DREAM VESSELS # 1: MAYIM
—from a collage by Marsha Connell
Is she asleep or dead—
this woman of the landscape?
The volcano goddess Pele's hair across her face—
Epicanthal fold lost in the darkness of dreams.
Sea stacks offshore, a reminder of home,
of the paintings lost, a multitude of King Lears
waiting in the wings at sunset,
the sky, a lid on the primordial soup
manifesting itself as rock.
Amphorae from another inland sea,
the cradle of civilization, overturned.
Gelatinous sea creatures thrown onto desert sands.
The earth is on fire, we cannot quench
the burning oil wells.
Maya, mayim, why are you sleeping?
She is a ghost. She is Ophelia.
Maya, teacher of the art of pillow talk.
Was it she, who, after a lover rejected her—
the mastectomy too graphic—
gave him an exquisite tea bowl
filled with the dry husks of bees?
Or some image I read from a novel?
She was the dancer who could no longer dance
because her bones melted. To survive during WWII,
she ate from Tokyo garbage cans. Rickets…
The soldier took her home to New York
where she was the actress typecast again
and again in Teahouse of the August Moon;
the mirror confirmed her roots.
It was then she began to paint her story.
Her ancestors were artists:
Grandfather Cezanne, Uncle Picasso—
Winter depressions came with the absence of light.
Searching for Hawaii—
the details of her death go unrecorded.
What genjii rise from these jars?
There is the equation of sunset to be considered:
the sun itself as if viewed through smoke.
We all live on fragile islands;
the sea stacks—old men
hunkering down to outwait the night.
Do those in power ever dream?
Or are we empty vessels waiting
to be filled with nightmare oil
purged from the sandy bowels of the earth?
There are more questions than answers.
I cannot say the same for basalt,
the earth's essence (and the moon's),
continually rising skyward.
I keep thinking of Ran,
Kurosawa's version of King Lear.
Intrigues of lust and power
felling the ruling families,
devastating the human potential.
Ethics. Our leaders are not Samurai. In Japan
even warrior thieves had a code of honor to uphold.
They say the plumes over Kuwait are visible from space.
The feathered serpent of the desert climbs
the holy ladder of smoke only to find darkness again.
They say in the desert, even the stones can speak.
What of the woman who is mute alabaster,
and the memory of water,
the mother ocean
who can no longer cradle her;
she is trapped within her cells.
The honor of the sky,
the veil over water,
Maya mayim.
Nothing but smoke and ash.
Asleep under the final Noh Mask.
Spring 1991
NOTE the mastectomy too graphic—
gave him an exquisite tea bowl
filled with the dry husks of bees?
this was from a Bob Hass, a workshop in the Bahamas in 1981, it later turned up in a prose poem of his, "Human Wishes."
1993 Dream Vessels, Marsha Connell
1992 Another version of this poem appeared in Sacred Riverthis was from a Bob Hass, a workshop in the Bahamas in 1981, it later turned up in a prose poem of his, "Human Wishes."
1993 Dream Vessels, Marsha Connell
and Chaminade Literary Review
DREAM VESSELS # 2: Earth Palette
from
a collage by Marsha Connell
Somewhere in Central America
blue shutters closed against the blue wall,
the indigo sky in the midst of war.
Guarding against the evil eye, Babylonians,
and later, the Arabs painted beads blue.
This is why blue beads dangle from the mirrors of
busses,
donkey's halters, and women's necks on both
continents.
The blue-eyed language of a Mestizo child—
Cortés, Cabrillo, Pizarro, & Las Malinches of the
world
who suffered at the hands of love.
All we have to measure entire civilizations
is blue tile from Inanna's ancient city,
vessels filled with golden beads, and arabesques—
images in the shape of God. Names of stars.
The midday sun seeks refuge at the base of shutters.
Behind closed doors a Yemenite bride is sleeping.
Soon she'll assemble herself in the form of desert
crystals.
Gathering the sun in her robes she turns
to catch the light, all she sees is ultraviolet.
Reduced to silica, she is pure transparency.
The calligraphy of wheat fields after scything
combines arranged in bezier curves,
visible only to the birds who are not bound to this
land.
Cuneiform on clay tablets: writing began when the
silos
and graineries were overfull, before the desert was
at hand.
