Checking Out Of The Punch And Judy Show

[to Rod Serling

to the Russian people,  forever  the guardians of Poetry

to all the Americas in my heart

to the poets of all lands, seen and unseen…]

“since in a net I seek to catch the wind.”

-Sir Thomas Wyatt “Whoso List to Hunt”

“Never forget!...I love you all, from the bottom of my heart…

Forever!”

-Van Cliburn, September 8, 2012, Fort Worth, Texas

(and to my Mama, this small bouquet is rendered)

it’s all candy striped at first you think and carouseled;

you gladly give your hand

and laugh when the others laugh at the same scene

in the movie.

and love the wafting of the buttered popcorn;

sidewalks where petals strew the soda fountained stoop;. blue twilights-

and treading carefully because you still can’t see

your soft red leatherette shoes in the theatre  dark;

you’re waiting for night vision to set-in

gemstoned like Christmas.

but when the score’s your own they turn and stare

and you’re aware the line has suddenly turned surly

for the larkspur ticket torn in half  

is you in your own stories

thrashed candy striped oh not in jest                                             

and sotto voce off-camera, always,

spurned lark beating at a thousand windows

so that it can’t be proved in court or to main street

glitterati  who thought why, everything was fine in study hall

with the one book only and the music stand

stuck to her hands just the way we glued it on in accessories

or was she born yesterday

                                     

you know how she is

living on her own at the doll house museum

near the Carnegie

now that she’s the jester that can’t find the grey-eyed king

in the stereoscopic parlour pacing tinily.

but lingering with her pianoforte,

melting in colour in the final frame.

pure pink spun sugar, vanishing, where?

in a sweetheart neckline in this weather?

into the greenwood.

one could well wonder,  unwrapping the paper cone

only holding air now, a bunch of pale blue ribbons

brought far from the farther fair

oh dear, and promised it looks like

only to you in her last letters

on lavender paper.

oh vellum pressed flowers in a volume of Keats

or Akhmatova or Barrett-Browning in Moroccan leather

slight tissue of India ink.

pressed pleats  pressed out  forever in my poem.

dear pink linen words, keep wrinkling.

(and with eyelet embroideries).

or you’re on the other side of the house-front and it’s sprinkling.

put out in the rain, bad prescient cat, no cream and no gelato!

observe the directorial gleam

on the puppet face smushed in or is it  carry the day, dissolving

in the hose green town with its toy train circling back

from the water tower for you forever in your best black velvet

winking out with the Giant stars…

you’re at the interview within the hour without

another dress to your sunburnt name

sent home to the mannequin station

we’ve just a thimbleful of dream to sell you

but you know you were there

on your one semi-formal occasion out,

oh party-frock laden lament

in a pencil skirt from work that will have to do and a notebook

when the child dissolved in the magic spring

blows in again on your sound stage kitchenette

with her black cherry warning: “ it’s not what you think, remember?”

she washes the Haviland in the sink.

stir the double boiler cocoa double-quick  she says

I want a raspberry phosphate...

why didn’t you listen when the sun melted  on the canvas?

now there’s no Time, I wept for the flickering.

and the Cross lifts shakily from earth  as in the painting by Dali

on the necklace of this dizzy universe Christ,

what did they do to you I cried

in our lost episodes by the stained glass props-

the rhinestone summonses.                                                                               

but you’ll pack early by moonlight

this time, Titania,

ill met by sponsors everywhere

if only they could find you

and just as rich suns are creaming in your mind…

the cocoa boils over, scalding the milk

for the lilac ticket-holders massed outside

thick pure green shutters.

you’re in the wrong line for the aliens they shouted.

reality cried in opals.

when suddenly you were asked rose-red to dance:

wistful in voile by the cake and punch:

by whose list to hunt.

there’s the little girl with the fetched pink handled scissors

from the dressing table,

the gauze spooled bandages , ticked off-

the baby’s breath,. a tiny drop of tea-rose perfume…::

old marionette, with your cold strings beautifully bleeding

through the fabric of His maritimes she sighed lightly

here’s my corsage for you, a hallmark snip was whispered

and the rose rose tear of  it is shed to let you know:

oh, flee!  for the soul’s white night has come too late here

to the children in their dreaming; it’s Christ, in the

windfall of all our twilight endings

light years beyond the countries of

their rending of the storybook rich tick tock

of the fairytale lacquer through the evening skies…

for you, the clasped hands with the sweet peas

Cliburn’s  last Chopin

and my red-rimmed eyes

and all this misplaced  creaking in a jewel-box lock

of the  soul’s  strange, lovely lovely light.

