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