A map of civilization is scattered in that wheat.
On the edge of the steppes, horsemen wait
against the sky for someone to tresspass:
they say, one must die to become a man,
to take one's place in the community.
After a good harvest of wheat, of bodies—
it's all the same in the end. On any of the
continents
nature doesn't distinguish between blood and chaff,
or invent abstractions about the shape and color of
space.
Where is the juncture where the desert shrub antlers
itself
against the brooding sky? Teased into patterns by the
wind,
it yields in random mathematical increments.
How then, to explain away those missiles,
more beautiful than the stars?
Spring 1991
1994 Kalliope, First Prize, Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry Prize
DREAM VESSELS # 3: Night Goddess
from a collage by Marsha Connell
The hawk Horus landed here first, or at least that's what is said.
Seated on funerary divans, the rulers of the Upper and Lower kingdoms
wear the sun of Horus; the bull between the su
and the root hunger of cobras, rays of Ra. Amun.
The sun in gold cartouches immortalized on temple walls.
Nefertiti sleeps, her profile, a landscape.
What is Egypt but an fertile dream of Africa?
The Fellahim, tillers of black earth.
Did worry beads first appear when the two kingdoms
were united in marriage and death?
Plenty of sand in Egypt; who first thought to melt
sand
into faence? Tin from Welsh mines took cooperation,
not war.
Another ridge on the ribbon road. Ivory and beads,
as if coral wept from all the blood spilled.
In the presence of so much stone, the rider
on a white horse is but a small afterthought.
Moving through worlds, searching for a sense of
place,
we disturb what's taken out of context: millions of
potshards
from the pilgrims who fed the gods milleniums on end.
The sun's rays fracture and separate on the lintel
the way a child's drawing depicts the sun with rays—
all curved and geometric at the same time.
Where is the white sand island rising from the sea of
chaos?
The reed shrine holding the image of the hawk?
Why are all the women asleep with their unadorned
profiles
to the sky? Where is Isis?
Here, there is no personal story to lean on.
Juxtaposed against two worlds,
our modern debris is seeking home.
On hands and feet, the goddess of the night,
Nut, has stretched her body across the sky.
Nefertiti's Nubian ear, a dark shell
in the wrinkled folds at sunset.
Anubis, God of the Dead, seeks New World Order.
Spring 91 & 92
from a Gulf War collage by Marsha Connell
The
women soldiers will go first.
—Marsha Connell, dream fragment
The
skies over Bagdhad have been illuminated.
—Bernard Shaw, CNN
She is a woman veiled. Roses dangle from stalks of
lightning
against a blood-red sky, a tree of strange knowledge.
In a dream she was asked to witness war games.
Sometimes life is like that—the artist observing
simultaneous layers of time. Mediators in occupied
territories:
A child in a pink dress watches reflections in the
water.
A woman shakes darkness from the folds of her robe.
Laser-guided missiles on the banks of the Tigris.
Confluence.
The idea of a key, a kite, and a storm unleashed
itself
from the sky to illumine the night. Tender filaments,
fragile blossoms of light burning from the coil.
But now, the ultimate burst which spawned the Age of
Light
yields roses of another kind. At Pearl Harbor
she saw Japanese men crying as they struggled to
understand,
because so much was hidden from them.
They learned for themselves what happened
from the things which did not survive.
The last of the Hibakusha, nearly all gone now.
She has more questions than answers, keeps looking
for hope, but finds only compelling darkness.
That child born during the Age of Light
holds onto a shadow woman of the desert,
the hijab hides her from prying eyes
of the 20th century, but cannot shield her from it.
The vase on a pedestal—a ballet dancer,
refined white gloves of ghosts,
the peculiar weight of roses.
Carrying dead grandmothers into marriage,
we were all young once, didn't notice the paradigm
between a love of nature, and dominion over the
weakest.
What of the child who will inherit the dowry of the
sky:
the seductive beauty of a mushrooming cloud,
incandescent roses,
the breathing of some unnamed fear in a dark room
where we can't find the switch in time.
Does she not see the lights of the city,
minute grains beneath her feet?
Spring 1991
1993 Dream Vessels, Marsha Connell
DREAM VESSELS # 5: Shards of
Destruction
from
a collage by Marsha Connell
Twilight comes
ponderously of age in the tropics.