God rest your pearl-drop music its swan-crested flight

sweet, sweet is the night air when we walk out

in a kingdom where they will not  hunt again…

mary angela douglas 26, 27, 28 february, 1 march 2013

Non Generic Valentine To Christ The Lord Making No Name For Himself

All Beauty Was A Doorway Into God

["Music, breathing of statues, perhaps..."

-Rainer Maria Rilke]

[to the memory of my sister and I playing swing-a-statue

in the dew bright grass.  Just before supper...

[for MBY and LWY, the "Grown-ups" in this Play]

all Beauty was a doorway into God:

the latch that chimed, the secret Spring in winter's hues

the hidden passageways we knew, the playhouse played

whose brick was laid so well where few could see

its lemon candied Sun above

when we came home from school; new jump rope rules;

the small room colored in, pale blue

the wind that sailed the cherry petals

sown and just as you were taking your first steps

in a sunshine ruffled gown near the Rose Garden

(and with a pink parasol, balancing.)

or watching a Grown-up pull the taffy of a smile from you

by winding up the pull-toy moon or

showing you the latest lady bug perched

dilly down down from a Grown-up's point of view

with its own cuticle moon rising or setting.

or on a slender thread of grass as dear

as the orange nasturtium we loved.

enchantment only grew and grew

when measuring the birthday shadow of a dream

that flickered when you blew the candles out

on the rose crowned cakes.  year on shining year

what was it whispered in your ear, oh, stay...

now they want Change:  too chic, too late

to find the doorway or the gate, the baby star

the thistledown sigh

and Poetry is run off in a ditch-

I don't know why

and the apricot cupolas singed

on every fairy tale page.

and those who talk among the stars

or feel they do, are half in love

with only Magnitude-
and miss, sheer Light

misreading the music as the end

of the One who made it shine in them

on all those peerless afternoons

mary angela douglas 7, 8, 10 february 2013 

Froggie

[first draft]*

I caught something golden at the world's bright end

thinking, surely I will be among friends

if I bring it to them.

For my pains

I was slammed against a wall-

but it was golden

mary angela douglas 8 february 2013

*a condensed milk imaginary primary source version of The Brother's Grimm, imaginary, The Frog Prince, or perhaps, the query letter, proposal to an unnamed publisher for the Froggie's memoir...alas, poor Froggie, thrown against a wall...transformed and then married to a princess with a very bad temper who judged books by their covers. I see the froggie /Prince as essentially, an incurable sentimental idealist, optimist. A promise is a promise he would tell his children which is exactly what the King, her father said.

Della Robbia And Other Things

to a dry fountain

small birds came to drink

when holes were punched in a daylight sky

and the blue of old plaster flew as if it were the wind.

and an eggshell quiet shattered in a dream

of the whispered sonnets

freezing through the trees

and I said only, I do not lie

to the dry fountain where the small birds came to drink

in the Park you may remember or not at all.

and a small twig breaks that was already broken

and nothing scurries through the last leaves on the ground

where small birds shiver near a glazed stream

or lodge in the holes punched in the sky

and sing through the end of the punches thrown

in delicate aqua or marine

where an eggshell quiet shattered in a dream

of the whispered sonnets freezing through the trees

and the ghost of Mary Stuart counting all her beads

and whispering

deliver my blue soul from the cracked marble of the world

mary angela douglas 31 january 2013

Tell Us A Little Bit About Yourself

a long way down the violet road

I tried to go.

it vanished in the shifting winds,

the snow.  Oh, God, are you still here?

I cried out in the cold

and on the frozen prairies,

all alone.

then flowery meadows arose.

arose.

I am a wild rose planted by His hand

in a language now foreign.

a long way down the violet road

I tried to go

with diamonds in my hands

to feed the diamond birds

of singing.

mary angela douglas 28 june 2013

Beyond All Tithing

giving You back the gold of the sun:

the honey-gold and the amber.

giving You back the white-gold

of the moon and rightfully,

the blue stars and the red.

giving you back the green

wind, her April sources

and the rose slip slipping into the Dreaming

all over again.

