On Jenny Lind

( for Hans Christian Andersen)

on Jenny Lind the poet was silent

I think of him in his latter days

or rather, imagine his chair faced the wall

one small dormer window lit; the mystical snow ballets heaped outside.

for Jenny Lind.

has the heart an aria left for the long unfolding winter's chime

a caparisoned horse on which to ride

in the jeweled the saddening night

have all blue birds taken flight

and childhood's ones of viridian green

is light a captive of the story that must wend

where the ghosts of curio stories most abide

the chance of being read or cast aside

the heart's forbidden murmuring;

a violet evanescence on a mermaid wave

the twilight cannot stay nor Jenny Lind

a small lark lodged in his throat.

one crystal note.

weeping on the quay

along a starlit way.

who is it the sparrows ask

out of an antique Past

he cries for Jenny Lind

for Jenny Lind,

at last.

mary angela douglas 25 december 2020;rev 27 decembr 2020

The Next Day

 you were in love with the falling Graces

so jubilant when they were no longer themselves

like the witch who daubed mud on Elise

so that the king her father couldn't tell

she was still his own daughter.

you on your throne you decide about it all.

the big and the small.

I know you will. until you are sick of proclamations

and proffeed peppermints

as if you COULD ever have your fill.

how to pick and choose your gipsy way

through other people's fortitude I cannot say.

it's your ballgame.

and then peacock display it

as if it were your own.

thinking no one will know:

you don't own anything

you just pilfer it.

dont you know 

the fairies will come by moonlight and snatch it back

it wont be there the next day.

mary angela douglas 25 december 2020

The Snowman Dreams Of Houses

(for Amanda Shute Sullivan)

the snowman dreams of houses

chimneys with no smoke

a modest closet where one can hang a shawl

an icebox, replete with spumoni.

books on the Arctic, Whittier perhaps.

and near the HiFi a chintz armchair, plastic wrapped

where one can relax and listen to xylophone= cool= jazz

and send out for raspberry popsicles...

not a fan of razmataz perhaps this snowman

likes Mozart, I don't know. a serenade

and frozen lemonade unthawed.

he drew the blueprints long ago with his stick arm

grazing the pond.

all shiny was the air;he looked at the moon

and stared and stared.

I suppose he thinks he might build there.

mary angela douglas 25 december 2020

Someday May All Lost Roads Converge

(to the poet William Butler Yeats)

someday, may all lost roads converge

where we have traveled wearied and alone

a desert to ourselves

no water for a stone.

at times the heralding angels seemed to close in

and then and then

that music fades away

how is it we seem to have gone through centuries this way

and the clock at only 3 who can say

whether afernoon or in the midling night

of the same the same day

still I have tuned the strings of my bent lyre

to the old music, flaking of rose gold

beating of wings against the heavy air o where

still the same yearning will bud    into a song

I know it will: only be still 

my ancient sorrow we may yet float

 beyond the bounds of music to sing to sing

to Thee to rise from weariness, footsore yet 

with inexplicable brightness clothed

like those like those of old 

on the brink of Jerusalem and the holy gates

who learned to wait

to find again the pearl of dawn

the rood of the Rose remembered

the earthquake shift on the page

where the birds are jubilant

the old dreams return.

mary angela douglas 25 december 2020

Tinfoil Crown And The Theatre of the Real

I think we had crowns of tinfoil in school plays

or maybe it was in kindergarten. I was in a play once then.

The Princess who Couldnt Smile. My sister was in the audience

and I must have cried tears real enough because she stood up suddenly and said in front of the whole audience parents, teachers and all:

Angela, Angela don't cry.