Birds gather to watch
the jewels on the shores
of Waikiki glisten with
that peculiar illusion of light
when the blurring of
headlights becomes a serpent
winding along Ala Moana
Drive. Streets converge in an X.
A multitude of shoes
come to mind; Imelda's maybe—
Kept in her exhiled
husband’s air-conditioned masoleum
in the Valley of the
Temples, where he waits for a political thaw.
Above the white void,
it is equally difficult to hide,
or to find one's way to
the other side of the question.
Should it be so strange
to see skyscrapers rise
from the curved smile
of pots, or lipstick crosses
lodged between fixed systems of thought?
Blue macaws witness
iridescent missiles
shove the horizon
against the edge of the rainforest;
they wear broken shards
for cloaks of mourning.
The household of the
earth torn open,
labia pierced by the
jeweled cities;
the rapists asking if
she enjoyed it.
What's the use of
asking those kinds of questions
when even the birds
lean away from each other?
A bamboo torii gate
with enough sense to grow
out of the confines of
the sky cannot close the hole.
Broken vessels cut just
as well as shrapnel.
It's only the context
of violence which is different.
The boats in their
berths, coffins of light
crusade against the
darkness of the sea.
Summer 91 & 92
1992 Chaminade Review
DREAM VESSELS # 6: Cellist
War
is a symphony of destruction
orchestrated
by few & paid for by many.
—anon.
In the gnarled bark of white pines,
an angel is hidden. Once a primordial sea
covered Owen's Valley. Sometimes
when the light is just right,
if you don't quite look, angels lean out
as if the tree were the prow of a ship
launched on the crest of the White Mountains.
We've sailed to the New World and taken the moon
hostage.
Who spilled the moon? Who will drink to it, or mend
its shell?
Annularity at sunset. Light knows its own source.
An eclipse swallowed the moon burning from within.
The faceless musician in a trenchcoat holds the
cello—
concealed behind the saturnine curves of resonant wood.
Who gets to be the cellist in the next incarnation?
Or the cat? Where is the orchestra?
Who's left to interpret the dreams of 1644? Or now?
Morphos is asleep. A netted fish for Medusa's hair.
The moon is made of basalt like the sea floor.
More dead than alive, the tree hangs onto dreams,
hangs onto life by a thin Cambrian cord,
umbilicus to earth; its roots—archaic seeds
that sprouted before the Bible was proscribed.
Shadows of branches finger the air,
ply the wind, fretting the traces
for an ancient symphony of light.
Summer 91/92
DREAM VESSELS # 7: Grandmothers
from
a collage by Marsha Connell
From a turbulent sea filled with icebergs,
where immigrants waited to enter the promised land,
blind and crowned with thorns, Liberty rises.
Or is she drowning, sinking beneath the waves?
In a crepuscular haze where nothing is clearly
defined,
not even the edges of the sky, industrial scrubbers
breathe warm clouds into the frigid air.
Towels and aprons, domestic prayer flags;
a grandmother hangs out clothes to dry, touches the
mezuzah.
In a locked cabinet, whiskered koi frozen on a ginger
jar—
The memory of ancient fish, venerable as the sun.
The small child wants to touch them and wonders
if they still dream of being fish—or have they
forgotten how.
Where are all the grandmothers?
How to explain to the children free carbon
cannot escape through the holes in the ozone layer.
A slow polar Armageddon ripens under greenhouse
skies.
The seas will rise, the cities will flood.
No time to worry about the trees.
Though everything is cyclical, we can't see into
the next one.
Both enemies shrouded under the same veil of history—
Liberty ages, ice melts into the sea.
Her eyes seem to say this too shall pass.
Prayer flags continue to do a brisk trade with the
wind.
DREAM VESSEL # 8 MASADA
from Gulf War Collages by Marsha Connell
Beneath a bandage of snow the stones of Masada—
wounded mathematics address a long mountainous road.
Am I dreaming a mirage of islands on the horizon?
Why not sooty chimney stacks or columns of faith?
Fluted pillars lintel the sunset. Icons of the past
take flight.
I struggle with the mechanics of closed systems.
In the collage, a virginal doll fell from a brooding sky.
Names of religion, of stars. Of missiles. The sixth
pillar.
