DIFFUSING LIGHT OF AERIAL GOLD

 

DIFFUSING LIGHT OF AERIAL GOLD

Diffusing light of aerial gold

A something azure in the wind

And my heart toward October tends

Where ochre and bright scarlet blend

Scarce maple shine incarnadines

Seeming so like valentines

As if the whole earth were a shrine

To unseen love, Divine.

Then later in the afternoon

God appears with a rubied spoon

And scoops out more for us

To view

As if he poured it through an amber sieve

The apricot glaze on everything

How most acutely to feel alive

When earnest studies must begin

Before the soul has wintered in

And time is melting oh my friend.

mary angela douglas 30 august 2024

 

 

 

ODE TO THE POPOVERS MODERATELY EATEN, OUR DAYS TO SWEETEN

 

ODE TO THE POPOVERS MODERATELY EATEN, OUR DAYS TO SWEETEN

Popover popover dark cherry laden

Bursting at seams

With pastry gleams

Of light brushed butter and sugar

And featherlight light

As angelical air

Keep us from despair

from trifles and cares

besetting us daily

lest we not go gaily

along the square

Or apricot ripe or peach perfect bright

Whatever your filling

We’re more than just willing, with kiwi or berries

to be made so merry

To nibble a little, light icing, no quibble

At your magic crust o we simply must

Or royalty’s crumbs in the oozing of plums

All purple and gold

In your pastry folds

Like the end of the day

In sunset display we survey

On our late teatime plate.

And sweetly say YAY! May I have another one?

mary angela douglas 28 august 2024;29 august 2024

I DREAM OF STARLINGS ULTIMATE VERSION

 I DREAM OF STARLINGS ULTIMATE VERSION

 I DREAM OF STARLINGS FINAL VERSION

I dream of starlings

Never having seen them

pictured or at some summer lake,

 musical notation taken down

but here in my cream coloured room and reading

I imagine them blue black, purple against

The skies I imagine as infinity’s turquoise

set in a silver sweet doom

In the passage of the book I have underlined

Momentarily.

Perhaps in real life as they call it

I could not recognize them

Perhaps they would lift off in a dark cloud

On the last day of the world and I 

And I not cognizant of their migration

Unable to call them back from a Méliès moon

But anyway I dreamed them

Perhaps the way I dreamed them

Is the way they wished to be

Who can say now that

rose tipped auroras from

Starpoint to starpoint are florescing

And incandescing

 for perhaps the last time

when we’ll swing out like meteors

from Heaven’s garden gate

flung back into the apple orchards of forever.

mary angela douglas 28 august 2024

 

I DREAM OF STARLINGS FINAL VERSION

 

I DREAM OF STARLINGS FINAL VERSION

I dream of starlings

Never having seen them

pictured or on some summer hike,

musical notation taken down

but here in my cream coloured room and reading

I imagine them blue black, purple against

The skies I imagine as infinity’s turquoise

set in a silver sweet doom

In the passage of the book I have underlined

Momentarily.

Perhaps in real life as they call it

I could not recognize them

Perhaps they would lift off in a dark cloud

On the last day of the world and I 

And I not cognizant of their migration

Unable to call them back from a Méliès moon

But anyway I dreamed them.

Perhaps the way I dreamed them

Is the way they wished to be

Who can say now that

rose tipped auroras from

Starpoint to starpoint are florescing

And incandescing

for perhaps the last time.

mary angela douglas 28 august 2024

 

 

I DREAM OF STARLINGS

I DREAM OF STARLINGS

I dream of starlings

Never having seen them

pictured or on some summer hike

but here in my cream coloured room and reading

I imagine them blue black, purple against

The skies I imagine as infinity’s turquoise

set in a silver sweet doom

In the passage of the book I have underlined

Momentarily 

Perhaps in real life as they call it

I could not recognize them

Perhaps they would lift off in a dark cloud

On the last day of the world and I 

And I not cognizant of their migration

Unable to call them back from a Méliès moon

But anyway I dreamed them

Perhaps the way I dreamed them

Is the way they wished to be

Who can say now that

The auroras have flared up for perhaps the last time.

mary angela douglas 28 august 2024

DEEP BOOKS I HAVE READ, THE POOLING OF GRAVE WATERS

DEEP BOOKS I HAVE READ, THE POOLING OF GRAVE WATERS

Deep books I have read the pooling of grave waters

To be new baptized christened or renamed

I cant explain it all away lens obscura, mist,  the other way

Cloud by night and pillar of fire by day Im in the other realms

The inner life begins to bloom in

The deep books and the way

They are more than reading them can be construed to be

By those who say

Who reads these days

To which I say

Who breathes.