I will remember till I die her plaintive voice. the earnestness of her shining face.

and that she cared I might be departing there on stage from all the happiness

we had, whenever we played we were both Cinderella at home.

mary angela douglas 24 december 2020

Our Stars Like Rhinestones, Still

there they are again our stars

like rhinestones scattered in  the velvet night

by an indulgent Father (God).

back then my sister and I rated rhinestones more highly than diamonds

due to a necklace of exquisite design that due to its setting looked more beautiful

to us than diamonds, and due to the way also my Grandmother wore it 

with her red taffeta piano recital dress, matching the gladioli.

well. all that is long past now.

still somehow somewhere in my mind I favor rhinestones every time

over Cartier, Tiffany's.

and still compare our stars to them. our stars with the same constellation names in God's forever Five and Dime 

and patterns, blueprints, our old friends.

it comforts me though I am far from home

since many years placed end to end

they never are.

my stars.our stars.

those sacred momentos.

mary angela douglas 24 december 2020

The Happiness Mystery Volume 1

 sometimes pure happiness just floats down

where did it come from the children softly ask

and then go on playing

while their angels look askance

and alternately chime.

sometimes a happiness outside Time

breaks through in a dream and into a rhyme

and no one knows but the wind that blows

who sent it and for what earthly reason

and why did it come this season?

the apple blossom from an orchard far away

so far from town

you could only measure it in light years

and you're not in that grade yet.

you're just in the way of its shining.

mary angela douglas 22 december 2020

And The Christmas Star

I wanted to live by the Dairy Queen

an antique bookstore and a movie screen

I wanted to live.

I wanted to work at a candy store

near a perfume counter on a parquet floor

and spend my money all the nickels and dimes

on the things that mattered like classic rhymes.

I wanted to gaze at the moon all night

and let it be the only light in a small house by a little cove.

and when I was old to start again

with a new jump rope and God for a friend

and collect all the marbles in a crystal jar

the sky blue ones and the Christmas Star.

mary angela douglas 22 december 2020

You, If You Had Listened

you would have to know the wider story

to know why the music's played that way

she may have said that day

closing the piano bench with the sheet music stored

the sheet music stored and the house surrounded by sudden

spring rain the kind I loved because it smelled green to me

and when you played the piano it showered green notes;

that was in a dream.

and the plum buds opened into a blue pink kind of scene

perceptibly staged

that was lavender only

if we were very still

if you did not spill your ice cream

on your Sunday frock.

if you listened to the Debussy quietly.

mary angela douglas 20 december 2020

The Swarm In Winter

"the white bees are swarming" I read in someone's poem once about the snow

I wish I could remember whose it was or perhaps in an English translation of

Hans Andersen's 'The Snow Queen" whosever it was it was rich in allusion

it gave back so many things I felt in that season of winter prolonged such a circuitous marvel of engineering,

music surely that would be the image for that Kingdom and the stinging nettle weather and how we were wronged.

and where the ice grew more thickly where we could no longer measure it at the poles,

enduring only another white twilight white night chain of our lack of being any longer

in the bright world the warm world or even just happy

amid the sugar snow, the sweet

maple reductions, left with only compunction

and thus, the sound of everything had become

the white bee swarm of the snow making it all indistinguishable for a long, long while, you know, or you don't know or you will forget

though it hasn't happened yet

both hill and fern and the immovable waters.

we could not have settled into that cold. it is always stinging but it became hard to leave

the puzzles behind simple to become entrapped in figuring out to perfection

what really should not matter to us at all. under the thrall of the white bees. the White Queen the numbed and numbered dominions intractable; measuring everything zeros and ones

the white bees swarm and the snows are stinging us repeatedly the summer of clover of cloves has died

each time we contemplate the weather outside and worship it as a god oh solstice solstice the murmuring drones on

no longer can it be called midsommer the heart is a husk that goes on beating while it is sleeting no longer will we

make flower chains and return to our mother with the violet and the honey colored ones

the heart is a blank mariner has set its frozen course in a mechanical diction, dictation with the buzzy buzz words

spurious meticulous nation reducing all music to a single drum

and cannot love and cannot remember the sun, the roses! Gerta cried the purple onions, or any one

because "the science has moved on" in stupified impervious gestures

the Queen of all law now

sweeping the data before her; dismissing

the wailing, the waning of the children. elegant. proving everything should be shall be

insensate, without mercy.

