Strawberry Sun

for my sister Sharon. yes, again.

it is for you that continents drifted
small brooks foaming over stones
the ones you polished and took home

until your Grandmother said
why do you bring rocks home
her sherry eyes examining

them and I imagined her
asking the same of Jack
with his magic beans

she would have too
and then awoke to find
oh I hope the magic refined

of the trellising vine
that restored the family fortune
the gold of that harp;

it's singing line

what if I had planted them with all my heart's
secret, most birthday like wishes
those pebbles that no longer shone

in my room at home
but in the depths of our backyard
near the irises.

I like to think we could have learned
to live in the cloud countries
my sister and I

and all the Grand peres and meres
and Mama too with lilac in her dark hair
my Father inky from newspapers

eating chilled pears of the canned variety
not seeking notoriety we're
reading excerpts from the Reader's Digest

condensed books, condensed
as in milk, or in Campbell's soup
I used to wonder out lo0ud

oh let it rest said Sharon
in all her gum machine
peridot rings

knowing like Dorothy,
home is best
in the light of a strawberry sun.

mary angela douglas 31 december 2017

Minstrel

the placement of notes on the page
the incontrovertible clarity of it
for this the composers suffered

not to alter one line
though they were shunned for it
birds in eternal migrations

ahead of the great snows.
does anyone know them
who knows of them.

do they know themselves
apart from the burden they carry
so few seem to want or need.

the amber burden of song.
trees wept for it.
now it must be guarded

and the flame endure.
how will they carry it
inside of them

without being singed

mary angela douglas 31 december 2017

The Wind Speaks Beautifully To The Poets

what the wind said to them
we only partly know
the poets of the long ago

except that it was beautiful
and in the sound
of their wind poems

the wind itself resounds
as though the poem were
eaves, or trees

and surges like the human heart
or ebbs and then the poem is gone
leaving a trace of music

leaving its trace of music

mary angela douglas 31 december 2017

Music Box No. 2

there you are broken on the ground
no longer making a sound
you who were pure crystal

turned with a key

and I wonder what they have found
who smashed you so insistently
pretending to be astonished

you couldn't work anymore

and I am captive
to menagerie shadows
and the shadows shatter

on the walls
and birdsong stalls
and the snowy scenes under glass

are laid to rest.

mary angela douglas 30 december 2017

Sonatina For The Rain, The Leaves, The Poets

raindrops traced sonnets on the windowpanes
we only copied them down
and on the pavements the leaves swept to the ground

formed alphabets, preconfiguring the latter snows.
everything was a secret language
everything was written in code

and we were the code breakers
or dreamed we were
speaking our mermaid languages

never drowning.

mary angela douglas 29 december 2017

To The Ants Dreaming They Are Sand

the ants with their parenthetical dreams
dreaming they are sand. they sleep
the dream of sand

of the blazing summer porch
and freedom
small picnics.

whole plains cleared out
for their generations of rust.
sometimes they dream

the dream of chrysanthemums
that they are flowers without fragrance
or that there are planets

stars, whole constellations
where they dance minutely minuets
or live in sand castles

where the inhabitants are forgetful
leaving the lids off the jars
of elderberry jam

and wild honey.

mary angela douglas 28 december 2017

The Death Of Van Gogh

there was a blue road, marbled with white
he thought it was water in the dying sun
and a field the clearest of lemons

I have carried this sunflower heart in my hand
he cried all silently until I can hardly stand
and now it beats without me

so that the crows can see
and the blue road intensified
as if it were the sea

the painted clouds weeping

will I disintegrate now
half wondering he wandered
dissolve into time past - stumbling=

and dip the brush at least, at last
into a glass of swirling colours Theo!
let me drink it up

and the blue road with it

drink up the sun as if it were absinthe
and give God back His colours lent
and a shot rings out

in a field the colour of lemons
and he carries the gold of the sun
the feeling that life is done or seeping out

or bleeding in blues and yellows
and a burning, burning wound
and senseles slaughter

of the sunflower heart
at noon the blue radiance,
dissolving into God.

mary angela douglas 27 december 2017

The History Of Dreams, The History Of Wishes Untold

THE HISTORY OF DREAMS, THE HISTORY OF WISHES UNTOLD

I wanted to write but not on stone
on water where it would flow away
the history of dreams, the history

of wishes never told
the children kept inside of them
as if their souls

were a rainbow bubble
that would burst
if exposed

so we kept still.
we did as we were told.
accumulating gold.

