SEEKING PARADISE

Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can see the landscape, 

how it once was before civilization tamed it. 

I imagine my eyes, focusing split-level, 

like the eyes of gobis, mudskippers and frogs 

as they navigate the twain worlds of water, mud and air. 

Call it split vision. Or invoking the ghosts.

Seeing the dual landscape was a coping mechanism, 

something I had learned at an early age—

while trying to plumb the old stories of then versus now. 

A distant then, a then that never was 

in the case of fairytales and myths 

harkening back to another age, 

another era where anything was possible.

Call it paradise, or call it a garden 

but even that is a tamed landscape.

Sometimes it’s like a time warp. 

For example, the land of my childhood,

before the houses, before the invasive species, 

both plant and animal. I imagined 

vast tracts of land, the hills painted with wildflowers.

Or Hanamua Bay before the coral bleached. 

It was a veritable garden from whence we came.

But then the tourist arrived in droves and loved it to death. 

In fact, we have gone and loved the entire world to death, 

it is like an addiction, seeking out paradise on the brink.

And then we lament and wonder why it’s no longer pristine.

And we have only ourselves to blame.

5/22/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen 

DEATH IN RAGS

See how Death is depicted as an old woman, 

dressed in rags, old beyond reckoning, 

from beyond the borderlands of time, 

always waiting in the wings 

like a carrion bird patrolling the land 

for those too young to know that their very lives 

depend upon camouflage or divine intervention. 

Pity the mother holding the child against the wind, 

not the east wind toward the birth of dawn, 

not the west wind to the end of the road, 

but to the north, where the chill winds,

unseasonable in late spring 

slither across the corners of the soul 

seeking prey among the fallen, 

especially those sleeping rough in the streets 

and those plagued by disease or the infirm. 

But sometimes she hunts for live prey, 

more like the eagle, not the vulture 

waiting to give us wings to those unwary souls 

who think she is a myth that time forgot.

5/7/24 Write On! with Nels Christiansen 

Seamus Heaney’s last words

At the Celtic colloquium, some hot young scholar, flexing the biceps of his intellect, presented a thesis on poet Seamus Heaney and synesthesia, insisting that Seamus was unaware of what he was doing. that it came naturally. Everyone nodded their heads sagely as if in agreement. I spluttered. The air was dancing with the images of Klee and Kandinsky, tight little figures dueling in the air, musical notes taking flight. The sharp odor of oranges, a pungent wake-up call. 

But mine was the lone voice of dissent,  the presenter’s words grated like a nail-file, full of grit and dust. The pale afternoon light was a seething beast of contradiction. I said, But all poets mix their senses. It comes with a turf, thinking outside the box. Tools of the trade.  It’s a territorial imperative of sorts. My voice twirled into scarlet ribbons, and bled out on the floor, I thought of the barber’s pole spinning madly. No one was listening.

Just today, I was working on my car and as I jabbered to myself, I realized I was automatically rendering my inane actions into prose, it’s something that goes on in the background, sub rosa, like that orchestra of tinnitus in my ears. No off switch. But the prose began to take on a life of its own, mixing the senses as if trying the idea on for size, dressing metaphor in the aisles at the thrift store. Do I remember any of them? Of course not. It happens on a subliminal level and then I unwind the process later. 

So, besides coming into the writing workshop late, I can’t seem to create an environment where synaesthesia will flourish naturally. Today, I am a bystander. Late late late. But when someone reads about Provincetown, I think of Fire Island, a place I’ve never been, and Frank O’Hara in Why I am not a Painter, wrote a dozen poems on oranges—he doesn’t mention the word orange once, while his friend Mike painted the word sardines on his canvas—and then obliterated it until all that was left was a few  letters. And he called it Sardines. I think of those elusive silvered fish of thought, wishing it was another kettle of fish altogether. I wanted it to be salmon, the fish of wisdom.

I imagined Seamus Heaney in an old dressing gown, and tattered slippers rundown at the heel, squatting  over a mossy pond like Bashō, as if in benediction, feeding the fish hazelnuts. But I am allergic to hazelnuts. The epipen is my lodestone. Wisdom ululating in the sacred well with haloed words ripening on the wind. And language becomes a palimpsest of lost thoughts. Words begin to blur on the edges of the canvas until they swim away into the air.

The fish seeking the secrets of the air, all those wayward words nibbling at the shore of cyberspace. I would’ve written more, finally I was in the zone, but my iPad shut down mid-sentence with a warning that it was too hot to continue. The screen turned black as night with no stars in sight. The thermometer bled down the screen. Not even Andromeda could rescue me now. It timorously asked, Would you like to make an emergency call? I thought of Seamus’s last words: Noli timere. Be not afraid, as a black dalia of blood blossomed in his brain.

1/2/24 WOW Writes, with Dulcie Witman