Nor Be The Gold Flounder

NOR BE THE GOLD FLOUNDER

(a very roundabout, off the trolley riff on a disquieting old legend from Quebec, with a generous sprinkling of other legends thrown in as well)

dark mirrors I will not reflect on you

nor find my reverse image burned in on the negative of the Sun, the Son

nor see my thumbnail tiny image in your vu finder overcome

sans the Disneyland

castles, pink clouds, the Springtide pianos and violins I loved

when laden with lilacs and their bright aftermaths.

keep your thunder claps your morose lightnings lurking tongues aplenty, skeletal horseman with no heart and impeccable gloves

your silver nitrate landscapes I am no part of you ,

you will not brand me your brand

nor castle the queen on the scorched the checkerboard earth

on which I stand, dreaming the dream of the flowers, nonetheless.

too long have I been scavenged by you oh aquamarine squint eyed squid,

ghost of a mariner sailing machine

near the wells that give forth no light

even in moonlight you revenant

of deserted courtyards

you the stolid derricks of iniquity, disquiet

you have pumped out your last and rasped in your

raspberry voice at the last repast

I will not rsvp for the balls held in your honor

oh ye eclipses of the sun the moon and the star showers left of

my imperiled quietude: the sole, lean word I keep for you is

depart you finaglers, caramel corn connivers and dissatisfied strivers

who will shrive YOU?

twisters of the grand mal prairie on the way to unfettered no man's land, no man's land listen mister in your frock coat with the razzle dazzle butttons, button it.

Resolute, I will not weep I will not reap your whirlwinds nor sop in your rations as though I had no recourse from Heaven.

or no mother.

inflate yourselves and purr yourselves to sleep pour your own cream you sizzling griddled cats

you parade balloons sifting the childrens' sugar candies you thieves.

I will not rest in the vacuity of the sorrowful the surcharged deeps of your Junes from which

you think to fish me out.

nor be the gold flounder on your kitchen table to furnish forth your Christmas.

mary angela douglas 30 july, 2021

Beautiful Imagination, I Have Come To Call

beautiful imagination I have come to call

can we have pink cakes today with silver icing?

it's dreary winter outside and many people who like it that way

live to complain turning the slush to rain.

I was hoping you'd be home

put on the gramaphone

we'll play Anna Moffo and glass record songs

clear shimmerings of Debussy

and libretti made of gold foil stars

and eat tons of spaghetti

and wish on stars nobody's even named yet

and paint in colors of the firmament

and I won't forget you ever

not in the coldest weather

can I come back sometimes?

and do you like my rhymes.

thanks. it's been lovely.

when I come back maybe we'll pick bluebells

and make gingerbread, music, without the measures

and feed at our leisure, the immortal birds of song.

mary angela douglas 29 july 2021

and Lida Calvert-Hayes

re

We Thought We Ruled The Country Of Clouds

 WE THOUGHT WE RULED THE COUNTRY OF CLOUDS

we thought we ruled the country of clouds

when we were children dreaming aloud

in soft voices like clouds too

our singing voices in the sky blue room

our bubble blown laughter in the yard

and larkspur sparred

and the clouds were happy with such

unsovereign sovereigns and bloomed

in many colours like Joseph's coat

favored by God favoring us in our sunset

retinues

and in the dawn when we turned in our sleep

to dream the dream of waking up

where it is Christmas and summer at the very same time

ah, we were free

and fair to bequeath this drifting

that cannot cannot abide

though in bridal veils festooned in the dimming rains

but only loved and adorned with garlands

in the aftermirage

of their floating, floating marginally away

leaving everything !we cried in the doorways

in pink and blue dismay

though angels warned us, on the winds

this lacework cannot stay.

mary angela douglas 28 july 2021

1Mary Angela Douglas

Postscript With Love To My Catholic Schooling

and if I admire the saints in their categories

the nostalgia of Catholic funeral cards

or leathern books with tissue paper over the

frontpieces veiling St. Therese with  her bouquets of

pink roses as if she'd just won some eternal beauty contest

I know you will still regard me as non Catholic

because I still think and after many years

as beautiful as the votive candles may be

their lengthening lights and shadows in the fragrant chapels

the ruby of the glass or the emerald of it

the pearl paved litanies of the Mass

leading back in time so close to the temporal Christ Himself

still more surpassing to me it always was

to stand on a windy hilltop

and think that God, pure God was in the apple blossomed winds.