I wanted to write in a shining script
translucent as rose fragrances
the history of lilies, the history

of what is missing
what is always missing
of how the soul goes underground

in disasters and is hunted.
and would be ferreted out,

if it weren't for God
and His mysterious hiding places
because this is not in the books

they gave us

the ones we were tested on
and I have thought and longed to find
a reason to stop thinking of

why this must be so
that we learn dates, perhaps exports
the snakeskin lives of kings

why this one exported rubber

the other wouldn't dream of it
and oranges were kept
alive while the worlds froze.

I have emptied my soul into
several tributaries by now
thinking it would be found

or at least, the transcript.
the ship's water scarred manifests
and I am here to say as a 

last, lost word to you perhaps

it just isn't so.
words can be buried
just as people can

while they're all still living.
one day one green leaf will
show above the ice

when the sun lingers too long
above the equatorial snows
and they will say, ah

an artifact.
but I will not be here
to know.

mary angela douglas 26 december 2017

Our Shadows On The Grass

we turned around as if we were on a music box
so carefully, our pink skirts flaring
or at the birthday parties blindfolded

spun out in the best direction
and the buttercream rose on the cake slice saved.
I loved then even our shadows on the grass

and looming on the summer sidewalks.
and now I think of summer in winter time
where before it was the other way round

and I am infinitely glad and sad at the same time
taking my wishes back to wish better ones now
so that our shadows on the grass will return

the way we found them, then
when the world was made of emeralds
and the moon in Oz.

mary angela douglas 23 december 2017

Did You See Alice

and did you see Alice

in an underground of tears

and every tear

a small red heart

who's littering here

cried the Duchess

then the Queen

sad paper doll

never changing her blue dress

I confess to nothing said Alice.

bread and honey and the

king counting money

and nothing is funny

when they tell jokes at table

the Cat has prickly hairs

You can take the back stairs

said the Duchess

for not minding the baby well

said the Duchess squalling,

you dont keep Christmas well either

Seize her, GUARDS!

is it so hard

is there no way then

observed Alice

people here can be happpy

no way at all?

mary angela douglas 23 february 2017

Epilogue in Brugge: Martin Burke (June 4, 1951=April 26, 2017)

EPILOGUE IN BRUGE: MARTIN BURKE (JUNE 4, 1951-APRIL 26, 2017)

I thought that words had come, once, unexpectedly to mind
or did I imagine that time
drifting through Northern regions, dream words, worlds

whirled up the colours of the sun, setting or rising?
freezing the dun

and dismal and shone the harbours the barges
moving slow and the tides so full of silver
star showers swept and then the long sleep.

and poetry for awhile came back to herself
amid the ballets splintered in two, the Romantics
disabused of their romanticism

and the gleams furtive, fugitive in darkness

then Ghent in sharp relief on a map of dream
and it is dawn in June or a
weathered inwardness recalled like Rilke at Duino:

the deep starred not the warring scars, the soaring!
the angels, heavy with song in the evening dews

and the ancient anchors lifted...and something
said, Come Through, now it is time and time itself wept

time swept and the angels poured through
all silver mouthed and lilting was Limerick was Brugge
for awhile, Blake's London, America reconstrued

and a theater of golden Kings in translation
as far as India, Algiers
recalling Yeats. the Celtic twilight reemerging,

forged anew or the start, at least made

and the flowers of rue and Kari and Gilberte
and Bruegel's parades

and the broken ships healed, departing, the poet's friends
no elegies he cried, no end in view and turned away
and the friends of friends and the poets know

and say, or do not say
what it is they know about this, each one

and Marie-Anne, muse of
the honeycombed summers and Crete
and a white and gold sleep assuming, ascending

transcending the blues of their half etched radiances
the infinite, the beautiful seclusions, equations

and the many-storied.

I dreamed this so it seemed that it came true
till through an open window came the stunned Graces,
with the news shunning the glorias

and Chaos with a ring of stone exchanged.
a blank page with the ghosts intact

half murmuring back to back, the King is dead
the Queen in mourning
the Court askew, the play in ruins

so that words are veiled and drift like snows no longer eluded,
the fait accompli, the prognosis, Father, it is finished
Chopin's last etudes falling through

between centuries, constellations, coteries conscious only how

tha poets come and go rarely (the ones of jeweled rarity excepted) with such intensity, tenacity, integrity
bleeding a meaning whiter brighter than snows

amid such lucidities,arabesques, agonies...