From Tel Aviv, photos of the artist’s daughter in a
gas mask;
an “I am” escapes on the breath of the god of
collateral damage.
I thought of Georgia O'Keeffe in the desert painting the
secrets
of flowers in the curved throat of mountains.
This is my body said the doll as she orbited industrial skies,
the moon is chasing the earth's darkness. This is
my blood.
When the cities were bombed, I dreamed of skiing on
sand.
Who told me to ski the fall line with harmonic
determination?
I traverse a slope too steep to bear the weight of
the world
in the direction of declination. A leap of faith.
Sand and snow are one thing, but time stutters
and slips like old movies as we watch celluloid fires
on CNN.
They say life passes before the eyes of those resurrected
from death.
In those last infinite seconds, what images did the
mind choose to view?
Drink from the body of memory, the world is a narrow
bridge.
The mountains, stubbled with 6 O'clock shadow.
If we make it out of this one, it'll be a close
shave,
no matter what icons we choose to salvage or bury.
Summer 1991/9/2001
DREAM VESSEL # 10 COVENANT
If a child walks on Jerusalem's walls.
should a rainbow appear?
While in the old Jewish cemetery
a raven's wing reaches upward.
Among the stones inscribed in Hebrew
the flute player and the golden cross of the sun at T'sanque
Across from the graveyard, windows of housesóten of them
like so many eyes or commandments,
I'd swear it was Russia, 1910.
But what is the flute player doing here
resurrecting the dead.
He is the Anasazi god of fertility, his penis a flute.
He is the hunchback, the bringer of music
growing among the graves, small blue flowers, vines.
The cornices of graves like gabled roofs
all crooked, like teeth.
The child looks back over his shoulder
as he takes his morning stroll to the citadel to the dome.
A child walks on Jerusalem's walls.
This is the line that divides nations, peoples.
His shadow cast into the courtyard of the wailing wall, leviathan.
He is strutting, a soldier in the making.
Participants, celebrants the size of ants.
A child walks on Jerusalem's walls; is he Arab or Jew? some will ask.
He is a child looking back through the four arches,
portal at the top of the steps leading to the citadel.
He is walking away, looking back to a distant time
when the only conceivable answer was yes.
I dreamed I was in the courtyard,
I was asked to chose between three religions:
the Christian I knew, Moslem scared me,
I was asked to chose between three religions:
the Christian I knew, Moslem scared me,
I went to the Jewish temple. I chose the oldest,
but the choice was not mine.
DREAM VESSELS # 11 Shards of Creation
DRAFT
From a collage by Marsha Connell
War, at least, has become the
human condition.
—William
Styron
The sky is a Sistine chapel draped over the holy
city at dawn;
the dome a lesser eye of the sun.
Writing on clay pots, images of the sun and zigzags
could be the rain, mountains or temples.
City of clay rising from the desert
God touches Adam, filling him with inspiration,
breathing into him
and like the effigies we once were made of clay it
is said
We write ourselves onto clay tablets while the
angels looked on
we would prove to be trouble. They were right.
Adam is a reclining colossus on the green hills
behind the city
God's balcony is overcrowded
perhaps this is why he is reaching out to Adam
It's a race, theyíre passing the baton, the
invisible wand
but Adam is lying down on the job, naked and
forthright
while God is clothed. original Sin?
He will take that back where it will lie on the
pillows of Eve.
She will carry it forth, creating the races of
Mankind
but the mother ship too is crowded.
The city wallsócells both protecting and isolating
the nest egg.
The maleness of this religion cannot be denied.
Where are the women, the femininity?
Even the liongates are male, the angels, the
cherubsóall male.
The sepulcher, by right, should be femaleó
like Queen bees, ants and termitesóthis is the
pattern of nature.
In that gesture of God's to Adam—like gentle apes
reaching
through the bars of a cage to touch a beloved
companion,
God and Adam are cellmates both in prison;
who made the walls? surely not the women.
Perhaps God and Adam fell in love.
After all, God made Adam in his own likeness
or so it is written. And like Narcissus, God saw
his own reflection in the pools of Adam's eyes
and could not bear to be parted from himself.
Maybe the angels are really jealous
wanting something of God for themselves but this is
blasphemy.
