To The Emerald Flies On The Window Screen That They May Depart

blind on the glass in a sudden shaft of fifth floor reaching sunlight  seemingly locked by the screen the small flies newly hatched have gathered

I feel such unease made helpless

by things so small as these unsummoned by me and I think perhaps a metaphor for the nagging

worries has come to be for my Divine illustration, illumination

this last day of April

why do I have such unreasoning fear of the small winged creatures clutching here in the updrafting winds

I fear they will breach the latch and uncontrolled

fly my low vaulted ceilings and disturb my soul. my fragile sense of order

yet once inside they leave me alone seeming to seek the heights

such as they are in aerial displays ballets

some navigational pattern home.

I don't know how to regard them half caught half maybe not

on their seemingly summering breaks

if there is some warp in the window frame some gap unseen

they may overwhelm my small dwelling but that

Thou Oh Lord keepest them at bay and all the crouching winged

and lingering fears

and make their path away from me on tiny wings of tulle

more clear.

that they may find their Heaven too.

mary angela douglas 30 april 2021;rev. 6 may 2021

Goodbye To Poetry;The Spoken Word Is a Bare Cupboard

everyone is smiling here

the room is thick with the word "poetry"

I cannot smile;despite the refreshments

the congenial crowd  honey sweet with masked enthusiasm

the golden linnet has flown away

I know that it won't return

but everyone will go on speaking anyway

saying something

smiling tenderly at the end with a question mark

as their voice recedes I take to mean

you will accept this as a poem won't you

I know that I would like to

if only I had not seen the snares laid

for my linnet

if only it had not flown away into the clouds of violet

never to return at least not here

in the green shade unmade.

mary angela douglas 29 april 2021

Sometimes It Is Difficult To Understand

sometimes it is difficult to understand

why a kind word merits no reply

why birds fly against the current of the wind

and the sky appears empty

I dont have a philosophy for this

I say to myself in quiet corners

looking out through the window at

the friendly trees which do seem

to hear me in the rustling of their leaves

why are the kind so often shunned

is the world that contrarian?

even in Heaven I will still be asking why

why were the cruel so prevalent

making others cry.

mary angela douglas 28 april 2021

As Though A Pebble Should Speak To A Star

as though a pebble should speak to a Star

so I have prayed to you , Lord God

a mud puddle to the Sea

remember me the wild grasses cry

when the  wind roves

one petal of the Infinite Rose

I was 

if that at all remember the raindrop

over the Falls or at least, Niagra freezing

and I with them all, the other drops composing the Whole

or under the microscope a mere glint of mica

from the vast and cosmic field

regard me accounted so I may be: 

no matter how small

how retrograde a stone

still accounted as your own.

mary angela douglas 28 april 2021

 INDEX OF POEMS PART THREE

(Poems dating from May 2021 onwards...)

FEBRUARY 2022

Is That Your Real Name

Advice To Be Followed In The Worst Part Of The Fairy Tale Or That Awful Dream About The

Balloon Poppers

Composition

Alice Comiig Up For Air Again, From The Dream State

Ghosts Live The Life Of Riley Said One A Little Wiley

And This Is A True Story

It Won't Make A Difference To The Stars

Yellow Diamonds

The Stage Set Historically Speaking, The Rollercoaster At The Time

JANUARY 2022

Career Day Quandry Subconsciously Streamed

Then We Dreamed Of The Sea, Wounded With Shipwrecks

Poem In Commemoration Of William Butler Yeats Who Died On January 28, 1939

Language Lesson

Big Top

The Hunters

For Emily Dickinson (2)

