the city of the future

the city of the future
nurses open sores plays
elect a mayor watches
legislators spit under their
desks and vote against
the ERA like it wasn't
really baseball

the explosions tear me up
I feel Vachel's despair
come hopefully out of the
high school across the street
each afternoon and I cannot
help but think this Mars
and these creatures aliens
that do not know the bells
that ring within them

it is so easy to call these avenues
streets of sin and graft
but that stove-piped scarecrow
still walks here still
rings his heart in the prairie
wind still knows that even
time does not divide us

and I love this city of the future
for in my own backyard
grows the tree of laughing bells
and I can just hear them
in the early morning their music
fey and dangerous and impossibly
bright


Another tribute to Vachel Lindsay. Both his poem about Springfield, the City of the Future, and the poem, the Tree of Laughing Bells contribute to this statement. I lived in Springfield for so very many years, and part of me remains there to this day. It is a wondrous and magical place, so incredibly profaned by money and power. But in some ways that makes it so very fascinating. Ghostly, though, for me. Alison once said that every time she came to Springfield it seemed there was a ghost in every house she saw. And of course she wrote the magnum opus statement on Springfield, "stillborn" that was published in the Lindsay tribute, The Village Magazine in 1979. It's a great statement on escaping the City of the Future. I stayed and tried my best to bring Springfield a little closer to Lindsay's vision. I did know some wonderful writers and artists while there, and I got to act on stage with some great and talented folks. I don't regret living there, though I may regret many of the things I did and said in those years.

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.