Cloud Talking To The Cumulus

[to vladimir mayakovsky

and to zach sobiech for his beautiful song, "Clouds"

(on youtube)]

oh beautiful whipped cream clouds outside my window,

five stories up by summer trees:

I love you.

may you live in my poem forever.

may my poem live to keep you alive that long.

let it now become international cloud something

for an indeterminate unit of time

and we'll be free from whatever it is,

uncloudlike-

they have us doing.

we'll escape from everything!

going up in hibiscus balloons to talk to you more freely.

and further up, with the rose spray paint,

looking down on you, fondly,

we'll colour you, for once,

before God gets to.

I don't mean that meanly clouds.

it's just that-

what artist has ever beaten Him

at anything?

Oh clouds.  do not drift.

do not change shape.

I might be your only witness. 

come back! don't be cirrus!

mary angela douglas 10 june 2014

Fact Checking The Fairy Tales I Find

[I dedicate this poem to my newspaper editor father who hated the word "gossamer"]

fact checking the fairy tales I find:

someone has a glass slipper in the lost and found;

a few missing jewels from an abandoned mine;

the last train out for a morning deadline

and the cloak of invisibility.

fact checking the fairy tales, certain elves

have told me to mind my own business.

but I've gotten wise to the candy houses.

I ain't parochial.

at the movies, I bring my own jr. mints.

oh anyway. they'll let a few things slide

in the glass offices.

they always do.

but I'm on the case and cannot lose.

isn't that what they say when fact checking the

fairytales' fact checker comes down to it

you better have your gossamer wings on straight.

mary angela douglas 10 june 2014

I Think Of My Buffalo

"oh give me a home

where the buffalo roam

where the deer and the antelope play.

where seldom is heard

a discouraging word

and the skies are not cloudy all day."

Home on the Range, (Traditional American folk song)

to Antoine St. Exupery

(because of the sheep drawing, etc.)

and to Charles M. Portis, author of True Grit,

(still unacknowledged as The Great American Novel)

I think of my buffalo;

the one I saw some years ago

in a field, alone,

somewhere in the Dakotas.

there must have been several of them

but my buffalo looked at me very specifically

and, of course, shaggily.

I carried him with me after that oh

not in my pocket.

I carried his buffaloness.

secretly from that day.

I am very small.

and every now and then create typos.

it is good to have a buffalo

in these cases.

I know many others may come forward to say

they have a buffalo too.

and tell me where's he grazing and a thing or two

I know they won't think I know.

for instance, they snuffle.

their heads are huge.

they don't play in the snow.

(the buffalo, not the others)

they pride themselves they are the only ones

who know how to have a buffalo

and being so short and a girl from Arkansas,

what the hell do I know.*

well, I'll tell you since you must be listening to this.

(and thank you).

I've got a color wheel from 1961 the kind that rotates when

you plug it in; that turns the aluminum Christmas tree

red, blue, yellow, green radiantly and in that order.

the whole thing.

when it thunders-

or when I'm homesick-

or finished with the Great Books-

my buffalo does the same thing,

completely on its own

without even one tuna-fish sandwich.

and not only at Christmas.

mary angela douglas 10 june 2014 

*dear reader: their words, not mine.

The Folks Back East Got Your Letter

[to the wagon trains that threw the maps away]

showboater, shilly shally
all I want to say:
the creek bed's dry;
don't go that way.

the barn burned down
before the hay.

the silos just melted.
no one came to the rebuilding party
angels on their last ladders

picked our rotted fruit.

all shimmery gold the pick axe strayed
into the mud; in just one day
well water scooped into our hands

evaporated. how are the children?
say hi to the folks
who don't know the Virginia Reel.

send wagon wheels...

send orange peel and citron, maybe.
a punch bowl ladle made from cut-glass.
grass seed. if it pleases you to think it grows here.