Basic Dilemmas 101

Snow In Jerusalem

In The End All You Want Is To Go Home

Punctuation Dream Scheme

Bridge Of Air

Bad Advice

Sad Song

I Dreamed Narcissus Looked Into The Sun

What Was Left Out Of The Story

Lemony Lullaby

Green Field

Already The Snow Lights Have Gathered In The Sky

The Poem I Love Chimes Out Of Time

We Walk In Dreams

Follow The Lantern Bearers Out Of The Dark

To The Post Modern Poets That They Turn Again, Back

Riddling Dream

Lost Above Ground I Carried On

Forgive Me Universe And Yellow Brick Road

The Small Make Do

The Gold Among The Ruins

Amesthyst

Palomino Gold

Silverly

The Dear Days Beyond Recall

What To Do

What Dreams In Us

High Above The Dreams Of Men, Softly Now The Snow Sets In

The Lost Language Of Dolls

The Queen's Platinum Pudding Poem

Uh Oh

On The Morning Of The Merlin Winds

With Exorbitant Praise Of The Sentimental, Y'all

Your Typical Metaphysical Nursery Q's And A's

Ranking It

Conversant With Birds

Looking for Beulah Land

Book Exchange

We Lived Behind The Wall In The World

How The Glass Hills Shone

Regarding The F Word And Etc. PLEASE SHUT UP, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!!

Sometimes In Moments Of Fitful Repose

To Forge A New Solitude

The Angel To Shoshtakovich In A Dream

Always To Think And Never To Feel

Golden Vanilla

Will It Always Be This Way, The Moon Through The Sudden Clouds

Sing The Sixpence Song Without The Pie

Dream Postcard Written In Haste

Mysterious Beams Sited;Origin Untraceable

Lamentation On The Feast Of Epiphany

Leftover Christmas Poem

The Heart That Goes On

Ars Poetica: Firework Show

Here On Earth, We Are Rich From Birth

Who Washed The Dream Sand Out Of Our Eyes

Notes For A Play I Don't Want To Be InThe Small Rubicons

Heaped With Flowers And Hushed In The Urn

That Old Riddle Time

At Recess Near The Shade Trees

Next Time Don't Put The Strawberry Tarts There

Another Pale Lament About The Clouds

First Poem Of The New Year

Spelling The Stone I Awake From Darkness

DECEMBER 2021

Elegy For A Cloud Well Painted

Landscapes In Dreams

Dream Of A Not So Ridiculous Man

I'm Not Going To Do It

Candy Apple Red In The Dead Of Winter

Sparkle

No Matter How Small You Make Him, He Still Made The Stars

Advice In Traffic

You Give Short Shrift To The Swan Decked Page

My Heart Before The Wearied Day

My Words Seek His Benediction

Plea

All Coming True

Potentially Speaking

My Broadway Song For The Hey Kids, Let's Put On A Show Retrospective

/Something Will Shine Sometimes

In Winter

Resolute

As If She Had

Petals

Doll Dress And The Dolls- Approbation

Still There Remains

Monologue On Cezanne

I Do Not Want To Acknowledge

Rosetta Stone

Thoughts On Listening To Beethoven Again

NOVEMBER 2021

The Names Of Things Spelled Into Her Hands

Irrevocably

In The Archives, A Little Past The Stonecutter's Cottage

Restless

Wolfie

Neither Leaf Nor Bloom Have They Left

School Dream Well Into June

Another Variation On The Story

No Fade From Green

Long Live The Emerald City I Said

Rhetorically Speaking Into The Vast Of Dream

A Faint Nostalgia For The Stars Of Eden

Let Now No Reasonable Star

On How A Poem Is Made

Ghosts On The Moon

O Give Me The Sun Bright Words

Each One A Galaxy

The Whole World Is Haunted With The Holy Ghost

Dorothy Toward Oz, The House Never Settling

For The Green Words Sung To Only One

Not The Hymn To Technocracy You Perhaps Wanted

The Poem To The Toys Left Behind

The Beautiful Words We Wept Over

The Haunted Histories Considered On Christmas Day

The Lilacs In The Evening Of My Poem

The Poem About Pastels

I'm Not Here To Speak To The Unhappiness Of The Uncrowned

The Poem To Thingamabobs, To Ray Bradbury

OCTOBER 2021

Glaze 

The Busy Soul

The End of Weather As We Knew It

Toward Winter Remembering The Lost Bird Of The Soul

I Heard The Weeping Of  Words

Here We Are Whispers The Soul

In October

To Poetry Eluding All Capture

I Only Hear The Angels Sing

Q.E.D. For The Princess And The Pea Proof

Mid Flood, Praying For The Rainbow Aftermath

Only Draw Light

Deposition From The Princess Marionette

Reposted: For Dylan Thomas In The Dark Blue Dusk, The Gilded Dust Of Words

After Long Deserts Dreamed

I Trace The Fault Lines In The Leaf

One Block From Me The Angels Live

Making The Meeting On Time On How To Not Save The Drowning

In Eden

The Days Right After

Translations

Unless

If Not

Narrow Escape

On The Quite Contrary & Etc.

