not native fruit

storm

We moved
To where your strange maw
Opens to the sea,
Pacific.
We crouched down
On a hillside
In the dark
And let
The wind and rain
Blow over
In wide whorls
And waves.

Once in November
Forks of lightening
Speared down
Six or seven times
All around,
Unusual for here,
A bursting sound
And then
Blue beams
Arced up
Into the sky
Illuminating
Everything
In nightmare day,
The transformer, hit.

For a moment
Our rocking chairs
Ceased creaking,
The mountains
Drifted through
Our memories,
Dark and unmoving
And we waited
Without
Any other sound
Except for thunder
And a rushing rain.

Our chairs rocked slightly
While we waited
In the dark
Wondering
At where we were,
Disoriented,
Transmogrified,
In a weird dream,
At home.

apartment

i longed to live
in the upper story,
the attic loft
of that shabby gray and black
queen anne
on the northwest corner
of knox and queen lane,
set back from the street
among shrubs
on a smallish lot.

the scruffy weeds,
the magnificent trees
beckoned to me
to make art
in a hooded,
hidden place.
that solitude
called to me.
that creative attention
to present moment
seemed hyper-real.
(the most real)

i dreamed that
in every season
it would call to me
there,
yield images
i'd love,
and i would answer
in my upper solitude,
while poor african-american children
walked past on the street,
and poor white-mixed-native
women with hair-braids on top,
german-style,
tended their front-yard gardens.

that was all i wanted,
was that presence
to light and air,
some charcoals and pastels,
perhaps a few oils
and
an easel near the window.

that recessed window
under the eaves
looked out
on what?
on my life,
on the past,
the reflected history
of germantown,
or on its tatterdemalion
inheritors of that present day.

i didn't know
that window
looked out
on a future and a world
i could not then imagine.

and i looked out
that window
when, later
anne and howard
lived there
briefly.
how i loved their apartment.
that promise
of a life of music,
of pipe-smoke (howard's),
books (anne and her career in publishing),
cats,
and later children.
of college degrees
and maybe just
a little touch of marijuana,
a few psilocybin memories
soon covered over
by good quality knitted sweaters,
tweed jackets and ties.

a wooden-staired,
banistered walk-up
to a garrett apartment
in old Philadelphia
fueled my dreams.

poetry of ancient/indigenous language

shelly de paul, a teacher of the lenape language in pennsylvania and online, has said that she finds the ancient languages powerful.  Words have power.  And that she began her study of lenape in order to write poetry. 

this is a sentiment I can definitely get behind.  i've also been wanting to find my poetic music in lenape.  i'm sure it will come.  in fact, it's already happening.

also, i've had a breakthrough in terms of communicating my feelings about my connection with the lenape.  i've been a bit sensitive to intimations on the part of 'others' that i may be a lenape wannabe, etcetera. 

what i've realized is that i've realized how much more our native heritage meant to my mother and my grandparents, and their parents.  it meant a lot to them, enough to keep it a secret from me, but to enjoy the secret secretly among themselves.  i've realized how much more it meant to me than i ever recognized or acknowledged, surrounded as i was by the land and the community of the lenape remnant in the philadelphia area. 

i can't not acknowledge that. 

not only have these realizations, recognitions and awakenings filled in many of the blanks in my story, but they have reduced my anxiety and my need to please others.  there's some way in which this experience has made me more whole, so it must be good.  therefore i will continue on this path.

that's simple, that's clear.  this clarity helps me.

'weli kishku' ~ have a nice day!

darkness

darkness,
at the hub of things,
don't let me forget you.
darkness,
womb of every thought,
don't let me shut you out
with light.
silence,
in the darkness,
our true home,
welcome me,
comfort me,
center me
in all that we are.

*    *    *

i'd like to say a brief word in prose here about darkness.  a spiritual-minded acquaintance of mine once said that my love of 'darkness' scared her.  her spiritual tradition favored light.  it seems to me now that some spiritual traditions demonize the darkness.  therefore people might get the totally wrong idea that i am somehow singing the praises of evil-doing, which is far from the case.  i do believe that our misapprehension of darkness might be at the root of more evil-doing than we care to admit, since so much of that is done in the shining, blinding light of day, in the shimmer of success, wealth and glory.  we often can't make peace with the darkness and the silence, and seek something else.  but then there's all kinds of wrongness and some of it is darkness-bred, too.  but evil-doing is not partial to either darkness or light, it makes use of both and itself operates on another principle altogether.

some of my happiest memories have to do with darkness.  the darkness of the ocean at night.  driving along the old two-lane road that skirted the beach in south jersey, with the sparse colored lights in the distance, before and behind, of tiny resort towns with their small modest boardwalk piers.  the only sound was the soft soughing of the waves, and the tiny distant lights were white, yellow, occasionally red, green or blue, trailing out into the sea. well, it was another time and place.

the darkness of my childhood garden at night, lit by stars and fireflies, ringed by the black canyon of our brick two- and three-story houses.

now, the darkness resting on the trees outside my bedroom window, their leaves lit only by the moon.

one of the things i particularly have loved about my spiritual beacon, Amma, is that while she can radiate intense decibels of light, she also has a profound darkness about her.  her skin and hair are dark, true, that's part of it.  she is mysterious and unknowable, that's another part of it.  but perhaps especially, for me, it is that her story has so much darkness in it.  she grew up along the seashore in south india, in a place without electricity until perhaps the late nineteen-seventies, and then very little of it. there was the poverty and 'ignorance' of the fishing-folk she grew up among. the 'darkness' of living in a remote, primitive, unknown little place in a swamp.  yet she grew and developed her intensely compassionate and wise spirituality in that desolate marginalized place.

