ALICE AT THE DINNER PARTY
Alice at the dinner party
In her navy frock
Wore a collar of Battenburg lace
And watched the evening clock
Waited for the twilight stars
Like trains out of the din
And sped away with firefly jars
And opened them and then
Rehearsed the scenes from earlier
Earlier in the day
And had the same glad feeling
When she was home to stay.
mary angela douglas 1 june 2024
I AM GOING AWAY, BUT NOT NOW
I am going away, but not now
To the final land of mists and separations
To the pearl enclosures of the Beginning
To be turned into starlight, moonlight
Whatever it pleases Him
A white rose shirring a little girl again in a pale blue shawl
Shedding petaled tears Or the great snows minutely
keeping his music boxes in order who
For the beauty of perfection
left us here
To wonder at the mists
The final separations
the afterwards to the chapter book
the future closeness of the constellations.
mary angela douglas 31 may 2024
THE GOLD THAT WAS WON WAS HER DAUGHTER
Rumplestiltskin without pity
All this gold cannot be spun
For the want of trollish mercy
Ah the golden wont be won
So to straw was she confined
And could naught her sorrow hide
When a dull bargain she had made
To cast her child into the Shades
Still she found a mercy mild
In the Heavens for her child
And she saved her from distress
And the ending you know best.
You by anger so possessed
Rumplestiltskin without pity
Wounded so by envy’s shaft
Overthrown by his own wrath.
mary angela douglas 31 may 2024
HOW SHALL I TEACH MY HEART SNOW SILENCE
How shall I teach my baffled heart snow silence
In moments when the air glistens with
So much absence
As to make another universe entire out of it.
All the birds in a muted landscape
Their choirs on hushed wing dazed as if they were become clouds
Strangers to music
Sketched in as if in an exodus from song
And in perilous haste
Cannot bear witness enough it seems of late
When we come to the knowledge
of the poverty of speech, stray rubric of song
in the instant of wrong
failing to meet us coming or going;
When the small fissures start
In the history of the dark.
Let Light keep watch.
Somehow.
Even sans transfiguration.
mary angela douglas 30 may 2024
WHY SHOULD THESE EFFIGIES TROUBLE THE HEART
Why should these effigies trouble the heart
These soft blue field Madonnas
I was asked in a dream where angels stood mute
And Rilke stood apart
With the stars as witnesses
Who will dare to judge the clouds of Van Gogh
The pinwheels of his stars
When art has laid down its palette at last
And men have begun truly to die
Without beauty how can we live
Whisper her orphaned children on the peppermint wind
Or they would if they could, and leave off playing hopscotch
On the rain smattered pavements forever subject to
Poorer kingdoms where
That wind blows only listlessly over
The brown curled leaves on the desultory pavements.
And poetry is remembered if at all
as just a moon drenched phase
we once went through.
mary angela douglas 30 may 2024
MAYFLOWER LOVELINESS WAS GRANTED
Mayflower loveliness was granted
As if heraldic in fairytales we belonged
In afternoons with the light filtering through the trees
And all the lost camelots emerge merge into one sequined focus
the instant the vowed sun leaves off shining
Snow angels catch up the clouds to keep them from tilting
Is the instant of the eclipse of love
But Divine Love redeems
And carries the pageant forward
As the Child carries the one and divides transparently
rich segments of orange or apple radiance
among the party guests
Of eternity.
mary angela douglas 30 may 2024
CAROUSEL REDUX
It shouldn’t be so hard to describe
The horses painted in oil spill colours
The gravity of getting on in the first place
It is always twilight in the dream
Attending angels with the low flying clouds
And spinning around makes me want
To go back home
but carousels are incapable of transport
my lavender steed cant detach itself from the mechanism
And become a children’s birthday party
Pony,a derby winner wreathed with roses
Useless to be riding painted ponies
Through the painted desert this time of year
I want to get off the carousel
But it is complicated
I have paid the fare
due diligence is expected.
the ghost conductors have gone home
With extra cotton candy for their children
And I am here in painted tears
Rehearsing all the carnival years
as the ponies look dangerous
And fearful simultaneously
Of my centrifugal heart
Their bright colours do them no good
Their bridles painted with wildflowers
And in my dream I know that they know
That the kettledrum thunder coming out of the sky
Was only just preliminary.
o they cannot bolt and go.
