This is the trail of my
poetry, all I have really, from the early 1970's to the last poems. While I have been a prolific visual artist, and fairly so with community arts as well, poetry has not poured forth from me except in certain poignant moments. And myth, it seems, has always been present.
I find these poems are
touchstones along the path, lucid and sometimes numinous artifacts that, by touching them
again, enable me to renew my acquaintance with those luminous moments of
insight, love, loss, and above all, the sheer beauty of being alive. Beyond
that, there is a pattern, a woven pentimento that glitters beneath each seeming
surface, a pattern that enfolds me from young adulthood to old age and belongs to all and
none of those "identities". There is a voice here I recognize
as uniquely my own. Archiving these poems in this little collection, even better,
having the pleasure of illustrating them............. has allowed me to hear
that voice again.
I
made this Collection for that reason, and as a Gift or Offering to any fellow Wayfarer who may chance upon it as
well. If you find a resonance here with your own voice, I am pleased indeed.
Saraswati
Love
is Saraswati's river
flowing
through our lands.
She will feed the rice fields,
She
will accept our woven offerings.
She will bear our ashes
and
the fires of Kintamani
to
the sea.
Formless,
she
neither takes nor gives:
we
impose these significances
upon
the flowers we cast in her.
From birth to death,
Saraswati's
river sustains us to the sea.
(2000)
ON THE BEACH
Oct. 11th, 2001
One month after the world ended.
The little island world we, the privileged few,
could pretend was safe, forever, and righteous.
The fallen towers, the fiery messengers
of unfathomable destruction yet to come.
Tourists walk here, barefoot on the beach.
They came here, I imagine, as I have
to remember, not to forget.
To remember a red dog and a yellow-haired child
as they enter the water, their cries of goodly shock
and honest forevers cold, blue, and always new.
A white heron stands balanced in perfect equanimity upon one leg.
Wave forms overlay my feet, transparent hieroglyphs of infinity:
Her way of speaking
Her manifest, unspoken words.
A brown man lies spread eagled on the cliff.
He is cast between sky and sea and land,
sand sunk, leaf-molten, blackberry thorn, the Green.
Toes, fingers, flesh reaching into the green redeeming Earth.
He is rooting himself. He is taking himself back.
I lie down in grateful imitation,
a stranger in companionable human proximity,
sharing this rite of re-membering.
I see a girl, walking on this very beach.
Yesterday, and 30 years ago (how did I get here from there?)
She is sourcing, sourcing the one who lives here,
a river Goddess with no name.
She has made a mermaid offering
of sand and stick and seaweed.
I can hear her sand prayers sound here still.
Wave resonant, purified by fire and time,
memory rooted, sky seeded, they ring true still,
here, in Gaia.
(2001)