mary angela douglas 27 july 2021

The Toads Depart From The Imaginary Gardens

it is the toad croaking to the princess every time

at least re the poems I have in mind

when the critics attack in the mode of 

the toad most slippery flinging the swamp  water back

on her gold worked hem when

they croak, :every one of them:

better to be dead than to be caught out

writing sentimental verse

or what is worse tell us how you feel

about what is real

because we dont believe in your sappy magical kingdoms

green and horrid let the unemerald frog depart

so I may keep the better angels of my heart.

mary angela douglas 27 july 2021

The Fairy Tale Woods Are Perishing

the fairy tale woods are perishing

I said in my small room and the wind heard

and became a gale

and the clouds heard and threw down all their colours at once

in their nursery petulance and wept

and I was in cathedral lights clean swept

from the great heights shimmering and broken on the ground

why have you forsaken the beautiful

and shuttled the heroic away in the post postmodern day

I want to play the mazurkas but you give us barely modeling clay

and want us to make something vaguely statistical out of it

Zeitgeist of this dispirited Age

and true dancing is banished now. oh. anyway!

it's my imagination pounding on the door

that once was pearl

and now is grey.

mary angela douglas 27 july 2021

I Was Thinking I Was Dreaming

I was thinking

I was dreaming

the beautiful things we must not leave them

we carry them

we carry them forever 

though they dissolve on earth

we carry them, the loveliest,

from our birth

and the scarlet leaf

and the gold alternately

the silver planets 

our untold fortunes, gold of the slightest

moment, unfolding of the rose

that seems so long ago and yet

the fragrance of the rose

is with us yet.

mary angela douglas 26 july 2021

All The Light He Sends Us

the earth is His Poem

the emergence of stars

and where they hide

the everlasting Sun oh

all the Light He sends us

and the light undone

the twilights the steps into the dusk

and edged with violet, the interludes

between dusk and dawn

the creases in the wind

in flower strewn winds I think of Him

then I am a poem too

and it is poetry indeed the way grass grows

how comets glow over the grasslands

where there are no words really possible

there is the poem of the Rose

the fragrance of the Sea

the cadence of tides

all that within the mysterious heart belies

and yet believes

all His poems I cherish even the least 

the remnants of the feast

the solitary birdsong that remedies all wrong.

mary angela douglas 24 july 2021

Alice in the Microcosmos

becoming smaller isn't so hard to do thought Alice,suddenly

dressed in a larger blue than she was accustomed to]: and shrinking

I've been practicing really quite a 

long time

living among the rosebuds finding the mossy entrance that's mine

keeping the dewdrops company.

strange in the world though to inhabit an acorn

and to want nothing more than that the squirrel that

buried it here last spring will not be remembering it

but everyone large or small has woes to deal with

and it is so easy for me to steal away making no sound

to use one ray from the moon and to keep tidy

this infinitessimal spot of ground

and under the frond of one leaf when the storms come through

to tell myself in a very little most miniscule while

this will all be a peridot glowing from so far away when

seen from the whirlwind lifting me to the skies.

mary angela douglas 23 july 2021

My Words

my words, fall like clocks, behind

that I forget to wind

my words float on every rill

that I can find that's still

and float in a single ray

on the overclouded day

and wish for you such joy

my words can never cloy,

my words

mary angela douglas 21 july 2021

Instructive Is The Moon

perhaps the moon knows the beauty of dwindling

or November's trees when losing leaves

oh may we too when loss ensues

still find a delicate beauty in what remains

dreaming through the other side of Death,

eternal springtime, we'll reclaim.

mary angela douglas 20 july 2021

On Reading Again His Verses

• • (for William Butler Yeats)

    again at the crossroads of the Celtic Twilight

    I make alas, again my all too temporary home

    hearing again as though they were my own

    these verses of love outworn as a clouded an insistent

    travailing breath

    on the pane of an Eternal wandering.

    how shall I prolong the moment

    when words were this beautiful unto Death

    and when the heart that sang them understood

    all the ways of the enchanted wood and love that faded not with Time.

    what have you got in your lost unaccountable unaccountable pockets

    oh modern, postmodern age, in the Greatcoat of your muted literacy

    in exchange for this

    I ask with the moon in my wrists

    till the specter of that Rose that Rose of all the world arises no more nor the waters of Sligo, the murmuring of bees.