Corrected. surpassingly drained of life.

and all of us one rapt field of acquiescence

who have laid down forever, our diamond shields.

mary angela douglas 20 december 2020

1Mary Angela Douglas

Sounding The Channel

"Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am nothing.' from 1 Corinthians Chapter 13,The Holy Bible, King James version.

forgive me if I speak in dreams not of my own devising

that they just come to me that way and furnish the lock but no key and am sometimes rather cloudy

not clear in my meaning it isn't that I don't care if you understand

it's just that the visionary is beautiful to me and a country long sought I don't know how to live any other way in any other place

caught between worlds unable

to tie my shoelace on the common pavement

forgive me I know I ought to consider always the words of St. Paul

to speak with love or not at all I get carried away by the elaborate and

the beautiful vanishing everywhere around me and I cannot help but mourn

these inscrutable losses.

words are for love, for charity, for kindness most of all. I know this is true.

my Grandmother taught me the Golden Rule but something else as well,

a longing for music and for music in the sound of language as well

and I cannot help it I want the moon of it and the ladder to it as well

as depicted in one of Blake's etchings, the dear and brave man called mad

because he listened to the voice of God to HIM.

I want to listen for the inward sounding of the channel of which I am only a part;

there are depths and shallows there.

forgive me, everyone, please, for the shallows.

mary angela douglas 20 december 2020

He Is Everywhere In The Pale Blue Water Colour Sky And Among The Teacups

=sometimes I do not pray before I eat and somewhere there may be

someone

thinking I am a heathen. You dont understand what it is to live alone with Him. wistful in corners examining His original dust.

Why must I summon Him from some failing blue water colour sky I could not

finish for art class correctly when I was fourteen just to say we are eating now and we're having Your strawberries minus the cream

when already I may hear him ringing among the teacups and in the cherry sound the teakettle makes

when it is thirsty.his shadow bright as marigolds on the wall

in the rising the desultory steam.

why should I summon Him at all who is already here all of the time being everywhere present in the gleams

why wouldnt he be there in my cockpit kitchen just a trace

or in the wisp of my chimney dreaming song or here where the books are toppling all over themselves

in saturday profusion teasing the illusion and out of Time

dont they believe He is everywhere. certainly that does include not having to come in from the pale and failed

failed wounded wisteria

blue water colour corner of the picture where the colour dripped continually as though there were

a perpetual rain in the painting a spigot I could not cut off I could not be graded on fairly

even though I put pink tints in it at the very last corally sprigged instantaneous instant suddenly majestically emphatically mystically reminded

of His most recent tea rose dawn for it was apt, far more than Aquinas and all of that:

creaking through the cracked ivory

of the blinds with the little draft.

the fumes from the neighbors cars.

a few of the lingering stars...

mary angela douglas 18 december 2020

1Mary Angela Douglas

Disappearing Into The Picture

the angels disappear into the picture they are the first to go

having further messages to deliver than to the children looking for upside down

umbrellas, parrots out of place I trace the semblances and await the snow filled frame

with only the names remaining that once meant something when

unlocking the fairy tale cabinet des fee

who can say what now we should not be breaking this way

it's evergreen the angel whispers and leaves her silver shadow on the floor and do not be dismayed anymore we tell ourselves in her echoes as though we were lecturing our dolls and not our souls

I will weave it into my song with the pearls my Grandmother gave me in the long ago the creamy ones the ones I gave my sister after all

because she wanted them so

because i loved her ballades her wild attempts at the ballet

we will trace the semblances each in her own way what remains

understanding how time has fled for us though the inner kingdoms wax strong

and in their candle flares in a stiff breeze I know the fragrant petals of the stars

will come to me will come to me as though it were still April when we were April too in our cotton flowered shirtwaists

learning all the meanings at once, each in our own music finding the way

the thread of light that threaded through the necklace of our days

as though the outcome and the way home were already given

the dot to dot of it secure.