Who lives in the orchards falling blossoms

Falling out of Time in the picture book dimensions

Larklike in happiness, in the blessed world made real

More than alice through the looking glass

Oh come to pass.

mary angela douglas 25 august 2024; 26 august 2024

HAS SOME LEAF THUNDERED

HAS SOME LEAF THUNDERED

Has something happened in the world

that I should know about

that I have awaken at this hour

Has some leaf thundered, has the rose bush quaked

Does some ship in distress on a colorless sea

Send its star of expiring after me

And signal send help right away…

Or only o pause and pray

Sometimes the quiet is so loud

I wonder do the crickets drown

Rather than drowse in the purple stillness

What is it crowds the air

As if midsummer fairies were there

With glimmering torches lit

As if the dreams of everywhere

Were wide awake and full of Stare

And wanted me as a witness there

mary angela douglas 21 august 2024 

CHARACTER FOR A NOVEL, MADE OF SNOW

CHARACTER FOR A NOVEL, MADE OF SNOW

(after the Russian)

No one could say because they did not know

That everything everyone she met she made into a thing

More pure than It was in actuality, adversity

As if she only saw through the prism of some ideal

Or would not see at all the not so hidden flaw

How they would have laughed to know

Or mocked her if an inkling showed

Of all her silverly ardent enshrinement

Quiet and afar, where all the meanings are or would have been

Had the earth been kinder

Of what they truly were not or maybe could they be

Transformed by her into some enchantment?

Let history forget what it patently knows

The common round, the cynical ground of things

Who can say but that another history grows one overgrown with roses

The kind small children know, fresh from the angel band

In a mind composed and tranquil as a field of snow

That overwhelms reality and makes it so

Eternity will yield the truth

That she already knows

That holy fool.

mary angela douglas 20 august 2024

ARTHURIAN TO THE LAST!

ARTHURIAN TO THE LAST!

Will you Return or will you be the

Glint on the water of the sword that burned

The Lady of the Lake withdrew

From all, from all of you or

it drowned itself 

and quenched not love betrayed

Nor kingdoms, yearned, unsaved

Nor happy discourse from the beginning

Doomed to fail

Oh what would they ask

If finally he returned at last

Why does it all dissolve in mist

Whenever we start to talk like this

And you and I, the same.

Its legend they say

Just thimblefuls of sighs

or breadcrumbs scattered by a child

who should grow up more worldly wise

then turn to think of what they’ll eat at noon

Or something that a colleague said

About a daughter to be wed real soon.

But speaking only for myself

If I had time and that much wealth

Id gather from four corners, more

All Arthurian scraps of lore and steep my tea most briskly

Revelng in the mystery, 

For in my dreams I see odd runes

And farther fields where there is no doom

But some recovered Elysium for them.

I ponder on the visions they had

Those knights of old

Though it is sad

Their kingdom was in any case short lived

Convivial for awhile then sandcastle

All kicked in yet I still hear them on the wind

The quest driven cry

That cannot die

Because it keeps the Soul alive.

Down to the last singed emblem:

tin soldier lead

melted to a heart instead.

mary angela douglas 19 august 2024

A SUMMER NIGHT AND THE NEWS IS ON

 A SUMMER NIGHT AND THE NEWS IS ON

A summer night and the news is on

I learn that the Holy Grail is gone

Or no one can prove the one they have is bona fide

How jewel encrusted it should be for what it meant in reality

Worn from the dust of centuries the curators polish up.

But jeweled in truth was all that Christ conveyed

Without ornate display, the touch of his hand upon the sick

The quickening of life in everything around him where he stood.

How sweet the lilies tossing in the wind

Their scarlet blooms and just for Him

In other news midsummer blues or how to view

The super rare phenomenon of the blue moon supersized

I drink my supersized lemonade and long for pale blue summer shade

On other planets far away…where indigo moths are drawn to it.

I want to stay tuned.

but the actual moon beckons outside the window

Glinting behind clouds

in overcast dreams I surmise, somehow

Are still allowed it in commercial space

And the tv seems so loud

By contrast and true lovers pace

In antique poems still mourning the moon’s inconstancy

Whether it be blue or rose

To metaphors bound in my shabby bookcase.

mary angela douglas 19 august 2024

MY ARK MY ARK

 MY ARK MY ARK

My ark my ark upon the flooding, the indigo waters

When shall we depart

Making the milk pearl stations of the cross to say as children do

Nothing is lost and all your rainbows are folded away for safe keeping

Though doves have strayed have strayed coming back

With no leafy foliage and yet, the scent of orange blossoms

On the evening air…is fair and

Who am I to say

All flooding is sad and embarkation from earth, the worst

Beyond what the heart should bear and yet

My heart, be glad

When we are set to surge on such a current as life on earth

Never had

Let the hour of departure come while ringed with magic

Fading fast from alpha to omega and past what we loved here

We await His grace and stocked with the Great Books

We shall leave this dear yet terrible place, this spinning wonder

The acutely beautiful  music we have heard the loved ones undeserved

Who preceeded us for whom we still may grieve and yet they will be and they are

Free at Home the first to greet us ashore, be assured with kind embrace

When all is accomplished here and face to face we see at last

What we were made for

And steadily endured for the promised life to come;

Be not dismayed.

mary angela douglas 18 august 2024

THE ONE LITTERED WITH STARS, WITH AMETHYSTS

 

THE ONE LITTERED WITH STARS, WITH AMETHYSTS

I took the silver bend in the road

The one littered with stars, with amethysts

The one where I sighed to the birch trees

Someone else’s heroine

In a language made of glass

And thought of Time as only mist.

