day,

as certain in their unknown future lunacy as time,

needing not

our oaths, love-lies

or meanderings in proxy paradise.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

SCENARIO

The director's eye

screens lovers making fairy tales,

casting them

in golden hair and strong arms,

casting enchantments

with divining rods

and muses.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

ELEGY

I, looking into

me, where the bleached

and pitted bone is gentled

by a constant, restless sea;

where the dunes rise

in my throat and

dark horizons fall before

the dipping sun;

where the mystery

of light is sure,

and the moon will rise

and shine on memory,

and tell me

what I alone can know

and whisper

of infinity: remembering

before birth

and after dying.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

RETROSPECTIVE

Roaming through the decades,

the polysyllabic histories

nurturing

observation, cataloging

points of origin,

illuminating perfectly

the crescent curve of thought

from its nativity:

the imperfect presence

where time imposes

its own murmuring, idiosyncratic essence

of unique

reality.

The terminal platitude

does not allow retreat.

Formal fallacies

and definite and painful borders lie

between horizons and the eye.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

TODAY IS TOMORROW

En pointe,

balanced on the past,

I remember it all, it is imprinted

on the cusp of turning: 

remembering discord and happiness,

designing discarded patterns

into imperatives

and surrender.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

OF ALL THE NUMBERLESS

Of all the numberless and legendary angels,

few guard the meek.

We inherit, mostly, a basic

heart-in-the-mouth

sense of derring do

and swing a mighty, lurching lance:

head on, daily endeavors

reach heroic

unproportions,

unknown, alas, to the

competent company

pinning medals on those

other heroes.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

MYSTERY

I wonder

what is going on in my magpie mind, that is so

intent upon saving the bits and pieces

in a kind of cheerful squalor, fiercely

hanging onto the stuff of daily life.

This morning one of the cats knocked the laundry hamper

over, and the resounding thwack! jerked me awake to the day;

the other one threw up

when I sat down to a peaceful cup of coffee.

I muse on the last of the roses,

tucked into a small goldfish bowl,

the goldfish long gone.

Didn't one of the kids

win that fish at a church fiesta?

What happened to it?

It wasn't Willie Mayes, who lived to an ancient age, and

my daughter has Romeo, who is so

old

that his scales have turned white, Romeo is a daily marvel.

And Lily and Lola lived to be three, they were the white mice

my son carried in his pocket to alarm female guests.

See what I mean?

What would this mess of a mind sustain itself with, if

it were forced to rely on its own insular resources?

On a desert island, or locked up somewhere?

Have all those books I read morphed into

this mysterious mish mosh?

Where are my real thoughts?

But I'm happy.

And the poetry surfaces often enough

that I'm on the edge of knowing that something good

may be going on in there.

I would forget it if I didn't write it down.

I hope I have a pen in my pocket

when I land on that island, where

in the silence

I am alone with me, alone on that island

every day.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

HISTORY LESSON, 2004

We are dancing out of step

to music out of hearing;

remote, pulled by moons of time,

the dark undertow that scours the patterned echolalia,

studying dissonance,

reverberating into arid canyons of time.

Are you listening?

Are you out there? where

unhearing,

we are condemned to repeat

in distance and inevitability,

in unsanctioned error, the evils of the past.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

MORNING ALIVE

A fine distraction of loose ends

coming together,

glazing delight over all,

stuffing happiness

into bursting, laving joy

that lurks like bootlegged bouquets of bubbles, 

defining essence

into the words of life.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

GENESIS

The past has stretched between,

not comprehending, but there

behind the rib's remembering:

enigmas are behind the rib, unknown and curious,

familiar, accepting secretly their power.

The rib's frail lattice is possessed by daemons,

or eventual truth, or a transitory hour.

As buds are opening, unrepentantly

pushing cloistered air,

or the liturgy of saints will raze a tomb,

love breaks through sometimes

that fortunate armor, reason.

Rejection of the myth is difficult

and filled with pain.

Construct me now with tenderness, this moment passed,

I saw, behind your eyes, it will not come again.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

CIRCLES

I know that what I am

was burnished once by fantasy

that the child I was had seized

and held as self bright paradise.

I know that what I am

is somewhere now between the earth

and all strange gaps of thought,

where the unknown air takes shape

as man, or tree, or musical idea.

I think that what I could have been

is perfectly contained

within the secret, terraqueous return to selfish summer,

where all the gods were green or golden

and growing in the sun.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

NOCTURN

We are our long, ulterior attitudes, which seem

about the slant of half past five in ailing light,

when habit is the skeleton, the wall

erected out of custom.