and grief the wine bright shadow of leaves only the rustle of old newspapers

and their conundrums, the colour of Sunday comics that came off on our hands

while we were passing through such marvel strewn lands

in emeralds like Dorothy, after the house settled or

coming home through the vast the spiced clover fields

and in a jubilant tear streaked daze

to what was always ours in the first place.

and could not be shaken like the glitter snow in the domes.

mary angela douglas 18 december 2020

i

1Mary Angela Douglas

I Would Be Of That Bright Company

(to the living God, to whom all praise is due)

ye singers of madrigals choirs of minstrelsy

how often I would have been even given the centuries I have lived in

wreathed in your song

but men now love flattery publicity getting a high degree piled on a high degree

more than they love beauty

how I wanted to be 

of your bright company

now they laugh to scorn.

someday it will be

the return of music and the muse

the return of the verities.

the rocks will sing out

and sound like crystal bells

then all shall be well

now we mourn for the coming of true day

and practice true singing

as if we were a quiet a desperate army

each of us, only one.

mary angela douglas 12 december 2020

,

On The Magi That Amazed

to have come so far for one Star no matter how resplendent

how convinced they must have been of their own visions

and interpretations

to endure the cold, the deserts, never faltering as though

they had become themselves the Star as though the Star

dwelt in them and an inner music of royal purple infinitely,

relentlessly Vast

truly they were Kings and could not fail to

apprehend the Everlasting

so that God gave them increasing favor even to be warned in a dream

to depart another way from a crazed and covetous Herod.

and from the court astronomers...

all this was later, on the non return.

I loved singing about the three kings,

their gifts proffered in reverence

how the radiance of the child illuminated them on the detour back.

I thought they were my Magi too I loved them so much

I would have fed their camels I would have looked into their faces

and seen the Star in their faces almost blinding them

for the rest of their days

they would have been

that amazed.

mary angela douglas 12 december 2020

Noel Noel!

in the cold the starlight shines with more acuity

perhaps the angel wings are tipped in frost

and bending their harps to earth, their harps of gold

as the carol dreams even while we forget most of the words

we can

almost imagine that music lingering over over the hard earth

at the stringent outposts where the wooly sheep are guarded by semi outcasts.

the instant before the world seemed dark the age as well

till in another song like a winter rose

a child is born to set it right

and all the world is full of light

the faces of  witnessing shepherds dazed transformed

into visages of gold

tear streaked and on the windy plains.

above, beyond the centuries of pain.

mary angela douglas 8 december 2020

Without Knowing Anything At All

 

never arriving no matter how far we walk, have walked,

will walk again
what is this strange recurring mood never arriving too late
or too soon under a changeable unchanging moon
always another step to go and then where are we
do we really know
is going anywhere going anywhere at all
we feel like figures coming out of the clock on every hour
disappearing into where we disappear to, through every season
every year who are we now who were we last year who will we be
observers of a mystery we can never really observe
you can think from dawn to dusk and never come up
with the answer
no matter how old you are now or were or will be soon
we are stuck in the noon and night of it and in the dawn too
wondering under a sky that is infinite or under our own roof
riddling the riddle alpha and omega
letters in gold I sing to you without knowing anything at all.

mary angela douglas 7 december 2020

To Those Now Unaccustomed To Walking

what has transpired that our veins have filled up with snow

are we winter landscapes now? have the fire escapes been modified

so that only balcony rescues are recommended

cloudy the questions when you arose, arose from dreams, from visions

such as these to turn on the furnace that wasnt really working

turn on the stove live in that corner if you please you who can limp

to it still so merry to be doing even that

have I become an adage fairytale that now I am sleeting leaves

in these November gales

take heart. the heart can fly even more than ever it did in

childhood's green slipped summer

release the kite of the soul with its diamond flaws let lightning light

the skies

over this strange solstice soon to arrive this advent still

we will sing into the storms my soul and I so fashioned by God as to

withstand

through bright imagination's dower

the cutting wind, the sunset hour.

mary angela douglas 1 december 2020