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