Sunday, March 11, 2018

On The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eisley, Ascending Music, The Fawn Coloured Dawns (Second and Final Version)

they see white gold often shading into the
rose gold, fawn dawns easily in the day when I looked
out in vain, some would say, my peers

to hear that they contained the murmuring of leaves
those choirs unknown, unannotated
their skies a silk screen painted with birdsong

how all things human then did seem suddenly,
absent and the winged things prevailed
holy and fountaining, some sacred trust

and ferns like souvenirs from an ancient green,
or rust and a forgotten Age, the palette gauged
were rearranged and the amber fossils in their

museum cages raged,
partitioned in sadness.
there is music in everything but wound up,

like a dimestore favor
not a key in sight
and then, the amplitude of stars

the silk fanned violet nights
the folk tale simpletons
with the riddling Rose

their pie faces crumbling
into, Who Knows

and then, antiphonies, stephanotis Spring,ascending
oh why not, neverending
the flights that made me weep

from fortresses of fleece, fleeing;
having to evade the staircase with
no warning

a long ways down all morning, and then, the shifting
to the glaced ground where it was winter.
I was late and the traffic all in ash drifting

there was no work in the world that day
the world was canceled
when I said

the inlaid clocks can bend
their deep waves faltered
in the semi-terraced seas

what do you Believe in
emulating sapphire
when it is showering Pearl

with not one friend in the world
and the marled dream-silver spooned into
all this sleeping;the altered tones

melting like Messiaen.

never the snows on celluloid where
it was impossible to ascertain
given the technicality of the Project

was it all a dream, unsayable, then flickering,
only what was Before us remaining
and no more the

here we are or now
no longer writing on cream paper
or lifting the coffee can out of the cupboard

stirring the golden instants there waylaid
in a linen world perfumed with the
nearness of Easter, the window shades rippling

in lilied array;
the hummingbird inscriptions, gone away
and I in a garden garbled language hanging onto

the least quilting scrap, scribbling the news
the rose endued, with what,
the sun a mere crystal toy

my head in my hands
from the burden of wonder
and the relay lines down.

mary angela douglas 11 march 2018