Jan Way
Jess’s Reach for the Sky
Damn their eyes – searching our cardboard soul—
knowing our carousel sputtered short of the brass ring.
Father Time watches invisible seekers and interlopers;
humans and horses of purpose and randomness,
misfortune and goodness ride by his face.
He peers out from a segment of trunk, an axhandle long,
from the twenty-three-mile-high Yggdrasil tree.
Sandwiching his stoic countenance, cigar-butt heads of two owls
gaze out. On the right a bored barn-owl settles over one eye,
while a stern screech-owl under the other cheek pulls our gaze left.
That bad-mood bird scratched in the hardwood
throws out life’s puzzles in its pupils
silently interrogating our shaky selves.
With the pen’s pigeon droppings in a thousand lines,
ten thousand words fall-down before this master’s sketch
of oak like casts of patience fowl and human acuity.
Bunged, art scribbles again for description
before arthritis and age call Ow! to canvas and page.
Shadows whisper the large owl head be wisdom,
be death, be mystery. Shhh! Listen for the wings.
No ode to the skylark here.
Three faces on the bark with leaves on their heads,
a triune, enlivened by sap and resin up from hidden roots
siphoning three wells in Odin’s three worlds:
the underworld, the land of giants and the home of the gods,
hide in the pulp and watch to and fro,
while one big eared knot hole eavesdrops on the world.
Are we missing sonority, music, fiesta,
a tintinnabulation calling us to a party
to which we dissed the invitation?
Are our livered lives flat, truncated?
Is the acute angle, separating stares from left and right
a hint of tensions in the heart? Is it a dialectic in the gate
of Janus or a fraction on a plane
of the three hundred sixty degrees of the ephemeral Lord?
The beak that breaks rodent bones, menaces—
tell us, who ate the mourning dove of peace from off the ark.
While ancient orbs of owl and God-time
glare into the churning gizzard of our fears,
tell us, how to escape tohubohu.
Pointed irises ping the heart,
(sweet pain get thee behind my butt),
tell us, why cold love doesn’t save us.
We know the other four parts of the Roy G. Biv
rainbow of knowledge: what, when, where and how much—
not candled, hide in bird eggs to pip in due time.
The world of questions bark against our deep essence.
Trees and woods tell us mysteries of the earth,
when we have quieted. Let’s go be fetal or sane on the forest floor.
Frowning crowns under foliage hear, see, know
and like sparks from curled bark, tell us:
watch the curls and colors portend—
our dead dermal seasons in our deciduous hair;
behold yourself age as agile turns toward senile;
see our acorns of new life and growth below
and beware the lurking chomper-worm.
Though ash and oak faces pose as sages,
they are but wood calling out our blood.
Those major eyes shake us; sit and stare into our conscience;
vibrate, penetrate, resonate. Hoo-hoo-hoooo – me, us, you.
On tiptoe all our naked generations wait
to salsa our defeated dervish into new wine,
and for God to mainline eudemonia in our veins.
We will conjure experimental joy that laces repairs
to the world from home-made glues;
come face to face with The Face that funnels strength,
the hand of eternity that counts the leaves at tip top.
Let those with eyes, see and those with ears hear, earth is bound.
Forgive the poison oak, the white oleander, one’s bad side.
The faces pulsate in slow throb and push our guilt
to release life’s cold fusion, to thrust energy
in a smile twenty-three miles high, to screech, or laugh.
Jan A. Way retired from the practice of law and being a dis- trict judge in Kansas. After writing his families stories with a lot of help from friends, he found he could write non legal matter, found writer groups were filled with special people, who were encouraging, and found that he could write lines that might be poetry. After nine years, he has noticed that practice is paying off. He is proud to know each writer, painter and person who aspires to the beauty of truth and/or something an inch beyond their fingertips.
