N.D.E.s And The Immortal Book At Hand

(I was) near death, they say
and all their tunnels glowing;
the silver overpasses of the angels...

and now, no longer do they fear death:
a moment's spume washed up on the
deck of eternities; back to their home making

with alacrity; no longer that commited to
washing the car every Saturday.

but I am still here not having made that journey
where a commanding angel commands, go back,
you have something left to do-

trembling over a multitude of old books
discarded from contemporary libraries
having the scent of gold apples procured

from far regions

or childhood's delicious, snowy bindings.
and I want to know I want to live
without categories

or catalogues or testimonies...
deeper and deeper to live
beyond mere life, near life

within these majestical phrases
that have been tossed out like so much rubble
into a modern alley.

or book sale-bake-sale salad
with the proceeds going to the astonishing
other things libraries are known for now.

while language is crowned with ever novel
diminishments, so as to be, also near death.
except that, how can I tell you this, that

God breathes on the vintage pages
as I read.
and He did then, as well

when they were writ-envoys to us their latter friends
so how in this case does death, near death
even enter into it?

mary angela douglas 9 novemer 2015

To John Keats, Not Only Written On Water

you are an enamel on the wind;
you with your bright clock ticking;
a tangle of myrhh and extravagance

bewildering the starlight;
dazzling past Time, infused with gold
well beyond wondering.

bitter honour conferred

or not conferred,
the nightingale has flown to you
and will not depart.

mary angela douglas 8 november 2015

I Dreamed That Music Faltered

I dreamed that music faltered like a piano in the rain.
a cloudburst, and then, it will not be the same.
and no one's going out there in this weather.

they could at least, close the lid I said at the high window
or thought I did as the rain gushed in.
but no one came.

a staircase floated by derailed from a home.
I know I am alone but I will try I cried
on a rising wind

but I couldn't find the stairs.
where are the angels where is saving grace
what kind of place is this where I feel

like an astronaut drowning in space
and then the clouds cleared. the rain stopped.
a strangeness in the air. not a drop of mercy.

the grand piano wasn't there somehow.
so I went to the bus stop, retracing steps
thinking I was getting somewhere now.

mary angela douglas 8 november 2015

P.S. In my dream there was no music and therefore no mercy. In real life there is both mercy and music, thanks be to God.

Fall Into Books

[to Roald Dahl]

fall into books as into a mirror:
the one near at hand.
as into snow drifts

in Christmas land.
as into green waters
with summer dappled

and on either hand:
one shore is golden,
the other, contraband.

but you, you in the middle
like the jam in the doughnut;
like the apricot center

in a strange candy;
they won't find till later
like the honey bun

in a corner cupboard
when they're low on funds.

mary angela douglas 8 november 2015

Suitcase

old paperbacks from school.
a golden sprig from a cotillion
where you fled.

Rose Red.
no lipstick.
a bunch of paper violets

not for a bride.
and silver ribbon tied beside
slippers for beginning in ballet.

all you know in a thimble.
stray clouds shadowing snow.
the last of the chocolate cherries.

a dress, for all occasions, pink,
with butterfly sleeves

or for  none, with a little sweater.
a juliet cap of stars. the scent
of trees in summer rains.limeade,

sweet tea in a jar. cheese crackers.
a program from a play; train tickets
to who you are.

or may be.
Someday.

mary angela douglas 6 november 2015

And I Was Sipping In The Cherry Dark

and I was sipping in the cherry dark
the whole summer as it first appeared.
the early years;

the golden tinge.
so much hinges on the fact that the  fairytales
did not surprise me,

seeming only an extension of our little house.

