COMING FROM THE CINEMA I MET MY SOUL

COMING FROM THE CINEMA I MET MY SOUL (for Dame Maggie Smith)

reimagining a PBS Charlie Rose interview with

Dame Maggie Smith, the poem beng her answer to

the questions about her "process"...in the form of a dramatic monologue with her own soul.] it was a good interview originally but he could never get her to answer anything regarding how she acted,or prepared for acting...so I made up an answer for myself PLEASE NOTE THIS POEM IS NOT POLITICAL AT ALL; IT IS MERELY A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM I HAD SOME TIME AGO ON HOW I IMAGINE THE SOUL OF THE ACTRESS AND HER LOVE FOR ACTING]I really don't know how I do it, Dame Maggie finally said I seem to remember her saying. "It's a mystery to me as well.".]..

coming from the cinema I met my soul

caught in the tread of the moviegoers exiting;

whirling in the turnstiles.

dream on dream in the seam of all this seeming

I feel carpet-tacked under the shuffling

sometimes in the scarlet lobbies of the world

she said to me, on the escalator, going down.

is poetry dead? is there an arrow in my back

skimming the moonlight at the crossroads?

it snows on the screen and I am cold

and stitched by the anti-heroes to the track

with my best silver sash I never lent them

and only God to lean on when the train comes.

somewhere there is thick soup and a pale blue shawl,

Chopin’s etudes and the blossoming trees

beyond all this popcorn and the flatlands’ flash.

and is my jeweled kaleidoscope

still trained on the moons

I left for you at home

dissolved in sequined weeping near the weeping cherry?

oh nowhere do I find

the citron country sung of long ago:.

the silken maps the missing compasses

for the kingdoms broadly confiscated, never atoned for…

oh what can I begin to say

who still can see in bright array

the subtexts of the brave and free

shifting imperceptibly

from stage to stage.

at the gate of every village left on earth gold coins

rained down her face instead of tears

as in the ancient fairytales when the sun appears

or near the atriums, decked in pearl-on-pearl

she merely stood

embroidered with laments from the dream-time.

unraveling:

like party favors at a birthday.

or what can I pretend to know

who saw the weeping cherry go

in winds that heeded not my will

in a tinfoil crown that’s shining, still…

is there feeling anymore she asked the straggling children

in the afternoon-

before the sun fizzles or the universe or

wouldn’t you like to know.

what is the sun they said

descending like no twelve

princesses ever could.

she fastened her words to the spokes of 

the winds behind them-

are you lost she said, almost in velvet

prodding with a violet hatpin

a tearful music, missing home:

 ..brief -  charioteers-

in the mesmerizing tread of the tread and the tread of the knock-off party shoes

plodding on in front of you, and filing on and on

into a dungeon, and not a jeweled mine?

oh Love from love cannot be severed when

enchantment’s  thistledown blown down the opaline anything

chimed from the stage God would have staged for you forever

in any summer evening’s lemon sheen…

lean, lissomely, to hear

her least soliloquy in a lilac picture hat

for the last rose leaving…

take the pale green daydream

wrapped for you in snow.

I really think you should

she whispered to the last child in line,

the one with the Juliet snood

and the cherry car-coat…

it may do you good.

mary angela douglas 23, 24, 25, 26 march 2013

Where Is The Beautiful Kingdom Where You Were

[to Van Cliburn at the piano playing “intuitively”  (July 12, 1934-February 27, 2013)]

where is the beautiful kingdom where you were

whenever you played music; its Niagras, at first. misted, far away?

the secret listener knew, surprised by an inner chromatic marveling

intensified from unseen castle to castle as you

sorted out the battlements

or were welling up from so many underground streams all at once-

iridescent in the night’s own studio with the windows flung wide open…

scattering the sweet pea blossoming sounds ..

until we were as you, yourself, unwaveringly,

solely comprised of music as the Heavens are of stars

from then on…

this is the mystic’s parade and vanishing

the soul said softly to the Trinity, no longer mystified:

is this how we’ve been breathing underwater all this time

imagining we heard music asked the child

and lapsed into a fairytale silence,

the rest is happiness.

