Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once.
Rilke (Ninth Duino Elegy)
By Lois P. Jones
I found a city of narrow passageways
where the day filtered in,
dove gray, sheltered and soft.
Sometimes an entire life is spent in museum light
and you become a part of its diffusion.
I might be anyone.
A stranger caught beneath the repeating arc
of portico, each curve rising in my rib.
I might have been the bas relief I passed under.
The saint I was.
The ruin I became.
Once, I awoke in Venetian twilight
and crept barefoot down the stone steps to the water
to watch my face tremble with the moon.
This was before they mistook me for a whore ––
then moored me to a life of silk and pearls
and the salty breath of counts and countesses
but I was no cortigiane di lume but a woman worthy of sin.
And they said angel /
are you drowning your bedsheets …
in the moon’s pool water?
And I said I spend my time
like a coin on its back shining for no one.
Satisfied as a hinge pin swung open.
A hand bell that’s found its clapper.
One life could never be enough. We long for what
we can’t explain –
like the four-poster bed in an antique shop
I wept over for days – this feeling of a small child
who walked toward me through the grass
but never reached my hand.
Rilke asks, but to the other realm… what can be taken?
And I say everything follows us from room to room
our lives hungry for what we feed them in the dark.
Worlds begin like this.
“cortigiane di lume” means lady of the lamp.
angel / are you drowning your bedsheets … in the moon’s pool water? ~ Elena Karina Byrne
but to the other realm… what can be taken? ~Rilke
Lois P. Jones awards include the Bristol Poetry Prize, the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a single poem, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. She was a finalist in 2023 for the annual Mslexia Poetry Competition judged by Helen Mort and in 2022 for both the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the 2021 Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition.
Jones’ work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets – Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Plume, Guernica Editions, Vallentine Mitchell of London; Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Narrative and others. Her first collection, “Night Ladder” was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2017 and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a poetry collection. She is a screening judge for Claremont University’s Kingsley-Tufts Awards. Since 2007 Jones has hosted KPFK’s Poets Café, co-produced the Moonday Poetry Series and acted as poetry editor for Pushcart and Utne prize-winning Kyoto Journal.
Jones participated in the 2022 Cheltenham Poetry Festival, the 2018 Houston Poetry Fest, the Bristol, England Poetry Festival, the Eyewear Publishing launch at Goodenough College, London, and attended conferences in San Miguel de Allende Mexico from 2005 to 2010 as well as Languedoc Rousseau, France with Pascale Petit.
Her literary works have been translated to Korean for Miju Poetry and Poetics by the Korean Poets Society of America (2019) as well as Chinese for Mirrors and Windows published by Guernica Editions. Other work has been included in Arabic for the Publisher Weekly, Arabic Edition “Al-Nasher Al-Usboei” magazine in 2015.
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