Blastopore; I will take that risk cursing the king
using God's nameórisking death by stoning.
Blas blas seed sprout
beginning in the beginning was the logos
blas + evil
blasto sprout seed bad polemy = speech sprouting speech
but there is a war going on in the Gulf.
Metaphors Desert Sand, Desert Storm, Desert Shield.
A victorious warrior returning from battle
is advised to dress for mourning (tao te ching)
We dress trees in yellow ribbons as if they were
young girls.
War as a shadow of war before Eden. Pax Amerika.
Who are the chosen, and what of the Hittites, the
Sumerians
and the Kurds? A continuous world war. Corporate
ideo war games.
Who is taking responsibility for our shadows during
this age of light?
The oil fires of Kuwait, a whole country on fire
how many days will the oil lamps burn this time?
What festival of light will lend its name to the
offering from the desert?
Scud missiles exploding over Israel more beautiful
than the stars
In every citadel there is a well—even the ground
water is poisoned
Saddam is rebuilding the tower of Babel Sodom is
Saddam in cuneiform
neb-Hussain builds for the nuclear armagedden.
There is little graceto be shed. The final prophet.
What pillars of wisdom, what articles of faith to
bear witness to this?
Afraid of their own impure thoughts, men blame the
women for them
in Russian every womanís patronymic name ends in
ova- ovum the egg
DV 12-16 missing
D V #17 Grandpa Sam's Farm (empty Word file..)
DREAM VESSELS # 20: Piano Rose I
from a collage by Marsha Connell
And the piano rose
only to find itself entangled
in the gnarled arms of an old oak.
Returning home to the trees
was what it least expected.
From the trunk, a cherub—
hair transformed into wings
muses over his handiwork:
a couple making sweet music
in the mossy arbor.
The crescent moon threatens to slip
down the throat of the well,
full-bellied roses rise from the dankness.
A single rose caught napping
on the piano lid like a flightless bird.
No one comes to play the piano
nesting clumsily in the trees.
Stone urns. Spanish moss gathers
in the wisdom of the air.
Summer, 1992
DREAM VESSEL # 21: Piano Rose II
from
a collage by Marsha Connell
Between shrouded barn and hills, cobwebs tether a piano
to the sky.
A raku bowl instructs a white rose on gravity & the
ritual of tea.
The eclipsed century unfurls its dark flag. Japanese
soldiers,
or the struggle of the sun and the moon comes to mind.
The artist said, A piano is more like a house than a barn.
The piano dreams itself into being: endless halls,
lonely floors,
the caged sun porch with its restless regiment of rocking
chairs.
Everything in black & white. The high ceilings, sconced
candles.
Her grandfather’s barn surprises her with a secret studio.
She dreams of finding lost art; her task: to restore
the garden.
Ivory keys tickle the confluence of memory and
longing.
In the empty house, dischordant music shatters the
windows.
Transfixed by dim visions of childhood, she returns to
the farm
of white roses, her father’s death, cobwebs shrouding
the past.
Born on the cusp of war, she finds light
by
naming the sources of darkness.
In the garden, a sculpture rises from a vessel, like
Daphne,
into the corona of the black sun. Who is the enemy?
She must choose between sprouting branches, or wings.
Oil derricks inscribe haloes of black gold on desert sands.
The moon weeps, footprints in the lunar dust.
Summer 92 - 4/94
DREAM VESSEL # 22 SOURCES OF POWER
The angel in back offers her golden bowl.
On the hem of her garment, a procession
of men offer bowls in rapid succession.
Her wings shelter those who stand beside
a painted hide beneath an orange sun
and the vertical vedrigris of a bamboo forest.
Worshippers carry the crozier and the chalice,
water plumments from the mountains.
Such is the gift of power; it begets more power.
An angel who is a bird drinks from the bowl
of a pillar that rises above them.
Old Byzantium, the Cheyenne Way
and modern technology collide head-on with nature.
An army of windmills compliments the electric pole
Bamboo gates and a score of sentient beings.
we transport
Splayed between the triangular bodies
(I think the rest is missing..... Blasted ASCII file)
DREAM VESSELS # 23: Three Mile Island
from
a collage by Marsha Connell
—for Regina Susskind who did
not leave TMI in time
Above the tilled field a monk dips knowerís ink
into the earth,
serenely addresses the dichotomy of a oil field;
a black chrysanthemum blossoming in his Zen
garden.