We are as grim as shrouds,

definitive as death

or stripped bare trees which grow

within in stark and raving winter:

we equivocate,

glib tongues dance in fat quadrilles:

but still

we hear within the silver syllables,

the labials, the undulant song

that shapes a secret world,

as if

some pagan beast in myth

had moaned his beauty into notes of love and fear.

We hear

this song, as palpable as kisses,

but we are mute as graven images:

we are the pointed tears of willows weeping

over old graves.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

EPITAPH UPON A PYRAMID

I was once a poet,

carving poems out of rock,

and on that rock

bred wind with silence.

Time is the wind,

impenetrable, unseen.

I am the unfervid rock.

I no longer am a tree, nor grass, nor any earth,

nor anything that once was green.

I am the unmomentous silences that do not

sing between.

I am not a rock on which the ocean sprays its foam,

not one to which strange, shelled creatures cling.

I am not now aware

of anything as new or strange, or first happening

to me.

I am the rock.

Time is the sea.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

WE ARE CONCEDING

We are conceding to the totems,

the plaque endowed by grief,

and shadowed by a myrtle tree, and we

commerce with variety

beneath a canopy

of dread awakenings.

How remote are strangers

in their clotted Babylon,

how polyglot their tongues:

where nothing is more possible

than grief.

We were one voice, however,

and the diffidence a sophistry:

a thing we had once held the moment,

made it marvel, drowned the finite skins

of past pollution.

We were a strange, unclinging honor,

amoral, God constructed bliss.

We were the leap,

the precipice.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

INCANTATION FOR AN INCONSTANT LOVER

On a windy hill, away from town,

I'll boil him in a caldron

and stir him with a stick.

Or freeze him in a block of ice,

then hit him with a pick,

or maybe in a frying pan

to scramble like an egg,

then laugh as only witches can 
who pull your broken leg.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

NIGHT SONG

Darkness gone over,
beyond, where the air is brazen,
bold and clamoring
until the silence fills it.
Here, where darkness goes over,
bridging
to yesterday.

There are places to weep
and paths to wander;
small cold graves to keep
watch over.

Erecting day
into a bridge to walk upon,
I shall not drown again,
hung high over,
walking high over water, from desert to desert,
turning time into distance,
walking between.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

THE GARDEN

The tight ass clay
is constricting all the plant roots,
but look at the geraniums:
tall, spindly, not-lush-green, but
blooming, rioting all over the place,
lush-hot pink-sweet,
round and full.
What kind of statement
are they making about deprivation,
for or against?
I wonder,
and I'm awed and grateful.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

CIRCLES

We smelled roses
in the snow, in mid-embrace
were pricked
by thorns: beware the carapace.
I am warned of you at night,
have lost you by the morning light;
was that seminal flight not ours but far,
far away in other worlds
and long ago, and
did we then hallucinate
the roses in the snow?

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

NOW IS THE EYE

Now is the hour, the time when time widens 
to enclose perfection of the rose,
but not the flower, flame, but not the fire. 
Now is when the in-be-tween
conspires to make the valley green,
conspires against the sequenced years, 
the distance of the spirit's winter.


We are nothing on the pinnacle of time,
we mediate the timelessness of age;
we are the spirit only as we turn the page.
We are the nothing that we see beyond the mirror. 
We are the matrix and the nadir.


We are again impossible beginning,
fusing hallowed need with blossoming and fair
beyond all death, beyond all fear.


We walk in solitary flashes,
we are the phoenix and the ashes.
We are the pyramids, the sweat
that built a pointed precipice in sand;
we are the boomerang or bread,
as though we met and mingled in each other's blood.


The vanity of little faith
divides us from the breath
of melody within the tune, but still
we are the water in the spring, or summer noon 
within the peach, we are a spark within the brute. 
Conceive the seed, forbear the fruit,
and hold out begging bowls and wander.
We are one within the center.


Now is the time when time divides itself, 
re-patterning amoebic aeons
east beyond morning, west beyond sight. 
Now is the eye
within the light.




© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

SPENDTHRIFT

Words are glittering

in the gutters of my mind,

where I need excess wrapping me

in lustful song and wanton fantasies, 

where I need to wallow,

expiating old, cold and hollow 
travesties.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

SMALL SONG

Dormancies of childhood
surfacing,
winging on remembered phrases:
dyphthong delicacies,
quintessential, mused
upon under apple trees.

