Lois P. Jones

HOUSEKEEPING:  Frida’s Future Kiss

At 26, Frida Baumgartner was Rilke’s housekeeper at Muzot from 1921
until 1926 when he died.  She never married.

After the palm reader told her no man would ever claim her, she asked to be claimed
by the white horse she dreamt of each evening. It always began with a nuzzle, a warm
breath, a kiss made of clouds that hovered and finally released its rain. As if life only
existed in the closed rooms of her eyes.  And there, the scent of crushed grapes and
the shadow of a horse becoming human. Not a satyr but a transmogrification like a
moon-impersonating streetlamp.  A tenderness that lived inside the small of her waist,
his hand, this gentleness, and the tongues that mixed their silence. She does not need
her knees, fingers, thighs, saliva – only this window where she looks into the mind’s
vanishing frame. A flutter like a valve opens and he turns to her. Their love like silk
sheets toppling over the wicker basket.

Author: Lois P. Jones

Lois P. Jones was the shortlist prize winner in the 2018 Terrain Poetry Contest judged by Jane Hirshfield.  Other awards include the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the Bristol Poetry Prize judged by Liz Berry and the Tiferet Poetry Prize, with work thrice listed for the Bridport Prize and the National Poetry Competition. Jones has work published or forthcoming in Plume, Guernica Editions (2021), New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell of London); Narrative, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly and American Poetry Journal. Her poem Reflections on La Scapigliata was a featured film-poem for the 2019 Visible Poetry Project.  She is the Poetry Editor for Kyoto Journal and host of Pacifica Radio’s Poets Café on KPFK.  Her first collection of poems Night Ladder is published by Glass Lyre Press.

Plume: Plume Issue #124 December 2021