2 Poems

CAUTION

Newly divorced, I wanted
sexy friends and friendly sex.
I found you who knew her heart
was cold; romance, a failed dream.
A perfect match. We wanted
to get laid. Our bodies fit
too well. You advised caution.
But our spirits fit too well.
We tried to stop at respect
and adoration. Our minds
fit too well. We admitted love
and learned the truth of caution.
We whisper the same promise:
I’m as reckless with my heart
as I am careful with yours.



AFTER

After the wisteria
shatters and honeysuckle
becomes a fragrant tangle
at woods edge, it seems the world
has always been this lush green.
The memory of branches
stripped bare brown is powerless
to prevent the moment
from stretching to forever.
And vice versa. The moment,
whether hopeful or helpless,
grows into a destiny.
If it isn’t yours, just seize
the moment after.

Merlefest 2008

Carolina Chocolate Drops Sweeten the Night

The Man Speaks

Saturday at America's largest roots music festival was messy, to put it kindly. The rains came that morning and turned the parking fields and the festival grounds ashen gray. Still, a muddy day at Merlefest is better than any work day... ever.

Doc Rolls Along

There is so much to recall about this year's four day journey through music paradise, and I will get to that in due time. Much to recount. Much to admire. So many fine threads of memory to spin into a fine cloth to keep the spirit warm in the days and months to come. Stay tuned.

Waiting and Cleaning

Outside your house in the red dusk
With the yellow glow of roses
In the window,
waiting for the invitation,
that never comes.

In my kitchen red sauces and
Squash blossoms on the fire simmer
Into the night.
The scorched caramel is washed away
At day's cleaning.

Glimpses of Divinity

GLIMPSES OF DIVINITY


1. Beginnings

In the gravel of our drive,
I built roads and rivers, woods
and mountains. I was the force
that animated the trucks
and cars, horses and knights,
cowboys and soldiers. I was
God until Mother called me
for lunch.

I wore a clip-on bow tie
to visit God’s house. There were
so many of them. How could
this fieldstone Methodist one
be His? I didn’t feel a presence
except when sun-lit stained glass
colored floating motes with shafts
of tinted light. Where did God
sleep? Maybe the Baptists
built Him a bedroom.

In the woods I was at home.
Sitting in the cool green fronds
or racing down a rabbit path
through the tangle on the tail
of my dog, I became another
force of nature.

Because my skin was so fair,
Daddy took me to the beach
early. The rising sun cast
a glittering path to Africa.
Before I learned to swim,
I’d claw through the shallow surf
pretending to be a boat
or some newly created
life-form, safely tumbled
on the heaving breast of the sea.



2. Bottoms

As a teenager, I ate enough
psilocybin to see God often.
Shiva danced in oaks. Gaia
blessed Buddha as Raven croaked
a re-creation. Addictions
trumped the divine.

I listened to Pathetique
and I reconsidered God.
My closed-eye-visions resolved
into clear patterns flowing
from Greek keys to paisley
to Celtic knots. Focusing
on space or the denim stretched
on my thigh, I imagined
a force that flows away.

A moment before launching
a sixty thousand ton missile
from the center of a submarine,
I muttered a foxhole prayer.
Don’t let us break in two.

At the bottom, all is brown
or grey or black. A hopeless,
helpless place where I lost all
my answers.



3. Births

In the morning I prayed,
Help me.
At bedtime I prayed,
Thank you,
and, Who are You?
One night She replied,
I am the one who answers
your prayers.
I found faith enough to heal.

At the moment of release
our faces shed all our years.
We rejuvenate. We fly
between the bonfires, maiden
and swain, nymph and faun,
Goddess and God. On our lips
we taste immortality.

An unseen crow caws,
pops its head above the clover
like a black thistle, dances
two hops to the side, and flies
into the woods. She shows me
a dozen paths easily missed.

One day in every twenty,
at sunset I light a lamp.
I honor Her flame all night,
waiting for dawn to bring us
face to face, waiting
for the world to catch fire.

Flow

The wine flows freely tonight.
All else is scraps;
They lie there untended and happy.