But Still Gold

Imperishably

I'd Rather Dream It So

Stop For A Moment And Read This Poem

If You Are The Child Who Stands Tiptoe At Midnight

In Mid October

On What To Do When The Second Best Wish Comes True

Lifting The Stone To Throw

It Was What I Dreamed

If I Could Build Inside Myself A House Of Sticks

To God My Father On The Subject Of Poets, Poetic Language

Scenes From A Christmas Dollhouse In The Catalogue

How A Poem Is Made

Tide Charts And Sun Tables

Their Purple They Have Wasted On The Wind

Catalpa Tree In The District

For That Which Is Beautiful The Artists Carried Water

On Reading Again His Verses

To Resemble The Light Of The Star

And Will Not Dream

All The Poems On Earth Can't Tell Me What The Light Said

Caught In The Snow Queen's Bright Exacting Mirrors

Some Poets, You Know

To God My Father In Receding Starlight

The Swan Of Tuonela

Thumbelina Scrawls On A Wall

To The Poem Forever Eluding Detection

Why Don't You (Composition No, 2)

Small Cancion On Disappearing

The Magic Cat of the King

SEPTEMBER 2021

To the Keepers Of The True, The Good And The Beautiful In A Cynical Time

To My Mama

Crimson Angels

Thumbelina's Lament

Retrospective

Poetry, I Won't Complain

Finals

Across The Potomac, Angels Along The Fault Lines

Big Top

Fitting Nowhere i Hang From A Star

Outside The Diamond Wind Cuts Hard

I Have Slipped The Marigold Stitch

It's A Fauve Mauve

Hymn To God My Father On The Subject Of Light

Alice In Chalk Pastels

Cry Into Softly, The Memory Of Snows

Still May The Unearthly Rainbow In The Shell

Dark Cherry Thoughts While Chewing Montmorency Cherries

On Listening To The Album My Attention Span Or Thereabouts

The Princess As I Envisioned Her

Largesse/I Sing In Favor Of The Jam-Packed Poem

Glorious Improviso

Song For The Constantly Berated

AUGUST 2021

My Ladder Leans Against The Skies

Not Poetry Outloud;Something Else Instead

Who Are You Where Have You Been

Rainy Saturday, Consulting The Dictionary Of Prisms

At The Malevich Exhibition For Awhile

When I Am Lost Like The Stray Puzzle Piece From The Box

Reading

When I Am Lost Like The Stray Puzzle Piece From The Box

(first draft?)

My Grandmother's Piano

Godmother

What Can I Do But Praise You Father Of Light

Song For A Radiant Atheist

Round Trip With Emeralds

Landscape With Urban Clouds

In The Fair Kingdms, Fast Asleep

The Fins Flash Silver But Some Flash Gold

Summer Poem In Chlorine Blue

Augury In August

For Amy Lowell, For Her Poem "Opal"

The Next To The Last Page In The Book

To My Sister In The Blue Dusk Of Time

Spirograph

From A Glass Sky

Silver On The Stones

This Lemon Bar Of Sunlight (two versions?)

His Famous Children Laud His More Resounding Fame

To Rainier Maria Rilke Again

Yum

Not In Praise Of Ambiguity

Anthems

A Prophecy Over The Small Child On The Swingset

Reading The Tea Leaves For Injust Justice

With A Single Theme

JULY 2021

Nor Be The Gold Flounder

Beautiful Imagination, I Have Come To Call

We Thought We Ruled The Country Of Clouds

Postscript With Love To My Catholic Schooling

The Toads Depart From The Imaginary Gardens

The Fairy Tale Woods Are Perishing

I Was Thinking I Was Dreaming

All The Light He Sends Us

Alice In The Microcosmos

My Words

Instructive Is The Moon

On Reading Again His Verses

Considering The Lilies

Here Before Us In Your Majesty

in The Intended Country In My Dream

Not Even Light Whom You Loved First

The Only Surviviing Detail From The Dream Wreck

Diving Off From The Dream Wreckage

Alchemy Revisited And The Prisms I Would Weep

The Poet Grieves The Loss Of Logos, The Green And Living Word,

And Is Then Made Glad

You Think You May Have

The Language of Birds

The Sendoff In The Pale Blue Galaxy 500

Post Modern Poetry: A Conjecture

Sometimes I Dream Of The Moon Over Calais

Go I Know Not Where, Fetch I Know Not What (variation?)