This is a dream of vertigo
But after awhile
I will wake up to birdsong
The stability of trees
Rising from the ground in green profusion
Turning their underside silver leafed wonder
while I'm
Thanking God I am home again at last
And spooning from a delft bowl of cream
the wild strawberries for breakfast.
mary angela douglas 29 may 2024
MADRIGAL
A benediction as of tears
Will flower here
Perhaps each whispered to his lute
And wove the pomegranates into rhyme
The golden apples of lost Time and place
I cannot at this date assess
But I confess in madrigals I find
A well tuned version of my mind
That drops slow tears at errant shrines
And weeps for the departing birds
As if my heart had been their nest
In all my dreams I labor thus
To find the state of mind like this
The paradox that in it flies
What’s fair and lovely
Often lies
Whats plain, is beauty in disguise
And if I could in green dells dwell
I Know my dears I know full well
the madrigals are my glass bells
as though my soul were ringing there
and each note did my soul compel
as flowers in May do scent the air
love’s hope is mixed with love’s despair,
lament for beauty
on a vanished stair
await the end or the reprieve
the moon stage left in ivory, grief
in ifs inevitability;
the play is set
the poem that mirrors sweet regret
that bears its own forget me nots
into the violet blue of Space imbued
with all I could ever say or do
anachronistically, I choose.
mary angela douglas 28 may 2024
I DREAMED OF THE SEA, OF THE CHILDREN OF LIR
INARTICULATION
Thoughts into words like flowers go
herded under winter snow
Far their range when they are free
In unspoken liberty
Music without the words is sooth
To reveal the heart’s vast truth
Borders of language can confine
What in feeling is gold refined
Then should silence still prevail
All our words will surely fail
Measuring the measureless sky
Across which migrant birds must fly.
mary angela douglas 27 may 2024
THE DESCENT OF ICARUS
It isn’t the descent of Icarus that astounds
As much as it is the gold burning off the waters
When he entered the sea door of his drowning
Into Eternity
I try to get out of my mind
Tangled with seaweed, urchins, surprised mermaids
Braiding each others hair with sea lilies suddenly looking up
The myths compounding one another
Diffused through many layered Time
But most of all it is dazzling to consider
His singed wings
Their sizzling in the water
Testament to his suffering
To what for a while was
His glory.
This is my Icarian story.
mary angela douglas 27 may 2024
CERTAIN IT IS HE BROUGHT WITH HIM THE SUNRISE OF BIRDSONG
For Rainer Maria Rilke
Certain it is he brought with him
The sunrise of birdsong
In the tree of the heart
As if the air had never been quite
That crystalline and ringing not even in the sylvan rains
So that now I can only hear
The bouquet of music he proffered
At home later at his desk in his charmed circle of lamplight
After solitary excursions
As it came into his mind
The whole earth was full
Of the dimming of light
Of angels in sad retreat from
The din of earth, the insufficiency of bells
And only he could translate the beauteous swells
Pouring out into the receding tides
So that we were transfigured into the poem of the far distances
yet incomparably near.
mary angela douglas 27 may 2024
WHICH IS THE DREAM, OR DREAM WITHIN A DREAM OR APPLE OF GOLD AND SIVER PEAR
Apple of gold and silver pear
I cannot pluck you from the orchard of dream
You merely shine there
Canopied by the blue silken skies
That ripple everywhere.
Made to be ornamental;
I shall abide your shade
Beauty far removed still casts its shadows
And in extremity I will drink orangeade
Waking up to find the table laid
The chair drawn up by the cooling fans.
The Spanish fountains.
mary angela douglas 27 may 2024
GILDING THE ARK
Gilding the Ark
I sigh in clouds
And rain bubbles never through the portals
We sail on
My rag dolls and I
My books with the antique pictures in them
Noon arrives with festive sandwiches
Nectar of grape and bread of life
And I am happy just to be here
Paddling small oceans without strife
Sailing the stream or even the brook
Tumbling in rapids of countless books
Listening to music I heard before
When I was much closer to the shore.
Waving at ghosts I still adore.
mary angela douglas 27 may 2024
SEAGULLS CANNOT
Seagulls cannot shatter the glass
Of the wild sand castles
That never will last
And the water recedes
And the wave forms again
And spins its foam in a spendthrift’s wind
Where no one’s there to let me in
When pink sand crumbles again, again;
Then the lift of the wing in a foreign dream
Angel or bird it isn’t clear
Is something I truly don’t want to sing
If the mist that surges is really my tears;
Can set my fleeting soul adrift
Far from the shores I knew before;
Sad angels to ransom sea Christmas pelf
Where the sea glass shines all by itself
Where the seagulls cannot shatter the rains
On the wild sand castles not built to remain
The seagulls rise they pivot and turn
But the shards of memory still can
Burn.