I will wear a cherry sundress
when I go back I notified the time machine
and set the dials for a little while

even if it's midnight,packing a picnic
and pinwheels streaked in pink and green;
viewmaster slides

of the Disney castle.

when I arrive,
I hope to find the right house.
you know, with the roof all shingled with candies.

and no oven.

mary angela douglas 6 novemer 2015

The Seventh Dimension Of Trees

here in the riffraff afternoon,
the one you said you wanted to see
come soon,

leaves fold their colours into
the seventh dimension of trees.
it is their particular kingdom

and we are just tourists there;
though you stood under the tree
letting go of all its leaves

simultaneously; the maple
red in the way no crayon
could ever be

except when it dreamed.
I wonder if it was you that stashed
the blueprints for these blue

hazed days; the ones where the starlight hides
because it is so frightened of the speed

it is destined to travel
and won't come out like a child
still hide and seek.

mary angela douglas 6 november 2015

The Sky Behind You

you will be banished and you won't know why.
relegated to corners for awhile.
then you'll go out to play

and it will be your day again
although a little wounded.
wound upon wound will follow you

like the shadow
you can't get rid of
in the picture

even when they hand out sweets.

the one taken last summer
and the one before that.
you are smiling in your

blue and green
but the sky behind you
looks dark.

mary angela douglas 5 november 2015

Beauty Floats Above In The Old Poems

Beauty floats above in the old poems.
made of clouds, pictures in the clouds
in the beleaguered galleries.

leaving the town at war.
old gossips hurling apple cores
after her.

it doesn't matter, really.
she'll turn into the apple trees
and laugh in the returning breeze

when April stirs.

or be the first thing you see
when you go home
after strange travels.

the thing you said you couldn't forfeit
if it came down to it. 

mary angela douglas 5 november 2015

To The Princess Aurora After Giving It Some Thought

whose dream could last a 100 years
and be deemed a penalty,
even a tragedy?

aurora.
and everything dreamed around her sympathetically:
drenched

in the same lilac Light.
who else in art achieved this

irreparable harmony?
of death.
in life.

at least a postponement
of all the surrounding;
castle and kingdom and woods asleep too

except for those on the outskirts gossiping,
the clueless princes, and the one True;
the wild defending Briar.

all else hibernating
with Beauty struck down;
all incapable of grieving.
.
sleep and you dream.
awake and the dream comes clear.
oh, dear, cried the fairies

thinking all was lost.
but she was at the beginning
of Graces.

mary angela douglas 5 november 2015

Lost Voices Known Only To The Lord

[to the untranslated, the burned down, the unconveyed...]
and to the Moldovan poet Mihai Eminescu -

lost voices known only to the Lord
lost voices crowd my open mind;
my mind, shut down by storms.

lost language, time and youth;
lost, lost the words spoken to you
in childhood near your loved, native streams.

and I would write to you in dreams,
in invisible ink:
"did you? write for me?"

Someone must be quickening lost voices
remaindering their gold and how they strove
dreaming into the day the other world.

but tonight I am so obscure
half ghosted by a rusted armour
where the leaves scuffle over your non-monuments

and you sighed, I have crumbled...

somewhere remains a bright seam undisclosed
and there I will leave this frost tipped rose
at the edge of sere winter's curtain.

and strain to hear
as if the snows had words

Time itself and all her birds
flung upward to the receiving angels

since here it cannot cannot cannot be heard

mary angela douglas 4 november 2015

Clear Pink And Green Glassware In A Little House

clear pink and green glassware in a little house
she wanted, and to wear only the colours
of roses.

nothing loud.
nothing crowded
except at Christmas

and in summer parades.
strawberry, chocolate, vanilla,
that's enough

ice cream for anyone;
we thought so, too
and that to live

in May by the honeysuckle vines
could surpass Heaven.

mary angela douglas 4 november 2015

How Do You Feel About Rainbows

how do you feel about rainbows
in someone else's sky?
or the river going by their door

bypassing you in your landlocked dream.
until you remember you like forests,
not seas

and then are you happy again?
and it seems good news to you
that first a crimson then a gold leaf

flutters down on you.
on you!
and that you get to be here

when it happens.

mary angela douglas 3 november 2015

For The Clouds As They Slip From View

everything then belonged to our backyard
complete with even our very own moon!
and you too clouds we saw you every day

after school as though you were waiting for us
until the bell rang before you started drifting again.
I didn't know you died when it rained

and that it wasn't really you the next day.
I always thought it was you, only, maybe a little pinker
a lot more fanciful.

oh you had your moods we knew that from
watching The Wizard of Oz every Easter on T.V.
and timed our chores so that tornadoes would

never come. we'd made a pact with God
that if we finished our Saturday chores at lightening speed
there'd be no cyclones. at least, not in Little Rock.