Then I looked at my watch,
my apple-watching timepiece,
having seen seasons from blossom to windfall,
and it had lost its hands:
then I knew
that those remembered hours
will no longer
call for me.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

OLD MAN ON THE BEACH

There are mermaids
in the corners of my eyes,
whistles fill my mouth,
the shouts of ruddy young things
are just behind my head:
turning quickly;
but they are gone, like snow melts of the past,  - .
In the meantime, walking beaches,
sand feels the same under foot
as it did fifty years ago.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

IMAGING

Plodding around corners of mundane,
veering left,
I am startled, finding myself here,
wandering where
lights flare and burn for all time,
infinitely for the taking:
a strange wind,
a fragile bent of limn or leaf
has put me here,
marveling
at what -
I know not.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

STEPPING CAREFULLY

We are stepping carefully
on stones of preconceived concept.
The march stops
here, where we were, fear
is firm, fencing
off a watershed, circumscribing generations,
creating artifice.

We walk a slow and unrelenting pace
but upheaval is a mandate, sending
slush and trash
down rushing waters with the force,
when its time
has come.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

SEA CHANGE

I find you in my mind,
where salt is crusted in the sandy, fettered wing:
the beatings of my thought uncurl
the foetal chance,
where blight had formed the pearl.

The beach begins to be:
I walk the shore alone
and watch the waters touch
the end of day;
the shells I walk upon were home
for small and unskilled creatures
whose defenceless flesh
created littoral fantasies:

the sand is luminous with sight.
Horizons are intense and blue,
the eyes of love
that call the gull to flight.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

HONEYSUCKLE POEM

The vapid deserts in my mind are fertilized:
golden, greedy,
branching avid tendrils out
to clutch the rose bush;
nurturing honey,
trollop for the bees' frenzy;
flowers
growing from the sockets of my eyes,
groping color, mad with fragrance.

We recognize each other, known unknown,
lover to lover.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

NIGHTMARE

We drove along the sand in candid carriages
bathed in brine,
the foaming horses leaped through bare, schematic
aeons, the sand below the wheels
unreal as destiny, inviolate as time.
We see the sand in sun, and black carriages,
the horses black, the gilded waves washing over roots
at intervals along the beaches,
the Judas trees are growing scherzo-like in sand:
the grace notes of the terrible dead.

We consecrate the inversion
in an aphonic chorusing
of dirges in the sand,
digging graves the waves will wash away,
but we have been here, and where we were, the air
hangs muted from the moment's presence,
as the voices of the dead have spoken
and passed on.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

THIN ICE

I remember the dark and narrow twist
of a mythic street in Florence
rounding the present
with artful haunts of time,
clutching at the edges
of elegiac felicity.

I look in the mirror now and say
"I am here"
and I am stolidly here;
did I ever walk or breathe
in that vivid Italian prism, lurching along,
searching for a fairy tale in which I could be
a princess, nacreous in the moon?

I'm here where the news anchor tells me
that the polar bears,in Antarctica, I think,
one of the poles,
are on thinning ice,
imperiled by the warming of their world.

And they not knowing.

The princess disappears
in glimpses of extinction, and the polar bears
are lost again in metaphor, there,
where they were,
cast in amber,
still forever.

© copyright 2010

THE ARCHITECT

Constructing a poem:

shaping, smoothing, polishing;

the sting of idea consumating its burn,

ascending to its nucleus:

the penitent's whisper

to God.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

BENEDICTION

All is what it seems

in the reverent hour of discovery;

temporal eddies of thought

wind in circling lassitude,

emptying into still pools,

there received and solaced.

Wanderers on the other side walk

softly through the smoky mists

of almost knowing,.

leaking color on the path to expiation,

signposts for followers,

glossing over fear and hag-ridden uncertainties.

There is no end, but all beginning

and morning is inevitable,

pouring light over.

© Charlotte Merrill Jensen

DRYAD

How single and alone I am tonight,

how narrow when I wake.

My sighs are not real,

but shaped like tear drops, even so.

I am shaking,

like birches in the wind,

and will the wind.

In spring and summer I am green,

the birds love me,

and they sing in my branches,

but I cannot give real shade,

only the spattered patterns

light has made between.

I wake, wavering, in a dream

have I seen my foot

through to the skeleton,

where the bones froth, like a sea

of wanting, shooting quills of folly:

and if I run, who will die,

when all is done,

as done it all must be?

Will I die, or shall it be the tree?

I am spell-caught,

could I come if one should call,

or touch with love the leaves that fall?

