The Playhouse As It Was Then

that's where the rain comes in we said
happily patching the patches instead
of what they thought we should do with the tarpaper,...

and starlight too and the moonlight
when its clouded and silver slips through
our dreams and the screen door

partly fastened.
years on we dreamed of the playhouse
how it would be the tree branches across the one window.

tapping in sympathy

how we could we could make it from
leaves and sticks pink bricks
lime green shutters o please, the one rosebush...

a slate blue teapot bubbling
a chintz rose print for curtains
one doll dressed in pink,

auburn curls.and pearls.
we would wear golden slippers there
the ones our Grandfather sang about

and play we were at the county fair
with a booth for raspberry lemonade.
I know we weren't the first to

dream this way;nibbling on royal pbjs.
I pray we weren't the last.

mary angela douglas 31 july 2018

Pink Christmas Trees, A Fond Remembrance

for Kay Thompson

pink Christmas Trees why shouldn't there be
and flocked, too
I remember thinking of you

ah roseate, roseate my favorite word then
why pretend otherwise.
in the Christmas tree showrooms

of tantalizing December issues
the glossy pages all the rage
how I loved too Christmas magazines

the best ones of the year
with cookies up to here little silver beads
and gingerbread houses

the ones I could never make
the cordial, cardigan recipes beckoning
it's not too late

it's jolly all the time
Christmas in my rhymes
won't you try a few?

pine scented.

Church services halloing, haloed through
Dickens and Joy to the World by the Mormon choir
on old Goodyear albums free at the filling stations

played at home,
soft candles and the angels chiming
Good Will, Good Will

the fragrance of McCalls, Ladies Home Journal
caroling, crackling off the coffee table, nostalgic too
who wouldn't pick up a few

for the latest view
of pink Christmas trees.
with holly, Please

I liked them best with the ornaments pictured sky blue
of the most intense hue
make mine pink for ever and ever

like strawbery ice cream, malts sipped, spooned so thick
and happiness quickening when I look back
I confess I love American colours best

the whole year through though in

the English spelling (colour is fuller than color)
all fears quelling
and Heavenly too

artificial or not
I'd take every tree on the lot
and drink all the Tang up

quite deliciously, like pixie stix
at summer camps nutritiously
or Lulu comics the rose red dress

for the little girl for whom
it's New Year's confetti swirled
every day in the world

I think of all of you
whenever Pink Christmas trees
float into my Vu Finder view.

(though j'adore the real ones best)-
the pink sapphire Star coming to rest
quietly over the stable

and I am not distressed.

mary angela douglas 31 july 2018

Reverie With Angels, Children Folded Up Like Fans

I know I am writing you from a country you imagine
you left a long time ago the blurry angel spoke
from decrepit dreaming movie reels then the trees were flickering

and it was Spring. the children sailed small boats
in middy blouses
and they wore gauzy wings for awhile before

they came down with scarlet fever, other things.

and went to never grow up land
with tremulous smiles.
it wasn't only in certain novellas, useful for pressing flowers

from the first bouquets they were remembered

children with folded hands their eyes shining
with worlds too good for us now you say to yourself
therefore, the Great Divide

as you are reading the eternities in their eyes
your hands shaking, contemplating

the short lifelines presumably hidden
in their clasped photogenic palms
and the emblems of doves and hearts entwined somehow

made  you think then of old funerals in a chill sunshine

the survivors fanning themselves with palmetto 
maybe an ice cream afterwards something raspberry that fizzed.
this was how we lived when we dreamed of old houses antique fairs

vintage books everywhere the creak on the stairs of the former
owners who cannot sleep but sweep into the libraries
turning injured pages.

by now you are dozing too in a place blurry on earth
where the Graces have brought heirloom roses, wreaths of them, to
commemorate. Something...what was it, and to soothe...

nothing is remembered now.
the angel in the old film fades into implied goldenness.
if you only knew the multitudes of angels

on the shore gazing after you that afternoon

when you spurned the country
you think I am too old
to be living in now.