I wonder if we were the only ones who thought of you
that way: light, yet constant, still, only you

in your souffle and lovely in any weather
will you be for some other children one day,
when we're disappearing, too?

mary angela douglas 3 november 2015

Is It The Tower of Babel, Then, That You Are Making

is it the tower of Babel, then, that you are making
day and night night and day always the fine phrase
all the fine gloved words for you alone

your fantastical blue plume struck at an angle.
and I - I am struck too and not wonder struck
whenever I speak in clouds in mists

in the hissing of heat on the bare pavements
summers without number.
summers without number winters too

how many words you have found
for leaving when it pleases you.
and linking the fools gold to your watch fob

and watching the clock
whenever I have leftovers to say
leftovers from the ancient promises

freshet, green the words spilling out of me.
I, with no towers at all.

but only, merely: God.

mary angela douglas 3 november 2015

Who Wanted To Ask Why In A Thousand Colours

who wanted to ask why in a thousand colours
chalking it in the rain

now that the arbiters of colours fix their power
with the glue that won't wash off
after so many washings.

after so many washings I have tried and found
this hopscotch marring wanting.
the chalk paintings shine like mirages

in the clouds thus, they live on so

that little children looking up
if they look up
accept the sky bourne Christmases

as if they were a birthright.
so much washes away
from day to day for the glitterati

asking who am I to say
if the poem is apropos.
it is a soul a soul a soul

you will not speak away
from the platform you think
exceeds even God's whose

oceans wash themselves
without your saying, "it is so..."
continually and

the brooks wash the coloured stones
I will not throw into the ripples of
the why of a thousand colours

in crowded rooms they ignore,
they ignore. at the interminable parties
where nothing is lauded and wall to wall.


mary angela douglas 3 november 2015

Poetry With No Prizes

[for Landis Everson]

poetry with no prizes wouldn't really be
like the birds singing but minus their trees
like the wind through no harps

like the porch with no chimes.
no it wouldn't.
poetry without prizes

would just be
singing for itself and God
when he happened by or

for the bystanders waiting out vast Storms.
careless, filled with clouds

and wings
no need of microphones, megaphones.
well kept stages, brittle cafes.

but telegrams, at Sea.

only the faces of angels; all greenery
left in the woods to its own or
Christmas with the snows stopped

suddenly,

the holy hush.
just itself, and free.
asking nothing

the inordinate Star above.

mary angela douglas 2 november 2015

Minor Divinity Desolation

every year at Christmas
and in between
the white capped candy

so supreme
was mythologized in our house
after savoring.

we all agreed
it was candy well named,
tasting like Heaven.

perfect complement
to angel's food cake.
and how delightful it

can't be calculated it
would be to say:
with casual elegance,

pass the Divinity, please.

what a pang I felt
at the market later on
when everyone else had gone

to their Divinity rewards
to find near the bakery aisle
in cherry pale splendor

PINK DIVINITY!

I wanted to go back through
the rose coloured blizzards of Time
and bring them some

like a foreign treasure
and then we could have had tiny pink marshmallows
in the hot chocolate

and improved on Christmases forever...

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

Raspberry Gingerale

I was so happy the afteroon I discovered
there was raspberry gingerale.
or maybe it was cranberry

that I ate Thanksgiving food
every day for an entire year
or remnants of it.

and it almost seemed
Grandmother could return
with the crystal relish dish

in time to join me in a can
of yams, or cranberry sauce
with the can indentations still intact

like cranberry tree rings if
there were such a thing.
when she was here barely

cooking herself- well, that's not
what our family was known for-
we baked poetry. and dusted

the piano. and we sang a lot
and not only at Christmas
I try to explain to the ladies

on break in the box store I work in.
but they cannot hide their queenly disdain
that I don't bring homemade pimento cheese

sandwiches to work
they gingerly let me sample,
wrapped in wax paper

and know nothing about
the little garnishes
that make a picnic, a picnic.