Should I then be free?

Or am I only tree?

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

CONVERSATION

I am retreating from humanity, the vision of escape has conquered

and I know at last oblivion is thorough,

that time can be a symbol of defeat.

In fantasy, we loved, were loved, had lived a thousand lives

and walked through savage ages, hand in hand,

picking our way through the tops of trees and stepping over water,

but I am not divine tonight, my friend, I am weak,

alone and tired as I view infinity through windows into

dark, reflecting what is here within the room I momentarily inhabit,

or gaze at mirrors holding images of illusion.

My visions are a luminous gestation, casting long light

over what may, or may not come: for prophecy

is often false.

I see your visions too, my friend, and harbor pain which is not

secular, but saints have clever knees;

my callouses are more apt behind,

or worn out feet, from stumbling.

I think of little children, and I am aware

that morning is a gift that I am thankful for.

Look, day breaks brilliantly and time is now

too young for Hamlet's Ghost:

he has been here and been here violently,

but he is Hamlet's Ghost (or any other shade of time),

not mine.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

MICROCOSM

We are incipient duality,

a form he rumored blindly; princes do not warn

their peoples of their lack of power.

She wore incestuous wreaths of hair, and wove her lust

into a keepsake, wrenching from that infamy a shape of tombs,

although overt murder was a crime she did not know,

and mercy was the nature of her love.

Break the soul, perform the miracle,

as grim gums mouth asperity and hands climb stairs

grabbing for the dog bond, bone,

grabbing for the lord's tail in the threatening air,

so I was born,

was catapulted into air which knew no balm as yet

but must be breathed alone and shrieking into sober harshness,

swaddled into clothes and bare

of mother world. I wept my lonely tears, reiteration of the hours when

growth fought fear, and all her broken faith

within our spatial hemisphere.

I grew the fruit flesh of all young children,

smelling of oranges and delight; juicy as the taste of apples.

Mountains rose on my perception day by day

and the valley laden breast with fruit and cockles hung:

the orchards of my landscape were fertilized

with sea shells.

But now we live in nun towns,

morticed on tombs.

We are the stripes of black and white,

the shining fences of our fear,

or leaving good and evil gormless, self constructed pickets

casting iron rage in which to pray,

or lavishing flowers on a statue.

There are still the pits, the traps are filled with tiger's milk,

the communion wine in which she drowned her young,

(blanketed in blue mantles, composed for prayer).

We are the heirs of superstition, breathing air of past attrition,

mouthing crypts

divined from an ovarian apocalypse, our final word.

We make no comment, but apostrophe:

we are the scarlet, polyglot breath, the postulant of reason:

a concentration of eccentric, a lament of need: there is no time

in which to wait coherently, by choice.

We are a split, a sound of hollow steps, we do not resound

in papier mache plazas built for children, as a toy,

we do not enjoy the eagle world. We do not like the sound,

utilitarian conversation.

Liberation is beyond the antic poppycock,

a mystic circle, or a stepping on a crack,

and frail flesh merely does not house the halls

where blood runs, yelling eagerly;

it waits, and watches slanting, rooftop eyelids,

where the glances fall

upon the ground, struck like lightning through a rod,

or singing hymns in church.

I am full knowledge of acrostic hours,

and divine as gypsies are,

a fraud, with cherries hanging on the ear.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

HE MADE ME WANT TO BE VULGAR

He infused his least routine with a dreadful verbosity

and a puffy, sepulchral charm,

that made me hate him momentarily,

but when I didn't see him for awhile,

I had kind and tolerant thoughts

and could despise him gently

until I talked with him

and then,

I got infuriated

all over again..

He told all

the dull gall glimmer of glum,

fat, turgid backlash of grump,

he told all, amid harumph,

about his little boy tears,

I could not but sorrow.

But shit!

I got my own fears.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

LAMENT, 1968 for M.L.K. Jr.

We are mingling now at last,

teetering above

the corpse filled canyons of the past,

revolving on the podiums

of eccentricity

and roaring at the whip.

There is no place for love

but bruised lips have kissed

among the crenellations of resentful hope

and are echoing the circumambient past,

the vengeant will and dream: hope creates a chill, uncertain bridge

between.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

QUESTIONS

As we, most passionately

squandered excesses upon idols,

italic to the past,

pimping linear sketches

of what that damned baby wanted,

casting dark on light years

of future vision,

we are our own hostages,

searching space,

looking through self

and questioning:

is the baby damned?

