Editor’s Choice
“The poems offer pathways for meditation and reflection. They move as our awareness moves. The experience belongs to the reader.” –C. Medalie
Untitled Poem #1
Daphne knew there were other bardos than the one entered after death. Encased by the laurel tree, river running past, Daphne was planted in a nether realm, neither girl nor tree. Daphne, roots and branches, felt the earth and sky as part of her, undifferentiated from the simple act of being.
The Rower idled in the dead center of the Styx, nothing to carry from one side to the other and the day hovering between light and dark. Rain clouds gathered over right and left banks, his boat a line cast in a circle of sun.
Multiverses surrounded the Monk, sitting in retreat. He felt these distant universes run faster, the six directions accelerating, pitched to flee the centrifuge of planet earth. Maya strung out every potential existence to infinity. The ground unraveled beneath the Monk, thunderous din echoed inside syllables of prayer.
Viola slipped the mala of mistaken identities and lost souls around her wrist, marveled at the transparent stone. She chanted waves and sky, never touching ground with body or mind. She breathed in water and breathed out air, kicked and pushed a mass of liquid sea, her swimming limbs arched forward, never back.
I recognize you, said Helena, enchanted by the sudden appearance of Bottom in her waking dream. Bottom, donkey and man, could not recognize himself nor be convinced that Helena was an ordinary mortal. They were wary. Helena did not wish to spend forever in a play with an ending and Bottom wanted no more of fairy interference with the familiar bodily essence, the molecules moving around inside him, crashing into one another in a zoo of transformation.
Dante and Virgil entered the bardo unwittingly, taking a wrong turn out of the three worlds and into a strange vibrating nowhere.
Ovid lost all sensation and all awareness vanished. As if they were connected, ethereal and material, contrary to either physical or spiritual order. Ovid’s center ran in a loop: matter and energy, matter is energy, energy matter. Ovid restarted the Metamorphoses, tying every beginning to an ending until he had created emptiness.
Untitled Poem #2
Falstaff’s brain, eyes, belly breathed in unison. The plentiful oxygen made its circuit around his corporeal self and returned to the sea of air. The center of the mandala differed from the rest because he stood there, stayed there.
Pay attention, messenger, was the caution, repeated by every zen practitioner within an earthly radius. Hermes had expected an interplanetary journey to demand more forethought, but the moment his mind left the earth, the rest of him followed. No one had specified, pay attention to what, thought Hermes, patting the air where his body should be, flinging his arms out in the space of missing wings.
Garuda flew the cosmic orbit and sensed Hermes’ consciousness struggling to cross the mind body divide in a place unfamiliar yet sustaining life. Hermes threw himself back in his body and crashed, jettisoned his spirit from the top of his head and flailed about, a whirlpool of wind shouting wordlessly.
The figures grew larger and larger until they broke the frame and stepped out into the gallery. Against white walls material objects claimed immateriality, none with a history longer than a blink, acts of difference performed in the vacuum of a mortal span.
Cordelia did not know what to do to alter Lear’s perception of her. She was left in a space of loss stronger than that of an old King without a kingdom, for innocence could not be redeemed through the forgiveness of another.
The Fool gave Cordelia a raft of kindling as if handing her the answer to a riddle, prodded her to light the fire on the darkened beach and illuminate the King. Lear’s features came to view, mortal with age, raging, and mad with betrayal. Cordelia looked out at the incoming tide, saltwater, and left all tears on the sand.
Michelangelo closed his eyes beneath the fresco, never once dreaming that the painting would be completed in his sleep. He placed his signature below a blue and white cloud; who else was there?
Fly away, urged Titania, Fly. Her fairies did. Within moments the butterfly beauty of wings and sound were gone.
Untitled Poem #3
Feigning ignorance of temporal phenomena and cloaking herself in a false curiosity, Hera departed the celestial for the earthly. Without an entourage or the surveillance of Zeus, who excused his own philandering but never any escapades of her own, Hera took on the disguise of a woman possessing neither supernatural powers nor the ability to leave the blue and green planet whenever she chose.
The mule was stubborn but no match for the rider. Quixote urged the reluctant animal forward under a blaze of primary-colored sun. Steady on, Sancho Panza murmured to a horse thin as a blade of grass. They were all losing heft and weight, fading from the pages which had sprung them to life. Quixote embraced forgetfulness, he did not wish to be remembered in the past tense, but to fill the frame of the present to bursting.
Chaucer picked up the only volume in the inn. Here was another pilgrimage, one that favored reimagining the known over the uncertain risks of the unknown. This particular pilgrim, an old man on a mule, lacked spiritual heft, unless one looked upon faith as an adamant belief in the extraordinary and overlooked the damage done to material contrivances such as mortals, thieves, beauty, and windmills.
The Zen Master encountered Celia on her favorite rock, flat enough to sit on for long spells and slant enough to bend to the river’s rush. This was not one of the quieter Zen Masters who spoke in calligraphic gestures and nursed a single koan for centuries; quite the opposite. This Zen Master, suspecting Celia of an interior depth and an exterior simplicity kin to idiocy, insisted on debating Celia on any and all topics.
Celia closed her ears and eyes. All things passed, did they not? Even interlocutors with no place in a forest of exile.
The Fool caught the Zen Master dozing and took the liberty of enclosing him in a circle of daylight. Much like the unicorn in the tapestry, the Zen Master woke in a flowered round without a gate under a sky without end and no keeper but the intention to debate with freedom no more.
Hera found exactly what was needed. Took a shortcut and found herself back where she had started, not alive, not dead, but something larger. Left her mortal immortal behind and took a long walk around wonder.
Untitled Poem #4
Opposites attract. Celia repeated her latest mantra, trying to find the sweet spot in the yin yang of everything clashing, clamoring, climbing, cascading over a thousand thousand lifetimes all vying for attention, that lullaby place where there was only river and wind and the rock she stood on.
Was Ariel’s reluctance a strength or weakness. When she flew backwards, sought the topmost branches of island palms, sang below hearing, and evaded notice by good magic as well as the devious kind, was it care or fear that precipitated action. Was a lifetime of the machinations of Sycorax and Prospero reason enough to shy from the inevitable.
The Three Fates spun the magic lantern when they tired of reading the through lines of destiny or witnessing mortals engaged in fierce combat with the illusion of choice.
Still alive, then? The Rower checked Antigone’s eyes, still in there, soul in its mortal cradle, heart beat slow but keeping time to the rhythm all the same. The Rower ran his oars gently across the surface of the water, turning back to the other side. Antigone refused to disembark, told the Rower she wanted to do this forever, back and forth, ferrying the dead, told him she had nowhere else to be.
Hamlet lay stiff in a newly dug grave, a furrow really, smaller than a child; what he could see from this vantage point was sky. Raw or cooked, the blue and white never varied; a climate long established for the interval where Hamlet played tenor to Death’s soprano and nothing ever changed.
Butterflies, said Bottom, talking out loud, dizzy from transformation into various states of being, each enclosed in another animal form. The Fairies laughed, a light sound, more bell-like than the open close of butterfly wings. Fairies, said Bottom, quick to name what could not be believed, stamping it into his mind for future recollection. The Fairies turned into butterflies quick quick, not wishing to be captive to any mortal’s fancy nor a donkey’s wish.
Run from running, Kali tells Girl, Go. Girl paralyzed by threat and promise, ran nowhere and everywhere until the sun fell out of the sky.
Grey Sparrow Journal 