To The Beautiful Standing Still

Her White Armour

Go I Know Nor Where, Fetch I Know Not What (first draft?)

God Of All These Paths Outworn

Sweet Unsecreted Light Terrestrial Celestial (unknown word) My Eyes

To The Unknown Poets, In Their Anguish

Till Thistledown, I Blow Away

Paperdoll Newsprint Project Not Even Papier Mache And You Can Do It Too

The Drifting Petals Set At Naught, The Clement Wave

To Certain Poets On The Misuse Of The Poetic Impulse

The Last, Late And Lingering Clouds

Let Now No Glistening Word Depart

If I Lose The White Sun

It Is Still Day

Phantasm

JUNE 2021

Pastorale

Beautiful Cosmos, Amid Our Anguish

Oh Bid The Sweet Dove Back

Return Translucent Ship Of Words, Return;I Cried Into The Open Mic Denied

REPOSTED: To Poetry Forever (In Honor Of National Poetry Month April 2021)

Into Our Wilderness You Dropped The Goldeen Orb Of Song

Hypothetical - Protected Species (to Osip Mandelstam)

Rose Gold In The Autumn Afternoon

The Lilacs In The Evening Of My Poem

Conquistadores

The Beautiful Evening At the End Of The World

The Colour Green Seen As A Country

REPOSTED: Particoloured Tears Were Falling Through The Evening Blind

SciFi

May 2021

To Be Found Again

String Theory

These Raids On Unspeakable Beauty

Looking At The Picture Of Flowers That Grow In The Himalayas

A Little Rococo With Your Cocoa

The Name Of God Fell Out Of The Sky

Poetry Is A Kingdom, Not A Locale

Dreaming In Order

Stray Notes On Stray Pieces Of Paper

The Reparations Rag

Subliminal Convenience Store Justifications Before The Lord/The Elevator Pitch For The Movie

Cherry Vanilla

Holding Onto The Light

There Is A Great River Of Sadness In The World

Transience

How Pursed Lipped The Moderns Were About God

Who Is He Really, The Keeper Of Our Days

Her Descendants

The Decline Of Modern Poetry: The Waning Of The Light

On The History Of Poetry

Here Where The Desolate Reminisce About The Beautiful

On Reading Belatedly Of The Immense Praise By The Irish Times Heaped On Bob 

 Dylan For His Nobel Prize Award

Largo

Where Is The Poem You Sent Out

My Most Roseate Years

Writing The Poem You Long To Be

Staff Picks

To A Young Poet Digging An Early Grave

Hemispheres

Minimalism

On The Deletion Of The Word God From The National Day Of Prayer 

 Declaration As Signed Off On By Joe Biden May 6, 2021

The Flight Of Libraries 

Paper Horse

We Would Not Be

To Sharon My Sister On The Brink Of May

O We Write Poetry

On The Futility Of Intellectualizing About Ray Bradbury My Unopened Letter To The Academics

The Heart Folded Over

Let's Call Everything Poetry Because We Can;t Write The Real Stuff Worth A Tinker's Dam, Sam

Invisible Threads

As They Were In The Original

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Reference Work

(to Hans Christian Andersen)

we shall consult the Encyclopedia of Snow

things written, seen, enacted that have somehow been effaced

for instance: the entry for Orange

slightly glazed

though a wedding fragrance lingers in the air

on the page with the entry for orange blossoms, lily of the valley

and there is the entry for jade things made

in several centuries, and the milky jade

does look pale emerald sheerly in the pages of snow remembered

clearly

the soul's impression very young

so how did they say it, once upon

let us not rifle through the songs of the disappearing

catalogued here 

the Emperor's nightingale in the fabled garden

may yet appear among the creamy rose buds where

Death lets go its hold weeping, at the song 

that holds such sweet repose

and the flight of swans transposed 

once more into men may yet regale

as the legend of the hour the evil enchantments ceased.