and sassafras. molasses candies.
an oistritch feather, tissue sewing pattern,
red shoe leather,

down country remedies for someone
sick from greasepaint and the smell of crowds
who don't know where they are
staring straight at it.

send bolts of silk, fresh underwear.
barrels of cough syrup to us here; to us-
you used to know

where trees were green
and the porch swings swung
in the minted breezes;

and us all laughing
in the afternoon sun of the
cooling drinks and the lily hands.

send piano strands. glad music.
berry picking.
send prayers on angel wings

before the next snows come:
to us, here, waylaid by
the folkloric maps in the newspapers.

pointing the way.

mary angela douglas 9 june 2014

Note on the Poem: the poem is my imaginary letter sent by pioneers to people they knew back east. Here is how I imagine the reply the folks back home posted by Western Union to the imaginary stranded pioneers: Sell golden axe. you should get something for it. of course the pick axe wasn't gold. The letter writer in his despair is telling a tall tale all his own.

Of course another problem is the strangeness of the items requested by the sender who may be equally affected by sun stroke or sarcasm, depending on previous experience with asking for help. Or delusional. The golden axe is out of place here, like those pictures where you are instructed to find something that doesn't belong with the other items.

Also, the poem reflects the dilemma of people asking for help who get sent things other people don't need anymore which are completely useless to the receipient like the contents of a missionary barrel.
Or you know, you go to an agency asking for help with rent and they direct you to the food pantry. Or vice versa. People offering the things you don't need, bypassing the things you do for whatever reason.

A problem within a problem. A person sent on a quest with the wrong information and, as a subset of that confusion is his own propensity for fairy tales, over and above the newspaper accounts. Or. a person making up stories as a means of survival perhaps the real source of all the best fairy tales and legends.

The telegram reply (sell the golden axe) indicates the folks back home were literal. Which may be why the pioneer left home in the first place, being of a different disposition.
One true fact in the poem: many American pioneers in the
latter part of the 19th century were misled by maps and
glowing reports (possibly entirely fabricated to sell more copy) by Eastern newspapers. Their maps showed water where there was no water, mountain passes where no one could get through. And that was the least of it.

Everything was not like Little House on the Prairie. It still isn't. The neighbors do not always show up to "raise" the new barn. God bless the ones who do. 

The maps that other people make for you don't always turn out to be so accurate.

Back Story Breakfast For The Emperor's New Clothes

[to my Grandmother]

the peacock visions preen: sheer emerald,

turquise, gold paint dribbled dream

down the chins of the boo-less

(don't eat so slow, dear)

with a thousand eyes blinking

losing the contest

if  you'll stare hard enough, long enough

piercing through the sheen.

so the child at her oatmeal heard

her Grandmother; pouring the cream

like a lake into the bowl lit with

islands of pure marigold butter.

-study hard to know the angel music

beginning with the first measure

she twirled the piano stool that afternoon

and opened the Steinway lid

as if it were gold.

-oh, sweet Pandora!

here's hope for you

in a dark-turned world

for the topsy turvy,

the witless and the scurvy days ahead;

though you are dressed in rainbow fashion now,

with a green bolero, thinking it's all candy

and the music box.

so passed the cherishing cherry pie days.

and every empty jar filled to the brim

with the wild honeysuckle.

till the festival day in the Square

where the scammed king stood:

exposed to the cold and a little more, the

rounded o; the child cherry lips composing

to disclose a fine truth spoken plainly

in a voice that carried over the confetti snows:

O

He has nothing on

mary angela douglas 9 june 2014

Note on the poem: of course this is my mini-Stanislavski

piano exercise on the very real fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Through Fine Curtains, Looking At Her Coming Up the Walk For The Last Time

["safe in their alabaster chambers"

=Emily Dickinson]

[for Julie Harris in her portrayal of "The Belle of Amherst"]

the sunrise of the half-risen strays

through fitful curtains, choking the days

that lie before-

to summer's brim with

whatever it is-

they will not say to your face,

too croaking to be remembered;

though you've brought flowers,

whole meadows full, and buckets of Grace,

your cherry-sprigged bonnet-

and new mown everything.

there is no birdsong here; no wooded greens.

faint trickling of a dried up stream-

a ransacked drawer of odds and ends;

a picked lock scream as suddenly, stifled:

you rob- just yourselves.

selective invitations on cream paper,

illegible as a dream within a dream or calling cards,

in someone else's gilded handwriting with

swiss-dotted "i's".

the tapping of a bold foot on a Sunday floor,

clean-swept- a merry look thwarted.