these were the heart’s requirements always when

wishing through the lens of another world

the one we’d missed, somehow, like a cherry bright bus

at the corner of the everyday

that just comes once going somewhere special

in the childhood of a Spring

that can’t be cherished twice  yet now we hear again

the hue of something glimpsed, glittering that flits away

at the corner of the eye or through the eye of sound

Rildia would say the clarity

that can’t stop pouring out with a

drifting loveliness that must not die

oh searing everyone.or  only you, who are always listening – listening…

for the taproot of music startled into daylight’s continents.

And glistening…

now you are going away

taking

all this light, grieving. piano, pianissimo, sown while

dreaming concert halls keep the glow of something

we have lost again like children in the long-ago

thinking it’s still in our pockets with the last lemon drop, small

petal of the honeysuckle;

too young to know that the ripples rippling out from the

genial smile, the cadenced voice the sunlit heights

will not return just because you asked them to.

or how much it can cost to unlock a world.

but where are the snipers at Beauty now?

what have they dreamed into leaves and flowers recently

who named your career short-lived, too little gleaned

too much too soon, too

unassuming in intellect as if it weren’t enough to

be glad for the music in you and to give it all away.

every time you played for anyone:

these  lustres of the

piano moon dropping no grace notes over Texas, filling the room

as if it were the universe.

and it was.

dumbfounded, they would have been then and crystal faceted, themselves

before they found the crooked mirror things to say out of envy

when you called the beautiful

kingdoms down delineated and delineated

and all around us, green or snowy fragrances

alive as L’Isle Joyeuse floated out to us on a breeze

in the lone colours of your piano only

or the rose of Rosina painting your music red

crisp garnet hummingbird rubied and rubied...

as you distilled the deepening shadows of your blue gold fissions

charming the ineffable

wreathing, joyously near at hand

beyond all vividness, kindness we knew to be possible in this world

until we understood, weeping violet,-

turreted:

it was there within our own hearing

the tomb of buried Music emptied

into the singing Empyrean.

mary angela douglas 13, 14, 15, 16 march 2013

Note on poem:  I loved listening to Van Cliburn very much as a child in the first and second grades and from then on when I first heard his recordings in my grandmother's piano studio.

Rildia in the poem as you may know was his mother (Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn) who taught him marvelously well from age 3 to 17 when he was under the guidance of Madame Rosina Levine who, according to the author, Howard Reich who wrote a beautiful biography of Van Cliburn,  (titled only Van Cliburn, Thomas Nelson Publishers. copyright 1993) saw in his music the color red.  (which I have slightly elaborated on to indicate the richness of her teaching him in the Russian style, the grand manner enhancing what he learned from Rildia Bee.

I recognize Van Cliburn meant and means much to people all over the world including his fellow Texans and the Russian people he always held in his heart by his own admission.

To me, he was the first great music I ever remember hearing (although I head Chopin and Debussy first rather than the Tchaikovsky and Rachmoninoff), therefore, the reference to the beautiful Debussy piece he played so well and which I listened to after he died with tears:

L'Isle Joyeuse.

Checking Out Of The Punch And Judy Show

[to Rod Serling

to the Russian people,  forever  the guardians of Poetry

to all the Americas in my heart

to the poets of all lands, seen and unseen…]

“since in a net I seek to catch the wind.”

-Sir Thomas Wyatt “Whoso List to Hunt”

“Never forget!...I love you all, from the bottom of my heart…

Forever!”