I should somehow,
spreading the marmalade thick on my toast,
know better.

childlike, in emeralds
filling the candy jars-

mary angela douglas 30 july 2018

Tertullian Amid The Sunflowers

a phrase that came to me today modified somewhat from past discussions with myself
my feeling as an American in trying on and off to read the Great Books and to await the Great Conversation and all of that:

Tertullian, amid the sunflowers...

mary angela douglas 29 july 2018

Let All The Schools Be Schools Of Dream

let all the schools be schools of dream
and all the children, dreamers
though we must walk by on tiptoe

the dragons, sleeping at the gate
bypass the accounting accountables
counting the mince pies out at Christmas

every angel threaded snowflake on the threshold of waking
trees will whisper it's green and it's green
out here ghost children of recessses, of the bygone years

passed, but into the Living Stream,
slip oranges  into our hands
old skipping ropes, jacks flung out like stars

children you were born to hope to be who you Are

and twirly all around to mimic the sound
of rampant birdsong the jeweled and hidden brooks
to find also in books such streams, such gleams

and the transcendant nooks of American schemes
the rhodora and rhododendron of it all
and the honeysuckled feasts the cloud swung swings

into the ridddles

the red clay scrawls of small animals ferret and the
fern ferned winding stories, the musk roses gathered
and twilight coming in without a butterscotch warning.

then we begin again.

mary angela douglas 29 july 2018

Holograms I Have Seen

holograms I have seen but I don't know where
post cards tinted in a fading script, hinting
from Here to There

stamps from a kingdom no longer with us
as they say the altars heaped up with waxen flowers
the organ music,,more than a little mournful...

I'm sleepy in the dust of Arkansas

drinking a dusty coke with my own folk
the tribe of those who assert the fairy tale
against the fatal hours

in between Here and There
I learned there was a crystal stair
a silver porthole

or is it silver because the moon has slipped
from behind the clouded centuries
an elaborate key flung down

flung down
into the mud at my feet

mary angela douglas 29 july 2018

The Shipwreck of Language Said The Talking Dolls

angels bear witness to the last scribe inscribed
not on the heart of the world;sad colours chime
on their own there isn't time when the winds come through

and words speak too without a clue their orphaned syllables floating
in between the worlds of seeing and hearing while feeling feeling
grows mute

all, all said the child in the pale blue shawl standing on tiptoe in the district
all of them have gone said Blake in the afternoon then

I am going too but who will look after you, my only angel, ange

spendrift, spendthrift gold in this lost summer
carry it home carefully said the child to the dolls
with their fine china hearts

breaking, breaking on the seas, those
pavements that are no more.

mary angela douglas 28 july 2018

I Fell Off The Cliff Of Learning

I fell off the cliff of learning
ooooooh the invisible said
what happened to your head

my head is made of valentines I said and sometime violins
not fractions of stale pie gardens of grades gone by
not tea things with wings aspiring to be more

collapsible telescopes evermore from that point on in the story,
collapsing stars. I'm Alicean in iced blue and pink
I said. I drifted, words drifting from me

turning red.stomping off. yellowING words with a cough.
and poly syllabled, words from the Greek and the replete.
I went to the ball with golden ones simple, in a gown of cherry

simon sampling the entire Fair in love with God not a siingle
care stuffed into my satchel while

my heart turns green unto the lanes of the fair day living
where no one learns anything apart from apple tarts
the heart already learn-ed in lawn, with clouds

the flowers made of snow heaped up to musing
and soft blue tones, pale things
and lightly fragranced.we shall compose

only knowing the roses.ringed and rosy tinged
I am the earthquake's lid at the tea party tres delicate
lost among the too too brilliant to live

I am a stranger on the cliff of learning
you don't even try to balance someone said weighing opinions
not carefully at all

your last week's assignment sugar bowl full of equations

why should I when it's my kaleidoscope that's
turning and turning from breakfast on, on violet china shine
the ever more beautiful into a Farther beauty, bouquet.flung

instead.my head full of violins valentines wistful
can you imagine it countenance it
with the olden songs,.at home
amidst the mignonette.

