Dangers Just out of View
Do not pursue the missing sock,
The partner to your single shoe;
Though losing either one may rock
Your sense of balance, don’t pursue,
Unduly, missing treasures: wide
Their unwed wanderings may flee,
And you might quite unsettled be
To see on capture what’s inside.
Remember as you, hunting, run,
That warmth and dark like boot or sock
Is favored as a sun-baked rock
By spider, snake or scorpion.
Stuff is ephemeral; imagination is what endures.
Real life has enough elements of adventure, romance and mystery to sustain us–indeed, to astonish and entertain quite endlessly–but if we don’t record and celebrate such magic parts of our history they are lost. If we fail to study our chronicles and journals of such marvels, they are but dust.
So the sages among us keep what documents they can and teach us as much as we’re able to learn. What, though, becomes of all this if we are ourselves not so sage? Those of us for whom history is mostly data, steeped and stopped in the past, rely on fantasy to renew in us a sense of the remarkable. The fictional, metaphorical and colorful characters, creatures and cataclysmic events we create in our arts give us vehicles for understanding the true mystical powers in our real lives. Types and archetypes remain because they represent not Things so much as Experiences, not acquisitions but states of being. Through these avatars and our vicarious living of all the extremes that we can imagine, we revisit–and can even revere–the lives that have gone before us.
Through these imaginings, we are best moved to become greater than our small natural selves. In our better selves we have hope of living out lives that might, in turn, outlive us to inspire later generations to dream beyond, to imagine greatness and loveliness not yet known. Dream on, my friends, dream on.
Be Not Ill at Ease
Around my sprockets and my spleen lurk what no doctor’s ever seen,
a plethora of arcane ills impossible to treat with pills
or pessaries, with tinctures, teas, or magic potions for disease–
not curable by overhaul of engine, tune-up, electrol-
ysis, electric shock–it’s thought by some I will infect them; not
true, though, for what seems to be feared is not contagious–
I’m just weird.
Possibilities
I think I have a hankering for things both rich and strange
To the degree that anything I love requires a change
From normalcy into a state you might consider odd
Or simply having no real weight upon the native sod
Of humankind–that is, not kin to mortals and their sort–
And if you find my life herein just makes you give a snort
Of disbelief (maybe disdain), I’ll not call it affront,
But pity you the sad refrain of living such a blunt
And circumscribed existence as mere ‘normalcy’ implies,
While I, adorned in fairy dust, take to the endless skies.
Hummingbird Unmasked
My beak’s a single fang I sink in artery or vein
And none suspect me of this drink but clinically insane
And paranoid-type fantasists whom no one else believes
When they accuse the pretty bird that flits in flowers and leaves.
Though tiny as a bumblebee, I may grow round and bloated;
The nectar of your heart is how I keep my Ruby-Throated
Good looks and family heritage (and, not the least, my name),
My shapely belly and my speed of flying fast as flame.
It’s not that I’m nefarious, invidious or rude,
But merely that I have a taste for human blood as food,
And do not fear: I’d never kill you outright when I dine—
Far rather sip and savor you as vintage claret wine.
Jester by Vocation
Think of me as a flitting fly;
I watch you with my ogling eye
From dusty corners and dank drains,
Always annoying–it remains
Your maddened wish to swat at me
And make the nasty nuisance flee,
But as you, saddened, quickly learn,
I stick to you at every turn,
For flies don’t go away with ease
Though you persist, and if you please,
Our lineage hews to this crime
Of stalking, to the end of time.
Bird-watching is easy in countryside where there’s a lot of flat land, a lot of sky and plenty of clumps of brush or trees here and there for roosting and cover. Our recent expedition to Texas Hill Country was a great occasion for it, especially since the fences, power poles and trees that line freeways are both the perfect lookout points and display pedestals for local hawks and grackles and doves. Most distinctively regional among those winged wonders catching my eye as we drove down and back were the marvelous black vultures.