Light God said let this be and it was

Whitman then,  intoned, lilac, I bring you my sprig of lilac,
Odysseus or Icarus, home and the weave that binds us
the Alpha and Omega strung like summer beads with joy!

teardrops of joy!

Penelope weaving and reweaving the mariner home

these songs remain.

when April trees
petaled the bright avenues amid the unknowable scenes
on such a mysterious breeze from

the last half coded plays, the players disbanded
in disbelief, new works he had said, forthcoming! the
lovesongs of

Jason Flanders, an opera on Oppenheimer, a cantata.....
the solstice journals closed.
unleaved the tree of Language fresh widowed.

not knowing  how to grieve

will the waters no longer flow
murmured Marie-Anne near the shoals
seeking a sign this is not so

the cathedrals heaved and I lost
for awhile the music of clouds
the vagrant heart obscured

no longer telegraphing,
I am. are you?

you are, we are through all these declensions

silently, sharply, suddenly pierced with rue
for Martin, for Brugge. for Marie-Anne
in Melle, their Melle, the colour of honey.

Eternal Aprils, Marie-Anne, the outposts!
whispered Martin on the strand
you haven't far to go she heard in the snows an

elegant rustling laughter theaded through tears
in the snowing of the years
or could she hear...Atlantis in every shell.

the trees, look at the trees weeping flowers
the daylight children sang
little choruses of stars, bring her wreaths of wildflowers

and the mariner rescued at sea
their favorite story ever.they believed
they believed

and Orion glows over Ireland, Brugge, and Crete
for the departing soul
and God receives what man conceives

that tenderly, to us, imperceptibly

the dream words tumbling in all their colours
dimension to dimension, enthralling,  calling elsewhere home
where there are no dissensions, shores

reports to Greco anymore

and the stars are closer viewed through that Arch
where all explorers long to go, yet dread,still in love with Earth,
lingering in cobbled streets becoming himself again and again

blending in (she feels it so) each evening in

the migrations of the swallows, lapwings through their
wheeling and wheeling and turning back, Eurydice.

to the harplike trees abandoned or abandoning,

turning back once more to view
the laughter and the pain threading through
a green door, Ghent, Galway in review...and Beauty

beauty strewn everywhere.

and it is Spring and the petals raining down
these petals compose
in their shattering some April sound,blossoming,

into pages of a manuscript Unbound.tuned impeccably
the man, the friend you knew or dreamed you did...

for a span, there was this music
and the lyre renewed.

mary angela douglas 21 december=. 22 december 2017

Your Clouds So Opal Inlaid

your clouds so opal inlaid
so rich am I
while they are drifting by

even sheer memory of the Rose
surpasses all extravagance
and I have seen so many

Springs.
what tribute can I bring
to you my Lord

for winged birdsong
the silvered slant of rains
the cooling breeze

gardenia shade
the beauteous things Your hands have made

so many sang before
and in more elegant refrains
your myriad wonders

and though they count me poor
I long to carol too
and under Your natal Star

on Christmas Day,
imperceptibly as I can,
quietly glorify.

all the embroidered
the ambrosial years.

mary angela douglas 18 december 2017/rev, 19 december 2017

If We Write

if we write on the last of the notebook paper
our last wishes
would this be a testament

to the volumes of the blue bird
I saw in a corridor well guarded
where I stepped around shattered glass

will this dream last gingerly
my angels chimed in snows
that fell in the corridor of a dream

where the further volumes of The Bluebird shone
maybe I'm not as far from home as
I always imagined

all things being equal, but are they
I'm dressed in blue forget me not and
wandering among books with antique

blue bindings
embossed with the moon on their spines
and this is night or I think it was

in the colours of hydrangea
and the moon is engraved on the spine
of the books in the blue libraries

weeping sapphires

that I remove to false alarms
it being dusk
and they are searching for who

are yous among my
confliscated belongings
for who

removed them but I think
but they are mine and
why are their guards

near the magnolias
in our old backyard
and I remember the dream of their sheen

as a dream within a dream
like Calderon
was like the sheen of music

the dusk of all my wishes
each one a star
I am lighting all my candles

in the far, far blue.