God holds all in His power

the princess from the tower released, the  princes too

it's not too late the clock of all clocks is chiming here

the angel cherishing of the Child's tear

the clock of fate remember what you will

though half the world forgets

the reason for the violets, the incomprehensible stars

choosing instead the trivialities and the trinket tournaments

slighting again the noble dead.

treading the ghosts of beauty down.

mary angela douglas 26 april 2021

NOTE ON THE POEM: I miss old encyclopedias so much. I have some in my own personal collection quite a few but I miss the mystical feeling I had as a child and in gradeschool especially leafing through all the entries and that kind of aimless but in a good way opening to different passages. For some time now I have been writing poems dedicated to what I call the book of snow and it means different things to me at different times but this time, after the last person on the internet insulted me for still loving the dewey decimal system and the library card catalogue system to distraction, the book of snow in my head suddenly turned into an encyclopedia of snow where things disappeared that you used to love and then among the things I thought of my grandmother's milky jade ring and of course of course the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen. And the oranges kind of as a reference to children's picture book encyclopedias back in the day which would of course have next to the word orange almost always a very cheering bright orange illustration of an Orange.

Every Moment On Earth

every moment on earth its gold is ticking away

gold of the sun, gold underlay of the beggar disguise

the worn carnation petticoat of the shepherdess,

her jewels tucked into the seams, the goose girl

and the wandering gander dreams, wither wherever they wander

downheel, downhill in any weather;no more the wedding silver

ware

royalty in a plain disguise

learn to factor in enterprise

the figurine on the mantle with the subtle smile

ceramic, will be gone in a little while with the seeming sheep in the

meadow...

children have heard time out of mind consumed with their

applesauce apprehensions

the soft receding of fairy tale dimensions

when they were young mixed in with the wind

in the fitful playing of let's pretend

the fern leaning out of the window

toward the lilies blowing more orangely in the sun

I'm the only one in the world thinking this right now

said I in the how and why of it AND setting my small boats afloat

underneath the piano, its geranium stillness in late afternoon

and are you going away so soon

I quarreled mildly with my sister over

which rose leaf really did Thumbelina sleep beneath

and I mourn the candles of their going:

these tribes of the fleetingly beautiful:

this diamond diaspora of the morning dews

I mourn every leaf of what we never knew ,

blew over us, never to return

declensions, enumerations of the painted clouds

over everything we ever wondered outloud

look, I am saying it now that I

tocked the wonders, the waters away

the fingerpaint ridges, the dwarf star midges

the blue waters, blue violet of my watercolour set.

the wedding setting of radiance, the piloted angels over

all this crystal etching of

the planet dreaming in mists of the scratch art

layers of our wistfulness;

the rubied gleanings of the hours no longer in retreat

for it is meet:

this interdiction of Christ for the disappearing...

...

the sunflowered door, then the pouring rain of our tears;

the birds of forevermore, singing.

mary angela douglas 24 april 2021

Meditation On Death And The Early Violets

we wait our turn to go home

as children wait for the ferris wheel at the fair

anticipating if I could only touch the pink clouds,

BE in the air

what then would I be

or where or how

so many summers passed  we wonder our arithmetic

could last and it's a different word problem

now than when all we had to do was figure out how many

apples among how many friends and with bright illustrations

it could all be divided into

so we wait and in our dreams there is a kind of summation where

its snowing bushels of moons and the orchards have lost

innumerable blooms

they lie on the ground past all pink  thundering or is it apricot

I have dropped the shimmering skein of my own imagery

or forgotten to lock the stitches in by knotting the thread

and I     dread the colorful unraveling of all I ever said

thought or loved and I wish for some apotheosis instead

some rose embroidered progression up a handy ladder

propped up against bright hearted Infinity

where I could step lightly from this skin into the

everlasting one where song will be effortless and yet,

again, somehow it was for me on this earth

the only easy thing to sing amid the ruins.

to call the beauteous things departing back to me.

the early violets. the riddle of Time so blissful in music

the princess could never resolve.