-it looks like snow, you offer;

they contradict -it's May.

the afternoon ravels on its way.

and if you try to speak in thick blues and greens,

in rivulets of feeling, rose fraught gleams

above the teacup clatter, the bacon and eggs,

the sauce pan chatter-

to sense- bright rivers of words! breaking on the tip of a blackberried sweetness, mid-conversation-

they bolt and leave you speechless:

dispensing-

whatever's left of time, in meager

party prizes, always to someone else;

while looking slantwise at your dress-

their Delft-

(as if you'd stolen it)-

handing you, your galoshes.

oh pour it all down the drain

with your thin lipped receipts for

raspberry vinaigrettes, peerless pimento cheeses

in seven counties (oh, Pleiades...);

your boiling rhubarb, spoilt silk

tea time's tipping over! 

I'm like a pearl edged bird, invisible in the blizzard

of your disparaging till I cry in a voice of yellow diamonds oh

why-

why have you quenched the golden

mary angela douglas 9 june 2014

Note on the poem: This is how I imagine Emily Dickinson calling on the neighbors (a custom of the time) for the last time after which she went into her famous seclusion at home only seeing those who dropped by.  See her beautiful poem, The Soul Selects Her Own Society for all we have, really, of her state of mind regarding perhaps these social moments among other things, metaphysical souvenirs of a haunting loveliness.

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.

To the Apple Green, Peach Blossomed Skies! Cried Buffalo Bill Riding Onward

[on the Western paintings of the Sonoma County California artist, Mr. Perry Cordill

and to the poet, Vachel Lindsey]

"The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring

In the days of long ago."

Vachel Lindsey, The Flower Fed Buffaloes

it's the code of the West parried against the

apple green skies; in after mirage, the surprise of

pink edging the profile of the rough explorers.

it's tangerine haloes falling aslant of their mythical naysayers. these wranglers, cow-herders, outlaws of

a mystical surmise:

trail-blazing, fresh hued and no rope-trick-

peeling the bark of the scratch art colours

like a stick from the Tree of Paradise

just as if, in a Heavenly gallery they are hung

while God intensified

old movie poster sunsets behind them

or opened an orchid portal on the world as

the artist, the poet, clip-clopped by to register

these incongruities.

standing stock still amid tall grasses

burr ridden, wearied with visions

after hard riding, painting silk on silk their colours-

huckleberried pie pleine aire-

and in the cyclone's eye:

they will astonish small animals;

the snuffling buffalo at the rainbow fed streams

who will never be the same, once, seen in this light-

they are cast in an Eternal Spring

by more than the virtue of the paint dried

on the meadowlark canvases:

vivid, the angels of freedom

have lassoed the dark steers

mary angela douglas 8 june 2014;rev. 9 june 2014

Note on the Poem: the art of Perry Cordill in part can be found at his website: perrycordill.com.  This poem refers especially to his Wild West portraits of heroes and heroines of the Old American West as well as to certain of his animal paintings.

I have written another poem on what I consider to be his masterpiece, "Papa Bear" displayed at the top of his homepage (the painting, not the poem).  My poem on this website, a tribute to the painting is called: The Many Coloured Bear at Rest in a Variegated Light.