mary angela douglas 26 july 2018

I Fell Off the Cliff Of Learning Into The Honied Day

I fell off the cliff of learning
ooooooh the invisible said
what happened to your head

my head is made of valentines I said and sometime violins
not fractions of stale pie gardens of grades gone by
not tea things with wings aspiring to be more

collapsible telescopes ever more
collapsing stars. I'm Alicean in iced blue and pink
I said. I drifted, words drifting from me

turning red.stomping off. yellowING words with a cough.
and poly syllabled, words from the Greek and the replete.
I went to the ball with golden ones simple, in a gown of cherry

simon sampling the entire Fair in love with God not a single
care stuffed into my satchel while

my heart turns green unto the lanes of the fair day living
where no one learns anything apart from apple tarts
the heart already learned in lawn, with clouds

the flowers made of snow heaped up to musing
and soft blue tones, pale things
and lightly fragranced.we shall compose

only knowing the roses.ringed and rosy tinged
I am the earthquake's lid at the tea party tres delicate
lost among the too too brilliant to live

I am a stranger on the cliff of learning
you don't even try to balance someone said weighing opinions
not carefully at all

your last week's assignment sugar bowl full of equations

why should I when it's my kaleidoscope that's
turning and turning from breakfast on, on violet china
the ever more beautiful into a Farther beauty, bouquet.

instead.my head full of violins valentines wistful
can you imagine it
with the olden songs,.at home
amid the mignonette.

mary angela douglas 26 july 2018

I Thought The Dreamers Of Things Had Come

to Stephen Vincent Benet, to Vachel Lindsay

I thought the dreamers of things had come

that the silt of lies had shifted otherwise

the great river had moved on

with ita showboats, its inimitable wrongs

that cadres of angels stalked the banks

that Progress had won.

fools gold so much of it seems now

farm houses blown apart and brothers and the heart

the splintering call to arms

the misery of industry.

the endless quarrels at the end of ropes

the newspaper quandries in the backstreet rooms.

the ghosts. the ghosts.

cool tombs said Sandburg, in the cool, cool tombs.

and still the supplications to Kingdom come.

starry, the folktales I have folded in my heart

American songs oh sprig of lilac mine!

the legend of a blue raspberry colored ox

the Lincoln Portraits the abyss of slave laments

laddered up to Praise!

the garnet wounded ear of God.

little sod houses set before the storms

the silk of prairie grasses in the winds

my lap heaped with buttercups the music

of To A  Wild Rose scrolling.the blowing snows heaped up

before the wild eyed foaming cattle fenced

sad impearlments of the Indian names for moons

crooned over with, and soon..

I wait. and count the till.

I will that these things live.

and won't  pretend all beauty has gone from

appled Appalachia, Ozarks greening,

the Great West still beckoning in  pure mirage.

the robins in the chinaberry trees, the pines- of OZ-

mama cornbread calling us from the back screen door.

still. between the robin's egg blue

the blue jay feather and the milky quartz I knew

I know there is real gold in you.

America of the sweet grasses

of the wagons moving on.

the supplicant willows by the creek beds.

the elegiac trains.

I believe in you.your hallowedness.

I still believe in you.

mary angela douglas 23 july 2018

The Poets Boarding The Ship Relinquish Their Images

to Francis Thompson

we would return to you dear Lord what if,
the images of all things we hoarded
as Keats said, in the realms of gold

that we might free them from the cursed
and lose them no more because, to you
we would return them all only to save them

from the hordes on earth our useless pride.

ah for they are fading anyway in this arrogant day
flowers set in amber to no avail.
the sad, curled ferns.

how may we bring to you our borrowed finery
the clues we left you in the forest that You
might find us anew

so that we can finally go home with light luggage
no longer carrying small stones in our pockets
dreading the trails that disappear without a trace.

to you all things must flee
or else lose liberty, lose the wings
we thought we had made 

you sewed for us in the shade of Eden.

now under a pale and ever a paler moon
we have wept in various guises
setting the invisible looms up for

the invisible costumes
no one will buy.