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

Home Ec Lament No. 3 or 4 And The Visionary Plumcake

[for Margaret Sidney, author of The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew and to Valerie Macon whose poem on Little Debbie Cakes inspired me to write one of my own]

put lots of plums into the batter
and cinammon sugar and children
scatter before their poverty made merry,

enriched with raisin cake, the
side yard chicken's eggs.
I wanted to make a cake like that

from an old fashioned novel
of families in hard times
making the best of it.

but pineapple frappe was on the menu
and white sauce number two.
and never a plummy cake or two

to take your mind off
all the disasters.
so I made do in the future

with Little Debbie Cakes
surreptitously unwrapped
from my bottom desk drawer.

and a plummy imagination.

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

Cranking The Livelong Ice Cream Day

cranking the livelong ice cream day
on porches out of the sun
we never danced upon

do their angels see us
in the yard at play?the ghosts
of their summers?

and what will they say to us

later on, in Heaven.
did you play too, your spools
on a different coloured thread,

your lives.
trajectories come and go.
and snows.

our orchards are too pruned.
your poets wandered in a vast demesne
before the wars, in love with rain

and every single thing.
and every single living thing.

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

These Trees, These Yellow Poplars

these trees appear more golden when it rains
than they were before, she said, and it makes me wonder
going out the door: was there another door

opening then  that unproverbial shower of
fairytale gold that falls on the deserving in
old stories; sometimes, after long trials

are over and you have been kind to
even the ogres on the road, you know,
and so, were the trees gold too?

partaking in the magical turn of fortune
a bit of the glitter flung their way

that they should be so endowed
or is it that here against the grey drizzle of a sky
they flame out momentarily making their

own light having no other recourse
missing the Sun more than
tongue can tell

or faith, abide.

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

Personal Day Out At the National Gallery

they tinted the public gardens (or their own)
with a Heavenly brush
those old painters you rush by in the museum

thinking you've already seen them
your mind on what's for lunch, what's going on

and you don't see the mystery of what they captured there
so far exceeds where you are going, anywhere
that, if you did, I know you would stand here too, transfixed

in a room filled with white radiance so long
admiring Monet's white cathedral and its opaline
qualities until the guard thinks you're going to

steal it and carry it out somehow in your pockets.
but I ride home on the bus so nondescript you think
if you think of me at all while you're holding court

in front of the Supreme Court or near one of those marbled
entities that made up what was never a city for human
habitation really but only the monumental and those 

who serve them;

you don't know but I do through delicate presentiment
by afternoon the city will be covered in snow from tip to toe
all the monuments, snow making a second snow

on the permanently snowy
while I'm at home removing from the raincoat
pocket of my mind most carefully

lest they fall apart,

as though they were mine alone from so much gazing:
those surpassing
those snow blinding images

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015

Prang Sunrise And Castle

in the kingdom with its watercoloured Prang
sunrise and castle
you still live on tiptoe

as in the sugarplum days
so good at finding diamonds in the clay
at Murfreesboro;

what else can you?

not too famous, just enough,
a Goldilocks fame as yet
in your cherry velvet,

cherry appliqued collar.

we'll race to the Living Room Tree
oh, our multicoloured!
to pray that this never vanishes

to the One who holds all sparkling
in snowy hands...

the distant lands in picture books
with the clouded towers we share-
bell towers that almost ring

for you with the gum machine
semi semi precious rings
on your every finger

and not a bit gaudy;
where you are citizen not merely but
Princess beyond reproach at the Piggly Wiggly

the first to reach the moon from the swing set
near the air conditioning water tower.

on a most unusual Saturday
we pray to Our Lady of the Orange Nasturtiums
when with all dolls looking on we'll

lemon pledge, sweep, and bake to a crisp
the Gold into existence; singing the birds
into their own trees as we harmonize.

this, I commemorate here and there.

for the soft air through my window
would be cherry branching, always,
strawberry chimed

in the pale blue room with the muslin curtains...

are we the golden twigs broken off
at the last moment
in a dream

of the Golden Tree?
we'd be in cotillion dresses by then.

maybe she asked me in a dream
within a dream within a dream
so many things,

both of us in our carcoats in
a Little Rock snow entranced
with the brand new glazing on the holly berries.

only I couldn't hear her then,
my sister,
as her Music swept away

that could have crowned the Flood-
with rainbows

mary angela douglas 1 november 2015