Hurt, In the Waves Hans Andersen Turned Aside

[to Hans Christian Andersen for the beautiful story of

"The Little Mermaid"]

weeping shells, the mermaid on dry land

longs for the pearl of her underwater

suns, her baby rainbows

wavering in deep waters.

nothing here is deep

and she sleeps sand.

she sleeps sand and cannot breathe

uncertain of a way to believe

the beating of her coral heart to music.

new steps for the ballet, no longer

gliding on a wave, she has to learn

through dancing on crushed shells.

and in her violet eyes, the far-off look

of skies reflected down and down the miles

of taffeta waters, swells

and clouds the view of nothing

till it feels like dying.

later in the story, could she turn to foam?

heartbroken, on the surface of all surfaces;

her soul, dispersed...

but this was a fine love, cried the author

weeping shells and out of stories in the moment;

his hands shaking on dry paper:

unable to unfold her valor and the sorrow more

and still to bear-

the vanishing point on the horizon.

the invisible Glory where she fled.

the moire closing of the waters

above her sea bright head

too late to record
(so I imagine it)

how the seas turned, then,

the colour of all roses

mary angela douglas 21 april 2014; rev. 8 june 2014

To Ray Bradbury Two Years Down The Heavenly Road

[to Ray Bradbury again-

on the second anniversary of his disappearance

and to his daughters who heard it all, first,

I am sure...]

our carnival glass collections shine

the ones that you've left far behind

a bit more fragile than they used to be

now that Jupiter is setting, Mars grows dim

and more dim by the day:

faint rose under intergalactic snows

perhaps you'd say were you still

here to care that

October's leaves fly up again.

a mist comes to the eyes, unsolicited.

I reread old stories, each time, new-

eating my candy corn way through them-

and caramel apples, if I could. 

four sisters beneath a parfait moon:

a story for each! pink, green or blue...

raspberry raspberry; lemonade,

drink every drop, it's poured for you-

but it's a long way back to and farther,

under the shade of fading lamplight, than winter constellations in the spring.

they are glazed with lillac leaves so

heart-shaped-

from the great distances, recalled...

bring on a stage set of clapboard houses

painted in cheerful colours, shielded by old trees,

eaves of Victorian gingerbread; porch glider ease,

screen doors banging in the veiling rains

that inexplicably come up whenever we breathe

your name: a flash of tender lightning in the skies.

we'd have larders like the ones you're used to:

brimmed with powdered doughnuts, cider,

cakes in every flavor and hue

(the many layered);

dandelion wine stocked

in the cellar, 1922.

bicycle, ice-cream bells; brand new,

the spring-fed summer tennis shoes

pavement, back lot splendid

mad weathervanes spinning in a copper green dusk

before the circus storms-

and right next door, a bookstore with rare editions,

Poe and Dickens.  who else?

you! and Margery trailing her Combray,

it's so becoming, in the original.

she's in pink organdie

with a picture hat

and posies.

across the street, an ice cream shoppe

with twirling stools of green leatherette;

old fans whirring from the ceilings.

one scoop or two?

I know the malted answer.

clark bars by the score we'd scatter

on all our door steps

and sing halloween songs

even out of tune  

and launch a million fire balloons

in just your favorite colours

all around the world

if only you'd come back, Ray-

wreathed in Glory-

to visit us with one more story.

mary angela douglas 5 june 2014;rev. 6 june 2014

Note on the poem of course some details in this poem

are from Ray's own stories, and biographies (see especially, Sam Weller's incredible biography, The Bradbury Chronicles, The Life of Ray Bradbury: Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future, the most beautiful biography of anyone I have ever read.

The image of the neighborhood stage set in my poem did appear in one or more of his stories - that idealized stage set of his Waukegan Illinois childhood home... mysteriously present even in his stories and novels where it isn't directly referenced.

But that is the point:

to lure the poet-storyteller back one more time with t he

golden bait of his own stories, (and promises of ice cream)

back for just a little while to tell us just one more...

