For Jan

City Trees~ for Jan Carroll with eternal love

from ‘Days of Mercury’

‘Red sail’ by Jan Carroll

au revoir Marcel

Are you quiet
Are you quiet
Over Damascus
Over Jerusalem
Over Atlantis
Quiet enough
To get by
Without me
Have you made me

a shield

An all gods
Dead or alive
godless prayer
for me
or a lyre to strum

in absent sanctuary

That keeps us safe
keeps me inside
those nights in Amsterdam
Where we
Drink absinthe
blindly stumble on to Paris
ignobly escaping

The fields of the dead

Are you with me
Are you with me
This time as you were before

was there even a before
In Barcelona
Where we didn’t leave that
imagined villa for two weeks
Before we were both starving
In the woods
Are we quiet enough
Running along this rivers
of the dead vanished but hearing
the testimony of the dead
I know you don’t want
To hear me
Because you think you can
Save us another way
But you did come to me

once in a dream
to tell me not to
Listen to you
That I would have to know
when we are going to
to leave
On the midnight boat to Capri
Or vanishing here.

Midsummer

‘Escaping’ by Jan Carroll

from Sassafrass

If I taught you to steep tea
If I couldn’t get
you down from that crag
to sit to hear
it seepseepseep
or some such thing

while waiting
over the basin
your face
in amber

muttering stupid curses
If then I let you

lay tealeaves
across my body
soaking the unknown past
through my skin,
If then we are,
If then.

Botanicals

Corner of the field by Jan
Carroll

ouija world

A time sketch faintly summoned
from someone else’s dream
lyric in sense memory
the pulse of escape
Trapped inside a buried motive
repelled in jaundiced objects
forgotten figures rewound out of the room
Sometimes fragments of music
fade in and out
Sometimes new blood cells
are heard
Sometimes shadows dance in private temples
commemorating the wombs of the dead
collapsing arc shadow
in shadow

Rarer still
overture of soundproof grief
or sotto
hanging from
crumbled battlement
foretelling the concert of the days

Heralded by leafcurls
I saw the
flowers in
your gardens from
the glare that opened
this gate to let me float out
sometimes the lyre lingered with
me down that path.

Botanicals

Moss again by Jan Carroll

When in 1999 we lived
the days
echoing or enfolding
quietly, lighted in
children’s weather
remembering what surreal
brilliance was
gone by elsewhere
sometimes, a terminal luster
on a missed eclipse
of forecasts, unapocalyptic
As a test of secular faith
As a wire that all
is forgiven in flight
or forgotten by the promontory
of water and shadow
sometimes
ashrouded, swept back in
a hollow tide.
(the scribbles of the dooms are
for selfcursed minds)
I wouldn’t have been
able to imagine
that the lilac would
dance out through the
breeze in quite this way.
so unpatterned
or that there would be that suspension
of clearness that is
caught in the eye on
in a windstream that carries
the resolution of Bach’s notes
that go forward to
the handless fire
hover on buried sand
When I thought all
there was to do to survive was
drink, revanquished.
Scarred and empty without
the fight that made us
drowned, not condemned
then, I recall nights.

for Jan and Jack

Botanicals

Opening Night  by Jan Carroll

from Day of Mercury

Protect water at thy temple  sign infinity  diamond eye

iron ear  sepia tongue  liquid touch   rainquills

the mercurical  silent  attitude

Botanicals

from The Silent Era

suncrowns arc
green frieze
in warring weather
untractable and unnamed
the integrity of the winds
heralds clearer to
untimed movement in the trees
unstudied, loveless
withered, hidden out
this bower
may be an oasis
or a trap or a canopy for bug continents
or livid bioscape
writhing, sacrifical
gold and mud of reed marsh in that dream
rips down
sordid and violent
unconsciously a primal document
a lewd imprimatur
quieted summer
for always, peace is disturbed.
 

Botanicals

from The Reading
Tarquam

His heaving blue shoulders face away
from the rust moon
singing Father of Water
naked on the dead soil
pierces ground by centimeters
with the specter of the dove
crowned in the masculine principal
foretold in jagged mountain
hidden beyond thundercloud
the masque of creativity
closing her eyes
in the afterburn of
quicksilver rainbow
dead Iris lurks
she feels the livid sun
thrown by the shade of the palm
digs her feet into the putrid soil
envisions the Earth finally
visible from its axis
reflected in the tranquil seed sounds

a Queen and I

a Queen and I by Jan Carroll

from Delphinium

Twinlace
barely pink
before noon
Swat and sway
Trying to dance against
the lazy chorus of chive hammers
In blur organza
brushing by
Spiked gay feathers
Tripping over bowl of clover
Whisper over
villainous amaryllis
loitering
With intent

from Jan’s gallery