Morning enters reverently through wooden slats.
Patterns endlessly repeat themselves.
Red lights—virgin teats—glow on the sleek green
bellies
of nuclear reactors resembling vessels emerging
from raw clay;
the potter breathes air into the pot, raising
the walls.
These, our towers to the strange worship of
divided light.
A vessel adorned with cranes sprouts papery
wings as if to escape.
They say Chernobyl is heating up again;
no one can extinguish the graphite fires.
Used to their government crying wolf,
the old ones have moved back to their villages
at Ground Zeroóthe black egg of the phoenix.
They say: we donít believe. Show us evidence.
The insidious light shines through us; a light
we canít see.
A light for which a child made a thousand paper
cranes.
The cranes, who mate for life, most elegantly
bow and rise,
pirouetting, sweeping their wings; a ballet for
air and earth.
It is evident the monk cultivates the origins
of running grass before he begins to write.
How then, to cipher the inscriptions
of those megaliths pilloring the garden of the
sky?
Summer 1992
DREAM VESSELS # 25 Southwest Venus (Rivkeh’s vision) DRAFT
From a collage by Marsha Connell
Blackware, San Ildefonso—
feathers circumnavigating the pots
I met Maria’s grandson at the farmer’s market,
he’s also a potter who showed us the new techniques,
when I told him I had met his grandmother years before.
He is proud to keep the tradition alive.
On the pedestal in the gallery, a torso of a woman,
with arms, head, and breast missing,
her clothing tucked between her thighs.
Such an odd way to dress for war,
was she an Amazon with one breast missing?
It also seems odd that a piece of carved stone
would willingly slough off one breast.
A mastectomy in stone?
The land folds its multitude of thighs
to where the water gathers.
The ollas pour the water of life into a parched land.
It wasn’t always so.
A trinity of ollas in perfect formation
preserved a way of life, an unwritten history.
These vessels of our bodies,
the vessels of the dead, and of life.
And the rotation of crops—
Once, the Middle East was the granary of the world,
with complex irrigation systems,
but the cycle was altered, the soil salted up, the crops failed.
Urok, Nineveh failed and the exodus began.
Starvation made them desperate.
History changed itself again and again.
Invaders, Raiders, Crusaders, and us.
Meanwhile in the New World,
the old ones built pots inscribed with the key to life.
Ariadne’s secret, the maze.
Anasazi redware, Pueblo blackware.
What survives of a lost culture.
The accumulation of a people began with the pots.
While the Greeks carved statues of warrior women,
the sacred theater froze time in stone.
The pots whisper secrets no one can translate.
Summer 1992
DREAM VESSELS # 26: Exodus DRAFT
From a collage by Marsha Connell
Three camels, ships of the desert
in caravan; turbaned riders asleep
in the green-gold of night
striding toward us
an archaic statue thick calves
a woman by the breasts, but a man in stride
the wind whips her garments
molding them to her body
left foot forward
a ricebowl above her head
the Orient, the camels, the silk road
naked vertebrae rise against the night sky
like a howling animal,
a quadruped reaching for the sky in grief
on the unstable platform of two legs
while lightning punctuates exclamates the horizon
The snow capped mountains bathed in royal afterglow
a messenger walks out of the desert
neither male nor female
we must seek new paths, new directions
the way we have been going has been too late
her arms are gone, she cannot embrace us
a fissure threatens to divide her
across the gut and she is bald
her hair is lost in the night
the rice bowl, a cauldron to resurrect the dead
but the fisher king is wounded and cannot heal
she is come to tell us
that she is come
and the camels head left into the sand storm
uneasily rocking their cargo (human or otherwise)
The Israelite fled out of Egypt into the desert
surviving a series of plagues.
Do nothing be still turn your fears into faith
aramís rod, the jar of manna
god walks among them
__________________
No period at the end of the poem suggests the rest is MIA, like so many of these Word files. Someday I will need to compare the hard copies (if I even have them). The rest of the poems below are drafts.
Marsha
did several more Dream Vessel collages after we'd made a chapbook for our joint Sonoma County Community Foundation regional artist NEA fellowships, and I
was onto other projects by then, so I never finished them.