Nefertiti must have felt this
loosening of restraint.
She drank and prayed to the one.

There is power in the grape,
so why should we worry about
unkempt papyrus?

She died knowing the one
thing we abhor in our waking hours:
the unison of gods,

the Solidarity of drunken men
born to create order when
they come around.

Let's not rouse them.

This place

I keep wondering what we're doing here.... how we reached the point when technology overlaps intimacy. This medium has become so much the place where dreams and fantasies are played out; since we dare not do so in our real lives. That's a good thing in some respects, but I'm struggling with the implications. Has the internet become our lover, our collective mistress?

So many words flow through the medium every hour, every minute. I've had to learn a new vocabulary: it's a kind of slang that is found only on the blogs... a kind of urban slang which, therefore, requires an urban slang dictionary. You can find it online, as you can find everything else. I've been thinking about research, and how the old timers used to slave through those huge massive County registrar books that contained property records (slaves included), birth and death records, marriage license information.... Is that time past? It was very tactile. It presented itself as a physical connection to the past, to the fate of your ancestors.

To all my friends from the RUG, I miss you all and wonder what a true meeting would be like? Are we so ensconced in the technology, so comfortable behind the facade, that we would not recognize each other without the digital barrier? Many of us have met each other, but do the same subjects emerge in our fleshy conversations; or do we resort to the age old standbys: weather speak and career choices, and how's the husband or the wife? Fine, thank you. We're all fine! I do not mean to wax cynical here in this forum that has given me new life, a forum for immediate expression. I question the technology even as I cling to it as a child to his mother's breast....

I simply don't know the answer. Perhaps that's the point. All new technology has brought with it profound changes in how humans relate to one another. I don't understand web speak, but I do understand our need for connection; dare I say, our need for acceptance and self expression. I do love you all. Elaine, you are a delightful academic who does not flaunt your degrees and your great knowledge. Eve, you are a wondrous mystery, a deep well of thought, the great interrogator. Mark, you are my friend, even from a distance; thus proving that the ether can pass along great affection. You have taught me things that men should know. Susan, you know how I feel about you, despite the fact that we've been in the same physical space a portion of perhaps seven days in our entire lives. Tim, et. al. I am intrigued by you. I have never met you; but the internet brought us together.

So, what now? I am along here tonight, relishing the soft amber sunset and the song of chicadees, mockingbirds, nuthatches..... neighbors..... the smell of cut grass... the fading light of a South Carolina day in the heart of spring. Given these gifts, what is my complaint? IT is that so many on this planet struggle just to live another day; and I have the nerve to question my life's choices? So many in Haiti eat dirt pies to live. They are closer to the essence of life than I could ever imagine. So many in the Congo, in Darfur, live in fear of the death squads.... their children live in the moment, with little hope of hope.

Billions go hungry or live under the oppression of an old man regime in China that survives by suppressing the truth. Their mega growth is capitalism gone wild.... a convenient subterfuge. See how free our capitalists are to get rich and to inflate the price of steel for all the world? Pay no attention to that man blocking the tank in Tiananmen Square. He is of no consequence.

I've said enough. I've rambled without purpose, without intent. Isn't it delicious?

Spring at the Farm

The mermaid swims to the pond's surface and deposits a jewel, a beautiful poem about the woods, on the shore, smiles, and vanishes. Greenman, ever diligent, hears the water rippling and shyly tosses a couple of poems into the pond after her. Zoe watches from the back porch, where she and Princess Afternoon do yoga postures. Zoe asks Princess, "Did you hear the warblers this morning? They were in the tall pines behind the barn. I think the Magnolia warblers have returned for summer."

Plink-plonk-plink

Greenman hears a plink in the pond. He peers out of the solid wood and vast stretch of fern-blanketed earth on the verge of being swallowed up by night. "Maybe I'll plink a couple of poems into the pond, too."



BEFORE DADDY DIED

Before Daddy died, I didn’t feel
like an orphan the month between
Father’s day and his birthday.

Before Daddy died, I thought
the ocean safe, the forest
friendly, and life unending.

Before Daddy died, I knew who
to call when the name of a tree
or flower eluded me.