mary angela douglas 18 december 2017

We Wanted To Be Everything

we used to think if we clapped hard enough
Tinkerbell would get well
by the time the record was over

or that if we held our breath
we could break the spell with our four leaf clovers
brought from home all show and tell

and the Princess would come back to life
and to herself
dressed in the pink brocade with purple netting

in the costume room

at our old grade school
where Sleeping Beauty
was always the class play.

for the third graders
who had Mrs. Caruth.

one day at lunch you opened the door
and we explored the costumes galore
and wanted to be everything

all at the same time.
it didn't seem that impossible then.
and I think if I went back again

with all I've learned
about not letting them wear off the glitter,
we could really make that happen.

mary angela douglas 17 december 2017

First Flights

{commemorating the Wright Brothers first flight,
December 17, 1903, Kitty Hawk, NC}

first flights, and were we made of clouds
that we could rise so easily from the cliffs
untarnished in our imaginations

or glide Da Vinci like with precision yet
without care and seek the Other Side
in faith stepping out onto a wire, unfinished stairs,

the wire of beauty stretched from star to star,
that delicate filament.
or we with kites of gold

and thoughts as bright
caught the winds and soared
all this was before

on Heavenly heights decreed
on the instant
God whispered let there be

birds and singing and let

music have wings
so that when the Shadow falls upon them
there will be visions gleaming

through the storm
and when they wake,
the endless skies.

mary angela douglas 17 december 2017; 24 june 2019

SECOND VERSION

FIRST FLIGHTS

{commemorating the Wright Brothers first flight,

December 17, 1903, Kitty Hawk, NC}

first flights, and were we made of clouds

that we could rise so easily from the cliffs

untarnished in our imaginations

or glide Da Vinci like with prescient precision yet

without care and seek the Other Side

in faith stepping out onto a landing of

unfinished stairs, a wire,

the wire of beauty stretched from star to star,

that delicate filament.

or we with kites of gold

and thoughts as bright

caught the winds and soared

all this was before

on Heavenly heights decreed

on the instant

God whispered let there be

birds and singing and let

music have wings

so that when the Shadow falls upon them

there will be visions gleaming

through the storm

and when they wake,

the endless chrism of the skies.

mary angela douglas 24 june 2019

It's Watercolour

it's watercolour
and it's faded, fading away
we say in our wash dresses appliqued,

speaking of the day, the afternoon and
looking at our hands
as if they weren't ours at all.

I'm very small
the words I say fall off a shelf
or are held in the hand like snow

till the wind lifts them away
it's watercoloured they say
and look straight through

my transparencies.

if I were a window I would be a rose one
shedding amethysts on the floor
when faded persons would come to pray

lighting candles in a ghostlike way
and light would have utterance there
and not despair

but I am watercoloured too
you cannot depend on me for that
I am no enterprise

but faded, fading away
as much as I deplore it
before you realize oh

something was there
it isn't anymore.

mary angela douglas 14 december 2017

Beautiful Gravity

beautiful gravity, you who ask so little
except that falling objects learn to fly
to you I write these lines and

hide them under a stone.
what are words if they are weightless
why will they then glide

making it harder to say
exactly the right thing

when all that comes between a sigh
and a sigh is Heavenly light.
the ache in your heart that was the wind

somehow I feel as if it were my own,
beautiful gravity.
without you snow would whirl up

and become
merely the moonlight.
though goodness knows

even with you here
everything always is going away
and disappears.

mary angela douglas 14 december 2017

And In It, The Sound Of Seas

the shell is poetry and in it, the sound of seas
and if not, this is not poetry to me
minus the sea, as Arnold said and poignantly in

the ebb and the flow of his Dover Beach
hearing as Sophocles, a sense of the tragic
and more than this, the music of it

and this they have lost. the note of melancholy, more...
they have lost the sea and the sound of the sea
and the music of this and the oars

and still they say, poetry. poetry.
and mean polemic. mean, my time to shine
mean plain potatoes any old time

without musk roses and the eglantine

and don't know what they mean
even by their own definitions
which seem less their own

than spindrift owns the waves
and words that do not sing
ring from no rafters green with praise

oh, nothing rings at all
and the bell towers
are listless. and the bells rust.

only in the wind can I still hear and in my mind
as in old manuscripts something clearly chiming
poetry. the singe and the surge of it sublime,

preserved and I am like a small tree in the wind
and subject to this dreaming.
and will not relinquish the crown of it.

though poems die with me
even.