    yet in the embattled consciousness remains

    the ash stirred imprint of these.

    mary angela douglas 20 july 2021'8 october 2021

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Considering The Lilies

consider the liles but they do not

rather, they trample them instead

in the name of progress, evolution,

change whatever name that can be

manufactured as the current currency, serious game

of let me in the door Im important too

to the general populations, the rest of the folk

I am superior to let's organize you or get you off

the taxpayer's back

that's another thIng they do

the trampling of names the individual imprint

gone are all fingerprints

the individual utterance so that they look

askance at you that you even have any personal things left to declare

at the borders

government issue all of it or vigilantes on a spree

 we with Orwellian swiftness

shall compel thee  to admit

to which populations are you tethered

and that you have nothing that's your own not even

your own regrets your own bellwether

and there are no saints. no individual consciencea

just group blanks to fill in so we can get you a case file

and you can be registered as a client after awhile

while we lecture you on why we think you are so irresponsible

since being poor is a crime you must pay and pay for

and yet I stop and I do consider

despite them all, despite the writing on the wall

or above the cameras: we are watching you all

the lilies are still spinning light

and getting away with it.

in plain sight.

There must be a God.

mary angela douglasa 20 july 2021

Here Before Us In Your Majesty

 I would like to paint the picture with unused brushes

but every star reminds me You were here before

and then I am comforted dear Father of Lights

that you have made it all and at best we are merely

the golden echoes of Your majesty.

which loves us loves us loves us.

mary angela douglas 20 July 2021

To The Intended Country In My Dreams

I wrote to the intended country in my dreams

in all the languages of green

I dont know who waylaid the messenger

no one will fill me in, it seems

I'm left to conjecture, to rude awakenings still

so I will send it out again the thing I wrote

the poem in code or the cablegram

or the song as I'm singing it to the dove in my hand

i will let go of finally from the last ark;s darkening rainbow's portal

the small diamond words i thought

I thought would smote the armies of the dread

until I'm dead, or carted away by angels

and I'll wake up and read the letters to them

instead though they are no captive audience either.

mary angela douglas 19 july 2021

Not Even Light Whom You Loved First

Lord God.

how you endure

waiting for the tides to turn

returning all things to you

each splintered domain

each picture frame of your first Creation

the green leaf in its first imprint on the day

and our tired hearts gone so far astray

you would have gathered in at any time

but we were blind.

our blindness you must endure as if it were your own

even Light cannot comfort you whom you loved first 

before all else

nor my poor words though how I wish they could.

mary angela douglas 19 July 2021

The Only Surviving Detail From The Dream Wreck

the only surviving detaial from the dream emerged

like a fairytale thread from a labyrinth no longer heard from

like a kind of  Rosetta Stone

from this, we were expected to reconstruct the whole thing

yet found it , impossible.

as Mandelstam said, to glue together with any sliver the broken 

backbone

of two centuries. rendered asunder.

mary angela douglas 18 july 2021

DIVING OFF FROM THE WRECKAGE

for John Keats, Percy Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane

diving off from the wreckage

I flee all treasure

floating like a leaf on the tide of

a poem by Shelley...though his tide was the wind''s

and not doubling back 

looking for the artifacts

for the target audience.

I am unmoored

and seemingly, dreamingly drown like Shelley

on the ocean floor clutching my volume of Keats

in an ironic Age

I weep for Adonis oh weep for him for he is dead

and now the singer of his elegy too 

I mourned and yet shall yet shall mourn as Whitman said

in ever returning Spring

and yet I sink not as lead, but am sprung

for I am the  treasure

that is not forgot and rung by rung from the seabed

I am the treasure Christ died

to buy and the Kingdom come:

ransoming me from all reefs

and wreckage

forever

mary angela douglas 18 july 2021

Alchemy Revisited and The Prisms I Would Weep

to you oh Lord I cry

from the depths of the mirrors they have inverted, converted

only to see themselves and no other

themselves without you

kites without strings

reengineered puppets

on a fling

what can I say to all the carnival mirror distortions

that are in play now

I would weep prisms and they would distort the rainbows

I would speak stars and You, the Maker

and they would cover my mouth with dirt

and call the undertaker

yet well I cry

Christ Jesus from the Cross died and rose again

and this is truth and this is all there is

of civil discourse

compound it how you may

in your false alchemy.

Only God is gold.

mary angela douglas 18 july 2021