Whom have you seen pass by you on the road

Almost the snowy saints seemed to ask me in dreams

Or some minor royalty displaced

Plucking the thornbush and not the rose.

I know what I know but I dream everything

I said, sometimes in secondary colours.

or jewel toned, Christmas bell tones.

Simpleton!  roared the ghostly throng

Always listening in on some old pay phone

Always riffing on my Song

But I still know

I wasn’t wrong.

mary angela douglas 17 august 2024

LET MY SPEECH BE HERE, OR IF, DENIED

LET MY SPEECH BE HERE, OR IF, DENIED

let my speech be here, or if, denied

 may I post telegrams of snow

 to the listening skies

 that turn in their opal sphere

 and balance on a point so far from here burnished

 and alive

 in words that cannot die

 that God immortal makes

 and on the winds of faery breaks not

 nor derides

 but flings upon the tides then may they row

 so foam endowed in flotillas of gold

 and bring then apples of delight

 that cannot fade

 to all the children for whom

 dreams were made.

 mary angela douglas 15 august 2024

 

I DREAMED IT WOULD BE RECITED TO ME

I dreamed it would be recited to me

In words of mother of pearl

The dream of the pearl poet

And I would see words like snowmelt

And feel the splash of glazed waters suddenly broken open

A feeling worth singing the dream birds sang

And heralded the Spring as though

There had never yet been Spring on earth

Poetry, or lilies branching from the Saviour’s brow.

mary angela douglas 13 august 2024

THE HISTORY OF SNOW

 

THE HISTORY OF SNOW

were we the readers of the history of snow

the history of melting

or of letting go

or having that much

farther to go

snow blind, we read on.

and winters acculumated

our faces worn quite through

with all the endless snowing

that we knew

that we trudged through

warming our hands at the fireplace

of the old stories,

the ones where you come in out of the rain

to take your tea and toast

not wanting to leave again

or quiet refreshment from the holy ghost

and somewhere in the castle

in a room you loved the most all tucked away

you find the books that say that said from childhood

what you longed to say

the ones where it is suddenly made plain

that you are reading in the blizzard too

of your own life

and will melt soon

and your true Spring, resume.

mary angela douglas 9 february 2017

THAT ONCE WE LOVED

 

THAT ONCE WE LOVED

Now they have laid to rest so negligently I think

The rose and the briar

And so thus it can be said

I no longer live

In the world that I desired

And gone is the lore of everything

They have banished in the name of whose dream

I cannot cannot glean

For lately I have heard in the wind

in tides of feeling never before

washed over the bridge that

The light we see from the stars

Is from the stars that long ago were dead

Or perhaps they live still

In storied song, in secret cherishing

in fingerpainted sighs I would have conjured

That they have dismissed as if children tardy to school

All the beloveds

That once we loved

That once we loved.

That still I adhere to.

mary angela douglas 12 august 2024

IF WE LEAVE THE WORLD TO THEM

 

IF WE LEAVE THE WORLD TO THEM

If we leave the world to them, the inventory takers

The movers and the shakers

They will run the fairies aground

Amethyst kites will no longer sail

The semi precious sunsets will pale

We will start to tell fantastical tales

Piling our cocoa high with the little pink marshmallows

We got on sale

And be cut short in less than midsentence.

Shall we lose our way, then, to the wild strawberries

Our shadows thin as paper dolls, dispirited

Shall we forget all we’ve inherited

And in the rain have only serviceable umbrellas?

Ah my golden parasols oh my fuchsia fans

In chivalrous midsummer, living without plans;

For apricot cobblers and gemmy pirate plunders

Oh my lovely storms minus their lightnings and blue thunders

How will I how will I live without wonder

How will we live with the quibblers, the dolorous

We who imagine that life is glorious and rejoice

For the sugared milk coloured like Rouault

On vintage cartoon Saturdays when we

Make our own parades and slurp our cereals

All afternoon in fanciful pjs

or under a shell pink moon

Reenacting the Christmas plays

Even in red clovered June

We dream it should be, we should always be

Exactly, precisely this way

With the angel harps tuned.