I love watching them, from the graceful, majestic soaring swoops and loops they draw across the broad planes of the sky to their awkward huddling in flocks on the massive transformer towers, to those rare and delightful closeups where I can get a better look at their funny mix of magnificent feathered eagle-like bodies with those wrinkly, wizened looking little heads and their bold hooked beaks. The sudden whuff-whuff as a large bird, unseen above my head on its light-pole perch, dove over me in a low arc to switch poles was like being fanned by the wing of a passing angel the other day. Clearly my intrusion on its territory wasn’t so distressing to the buzzard either, as he opted to land on the next post over and then sat surveying our party placidly even when my husband and I came and stood directly below to gaze on the magnificent creature. He felt exceedingly well fitted for the place, letting the cold drafts ruffle his feathers just a little as he sat gazing out at Canyon Lake under the lowering skies of the first of the year.
I call that a very good Texas omen.
Stratospheric Eventualities
Calm and measureless heights of azure Texas sky
Rise streaked with silent foaming white,
The broad hot blue patterned with these delicate
Ambling clouds that stretch to cover great distance at
A leisurely, attenuated speed, always slipping noiselessly
Across branch-tops, over the brazen sun, and into
The realms of seeming outer space, asleep
Though it should be at lazy midday
Suddenly this easy traffic is crossed
By a soaring, circling pair of
Dark metallic wings, the steely black of one
Great vulture passing through to catch
The updrafts and to cycle down, surveying
His kingdom plat by plat—he’s joined, soon enough,
By would-be kings, the other buzzard princes of
The wide blue air, who comb the same
Field of clouds with their own
Gunmetal-dark brace of wings
And after a time, these too are scattered abroad at the dash
Of two, then three, sharp triangles of louder, faster, sterner steel,
As fighter jets flash by in succession,
Pull together into a tight
Formation from their first sharp linear slash, and make
A single force with which they will unzip
The sometime quiet of that great wide sky
Getting Ahead of Myself
Around that corner just ahead is some Unknown that in my head
Is not the terror-building fright that lends to terrors in the night
For pessimistic glass-half-gone, despairing people, dusk to dawn,
In nightmare hiding, room to room, expecting any moment Doom–
In my imaginings and dreams, instead, the Unknown beckons, gleams
And twinkles like a shooting star, calling to me to roam afar
Into ephemeral and great new joys from early hours to late,
Adventures, newness, glamor, thrills, all dancing at my windowsills
And hovering at door and gate just out of view–
Oh, I can’t wait!
Defying Gravity
Once upon a leafy glade, a pretty perch in sun and shade,
Where callas leapt into the day from darker places and made play
Of turning winter into spring full suddenly, the single thing
That was most lovely in that place, that clearing full of sweetness, grace
And peaceful calm, was that the birds alighting there, beyond all words
And dreams of nature, sat quite still and quiet, and a subtle thrill
Of magic held the place in thrall–as if amid a concert hall
The orchestra fell silent, yet their silver melodies still set
The air a-quiver, pulsing, live with such wild music as to thrive
Beyond its moment and to sing whether the birds sat or took wing–
The butterflies that came around this glade of gladness also found
It fit to sit rather than fly and flit about the gleaming sky,
And set their wings to capture sun rather than race about and run,
Their painted beauty neatly limned as though tall ships in port had trimmed
Their sails to rest and find surcease in this most gracious bay of peace–
And yet, the clearing’s finest gift was that no butterfly would lift
A wing disturbing stillness there, nor bird stir up the hovering air,
Nor even angel choose to float aloft, disturbing the remote
And pleasant sense of such remove as was existent in that grove–
All this to say, though all could rise and wing their way about the skies,
Each visitor the clearing drew found on arriving that she knew
It was a place whose joy and mirth might make her leap up from the earth,
Yet with serenity so blessed she chose instead to lie at rest,
By flight’s exertions not be led, but letting souls fly high instead.
Angels in the Aviary
Of winged and wondrous beings shall I tell,
Whose incandescence fills the deepest wood,
With brilliance, dazzling, pretty as it’s good,
And singing lays clear as a silver bell–
Take wing, you also, soaring wide abroad,
To sing elated tales of what is seen
From over oceans, forests rich with green
And storied mountains–palisades of God–
Let each take flight, to race the sands of time;
To see along the universe’s rim
All future iterations growing dim,
As at such speeds our eyes glaze up with rime–
Of angels such as these I tell my tale
And bid you join their swiftest ranks to fly
Above the oceans, forest, land and sky
To loveliness beside which all falls pale–
And cry, sweet birds, for happiness that we
Are joined in such angelic company.
Art-Colored Glasses 