-Van Cliburn, September 8, 2012, Fort Worth, Texas

(and to my Mama, this small bouquet is rendered)

it’s all candy striped at first you think and carouseled;

you gladly give your hand

and laugh when the others laugh at the same scene

in the movie.

and love the wafting of the buttered popcorn;

sidewalks where petals strew the soda fountained stoop;. blue twilights-

and treading carefully because you still can’t see

your soft red leatherette shoes in the theatre  dark;

you’re waiting for night vision to set-in

gemstoned like Christmas.

but when the score’s your own they turn and stare

and you’re aware the line has suddenly turned surly

for the larkspur ticket torn in half  

is you in your own stories

thrashed candy striped oh not in jest                                             

and sotto voce off-camera, always,

spurned lark beating at a thousand windows

so that it can’t be proved in court or to main street

glitterati  who thought why, everything was fine in study hall

with the one book only and the music stand

stuck to her hands just the way we glued it on in accessories

or was she born yesterday

                                     

you know how she is

living on her own at the doll house museum

near the Carnegie

now that she’s the jester that can’t find the grey-eyed king

in the stereoscopic parlour pacing tinily.

but lingering with her pianoforte,

melting in colour in the final frame.

pure pink spun sugar, vanishing, where?

in a sweetheart neckline in this weather?

into the greenwood.

one could well wonder,  unwrapping the paper cone

only holding air now, a bunch of pale blue ribbons

brought far from the farther fair

oh dear, and promised it looks like

only to you in her last letters

on lavender paper.

oh vellum pressed flowers in a volume of Keats

or Akhmatova or Barrett-Browning in Moroccan leather

slight tissue of India ink.

pressed pleats  pressed out  forever in my poem.

dear pink linen words, keep wrinkling.

(and with eyelet embroideries).

or you’re on the other side of the house-front and it’s sprinkling.

put out in the rain, bad prescient cat, no cream and no gelato!

observe the directorial gleam

on the puppet face smushed in or is it  carry the day, dissolving

in the hose green town with its toy train circling back

from the water tower for you forever in your best black velvet

winking out with the Giant stars…

you’re at the interview within the hour without

another dress to your sunburnt name

sent home to the mannequin station

we’ve just a thimbleful of dream to sell you

but you know you were there

on your one semi-formal occasion out,

oh party-frock laden lament

in a pencil skirt from work that will have to do and a notebook

when the child dissolved in the magic spring

blows in again on your sound stage kitchenette

with her black cherry warning: “ it’s not what you think, remember?”

she washes the Haviland in the sink.

stir the double boiler cocoa double-quick  she says

I want a raspberry phosphate...

why didn’t you listen when the sun melted  on the canvas?

now there’s no Time, I wept for the flickering.

and the Cross lifts shakily from earth  as in the painting by Dali

on the necklace of this dizzy universe Christ,

what did they do to you I cried

in our lost episodes by the stained glass props-

the rhinestone summonses.                                                                               

but you’ll pack early by moonlight

this time, Titania,

ill met by sponsors everywhere

if only they could find you

and just as rich suns are creaming in your mind…

the cocoa boils over, scalding the milk

for the lilac ticket-holders massed outside

thick pure green shutters.

you’re in the wrong line for the aliens they shouted.

reality cried in opals.

when suddenly you were asked rose-red to dance:

wistful in voile by the cake and punch:

by whose list to hunt.

there’s the little girl with the fetched pink handled scissors

from the dressing table,

the gauze spooled bandages , ticked off-

the baby’s breath,. a tiny drop of tea-rose perfume…::

old marionette, with your cold strings beautifully bleeding

through the fabric of His maritimes she sighed lightly

here’s my corsage for you, a hallmark snip was whispered

and the rose rose tear of  it is shed to let you know:

oh, flee!  for the soul’s white night has come too late here

to the children in their dreaming; it’s Christ, in the

windfall of all our twilight endings

light years beyond the countries of

their rending of the storybook rich tick tock

of the fairytale lacquer through the evening skies…

for you, the clasped hands with the sweet peas

Cliburn’s  last Chopin

and my red-rimmed eyes

and all this misplaced  creaking in a jewel-box lock

of the  soul’s  strange, lovely lovely light.

God rest your pearl-drop music its swan-crested flight

sweet, sweet is the night air when we walk out

in a kingdom where they will not  hunt again…

mary angela douglas 26, 27, 28 february, 1 march 2013