Piper

Again I hear the silver bells
Lindsay’s words remind me
We all are faeries when we start
And you Sweet One are
Certainly a Faery child
Coming, as you do, from the
Lady’s laughter
Your mother’s honest smile
Upon your face
Your eyes clear windows
To the Land of our peace
The energetic knowing of
Your smile, ancestral lips blowing
Bubbles in the morning
And then you howl in your
Italian crib, time to rise
Time to Rise
Tim Rise
The Piper must be paid
With the coin in this
Never hardened heart

I remember Joel in his crib
I remember Paige in her crib
I remember Piper in the morning
True Child of Our Lady’s Love.

3/2004

Vachel Lindsay's Tree of Laughing Bells still haunts my vision. Lindsay was an american poet of the first part of the last century. Now out of favor with the academics because he was (at least overtly) a xtian and a rhyming poet, few people remember his work. I lived in Springfield, Illinois for very many years and that was his hometown. I have pretty much read all of his stuff and that is a feat, for a great deal of it is dreadful. But much of it is magical. Particularly the Tree of Laughing Bells. For Lindsay the laughing bells signify the wild and true sense of being alive first felt before consciousness lays meaning on it all. The heart, laughing. There is also a dark side to this concept, but for the sake of this poem I dwell in the innocence of my child, first awake, smiling at me and at the tapestry of the Lady that hangs above her bed. The best part of my life has been the time I have spent with my three children. I have had a very different life than most. And the gift of this life is the fact that I have been allowed to spend thousand of hours with my children when they were first here. Despite failed relationships and failed marriages. Despite lack of funds and loss of jobs. I have been honored with so many hours spent with these new humans. You learn more from the babies than from any other source. At least, I have.

Speech

The humming song
Phonemes in strings
Jumbly baby truest melody
Waving sticks tympanic
Choice and howls
Cheerios and cheers
The humming song
Sheer joy of air and moisture
In the new mouth.

3/2004

Doorway

spring nights the child appears her crib the doorway
fibonacci constant the golden rectangle in pkd's delirium
but this girl lives the joy that comes from passing through
one leaf is but another version and blessed is Our Lady
the Version among versions the faint trace of new
growth in the air a Marriage in the wings the warmth
awakening us the music of the natural sensuous like
the lines of violin and saxophone uttered by the wild folk
gathering at the edge of this sight: the little girl is there
taking her first steps into the Lady's garden,
leaf and stone, brook and grasshopper, fire and wind,
the earth our bed and the water our blood through
this doorway we pass, again and again, ageless in our hope

5/2004


PKD refers to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The fibonacci constant is a mathematical relationship, 1:1.6, that appears over and over again in nature. Dick believed in things like doorways from one reality to another and envisioned them in the correct proportion. The child in this poem is Piper. I was thinking here of where she had been before she came to be with us. I believe in at least some form of reincarnation, although I don't necessarily believe that one's existence in any way presupposes what one's next existence will be. I do believe in kharma, in a certain fashion, but it has more to do with being faced with the un-truths we use to manipulate ourselves and others in this world.

The egyptians had it right, being weighed against the feather of truth.

Great Song

Standing on the beach at Granliden
In the starry starry night of a cold December
Looking at the largest full moon ever
Accepting the melody of the silver wheel
Looking for my role in Her meaning.
& Granliden so cold and beautiful at once
Great Song. In New Hampshire. 1999.


Ela White emailed me there would be the brightest full moon in a century. Kimb and I went down to the beach at Granliden, where her parent's condo is, on Lake Sunapee and we stood out there in the freezing cold and looked up at that beautiful sight for quite awhile. I make a slight pun here. Liden means lake. Lied means song. So Granliden means great lake. But that night it was a great song.

The Lady

Annaliese the breaths of my days
grow small leafs in a pagan design
symmetrical the constant golden
dramatic skein of another life
leads the seasons notes falling
from the flute truth served as best
one can your frail figure the woman
in the wings candied memory
which is thy deception? The leaves
upon the wind in their dance specific
stories telling the solar river and
the lunar catharsis points reached
gates opened poems spoken?
Annaliese you are there unremembered
truly but the song and the wind and
the summer of this life has now passed.

6/2004


The name, Annaliese, came to me in a dream last spring. I associate it with the primal name of the Goddess, Ana/Anna/Anna-Nin. Perhaps it is an indicator of a previous existence. For a long time I believed we are reincarnated in certain social groups for reasons that have to do with a subtle moral mechanic. I am well into Autumn now, at 54.

Kharma

“ . . .we all shine on/like the stars and the moon and the sun”
Instant Kharma, John Lennon


Gary you are in some country
Tonight New England is it snowing
The list of moments is stark
You play with your website
The final pieces of the reconstruction
Another vision from the deep
Waters you have always wandered
The ocean of humanness the bridge
You crossed in Massachusetts
A hundred years ago the times
We walked that alley on scarritt
Snow crunching under my
Salvation army shoes
Planetary excess still a friend
& when you thought of me
Did you think of what it means
To trust someone? I wonder.
I lost so much when those
Ghosts left this latitude for the north
The reflection dimmed, the question
Came. I lost you. I lost the others
Gary your moments are still
The jeweled connections to
The Starry Dynamo (Kerouac)
And I can feel myself spinning
And I am shining, again.

5/2004