Jane Blue is our March Editor's Pick
You can email Jane at: juanaazul@comcast.net
SONNET
The dead live under a riot of flowers, their gardens
tended better than my own; the roses and lilacs,
the coral and deep orange geraniums,
Dusty Miller growing like weeds for the silver
in its leaves, white sweet alyssum and deep blue
lobelia overflowing brick ledges with old mortar
that can barely contain the dead. Such rash hues
above them, their plots fertilized and watered,
sometimes by rain, sometimes by the arcs
of automatic sprinklers--will corpses plump up,
century-old skeletons, crumbs, lying in this lush park
covering dark graves? Coursed thorough with new sap,
will they walk among the orange-vested work crew,
taking pictures of the stones to remember who they were?
THE NEST
for Paula
Every missive from my sister is a weather report.
But how are you, really?
The sky is busy catching the sun's rays
on its castled clouds, hiding and revealing the sun.
Lichen-encrusted limbs on the sidewalk,
a nest cast out of a tree, half done or half undone.
What am I? Half done or half undone?
Ash-blond grasses streaked with a little gray
are wound into the walls of a basket, or a chignon.
It seems a robin's nest, or an attempt at one,
with just a twig at the bottom where there should be mud.
The robin, liking water, shores up a tight little ship.
We all have a good bit of mud
woven into our lives, to remind us
of what we've weathered. Did the nest cushion
two or three little robin's-egg-blue ovals last year,
or was it just a failure in the stormy spring?
She thinks sometimes that her life is a failure,
No life is a failure, it is life. think of your bravery
in the face of it. Eye-blue forget-me-nots
look up from the lawns. Yellow oxalis--a weed
covers empty lots like sunshine. We are weeds,
my dear, like turf daisies and dandelions
and the pale lavender stars of wild onions just beginning.
FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST
He was a big, handsome, charismatic man
who worked with my mother.
She told he story coolly. The pathologist--
famous as an expert witness at murder trials--
stood at the top of a staircase in his home
outside an upstairs office and called down
to his wife and children below, cheerful even then.
"I've tasted the cyanide sample on my desk,"
he said. "I'll be dead in two minutes." It was a fact
that couldn't be reversed. "I'm sorry,
I never meant it." He was impulsive, and
an impulsive person shouldn't be
so intimately acquainted with poison. I knew
then and there, as a compulsive sampler myself
(of cookie batter or the lettuce I tore up
for salad) that I'd better choose a profession
requiring me to work only with words.
SPRING EQUINOX
I feel peeled, coffin-ripped.
The worms of night are sated now.
My spectacled eyes
tender as incubated babes.
Elms hang infant leaves
like minuscule laundry.
At a bus stop, a bird walks
high in a tree's new fringe,
peeking, sashaying
up the limb skyward.
It pauses to call "chip-chip"
into the Morse-code morning.
Soon, something replies,
"chip-chip." The bird saunters
out on the attenuating branch,
then steps into air.
What soldier, what saint
Will I be in this new life?
Jane Blue was born and raised in Berkeley, California. Her poems have been published in many print and on-line magazines, such as Umbrella, Stirring, Convergence, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Avatar Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Poetry International, and many others. Her most recent books are Turf Daisies and Dandelions, Rattlesnake Press, Sacramento, and The Persistence of Vision, Poet’s Corner Press, Stockton. She has taught creative writing at women's centers, colleges and prisons, and privately. She lives near the Sacramento River with her husband, Peter Rodman.
"Sonnet" was published in The Rattlesnake Review, and in Turf Daisies and Dandelions, Rattlesnake Press, Sacramento, 2006.
"The Nest" was published in Turf Daisies and Dandelions, Rattlesnake Press, Sacramento, 2006.
"Forensic Pathologist" and "Spring Equinox" were published in The Persistence of Vision, The Poet's Corner Press, Stockton, 2003.