P.S. The astronomical details drifted in and out of my sleep last night around 3: a.m. while dreaming/listening to John

Grayson's radio show Overnight America. He was hosting

a guy from astronomy magazine (astronomy.com) who was

giving incredible upcoming astronomical forecasts and I

woke up completely thinking how wonderful to hear and

thought immediately of the time two years ago when cbs

radio announced (among others) that Venus was in transit

as Ray Bradbury died.

About the halloween songs, I don't think there are any.

somebody make one up real quick for the occasion...a friendly one with apple cake and pumpkin coloured stars

all over it. (maybe one cat)

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Other poems I have dedicated to Bradbury include:

Particoloured Tears Are Falling Through the Evening Blind

(an elegy written shortly after he died on June 5, 2012)

Welcome, Ray Bradbury, to Your First October in Heaven

To the Poet on the Island of Fire Marshals

and Even Late in the Day, It Was Comforting to Think

(the poem I wrote the day his death was announced)

Pale Green, On The Under Leaf Of Words

[to Sidney Lanier for "The Marshes of Glynn";

to the woods of northern Arkansas]

on the underside of words

where the green moss grows

where the white stones glisten in

the sweeping arc of rainbow banded rains

where small brooks overflow the spice of

ferns and last october's leaves and the years before and hold

the violet the magenta and the peach sunsets

out of reach from all encroaching

where shadows deepen into the green

and the trees close ranks dripping with the sun

I want to run where only music is heard 

as the winds rush nowhere known

binding the times beyond time 

in the first of languages small, waterfalling,

foamed keeping the secret secret, my only-

home

mary angela douglas 5 june 2014

That There Should Be Flowers There

the mood of Hamlet is a winter mood-

without the sun, or only a chilled sun.

uncertainty. the ghost shifts through the

mists.  the kingdom of mists.

at least I thought so

for a score of winters.

how odd, then, how unaccountable

that there should be flowers in that landscape

of every hue.  those she wove in the end, Ophelia,

abdicating the sweetness of her mind;

unless, they only dreamed it all

through long midwinters-

deep as a sleep in the suspended fairytales:

skipping the Paegents and the Christmases

they could awake to find

a kingdom honeyed with sunlight

and all, as before.

and how, with rue, heart sore

thinking long on that story,

I wished that this were true.

mary angela douglas 5 june 2014

It's The Paper Chains Of Red And Green My Lord

it's the  paper chains of red and green, my Lord

I have flung across the Tree of your shadow:

let it be splendid, with small cakes; the cookies

with the silver beads; the rose red punch-

the excitements of the car-coats gathered at the end of school, before the first snow

and I am solely in the snow air

the way I want to be

like a prayer lightly walking toward you

in the Manger.

I will not change the way I feel

through a thousand Christmases.

it's only you in the cradle of starlight I want to see after all.

and I will thread through my own heart these silver strands of music and stand on the crest of the cold hills

under your cranberry skies;

closing my eyes before the ornaments arrive

in the night sky- oh chandeliers,

the fair and silver branching Tree of your Smile

mary angela douglas 4 june 2014

Oh, How Have The Coloured Birds Flown From The Palace Of Night

[to Georgette LeBlanc]

[commemorating a scene from the children's library where a little girl read, all on her own, an outsize version of "The Children's Blue Bird"...]

oh how have the coloured birds flown from the

Palace of Night, leaving only their indigo shadows.

and will the children linger long on the palace steps,

will this be allowed?

turning also into blue dusk...

into blue dust.

we held in our hands the story

as though it were made of sapphires.

and ours was the freedom, only given once,

to stare and stare at the page without turning it,

alive in the lithograph as though we were the ones

drawn there by an Unseen hand

and lovely still.

and in the stillness, almost home.

now I cannot turn back and look at all we left

did Mytyl say, suddenly crying.

or did the shadows only sing to them that

the sun will rise, but not disclose

whatever it was that

vanished into purple, long ago?

mary angela douglas 4 june 2014