And the green wave falter.
mary angela douglas 26 may 2024
ON CEZANNE
It was the blue and lemon of Cezanne
The abstract planes of mottled green in the various trees
The dappled red of the roofs I wanted to keep
To myself
On Sundays without the museums
Like a second shelter
The first being God and his blue green world
My tiny apartments with his prints on the walls
And it hurt me when people said Cezanne
As if they were saying anything at all, tossed off
And scared me
when I couldn’t remember the delicate sketches
He made of just green leaves daubed
I had glimpsed once when someone else was in a hurry
In the National Gallery bookshop
Come to me in dreams, oh green daubed leaves
Where there is time to think about leaf and the imagination
Of the leaf and why it is so cooling now and consoling
To catch one more shining glimpse of it
In my non theoretical mind.
As if that coolness could heal me now.
And I wonder beyond any possible sadness, mystified
How can the coolness of the rain daubed leaf
feel just the same as
In his painting so that I cannot tell at all the difference.
mary angela douglas 26 may 2024
TO PRESENT YOURSELF AS A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS
To present yourself as a damsel in distress
Looks fetching in fairy tales
Saved from dragons and all the rest
There you are clad in a pink gown
With princess seams and you seem to be one
A princess, I mean,
your paper thin arms outstretched
Over the pop up paper castle balcony
Prepared to leap from danger
To live as a damsel in distress is to live with the real
Possibility of being manipulated by frog princes or hand puppets
Of being trapped by flinging yourself too hastily over the moat.
Yet if you present yourself as capable of handling your own distress
Even if the Lord God is beside you which He certainly is
GIVING you the strength
You may be regarded as too bold, no swan
But an odd duck quacking.
Alack. What is it you are lacking.
What is to be done in a world where truly
You do not wish to be bought or sold
To be part of any financial transaction
And yet, not to grow old alone.
To freely give your heart. Or perhaps to live apart if necessary
If that is the only way to be true to the One who is calling you
Most earnestly.
Abide. Endure.
Forget what other people think.
Cling to the real possibility you have a Soul.
And you are on on the brink on earth to grow strong
To heal and to bless in this life for the Next
To prevail. To live for beauty is no disgrace
To live for Art.
In every way He allows. To keep your vows.
mary angela douglas 26 may 2024
RIDDLE IN BLUE AND GOLD
That which falls away is snow
Whispered the child unknowingly
On the blue planet wistfully
On the gold planet knowingly
Putting the colours back in order
Of beauty again, the Marian colours
The colours of when
The sky came dancing
The sun stood still
That which falls away is music still
Cried the child on the planet of ash
as the Marian colors came sifting through
And untied the ribbons of sorrow at last
Upon the curtains that hid the view
Of the planet of blue
The planet of blue
mary angela douglas 26 may 2024
LILLIAN GISH IN A STARRY CROWN
for her epiphanous role in the film Night of the Hunter, for her impeccable role in American film, for her loyalty to D.W. Griffith and her love of her sister, Dorothy.
Lillian Gish in a starry crown
Told the children to turn around
To turn around lest they be found
By the shadow of evil stalking the ground
And she will keep vigil all night if she must
To save their gold from turning to rust
To stay the slaughter of innocents there
By hiding them up her rickety stairs
And all I can cry is oh keep her there
The stalwart angel with fragile might
Crossing the borders and facing the wind
And flinging her soul out again and again
In her own being; almost drowning on floes
To get the best shot the most serious pose
Lillian gish in the hour of fire
Keeping the lambs from the devil’s desire
Holding the fort in a dubious hour
Wedded to film only she could say
In the way that she said it in Charles Laughtons day
Children endure and they abide
In a voice like a small sea at high tide
Lillian Gish in a robe of stars
I wonder who you truly are
And make this small poem of stars for you
So disingenuous and so pure
to all such ways of the world inured
On the front porch guarding the lambs that endure.
mary angela douglas 25 may 2024
FOR THAT WHICH HAS CARRIED US ALONG
For that which has carried us along
Even while we thought surely I am drowning now
And we wake up disbelieving
On a dry and fragrant shore
Thinking how
How did I get here
For that which in the
depths of gloom
Dances one faint star upon the ceiling
So that we say, fitfully, Sistine?
What can I call you so that you know
It is me speaking to you
And me alone Lord God
Whom I know
Specifically as the one who has carried me
While I thought I was drowning
Is the one who sings in me
Things beyond my knowledge
Who walks through doors through seas
Who leads me out of grief
Even when I insist snow blind to maytime
I am still a tenant.
