20 Wednesday Aug 2014
02 Saturday Aug 2014
Tags
Albuquerque, death, dreams, emotions, ice cream, Love, New Mexico
California and Utah, 2009
Photo: Albuquerque, NM, 1948 or 49,
me on far left, Lynelle on far right
My cousin Lynelle was dying,
I heard; remembering when we were children,
her big green eyes, smile sweet,
a bit crooked from a bad delivery,
five years older, so kind
to three-year-old me I thought
she was an angel;
that night I visited her in a dream,
in her hospital room in Utah,
kissed her cheek, told her I loved her;
standing all around, next to the walls,
my mother, Lynelle’s parents,
our grandmother,
Aunt Zulema and Auntie Irene,
all departed years before,
there to welcome, console, help,
I didn’t know which;
later on, Lynelle’s daughter wrote me
that the next day her mother was fading
in and out, but one time
she opened her eyes,
gestured at the empty room,
and told her daughter, as though the time
had come for the highlight of the picnic,
“Get ice cream for everyone!”
25 Friday Jul 2014
Posted in Ancient ways, death, Past Lives, Poetry
Tags
Sixteenth century
In castle high
upon a stony Highlands ridge,
I lived for my clan;
my father and I septs, outsiders
accepted by the chief, allowed
into the brotherhood, blood brothers
I would give my life for; the clan
meant everything to me, to all:
home, family, safety.
One evening, as we rowdied
in the dining hall over venison and beer,
my closest friend, returning wounded
on his horse, named the clan
that did it, and then died.
While mother and sisters wailed,
so young, seventeen, dying
for a blood feud centuries old,
cause long forgotten,
bagpipes skirled,
the chief planned our revenge.
With moonlight
guiding us on rocky trail
around the mountain,
we found their camp,
guarding cattle;
as we attacked, they sprang
to their feet, ready;
with dirk across my throat,
I passed from this world,
my day of honor:
I died for my clan.
05 Saturday Jul 2014
Posted in death, Poetry, psychic awareness, Relationships
Tags
They show up in dreams as I shop for flower
pots, or peer down from above, crowded
by golden angels, or arrive in my study
like silent thunder. Tell my mother I’m fine,
they insist,
or, Tell my children not to cry, I’m in Heaven, or,
Say I’m with them all the time. The messages
I sent to families met with silence, even anger;
my courage faltered. The dead review
their lives and see
things in new ways, though they lose interest
in earthly doings and come rarely.
Last night my husband came from a place
or time so distant, he was the faintest
signal, light
from a burned-out star. He couldn’t
speak at first, but finally in a whisper
said, I’m sorry. In life he’d thought
I didn’t love him, and gouged me
with words
and withered me with silence, but now at last
he knew I cared. My old friend Kathy,
gone twelve years, came too, an angel
in a long robe, gray-blue, with curly hair
and wings of paper mache
the color of antique brass. She blessed her children,
leaving them at last. She had asked me to tell
them she was there, but I never did. She forgave me,
glided past the steeple of an old church and said,
I am at peace.
22 Sunday Jun 2014
Tags
Washington. DC, 1945, Los Angeles, CA, 1958
Alameda, CA, 2014
Their clothing, exuberant Technicolor
reds and greens and yellows,
mother, father, three children
boarding a streetcar in San Francisco,
old friends of my parents,
unseen for fifty years
until this dream.
Smiling, laughing, they wave and call to us:
my parents, long-dead, my sister, and me,
all young.
Guilt caught my heart, stopped my breath,
when I heard, age twelve, that their first,
a daughter my age, had died in her crib,
while I had lived. Two more came to them;
the first left behind.
We moved to L. A. that year,
visited them; not a swimmer,
I stood in their small, tree-shadowed
pool and wondered,
unhappy thought of the unloved,
if they hated me for breathing.
But there she was last night,
tartan skirt, red sweater,
taller than the other two,
caught up at last.
21 Saturday Jun 2014
Posted in Ancient ways, death, Poetry
London, 1969;
Kenya, 1971 and 1972
Any afterlife heard of or imagined
already exists in another dimension:
Heaven, Hell, Valhalla,
the Summerland of pagans,
the paradise where virgins
await the Muslim martyr.
In London, two young men
bought a lion at Harrods. He grew
too big, so they released
him into the wild in Africa.
Nine months later, they came back,
visitors from a long-ago lifetime;
he remembered them: the love,
the joyful embraces on that granite slope.
That’s my afterlife, ecstatic
reunion with friends and relatives
from other, less lonely lifetimes.
28 Wednesday May 2014
Tags
Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
1965
O Fortuna, began the Carmina Burana,
drums pounding like the blows of Fate,
you are against me. Went to the concert
with Vissers, slight, pale, sardonic; no one
called him Jim. Afterwards we kissed,
ended up laughing, just friends.
One rainy evening, sitting against
illuminated pillars, he said his mother
refinished a child’s rocking chair
for when he had children. He laughed
as though she’d been obtuse, said,
I’ll be dead before I’m twenty-five.
I’ve always known that. I didn’t know
what to say; what would I say even now?
The next fall, he was in the hospital
with a heart infection, said he was on drugs
all summer, never slept,
asked if I saw a black girl named Sharleen,
to tell her hello, said he was tired,
needed to hang up. I called the next week,
but by then he was dead. O Fortuna….
A Life in Poems 