fin-de-siecle adverts, and a scrappy little poem, unedited.

Having chucked the cable hook-up for a fresh start, I should blog more frequently soon.  My last couple of poems are pretty personal/sensitive pieces…stuff I can’t publish until I’m sure it won’t affect anyone’s feelings too much.  In the meantime, I’ve written this unstable piece:

Yellow Jasmine

willows webbed into a wicker caste of time,
creaking, with fingers, beside the vine
heavy with poison, on the fence:
its thousand yellow trumpets at rest
on a china plate, the fluted charms reduce to paint.

what good is artistry here, among the names?
among years of heavy tin-folded copied plates
of slicked, copper faces, jet hair in brylecreem curls
in dusty jackets, stamped Olan Mills.
What use the native, yellow vine’s pale-featured
cousin, Poet’s Jasmine, all serpentine limbs,
open-throated, triplicate singled in rhyme.

my young self, helpless made by turnicates
of gold and green, fastened tightly to my name–
people of the white island– child of the many fluted vine,
green and gold as her mother’s eyes,
swept clean along the fenced-in sandy edge
of tides, defacing memories, with her frothy
blue gowns trimmed in lace.

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And I’ve found a flickr account I am completely enamored of.  I’ve immersed myself in Walcott’s Omeros for the last two-and-a-half weeks, which I am sure will show itself in my work soon.  I am feeling the need to finally draw in the many sea metaphors that lie just under the teeming surface of my writing brain.  I am of ocean people.  And so, expect a poem about coral sometime soon.  (While you wait, examine these incredible amassed prints and photographs…)

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