Today I ask him anyway.
Like school vocabulary words,
he says to look it up.



THE LOVE OF CROWS

When you love me, you invite
the crows. I open the door
and they caw good morning.
At each curve, they remind me
of past deaths suffered or caused.
You must hear the whole story.
Seeing them pick some last scrap
from the road and fly into
the woods, I’m guided to tell
a truth. They will follow you.
When I’m away crows will perch
on your mailbox. When we are
together, they’ll dance a jig
of mischief. Raucous laughter
caws at us or with us.
When you love me, you invite
the crows to foretell futures,
black as the space between stars,
filled with dreams. All true.

answer in the wood

This cool green wood that silent waits
guarded, watchful
catching the last clear rays of light
with upturned boughs of verdant trees
before the mist rises to veil the calm-laden valley
It softens the heat, lightens the gloom of evening, and
for brief silver seconds the world seems to shimmer, not really there,
but an intangible thing;
Solid wood and vast stretch of fern-blanketed earth
seems momentarily fragile,
on the verge of being swallowed up by night.
Here is where I played,
I stood in the shadows and watched--
my mind alive,
hearing finely tuned,
straining to catch the essence of the wooded green
in the treasure chest of my imagination.
I could not hold it for more than a moment,
the vibrant pitch of waiting, growing greenery
would filter through when all was silent,
and as quickly, was lost, when I turned away and
answered the call of the outside world.

I must return to the wood,
go back and walk those paths
along which I ran as a child
when I was too busy chasing dreams
to gather in the wonder that lay about me.
To examine bark, and leaf, and twig,
touching needle-strewn beds of moss,
gazing intently at the pattern of life within
each tiny sprout and curling lichen
Something rests here, which helped me
to make peace with my world,
and I need to find that, to once more make it a part of me
the young part, the growing, wondering, reflecting part,
the part of me which accepts,
and believes in the future,
and grows wiser, knowing.


As the wood, we grow tall, stretching forth our branches,
we answer the call of the whippoorwill,
our voices teasing, beckoning,
wanting deep within our hearts to mate,
but always holding something back, something vast,
precious, and green...
...answer, tell, pray, answer, look, tell, answer, answer, tell:
Believe, said the spirit, and isn't it a shame that the
legend is such that the magician had to die before he could
communicate to his wife that one small intelligence?
that love surpasses even Death?

We should know this, and trust in it, and go on,
wiser,
knowing.
What is it that we do not acknowledge?
I think that deeper than Fear, it is our Want,
our need of soulful replenishment
our craving of a concrete essence to re-affirm our own choices,
our own decisions.
Laughing, we mate, we do not think that a lifetime will be so long
to share with another.
Laughing, we were wrong.
So misguided.
We are lost, after a time. Life itself eludes us, we look upon one another as at the door of death itself, and recoil –
aghast, shivering, disgusted.
Depleted, indifferent, yet still tightly nursing the flame of want within our own being.
And so we return to the wood, we look at every tree and branch,
and slowly, we understand.
We grow old, we wither, we die, but
though individually the trees of the wood do just that, the forest remains.
Whole. Vital. Alive.
With every death, a new seed sprouts forth,
to feed upon the old.
Either within the wood, or just outside of it.
Love doesn't die; the men and women do,
so says old Will in the midst of rising waters and thrashing wild palms;
and so right he was.
Love doesn’t die, it outlives us all.
We can hold nothing fast to us
when we are constantly changing, evolving, growing
into someone else ourselves.
The very limbs we use to clasp will wither away to dust,
and grow again, as flowers, new fronds of sun-kissed willow,
and the tiniest of earth-bound leaves.
So. Like the seeds of larch, oak and pine,
we too reach out to grow new roots,
and embrace the Death when we can do no more,
draw from it, extract its nourishment
adding strength to the stand from within ourselves,
expanding our very breadth,
breathing life into death
with new seeds to sow,
ideas and sustenance that we’ve brought in
on winds aloft, from far away.
---Susannah

Note: This is an old version of a poem; the final version was much shorter. Posted in honor of National Poetry Month.

Free Tibet

http://www.tibet.org/index.html