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

HAND IN HAND

Walking, hand in hand

along long strange avenues

of hope,

rounding each turn with fear,

walking

where the wolves of memory

are salivating in the past.

Do not wait, go fast beyond that time,

beyond the turn,

beyond a childish vision of minutiae.

Walk with me and trust

that last strange turn, the future.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

CALIBAN

Muddled monster, I, with

pearl-like eye

awash with shell and sand,

and brittle hand and rocky feet:

the simpleton who stamped and stared

and saw the unicorn,

and pale again the bell-like air,

the starry horn of unicorn

impaling moments out of time,

or searching slopes, transfixed.

The unicorn had come with summer,

poised upon a stony barrier,

reeling solidly through myth,

where wisdom is a fable and the gods beget,

enraged or passionate or trial by faith:

as love is death and we must mourn

the pagan hearse, the gentle unicorn.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

GHOSTS

I hear the footsteps

walking in the corridor between

sleep and waking,

listening to the murmuring become a shout

and the footsteps fading away.

The footsteps haunt my day,

walking

beside me

and behind me,

pacing

in the ramparts of my mind,

High above the wind,

watching life boil down the streets,

I wait for sleep

and listen

for the footsteps.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

THE BAD KING

Inconstant, urgent

and in vain,

a demon lover

craving woe and then the fall,

needing empty,

hunching inside the garden wall,

watching words

trace frost upon the pear tree hanging over,

crouching,

whispering behind my hands,

my king craft freezing sap.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

THE LISTENER

The man has fawn's ears, alert,

inquiring as a wild child, pawing delicately through underbrush

in search of something green;

experimenting in necessity

or the possibility of truth.

Tomes of dead leaves have fertilized the ground

on which he listens, observing air and sun in which

the green bush, the stunted twisting roots grow on

in various shapes,

affronting startled time,

whose genesis may have been direct and uncomplicated.

Time is not arrested here, but pushes through

in weird and ugly limns of pain,

leaving a sense of history, of wrecks and wars

and frail human decency.

He listens for truth and sees the past

grow lichens and green moss and softening implacably

the rock above the cave in which the shadows hide

and reach their voices out and call

the frantic air, stripping

words of their folly, cleansing

muddy streams of drifting leaves

and the small dead.

The clawing roots stir underground and settle

into living earth.

Fearful lives inhabiting this wood

move through the trees, and come

in search of food.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

SONG WITHOUT WORDS

A periphery of thought performs

the rectilinear barricade,

fantastic fence, bizarre and beveled incongruity.

Within the stricture, music moves in mellow monody,

soars and falls in dulcet polyphonic harmony.

The unutterable phrase, the phrase

we fought so bitterly within

has flown out, and grown

into this music, and we,

the snare of song,

the filigree of notes, will be

a sonorous simplicity of sound,

the cantabile composed

from days and nights of mordant prose.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

OF LOVE AND ORANGES

The orchards bloom in myth

as a personal belief,

or the possibility of fruit, as the trees enleaf

and order solemnly

defiance of the certain frost.

Monastic thoughts design the rind,

which shelters flesh and juice in chancy weather, and

perspective the lonely voice, the errant adversary

who walks within, alone and feline thin,

upon a stricken fence.

We were together in the dark requited past,

where ancient lovers swore allegiance in a Doric oath,

constructed from a pagan dream.

The moments we have lost are shriven solitude, we burned in time

and learned to wear

a crucible to clothe our nakedness, and learned to breathe again

in suddenly more difficult, more transitory air.

As we have stolen time, have wrenched it out in rhyme,

have sucked the nectar dry, we can impose

the skeletons, echoing in prose

a barricaded, lyric spring

bubbling up in footprints left behind

in an ancient, golden time

where hand in hand we walked a happy childlike land

and heard unerringly the voice of love.

Our being then had chained the future

in an allegorical beatitude that is reality, and apart

from other images, or attitudes.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

AGING MOVIE IDOL

He is draped in remnants of desire,

hanging shreds of yearning, a peering aura

left behind by housewives, schoolgirls, secretaries.

The man behind the lived in face is in his eyes: his eyes,

that saw his own world, where he lived,

(where he did not live in the dreams of hungry ladies,

whose dreams reflect his craft), he was, and is,

so good at what he does.

That stalking animal smolders still,

but does not roar; is it slaked by age, or satisfaction?

He knows who he is,

and he isn't ours.

It is said, however, that the camera

does not lie:

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

CANTICLE

I saw God's eye in the cloud.