Who must fulfill the lease.
mary angela douglas 23 may 2024
THE HOSPITAL STAY OF DREAMS
Surely a way can be found in the hospital stay of dreams
To fling our pain into the clouds
And let the clouds weep it out for us
And then sail on so unperturbed
Sweet nurses of the heavenly air
Or trees at the window take our sighs
Diffuse the aromas of sap and pine
And round out our breathing
So that we remember suddenly
The intake of breath we felt as children
Regarding the Beautiful
The Beautiful will return
The angels murmur in the corridors
To those who manage sleep and pain
And are themselves alone
Oh not alone.
Though seeming to have no visitors.
Let angels throng to comfort the consoling too
And when you wake
May all the music in the rain
Disperse all pain.
The thought of home
Heal you wholly.
Love bind the ragged edges.
with oranges, with peppermint
with cooling waters.
the waters of Shiloh that go softly.
mary angela douglas 23 may 2024
TOLL SOFTLY FOR CHRISTIANE, SHEER ROSEPETALED SONG (FINAL VERSION)
in memory of Christiane Coste, my friend (d. february 27, 1978) to be sung from tower to tower...]
oh how could we mourn you then, Christiane,
being blinded by the same sun.
somewhere there must be old carols sung. chanson-
for the princess never returning home.
and in the distance you can see
the Griefs all silver and gold
raised like pennants floating:
unmoored, the ships of goodness, truth
and beauty gliding on gilt waters to retrieve
your faith displaced as mine was
because true mandarins wished it so
in their purple gloating.
let there be worldwide lamentation.
or none at all when silent tears
blur your water-coloured imprint
bourne away on the glittering waters
since you, to a fair country returned
to the One beyond all deception;
the One who held in store for you
the fairy tale gown of simple pearl.
the unalloyed crown.
somewhere old carols must be rung
for the triumph over the world,
over all charlatans forever-
clear focus: crystal star.
rolling from tower to tower in this,
our brief exile.
oh lily snatched back with the laughing eyes,
devoutness unsurpassed. my wildflower heart
was once subdued now
tolling, tolling for the carol hid from your heart
only for a span-
the rose petaled scattering
of your hands
mary angela douglas 22 may 2014;rev. 24 may 2014 rev. 26 may 2014
Notes on the Poem: use of the word "mandarin" is not used for any ethnic sense, nor is it meant as a slur, but more in the meaning of bureaucrats, court hangers-on in a kind of anamolie, fairy tale sense, as in Hans Christian Anderson's "The Emperor's Nightingale", or "The Emperor's New Clothes" the fawning of those who praise the wrong music instinctively or agree to see what isn't there for the sake of getting along. The circumstances of her death were surrounded by exactly this atmosphere.
It is also used to express a certain broken hearted disenchantment in a delicate way to echo the beautiful soul of the person departed (especially in contrast to her brutal murder which I have not even acknowledged in the poem for good reason as it is not paramount-when compared with the indestructibility of her soul)-
and in token of her youth. She was barely into her late twenties at the time of her death.
The rose petaled scattering of her hands refers simultaneously to her death as well as to the rose miracles of the French saint, St. Therese of Lisieux as Christiane was from France
though she died in New York City.
The entire poem musically I longed to set as a kind of antique French song from the Middle Ages, one of those mysterious songs that mirror so much beyond the power of common speech to convey.
This rose petal hands image is also to represent the fact that her body was found in a huge flower box, a detail that was left out of some newspaper accounts and which I have now "corrected:
[to Robin Williams and those who loved him]
we are the jesters in old costumes
and bright slippers, with worn soles;
worn souls, gestures of the
harlequinade, the dancing days;
with glittery wings and gauze,
we give them pause,
the brokers in the rain
bounding for their trains.
o may they fill our felt hats
to the brim caught in the nets of whimsey;
with spare gold, a doubloon or two,
for stories told,
the odd star sapphire.
odd isn't it, how a lifetime
can be spent as plain as plain
with no revelations whatsoever
then, down the drain
we, on the other hand appear
over decorated
like Eloise at Christmas
cause we like it that way;
careening in and out of traffic
and making small payments
day upon day
on the velocipedes
of the fairly free;
olde poetry on a spree.
and the paper flower bouquets,
the scarves in credible array
in quixotic shades
pulled out of the very air
we breakfasted on,
just yesterday.
mary angela douglas 7 august 2016
YOU CAN'T REMEMBER SOMEONE ELSE'S MEMORIES
You cant remember someone else's memories
I tried to tell them in Wonderland
Of course they disputed me
It was their business to do so
It was state craft I was told
If I grow old or older
Still rust will not turn into gold
Of someone else's saying
They were there and you never were-
Anywhere
Let us not become their blurring
of our edges
I whisper to those
Who in deep twilight sleep
And by no ties that bind
Were bereft of all roses.
Once upon a time.
mary angela douglas 22 may 2024