through the long noons
that withered the grasses
yet, not You, the giver of dews

and rose refreshments. can Wither with the worlds.
from childhood I remember asking You
what does it mean to give you glory

who are glory and my angel whispered
even then
give the thing you love the most to Him

give it back that's all you need to do.
yet it is hard. but harder to resist the truth
all things were made by You, not us

we only borrowed the moon and stars
we even borrowed love
and what can be said of beauty

except it's the hardest to lose and yet we
lose it everyday disappearing into you
whole fields of flowers and those that we have loved.

dropping off suddenly

the edge of continents, all our fears
dissolving through the years.
we ask of you take all our verses too

and winnow them in the Winds.

mary angela douglas 22 july 2018

Chekovian, My Cherry Jubilee

how happy I was on  certain cerise afternoons
reading Chekov's Cherry Orchards endlessly
up to the point the first axe felled...

for me perhaps for you in your Heavenly dacha
watching the lacework clouds
the sound of the axe is stilled

and the cherry orchards bloom
and bloom. I send this note to you
if it may be

your saints would entertain the thought to pass it on
as couriers of song

no matter what happened in Russia later on
at least on your earlier pages the orchards remain.

this is the power of literature
I think.while History's plunging off the brink,
it is still...still

surrendered to blossoms of pink.

mary angela douglas 22 july 2018

My Last Testament To The Jewel Encrusted Skies

to my sister Sharon (again!)

we thought the skies in fairy tales were  jewel encrusted 
and should rain down sequins, crystals, the little pearls
diamonds, emeralds and sapphires squirrled away

by the pirates on a summery shipwrecked day, revealed:
let it all rain down we caused our doll queens to say,
the princesses too

even the ladies in waiting in their puzzling satin
dunce caps
down,down on a discouraged world

heaped up now in glitter in every shade
evading the giant Vacuums.
or at least we made our mark

leaving a trail of glitter on our Grandmother's carpet
in our paper crowns, our wands of faux stars. in pretend evening gowns
(the best kind)

seeking the ribboned candies in the yellow glass jar
that candy Grail on the living room maple table.

our roles in the secret plays we played unheralded,
but that's o.k.
our house the stage

and our backyard.

while the dog played the other parts
with a willing and a fluffy heart
and didn't mind as long as we played with her.

I still think glitter is as good as diamonds.

and rhinestones will do for a coronation or two
in any emergency. also rose taffeta rayon.
and we were the true, the original

glitterati.from the Kingdom of Crayon.
I think that too.
I really do.

mary angela douglas 22 july 2018

Mothlike, Lacunae.. The Poets Gone.

mothlike, lacunae, I dreamed of that pale green shade
the hushed rose scented evenings of a former age
the truth plighted to love

and wrote it all down in a fragmentary way
dipped in silver:

when will the clouds awake let Shelley say
and then the wind comes through
laden with God.

after days I wait.
the burnished emblems sigh
orphaned after Yeats.

and his unmooring verses fly
to vaster worlds, Away!

to whom shall I cry
give notice to the violet skies, the shires,
the torch is gone.

the one they carried for so long
from ministering hand to hand

by God recalled.
men build tinkertoy walls, towers
what they will or may

out of the last few sticks, or clay

to wall it all in.as though this had never been...
to bury them again.
and leave us to technical English.

the minimal parings. the lacklustre kings.
the public shearing of wings.

mary angela douglas 22 july 2018

Dark Ages. Where Is The Stained Glass Moon

perhaps we brushed through the webs of God
carelessly, in our going
leaving the silken shreds behind

the unexpected gold of evenings wounded.
how will we know when golden words are slayed
the picture book of memory fades

the mail of the heart is shattered through.
we wandered through Arden forgetting old names
the pearl of it all discarded

the rains washing all of it away
and then in a time of drought,
not even the rains were singing

not even the birds.of the pale Emperor.

mary angela douglas 22 july 2018

Things As They Are In Our Town, Your Town Too

they're bleeding all colours dry I dreamed
let's go from here before they've dried us all up too
what's left of me or you