Oh how did it cost so little:

the clouded violet in the snows:

the tunes still turning my music-box soul.

it's You in the marigold darkness everywhere

I know I know I know

in the rushing gold of the words You gave us:

the honey-gold and the amber

and the white gold of the moon

mary angela douglas 27, 28 january 2013

The Last Republic In The Sun

[to Miro Zdrahal]

we all survive with just one scrap of sky,

the bluest one-

even with no boundaries left

to cross, when the storms come;

every soldier for himself, the histories go.

and come again.

we can survive with just one

scrap of sky, and the green light all around filtered through the trees and

through our tears and through long

aeons of His smile.

our God,

the only one:

the last Republic in the sun.

mary angela douglas 23 january 2013

A Harp Is Weeping At The Door

[to Christ the Lord, even so...]

a harp is weeping at the door:

I have found an inconsolable stillness here;

there were jewels

they didn't come back for

even though the moonlight read:

here you will find the harp at the door.

it will be weeping.

now the glissando of the things that did not happen

is struck is struck down

by angels sparing you the memory of what was never intended

spoken into the funnel of jeweled afternoon.

or maybe it is that you had merely dropped

in leaves the colour of rust

the fairytale instructions

on the way to the Castle

so that some have turned to magic in no refined mood

self-spelled in the spume of the proud clouds drifting over:

itinerant traces of a yearning music

far from the range of their hearing it, now.

oh think but not too long on those

oh those-

who labored hammering

into such a soundless arc

the jeweled manifest of His singing

mary angela douglas 13-22 january 2013

Fragment For Rilke Inlaid By Akhmatova And Dante

the last Christmas train has left the station.

beatitude is drifting with the sun.

all things have gathered flight

for the last poets rising

on a golden wind

now that frost has cut the 

moon out of the skies.

and the snow in the heart keeps sifting down

keeps sifting down

all along the kleig-white evenings

where you whispered to yourself

and the First Angel, out of hearing

I am no longer cold.

mary angela douglas 13. 14., 19 january 2013

The Cyclops in REM Sleep (Dreams Of A Wedding)

the bride in the mirror of his Eye.

discards the sun, the smaller planets;

why would she need them now or

the woolly path from childhood, cherry bright

her mother hemmed in close firm stitches overnight

that wouldn’t ravel out

so she couldn’t catch cold coming home from the Anywhere

and shod

in her merry silk slippers, singing…

and radiant with her own radiance, still-

she seeks Forever, stepping out of the Chancery

telling herself, this must be the good I dreamed of:

while something murmurs

who let the Thunder in

through the ash trees

and every bough  is quivering

no.  it isn’t.

then everyone smiles so much

admiring the gown…and says she’s the

prima lily ringed by bridesmaids, after all

in pale Giselle her afterlife hues

the bride in the mirror of his eye  grew

vastly small; then

vastness flew

crowned with something glittery so they knew

it wasn’t her, how could it be

boarding a train that wouldn’t come back

because there is no station

and she’ll awake to a  matinee scattering now

of a dream within a dream of all that she believed

 in, forfeited

she must she must she must the Chorus chimes

dissolve into a perpetual Roaring as if, on cue;

they’ll say though not so openly as before

it’s like the wave purling from the shore my dear my dear

when it hits the rocks;

you’ll get the hang of it,

we’ll help you till you do…

except except the wave turns back she thinks

(while she still can) and is free, that way

occasionally in the tide of things from day to day

to talk to God or the winds in spring

without anyone knowing  anything

or having to.

but days have gone or just grown dim

while she’s so quiet, turned within and can’t be found

in the fractioning mirror of his eye of childlike puzzlement.

not quite, distress

that there’s a gaping where the green wind blew

sometime in April

and the kaleidoscope doesn’t work

mary angela douglas 8 january 2013

All ThingsYou May Expect To Shine

[at Christmastime]

[“Greater love than this, has no man, that he lay down His life for a friend.”

-Jesus]

all the things you may expect to shine

can fall between the cracks of vagrant stars or sidewalks

never glistening at all beside the lost marbles, jacks, and

mercury dimes you know are all still in there.

and you are unornamented

and your branches cannot hold

all this through long ages

for even an instant longer

while they measure you

for a costume in

the Pageant of Nothing,

holding you hostage

to the solstice snowmen on an

elementary stage.

O beknighted Child.