mary angela douglas 25 april 2021

Remembering The Color Of Snow

I remember the color of snow in certain paintings

out of the long ago,pearlescent and wistfully I do recall

the roselight falling across the canvas

the hidden light revealed the inner rose and the outer

becoming one distinction as Dante knew

I remember it do you  or snow as azure, as gold as mauve

as the fielding of small questions to the sparrow on my

left hand

bad art is the endless revealing of things I reprimand

almost my sparrow laughs

I said to my sparrow, the one on my right hand

balancing in my portrait as inferred I will withstand:

the princess in exile surveying the ruined lands

making ragged suppositions

and suffering through odd dispositions

revealing in song the long exile

the beauty of the colours of snow 

falling aslant of all predictability

and lamenting that 

no one remembers them now.

mary angela douglas 23 april 2021

No Other Song

how I wish that I could have translated into one searing valentine

the blurred heart stung obscenities of the man this evening

standing confused in the middle of our hallway with the speech impediment

of thick lava and remorse standing buttersoft and stranded

as if he were at a four way stop where all the stoplights went blind

and I know he was trying to reach Heaven like a black dove

with something childlike in his heart to say why why do they turn away

 but he didnt have the words the way 

with the marbles in his mouth from birth no way of forming eligible syllables

to reach the angels the citizenry and so I cry but my cry also is a ragged ragged impression

fading away

compared with his sublimity his

childlike cosmic way of turning a mangled phrase his soul- like the orphanhood

of  a world within him his words striking my heart like a gong

until finally i could hear no other song.

mary angela douglas 22 april 2021

If I Throw My Heart

if I throw my heart over the stone cold wall of the world

can I say I am a message in the bottle shatter the bottle

or the ship in the bottle set free upon a real sea

I have broken the glass with my own fraught soul

raising one frail voice but a little in such a narrow channel yet-

one sparkle of truth outnumbers the circus verbosity of those

who spin the plates that they may rule and count the rest of us fools

the fool scripture well says believes in his heart that there is no God

the message will survive I am speaking tonight, of all the poets

who withstood all the lies who were not used in any complicit way

how beautiful their lines encoded with hidden moonlight in such a dark time lay in infinite peril of disappearing

so that if you in a future time should read them merely glance upon a line

you will know what is meant by the ambivalence of your Age

and what a forged signature it all is.

and through the after mirage of their words

learn the trick of outwitting it all

that they in their hunted luminosity

will not have haunted this stage for nothing.

mary angela douglas 22 april 2021

1Mary Angela Douglas

 

Looking For A Finer Sieve

that winter we lived: looking for a finer sieve

that the honey might strain through from a single star

that we might hoard light.

that in the icehouse melting all that summer

still there might be a corner of shade

of the green days we loved

when the well was full.

I am full now

from the gold of the honey strained through

in hard times.

when the mines were closed.

when there seemed to be no gold

ah no,

light, light is unending

mary angela douglas 2021

How It Is, Feels To Be Lost In The Blizzard Of The Poem

how it is, feels to be lost in the blizzard of the poem

with night coming on is not what you would imagine

for the snows are imaginary and especially the cold

though on the surface windowpane my breath

makes convincing frost and is elaborate as a tapestry

with its buds, its blooms, its little ferns entwined

in pure silver so refined

yet I am not in the house but without and words appear

as the moon receding the frozen moon in the frozen pond

is snowed upon and I feel the snow filling up my heart

as though my heart were a cupping flower pale and lifted up in the dark

from its blossoming in the interrupted Spring

and now unaccountably a star has fallen from Heaven

and become a swinging lantern in my hands

and the landscape I once knew is the snow country

and it's all all in my own language.

mary angela douglas 21 april 2021

The Things My Weeping Eyes Have Seen

to you who keep us above the malignant waves

oh Lord be swift to save

we live in peril of our lives our souls crushed to the earth

by those who claim even now they live and die

for the birth of a new freedom

I have seen with my own eyes and heard the tones of voice

and felt the humiliation of the daily grind and I know what I have seen

and every despicable thing it means

is against the Heart that made the stars and you know where we are

you know the truth in every workplace, classroom, living space, back alley

oh God light the back corners of my country the little kicks under the table

of your Grace those who scorn the poor, the meek, the fallen on hard times

God Lord God remember who you are

and that we

are thine.

mary angela douglas 21 april 2021

CRYSTAL TOWERS PUBLIC HOUSING

FOR THE HANDICAPPED AND ELDERLY

WINSTON SALEM NC