|
Wild Moon Symphony
Preview Back Issues
VOL. 4
 Jimmy Warner's Wild Moon Transit
March 2000
Wild
Onions
Look out for that occasional clump of onion grass that
can stink up the mower or find you breathless between chives and garlic.
RIVER GIRL
Farmer's wives are made of the hard stuff,
not your fragile vanity and Calvin Kleins.
You run the hardware store
and amid your constant running
seem to live on air and bird seed.
To capture that something of you
I rush down river to test my lines each year
at the cottage of my riverside drives.
As a teenager I held you in view like a wild flower
whose out-of-the-blue flair for fashion
grabs the tourist eye away from cards and tee-shirts,
interrupts the pursuit of Coolrays or Raybans,
more like a hardware calendar event.
Seasons pass you by, leaving nothing but slight lines of care
and a sadness that came with marriage,
and not a hair out of place nor an ounce of middle age
to grace your running, blue-legged, girl-like body,
just a blur of helpful hardware, in and out of green house mist,
a trail going back and forth to constant cash register.
Yes, how dignified you bow to absurdity,
in spite of all my presumptuous, whimsy.
That which humbles you cannot be moved by will,
no pot of luxury loam where you would die of care.
You've seen me looking all this time
without a clue to what my eyes are saying,
no remarkable difference between myself
and all " them river boys, come in sweaty"
from sunshine and hay moaning,
looking to buy a whats-it for the tractor,
watching you move down aisles of screw-eyes
to the part they most desire.
Watching you run blue as channel waters in March
and turning about with merchandise in manicured hand
those hot eyes imagine you
down by the strip of blue at the edge of the field and the forest, a flower just for the plowboy's romp.
Still, you abide the stations of love,
a post that you have chosen to keep,
despite the flow of river men and city men,
in need of hardware, each with a burning look.
You maintain course, straight and narrow,
piloting along banks and shore
the strangeness you may never come to understand.
I won't draw attention to my fascination,
or slip little notes onto cash register ledges,
no desperate calls in the breathless hours of river calm.
I'll buy my usual hardware items
and follow along the jazz progression of you
in links of chain and rope, by useful yards of chicken wire
and tell the season of you with each new pot of lavender
and spray of ruby sage that hums your fragile notes.
My eyes will keep dead silence, feeling the tide of you
each time I run with the come-here crowd,
to my Greenbay haven where the stingray found her mark.
I'll buy hardware with respect for delicate ecology
where the graceful and the gross live in shadow of each other, part of the hard pan, salt rain and nor'easter snow,
which determines
how the wisp of a cornflower survives.
Only narrow blue lines can come between hay field
and timberline, between macho and true manicure.
The balance of elegance digs into its sand-hill existence
with well-disguised claws and holds on to whatever beauty
can be discerned in whatever fashion there is to behold.
I come to enjoy the river's much needed effect on me
as it rolls up brief pleasures,
and thunders on my tin roof with salt soul.
I leave indigenous people to their own destiny,
life too fragile to touch.
Delta days progress along the mood and
temperament of
watery will
where wild onion grass and rip-rap
border the bay's vague intentions.
It takes a well-weathered edge
to predict the deep blue-green,
when augury scatters more ripples
than fortune's intuition can read.
In the parking lot, a new breed is growing wild.
Excerpt from Delta Nightfall
i
Across the river's diverse blue stripe
the haze of care evaporates
into lavender blades of sunset and signal.
Relief from scorching sunlight floods
an all-purpose revival
onto these desert bounds and frail swamps
where feathered tufts of pale orange
erupt over tall reeds.
Where there's a will
there's adaptation too stringent
for human propagation.
The offspring of a season
will let habit go alone,
down the estuary, flowing;
OVER EXUBERANCE PUNISHED BY DEATH.
SPRING
The rewards of small things
come tip-toe on ant's feet.
First
tops of onion
snow peas
winter's
odd survivors
PEAK INTEREST,
seek welcome
gradually.
One's first loves
like fallen leaves
TAKE LONGER
DECOMPOSING.
All things focus
their stronger traits,
choose their time
to grab us by the eye
TO TELL US WE ARE WAITING,
BUT NOT WHY.
Excerpt from Delta Nightfall
i i
Holding this observance of nightfall
in tender consideration
of all that befalls this delta region
of weed worship and snake wisdom,
of long, pine-standing religion
and sand-painted memory;
of tide-sworn return
and canoe-pointed destiny,
gives HUMAN dust room to settle.
You trade each sigh for a breeze,
each wish for a homeward turning gull.
Each inspiration is exchanged
for a splash of gray-green wave
in the hope that you fill in softly
between the hard edges
of delta poverty and splendor
SOME SEMBLANCE OF RESPECT.
Wild Moon Haiku
A green wave crashes
on jagged piles of riprap,
one stone turns to jade.
Wild Onions
Sometimes you rave over onions at the super
though you must admire the ones that grow wild.
They are the radicals in the yard
the wilderness between tears
orphan bulbs in nature’s cheek
food for elves and gnomes?
surely signs of a troll nearby
a starved symbol,
cymlings and rampion,
horseradish and okra for the soul.
Falling in the onion grass a bare breast
colors in new diet plans, testing aversions
making a poisonous palette, a time for tryst
a crude calendar of spring truth.
Thank God for noses held or fixed
discovering invisible struggle
the rancor toward its breath and digestion
the smolder of earthy suggestion
its dark green dearth of powerful seasoning
born of brute things, all food
all pagan energy, fodder of the heart.
You linger over wild onions,
but yearn to live like weeds.
Jimmy's poetry table of contents
©
Jimmy Warner 2011
|