peace available, ii

in sleep's moments your hands
find mine the vision is of rooms
with windows in time and curries
smoking the touch breaks open
matter as memory days as shell's
rippled surfaces this page
reloaded your breath on my face
we walk into another room
the window open the young girl
among the flowers sun still
friendly the motes poignant as
we walk comfortable on this shore
your dream my dream our daughter
now in a house of her own

This piece is about Kimberly and myself and our relationship to our daughter Piper. Piper is an AS child and her early childhood has not been at all easy. At the same time Piper is both brilliant and remarkably creative. She can hook different things together in that way that metaphor works and I have found that I learn from her every single day. While I would not wish Asperger's Syndrome on any child, we have worked at dealing with it and have found that Piper is herself both because of and despite the condition. This poem was originally written in 2006. I have learned a lot in the ensuing years. Mostly what I know about life is how grateful I am the Lady brought me together with Kimberly Britton. That is a miracle, something I could never have predicted or even guessed at. She is the most remarkable mother I have ever known. And the very best wife. I've not done that well in the relationship department, but then along came Kimberly. Like Nicholson in that one movie, she always makes me want to be a better man. And I am a better man, now, after these years with her. And I thank the Lady for our daughter, Piper. The greatest gift that life can give you is the opportunity to see the new person discover their self.

failing to indict at 58

you didn't know my intentions
I never saw you lose
the daylight sheds my different skins
the river holds your skeleton as
daguerrotype in prehistoric times
we were lover and no one had
the patience for words

I still carry these fingers in a peanut butter jar
the same fingers that once lay in the shallow of
your shoulder blades while I thought about
learning to write (and your eyes stare out at me
from the length of the river always reminding me
that I only claim to be Osiris)

and it's weird the sun keeps coming up
I write the same movie rehearse your face
give you names through the decades
the small death comes and then with wings
leaves me once again like the flickers
of a strobe light or the dawn and the dusk
in the time machine

(are you really Isis? do you really whisper
to me from the river? your eyes penetrate
however many words I put between us and there
is no rock and roll your hands cannot stroke
out of me please not again don't tell me
that I am only idealising you we were once
lovers)

you don't know my intentions (I suspect myself)
I never saw you lose (I often thought I was your loss)
I changed my hands today they were worn
you crossed yourself in the river as I walked past
(you don't really believe it you just do it to bug me)

you know I've suspected you for years
I've the evidence the design
all I lack is the motive

Again another attempt to understand what might have been going on in my personal life. I like the business abut Osiris and Isis, though it switches the story around a bit. But the treating of "hands" as instruments that can be removed and replaced is using metaphor as it should be used. Hands denote the very act of writing these words. Wearing them out means this process has sucked the person dry and he desperately needs to get new hands, do something different.

I've decided that since no one reads this blog (seriously, very very few hits at all) I can pretty much say whatever I want. The chances that someone I know who's emotional reality will be hurt is almost impossible because they would feel constrained to read my poems, and that is a step most human beings will not take. Now perhaps GD will skip to the commentary and read it first. But most people will assume that you need to read the lines to get into the commentary. I am not sure anyone needs to read anything. That is how it is in this universe.

Meanwhile I go through these pieces and clean them up again, and try and find a happy medium between making them comprehensible and keeping that which I find beautiful in them, the lyric aspects of the language and its constructive music.

I particularly like the final lines because they resonate that which was in me at that time. I truly do not understand why * did this to me. Why could she possibly have gotten out of it all? I am sure that GD would say that she wasn't that aware, and that she played the game on a day to day basis. And there would be some truth to that. But I have those hundred odd poems, and there is a great deal more there than can be accounted for. It seems a stupid game from this temporal distance. So, I guess I wasted a significant portion of my life, evaluating it that way. That would be no surprise; in certain terms I am clearly a terrible failure. Yet, I ask the Lady for Her mercy and She brings it to me every day in the hugs and kisses of Kimberly Britton and Piper. Life goes on, despite your confusions. An important lesson and a useful one.

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.