What will we do with their stock and trade

Sipping so sadly their watered down orangeades

Seeking for Andrew Marvell, for o, in a green shade

We who surely

For miracles were made.

And fragrant gardenias.

mary angela douglas 10 august 2024

 

REPOSTED: PHILIPPE PETIT:BALANCED ON HIS BEST DAY

 

[for Elaine Fasula]

he will be balanced on a diamond thread

between two points: connecting the heart

to the Heart someday

around his head flowed the stars of Van Gogh,

the unfounded galaxies, the future snows,

the opalescent birds cut from their fairy tales at last,

escaped into ruby paned air.

oh how will he wound the doves from there with a mere gesture?

she sighed to his detractors

doffing his crown of breezes and if he slips it is not into

the abyss but into our wondering care

or wedged somewhere, so quietly

he thinks it is dreaming,

in a pale blue notebook,

cloud clotted lines

of the elegiac poem of a

little girl's old homework,

wind tossed (never lost),

returning.

she's from the everywhere,

collecting her bouquets,

her pocket creme sachets,

who rushes there-

as if to say:  oh, not too late papa-

with borrowed gemmy wings o!

just in case?

mary angela douglas 8 june 2014

Note on the Poem: the little girl in the poem is a reference

to his daughter, Gypsy who died at 9 years old of a brain hemorrhage.  This poem was written just after a very poetic interview (I mean Philippe Petit gave poetic answers to perfect questions) of Philippe Petit by Bob Edwards radio today on the subject of Mr. Petit's new book: Creativity: the Perfect Crime. Previously I had watched the lovely film Man on Wire, which also influenced the poem in a similar way.

By "unfounded galaxies" I mean: non-commercial space,

Space as dreamed of through centuries by children, poets, and astronomers...This is the man who walked on a wire between the World Trade Center Twin Towers while the were still with us on no one's say so but his own. A poet of the air, of space, of impossibilities suddenly, possible.

ALL OUR SHIPS

 

ALL OUR SHIPS

This is my day my favorite day

The one lined in gold or apricot

The one with poplars in the wind

Lining the shadowy driveway to the villa

Where we will have chocolate or is it vanilla

This is the day with maypole streamers

Cakes with frosting roses piled high

Pinker then pink or coral, oh my;

pekoe tea to wash it all down

Accented with Florentine lemons ;

The day of thickly buttered garlic toast

And piping hot spaghetti for dinner like they used to make it

At the Catholic school raffles and fairs with the help of the Holy Ghost

And fair is the night oh everywhere with spangled stars

Afternoon and evening pure as cream

The day I catch the fairy tale gleam of

A moon pale dream I must have dreamed somewhere before

Of all the miracles at the door of

The Princesses who wore out their ballet shoes

Dancing till dawn on a secret lawn

Of wild jasmine

 

Tin whistles at the birthday feasts

The day when everything I see is the outright mirror of my heart

And the art of living is so delectable

And serendipity, as God intended it, the bottle green wave

With the lacelike foam

Means all our ships

have come laden, home.

mary angela douglas 6 august 2024

AT SOME SLOWED DREAM SPEED

 

AT SOME SLOWED DREAM SPEED

Freeze frame and then

At some slowed dream speed reveal

Most delicately rifling the violet pages of an infinite book

The intricate ballet conveyed by our least motion, broken down

From its jeweled composite

So I long my words in the green shade of their

mystified meanings puzzle bright

To shed secret starlight and then grow wings among the apple trees

Crayoned in the quiet nook

Or burst into a bouquet of birds in the hedges singing;

The nocturne awaits, the colours of darkening blue intensify

The end, the beginning of all things cherished

That fled upon some slight quaking mountain or

The burnt sienna hills in myriad autumnals

Where I had lived my God my God until and

Where You are so peacock splendid transfiguring,

Rushing in no disaster but sparkling,

Still and arrayed.

mary angela douglas 5 august 2024

 

DEARLY I HAVE LOVED ILLUSIONS

 

DEARLY I HAVE LOVED ILLUSIONS

Dearly I have loved illusions

Not losing sight that they were illusions;

I would not follow the mermaids down

Knowing that if I did, I would drown.

But something of illusion

Glitters and is innocent in its beckoning

Fragile and fraught; defiant as roses in a winter scene

And Christ Was such a  Rose so I believe

rooted in our long sleep

And sing at Christmas most fervently

Most merrily, to Christmas keep.

mary angela douglas 3 august 2024

RAVELS OF TAFFETA DUSK

 

RAVELS OF TAFFETA DUSK

Ravels of taffeta dusk I have gathered

Silver soliloquies beyond the ken of stars

The something hidden in music

That you cannot say

Because it is what you are

And so you listen instead as if you were

an attending angel

What else have you got to do

You with your ear of pearl

Your longing to be still.

mary angela douglas 2 august 2024