I do not like the words they use

the way they use the words I used to love at home
before they got ahold of them and droned
and tamed them down

with a world weary sound resounding
I am sophisticated look at me
what can the child know about mystery, rainbows...

only, they're somehow there for joy, for glee
I would have thought defensively and striking back
that way from my small desk  though wordlessly

if I had an inkling then what was going on there
since then we are ruled by mobs and learn to disguise
our fingerpainted sobs early on.

isn' t that the most that can be known, we're here for joy
and that's the code
not to be dragged by the ear

and made to memorize from year to year the rules colors
really are not there; we only think we see them,
phenomenon,deplaned- over and oversville explained,

trick of the eye exult the masters
it made me cry 

to see the magic drain from it all
under a stern unflinching eye.
I still wake up to the dazzling day,

my rudimentary skies,
feeling that way.
me and my rainbows, packed to go.

mary angela douglas 21 july 2018

I Wonder

I wonder if the angels sit around reading poetry
on their days off
the poetry that no one reads on earth

that no one read.

piling up remaindered in the odd basement, pastorale shed, unheralded.or in the attics, next to the Morris Chair.
of course they don't have days in Heaven

it's all just one golden glare
off the burnished streets
of Everywhere

you might miss moonrise.
perhaps they wait at the Gate
for poems about the moon.

with Yeats, for his purple noons.
it's hard to picture angels sitting.
really, I can't do it.

what about the wings?
maybe a folding chair.
or do the wings fold down.

haha. wing back chairs...

perhaps they read while flying
their attendant breezes turning a page
or do they lose their place that way.

I'd like to know from age to age

and if we're good
will we at least be understood there
for what we meant to say when we had words.

I picture the secret poems in clouds,
that rain publishes on the pavement
so that children splash through rainbows

mirrored. are we the mirrorng ones
after we've gone? catching
what travels There in sound,

in opal waves, from the lost and founds
of half remembered pink afternoons

from Eden's formal gardens, guarded.
from the lisp of children lost in their parades

their lilied dreams
brimming with rhyme schemes.
twirling in their velvet shoes
with the pom-poms.

mary angela douglas 20 july 2018

Angels Pulling Strings

angels pulling strings do not pull rank
they make sweet marionettes dance and sing
they fix the string on the English cracker so that

it explodes mildly in sweet candies fountaining
or unexpected charms oh thank you angel breathed
the child who couldn't get it to work

and was about to cry.
angels do not pull rank.
let me repeat

they'd rather die though dying for them
is a little problematical don't you think.
angels glide

into a room thst some see
as a golden flash in the corner that should be cornered
especially the dog who barks rapturously

in several languages perhaps, who knows
we haven't got the code;he's

waiting for the spectral show to show
by the picture window and the vintage lamp
even if it's only, for him at least, the curly headed

and the circumspect pet, (can you tell
I just wanted to use the word circumspect)

projected in black and white
faint shades of grey shimmering
it's kindness, anyway.

and it is lovely.

mary angela douglas 18 july 2018

Bye. Must fly.

Folk Song For A Prize Winning Age

still meaning what they say the kings of ruth
size up the populations and divine the spoils
not enough toil going on in here in sun or shade

in cubicle glade I hear them early and I hear them late
I look upon my dinner plate and savage the one pea left on it
said the dog

i've got to log in and see the world without sin
because you know its only fair to spare us bad news everywhere
we/ve much to do sawing the population in two

getting their children to dry our eyes
while leaving them out of the Big Surprise
those with manners wont get the prize

but the ones that tear it out of the jaws
of all the dubious rhinestone laws.

mary angela douglas 18 july 2018

Some Things

I heard Satie in the afternoons
the pearl elongated notes of a
vague melancholy

thinking of famous willows I have known
the fronds sweeping the clouds away
from the ponds

then I read Turgenev and wanted a dress of lawn
sweeping the grass, the river grasses with a
sash of pure azure.

some things cannot be
not even in the original
some things are dreamed

like famous willows I have known
the flower wreathed Ophelia
on no tide

human pride, our harps left there
and the rivers rising.

mary angela douglas 17 july 2018