Sing, Noel, though you are banished for it

by the fathers of the long frost, everywhere.

somewhere, something waits and bides all Time, again;

and unexpectedly, the gales begin to turn

on a fragrance from a winter garden

you once thought you learned the music to;

so fugitive, you thought you may have dreamed it all

when you were home sick from school and

stuffed with fairytales and mentholatum in

the drifting counterpanes,

back to life and missed homework

redolent with the outside air 

brought in a little judgmentally

by cheerful, car-coated classmates you barely knew…

and unnamed dread.

but lowly beyond belief, He is:

accrued like a pearl in a sea of darkness

and silent, tear on tear

while small horrors thundered
and their retinues.
and their retinues.

and everything you fought

you have forgotten;  the stick-like words they said

the silly, sicled sighs, the paper wadded landings.

kick through the pebbles they pebbled you with,

debris they wrapped in fancy paper

(before they threw) smiling before the Teacher's face.

it’s only rubble now though yesterday their towers grew

though not by grace.

now that the Light of all lights appears

in your own skies now in God’s own time each tinted year

and pastel bulbed and bright through mist fraught windowpanes

canceling the shadows Forever as many times as you cry out for it

of the puppeteers with their vast holdings

and talent for mimicry that know how to

dig in for the long haul

fox-holed in your gleaming mind or

rabitting at the children’s parties to much applause

to pointless punch and cookies, and cake that crumbles
and breaks off at the end

of the dime store holly rimmed paper plates too paper thin.

while your embarrassment shines through the room
 as though it were candlelabra.

you just want to go home where the real Christmas is.

never mind that in these latter days

the thwarted herods of the work-a-day
 having been brought word of your soul

are trumpeting it all over town  that it’s all over for you, now-

and calling the caterers a little prematurely,b.c.e…

while mysteriously the Sundial gathers force
in a forgotten rose garden in the snow
indicating what can't be predicted
it’s not the end of the world, now, is it?
Grandmother whispered softly

Light, pure light.

Be not dismayed.

mary angela douglas 20 december 2012

Pavane Of The Silver Beads

I will sew silver beads onto the night;

and sing the chanson the princess left behind

when moving from one universe to another

here is the rose thread for the sun when it’s all over;

and the pearl accents for the impossible.

somewhere is stashed the reason to go on

and it just keeps sparkling, though we can’t say why

mary angela douglas 15 december 2012

Pasting The Book Of Hearts By The Paper-doll Stream

“Thou tellest my wanderings; put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in Thy book?”

Psalm 56:8, The Holy Bible

“Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.”

Psalm 84: 3, The Holy Bible

[in memory of my mother, Mary Adalyn Young-Douglas]

pasting the book of hearts by the paper-doll stream

I paper-cut the moon and the glitter from antique cards

hoping it would make You appear too soon, my Lord

and the hedges bloom long before spring,

time-lapsed, lilting into a golden light.

It’s the perfect silhouette of a world in Hans

Christian Anderson I still seek or the onion towers’

reckoning In full colour: scarred are the skies the wide world over

for the poet blinded for his imagination.

yet he still sees, spurring the moon bright horses on

for our Lady of the Fleur-di-Lis and the rose gardens:

toward her never collapsing lucidity.

and now, and now again I grieve on the scissoring cello

of the fairytale ellipse like Shoshtakovich-

recording the eclipse at land’s end.

I ‘ll make you apple blossoms pink waxed

on blue crayoned pages

and later, the cherry repetitions of a heart in construction paper 

but now, no longer measuring the cocoa out at Christmastime

the xxxs and the oooos…

whole countries seem to be cut off overnight

from the crystalized candy-cane singing, the Holy Night

she is so far from the land.

and God goes collecting the rosewater tears

of the daughters the daughters the daughters

and the pink dominoes of the childhoods

falling, falling through your 40 year misdiagnosis and

the country you used to come from.

let it all be momentary:

do not weep ma mere

in the courtyard where the artist

condemned to linger

traces on the air allotted him

the roses no one sees and colors them in.

we will archive everything

In poems without number

convinced of an afterlife

pale pink and blue  

where megaphones cannot blare

this cannot be (they mean your soul)

and neighborhoods

turn to pour the stone cold kitchen coffee out

never dreaming you’re right there in a dress of pure magenta.

a smile like Alencon…

one instant ever after…

I’m weeping paper lace in an endless stream

to wrap the flowers for a small bouquet

for the one in a thousand’s thousand

who knew how to read the music this way:

it’s long ago we played in the late afternoon

that the world could not be banished anymore

that someone would recognize our Fate

and that we still hear our mothers calling

from an orchid twilight

all the way from Eden or the State Hospital.

mary angela douglas 30 november, 2, 3 december 2012