MARCY JARVIS
Black Forest, Germany
About Marcy Jarvis
Cast out in the desert in moonlight and sand,
Boldly, in teasing, you licked at my hand.
Now, other moons beckon, you wander astray;
I'm left in the branches; an outcast in grey.
An urn in the rubble, a brick in the wall,
Now broken, now sagging, deflated beach ball.
Cruel hearted and selfish, for this is your way,
To wring this heart dry in pursuit of the grey.
Come, lover, be kind now, -- I'm weary in mind,
Curl up in this lap and cherish your find.
Nay! Snubbing and snapping, you put me away --
A dog who denies his own kin in the grey.
Ay, keep what you want, -- though my heart you deny,
You gypsy, you beggar, -- O your ways are sly!
I'll bide my own counsel, on this course I'll stay,
Despite shaggy friars in orders of grey.© April 2002, Marcy Jarvis
This poem may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
I Dug an Old Cowpoke Up Once
I dug an old cowpoke up once,
as ancient as the plains
but he had been buried so long
his hands fused with the reins.
His horse, it couldn't run no more
but petrified, it posed
as if the wild, wild west was still
as wild as we supposed.© 2006, Marcy Jarvis
This poem may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
Marcy told us about the photograph, which inspired this poem, and her latest book: It's an old iron toy that I think I dug up on one of my grandparents' bottle digs one time. It was sitting in the bottle window at my mom's house forever; she recently sent it to me and it inspired this poem.
My latest poetry collection, Advice to a Young Bivouac, has just been released and was written in this way, to the spirit of photos from around the world with the poems written directly into the comments at various photoblogs. "Bivouac! " is now available from Lulu and includes 46 colored photos from photobloggers in Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, Wales, Columbia, Canada, Germany and the U.S. It may be the first ekphrastic (a literary representation of a work of art) collection ever published in combination with the photoblogged art that inspired it.
What the Horse Has Done
The horse has hauled its last bale
uphill by light of setting sun.
The horse has run, lightly in our eyes,
tethered by traces, hames and bits,
bridled to hands that have held oats
out to it in compensation.
The horse has heaved under horrid burden
and made it all look so graceful,
nuzzled the hand with the apple,
had sweat stripped off at day's end
by a friend if it was lucky,
got turned out to pasture after
being stalled in winter, stood in mud
many a spring up to its hocks,
forelocks fallen over marble
brown eyes, switching its tail, noble
uncomplaining breathtaking beast.
© 2010, Marcy Jarvis
This poem may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
Marcy comments, "I wrote this in September of 2010 for a competition called "Help the Horse" for poems meant to be sent to a horse rescue... It's written in loving memory of not only the gentle beasts I grew up knowing, most notably our horse April, who pulled the sleigh and the roading cart..."
About Marcy Jarvis:
I grew up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State and now live in Germany's Black Forest. As you can see by the picture below (that's me and my horse Chester, ca. 1965) I'm a cowgirl poet from way back.
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