for so many years, she sang devotional songs at night in the family shrine-room, and still to this day, she walks along the seashore there at night singing her spiritual songs.  the workshop of her spiritual life was the darkness of the night and of the vast and unknowable sea. 

when i visited amritapuri during its early days, i too had the chance to experience the qualities of her home-place, and i am sure that this helped me to evolve in terms of my own relationship with darkness.  but that's much more than i can write here, today.

songbird

I need to hear you sing,
Songbird.
Your note cuts through
To the other world,
Where I live inside,
The green world,
O songbird.
Your green rind sound
Pierces
My upper heart
To remind me
Of the echo of rain-storms
On the moon.
That’s how far I have to go,
To find home.
Your note travels to me
Over a great distance,
Through the loneliness
Of the missing world,
The absence of relatives,
The disappearance of kin,
Other than you
And all the green world
Which holds me,
Lovingly.
Within myself,
The modern world
Of cars, and people and houses,
Falls away
And I am on the hillside
Of bracken
All the way to Grizzly Peak.
I am isolated
In the loneliness
Of the secret half-breed.
The values of
My grandmother
Speak to me
Fluently
Within,
But these words
Cannot be heard
By outsiders.
And that’s almost everyone.
Songbird, sing your green song,
please.

summer land

i've spent my whole
spiritual life
in this dry place
where trees
who don't belong together
grow up side by side,
the fir-tree and the palm,
in a place where
nuns seem silly
amidst so much sunshine,
and it's hard to take
Lent seriously
when the surf is up.

from the berkeley hills overlooking the bay near albany hill

Gentle November,
you gather your
violet comforter,
rumpled,
round the shoulders
of the drab green hills
and the purpled plush crowns
of spreading camphor trees
on Neilson Street.

A sweet blue slumber
of evening sky,
edged in amber,
embraces every bird
and passing motorist
in its warm enfolding,
softly
promising
a season of retreat,
a wintering-over
in a snug harbor,
with peach-colored
lamplight
filling windows,
steaming mugs of hot
coffee or tea,
brandied cherries,
purpled,
and a tray of bon-bons,
black,
near the fire.

And outside
the peace and stillness
of a coastal beauty
that never fades,
that never sheds its leaves,
a Nature where
a soporific rainy season
comes to water roots,
to cleanse the heavy tree-tops,
while a time
of glistening leaves
and swaths of colored
moisture
circulate the skies.

But this, just now,
this velvet hush,
is only that first
in-drawn breath,
that stops, then sighs:
the letting-go, the
sinking down
to thorough
relaxation
and then sleep.

lotus

i've crawled up
from a tunnel
of cracked and broken tiles,
ivoried,
aged and bluish,
or ambered over,
dark greenly zillijied,
and mossy.
stored within their surfaces,
stories
of poor people
brown and sallow pale,
with the sheen of olive,
bronzed and sad,
living in a cold climate,
strictly stratified,
old home,
with icy porches
frigid underfoot,
potted plants
in green glazed jars
in the foyer
near the threadbare rug,
broken panes
on the tiny greenhouse roof
above the eaves,
speaking to me
of past grandeurs,
secrets of the orient
and of slaves.
And then,
the house where
Louisa May Alcott
was born,
so staid and prim
in pristine poverty.

This is the worm-hole
I've been crawling up
for ages.
Or is it the root-stem
of a lotus?

Oh, when will this lotus bloom?

casbah

we lived
in a secret world,
a world apart,
of sand and sun,
rain and marshes,
silences,
and all the varied weather
of the heart.

we didn't know
the modern world
was oozing toward us
to absorb us,
make us all its slaves
and fill our natural silences
with its noise,
and turmoil,
stealing even
the poor places
where we once lived.

since then it's been
a compromise
between the gritty world
and whatever
fna or casbah
we create,
within our home,
our alcove or our yard,
or just within ourselves.

tears

She’s working on me through tears:

the hardness I pressed down

onto my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids,

She’s melting it, washing the hardness away.

So that now I see

so many things I saw and judged

and felt triumphant over,

over-looking them,

from my high vantage point of ‘beauty and brains’

the self-sufficiency of the ‘loner child.’

I’ve been now crushed down to join the mash

so that I can clearly see that all along they were me.

I should have seen, from all I saw

that I was headed there too

- heartbreak hotel - to

the land of the childless couple,

the unbudded and bitter.

Before I wed I saw them

standing there

at the front of the line

in the Boswell House,

the place where we later
ate our wedding dinner.

And they seemed attractive to me at the time,

they were tall and straight

and their stately heads,

erect and handsome,

radiated spiritual light,

yet their connection to each other

appeared intimate.

My own mother bailed from the childless canoe

with the help of doctors

and the prayers of a cloistered nun,

yet strangely, she didn’t seem to want me

once she got me,

or not completely - she felt ambivalent.

This is not uncommon among those

who struggle to attain some prize

and after getting it feel overwhelmed.

Now I’m rowing that old dugout.

And I know that

the real pain is coming

from the loss of ego

- it’s a lot to give up

those pictures of yourself:

the happy matriarch

beloved of all the clan,

the maker of biscuits

with upper arms and breasts like

loaves of bread,

near the frowsy milky heads

of your young

watching them grow to

adolescence,
young adulthood.

To accept the aloneness of the spiritual life.

Yes, Divine Mother is using tears now

to clear my eyes

so I can see.

*       *       *

This is one of my ongoing issues: our infertility.  It's all a long time in the past now.  I wrote this poem in 2002, and at that time I was newly at the age when there could be no further doubt that it wasn't going to happen.  I mean, conception.  So, in my mind, it makes sense that I would have another go-round with all the feelings at that time.