Poetry itself.

mary angela douglas 14 december 2017

What Music There Is

for Martin Burke and for Marie-Anne

...the light on my hand is the shadow on the page and the silence a perfection..."

Martin Burke, Vortex

what music there is

for the hand, fallen from the page
for the eye lidded upon

its own worlds now
only angels know
in their celestial vows.

what music there is
what music can there be
when the sea runs down to the sea

its own disappearance allowing or
for the harp too suddenly unstrung.
and familiar streets are overcome

familiar bells unrung
by the bookshop, cafe absences.
the sun in your eyes more fugitive now

than I imagined it who never met you
except through poetry
who dare not imagine your sweetheart's grief.

or how she binds laurel, leaf to leaf.

there is a glow by fruit stalls
old cathedrals.
the angels hidden in the shrubbery

that shook when you strode by
thinking you were the wind.
now that you no longer

breathe upon glass
or recognize old friends
how could they pretend

Brugge is not bruised now
that you've become her past
who seemed so vital and proud

tilling your garden of words
so happy to be, it seemed
the genial brother of so many,

poetry's herald.and all the rest,
second guessed, now.

what music there is for this
I can't bear now.
no elegies, you said

for those you had lost.
and now we bear that cost as well
who cannot call you back

to Beauty's spell on earth,
to your mythologies who miss you,
your twilight harbours;

you Irish Belgian Orpheus
maddeningly gone
from our midst.

what music is there for this.

mary angela douglas 12 december 2017

To Write In Longhand

you thought it was possible to write in longhand
your green thoughts in even greener ink.
they all think that, chided the shadows

or would have if you had written for them
an alphabet, perhaps. of lowering clouds,
in purple.

it's dark your mother said
from her long exile

telepathically.
come inside.
and we felt april

through an open screen door,
the sandlot variations
and our little pails.

in Heaven there will be time
for silver engraving on

the Wedding cards;
for the fine embroidery
on all the veils

your soul required
when you were writing in green ink,
attired in colours of the rose.

mary angela douglas 12 decemer 2017

Oh Etretat

oh Etretat
that wasn't on my map before
and now is only a mist

rolling off of a fugitive poem
signed off on
I can't get out of my head

chalk white I bled words
thinking it was the light
that entered the room

then forests bloomed
as though on the underside
of water

the stars resumed their wheeling
above what cannot be named
the plains the everlasting plains

of a snowiness
I can never explain
etretat

the heart is new made now
and branches like the pear orchard.
in the fairy stories.

mary angela douglas 12 december 2017

Then All The Translations Sounded The Same

then all the translations sounded the same
only the original flew free,
while the world of small victories

clawed through was all that
they could do

while he flung himself down
from the top note of the psalm
becoming no blue mountain.

I thought he would be a cloud
or fall into a silver lake
but he became

the lost reverie of Praise.
now there is reville somewhere
and whiter, the risen moon.

who will rouse the sleeping tunes,
delineations at Land's End.
whom will God send now.

mary angela douglas 12 december 2017

When All Their Suns Have Set

to all poets writing (or who wrote) in the margins of their Age

fade, tales of lesser renown
you marginal troubadours brief authors of:
lost tales of Arthur

all without a sound
frieze frozen as in fairy tales
when the spells are cast,

the spells that last
and the fights are fixed
mutter the scholars to themselves.

they will not sound the lake
to see if there was some mistake
when you are gone

who know where the bodies
as they say, are buried with their songs;
those of a more acute ambition

muting the competition
but ah, the soul
the soul was ferried elsewhere.

so we have lost time without mind
the legends that more brightly shine
as Petrarch cried

some works for Heaven are made.
so they throw shade on them on earth.
I sigh

and Herod like, at their birth
stand grim watch.
only in Heaven

will their songs be found,
the overthrown,
the excised from the lists

true monarchs of words and not the pretenders
to the throne
and the muted strings resound

new made of gold
outdistancing the day and the fretted stars
by far, when all their suns have set.

mary angela douglas 10 december 2017

Note on the poem: the word lists in used in the sense of a jousting term as in: Lists - The 'lists' were barriers which defined the battlefield in a tournament