It was looking at me.

Scoured and expectant,

descending from flight

into the pale of morning,

pressing further into summer somnolence,

bursting with juice,

like fruit

self contained in all its holy summer sweetness:

creaming over sound, with all the bells ringing:-

I'm learning survival in wary silence, remembering

the eye.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

MERMAID'S SONG

Why I wept I did not know,

or why my tears were freezing as they fell,

as I became a fish again,

swimming through the womb of time,

assaulting an injudicious past

against the barriers of rhyme.

I hear the sounding bells toll time beneath the water,

where the valley settles long years,

and queer birds swim

among the blemished rocks.

Sometimes, when I am tired of playing with fish babies,

I make love with humans,

rocking on the surface waves,

the juices spill light year seasons down hill, greening

where the wind

is blowing sandy moonlight over dunes.

When morning comes, implacable pale dawn,

imperiled love is gone,

drowned again within the sound of time,

wavering

beneath the salty water,

where the sea is Pleistocene.

Coral shapes below are green,

the waters

cool within,

idea of the fin,

but fish itself is sin, and

carnal breast is algae green;

the sea is frozen Pleistocene.

Then I heard it said

that mermaids weep

because they have no souls.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

INVOCATION

As you were my lover,

let me wash words over

your clever, lewd, and unspent feet,

washing words over

the moth wing bruised bloom upon your mind, you

not yet too hurt, not yet inured to grace.

As covetous of space

as energy is mind made man again,

the breath wihin your mouth is light years of erotica

upon the pyres of words I burnt in fantasy.

Aeons stretched between:

my words were want, made green,

they fell down chasms cut

into a mountainous and deviled world,

chased as drunken images within the wine,

eluding the crude and thrusting verb

in an intricate and arduous unwinding

of the tensile shrouds that clothe my body tightly,

springing back to thought that binds between,

that prints my breast with tenderness or hard awakening

in patterned time which sought

the blind and listening blood, the cuneiform advent

of love,

defining unwary, nude dunes

which sleep in faith beneath the sky, or

immuring young queens in pyramids,

who fell to dust in lost, uncertain fumbling.

The final fluent groping is the mind unvictimized,

the dorsal meditation

of the lucent eye,

endowed by falling light or

fretted tears, like strings on lutes;

impaling thought upon the myth

or laying on of hands, in blessing.

© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

LOVE SONG

The night is wind that blows spring about,
pushing poetry through stems
and long legged humans;
rain-hints are effervesence in the blood,
shining dust off,
as though we had no skin, were wind,
were curling air into the chosen buds.
Morning is beset by sunrise,
with night music on the breath
and night blooming lilies under eyelids.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

ANAGRAM

The written shape of sand, drifting
into dunes,
lifting stubborn earth, cutting valleys into hills,
where spills of sand fall gently into other hours
which in turn are never still,
but fall again and shift between.


The words are scattered over sand,
stung into smooth and polished shapes by wind and sea,
holding no meaning, merely there,
devoid of continuity, a difficult and daring
Decalogue of destiny,
where time is the consonant that clips the cryptograph,
the anagram, reiteration of the wind,
whose stealth we do not comprehend.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

LOST

I don't know why I'm here,
rooted in orderly gardens and green lawns.
They told me
that when I was two weeks old
they took me camping on the shore at Rockaway Beach.
My blood still hums
with crash and roar
or gentle lapping on the beach,
and my soul is streaked with salt.
Sand is my turf,
it was always safe to walk upon.

That wild girl still longs
for the limitless water,
wants to be washed in susurration,
rocked in the nurturing fog.
It's scary,
that lost part of her
that nestles quiet in the circling garden.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

MEDITATION

Meditation
on the color of clarity;
like mountain water
falling cold over stones,
carrying down patterns.

Refractive,
like plants
leaning into light, accepting
what is offered
and turning it green.



© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen

TIME STEPS

I'm watching midnight eccentricities of light
force luminous reflections
of Sirius and the moon
into incandescent, transcendant nebulae,
pour music onto snow in the back garden,
blazing into past prophecies, radiant and unearthly,
where all knowledge is prescient.

The imprint is perceptible.
I feel the deft cells' remembering,
the learning to swim in primordial soup,
paring away, evolving
into footprints in a dark world, learning to solve,
nudging, one by one,
cryptic concatenations marching in real-time
like pain filled sluggards.

Ongoing.
Still worrying at unknown
and difficult
milleniums.


© 2010 Charlotte Merrill Jensen