Literary Enclave:
Poetry Zone

"Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened
and all wines flowed."
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In Hell (Une Saison en Enfer)


I

The same sun's shining        yesterday
That rose so slow, and stood so long
And stretched my time like clay

Years can't turn 'round
As the whirl of the windmill's vanes
Or the foot-pumped potter's wheel
Yet still the scintillant dust blows
Through the chasm between
That place, once called home
And the Chinese boxes of dream after dream
Where desert light refracts
Rebounds off phantom forms
And aches

To reach that ground again
Where bronze-backed workers sweated in the sun
Piling mud cake blocks to make an adobe home
Day in, day out
Hardscrabble immigrants with blistered feet
They'd crossed a hundred miles or more
From Sabinas Hidalgo 
To work a day or two or three
Then be on their way to Winkleman
There our home was a school bus
Shaded by trees of mesquite 
While down the dirt road woven mysteries loomed
In the redolent realm of communal house and pottery works
And our backyard: a yawning canyon
The gnarled ribs of the San Pedro River

To touch that ground again
Would it be again to taste
The juice that only once
Produced amazement in every sense?
Would I merge with my old self's shadow
And swim again in flowing wine?

Oh, but only a child can really see
The blueness of the blue

II

Now broken strands will fall together:
Memories embedded like a graffitto in cement
Nameless as a scent of wind
Fleeting as a feather
Are brought toward ambience again
To form this song's single heather

Tucson's somewhere back there in the dust
As my father wheels the '47 Studebaker bus
And drives further, further across the arid land
Peppered with cacti, sky so tender, endless blue
While our yellow caravan bounces and careens
Suffused with hazel sunlight
Warm with strangers bearded, beaded, embroidered 
That was the incandescent time 
When things seem received rather than found
And as the sun went down, past the loopy road from Pomerene
My family was all aboard, with Dixie cups of Rainbow Water 
Circulating, flowing from the giant blue see-through jug
And we wondered as the bus rattled on:
Where, where are we going? Where blows the wind?

Nearby dusty Benson town
(With its stagecoach robber ghosts
And the brown tabled Horseshoe Cafe
Where once we had dined
On ham smothered in sauce of glistening orange)
Was a 30 mile bumpy ride away
From where Cascabel lay, and it lies still  
Cascabel, may the wind, when it comes
Ripple hushed among your mesquite leaves
Embrace you, its dreaming, sleeping child
In her lush maternal shawl
Protect you from the rain of castigating stars
That bides with the wolf and rattlesnake
Cascabel's namesake
Formidable serpent that comes to pay a visit 
To my father, who's shrouded with another
Across the river, under the trees
Where they dare not move 
Deathly still, silent
Until snake's wrath has been meditated away

First night's sleep in red parachute tepee
'Til the school bus, parked, became our home
Around us the shadowland enwrapped
And as the sun arose, master of ceremonies
Segue into paradise
I lifted my five year old eyes, lamb-like
And learned to see and taste

III

Eternity in the bosom of a year, papaya on its bough
Tablature of clay, garden, canyon
Vivified by eyes, sensorium, soul

School bus furnished with life's imperatives:
Stove, beds 
(Where one morning I awoke in horror
Cut with a razor
My pajamas soaked red with blood)
A family all together
Lulled into peace
After the rough and rattly journey'd road
So dormant were we, sleeping with our seeds
Wired for fury, to erupt years hence
Buried now and lost in forgetful clouds of long ago

Our daily trip was down that dusty road
To the "Big House," axis of our stay:
Infrangibe kingdom of stone, wood, and glass
Forever resting just an amble down the road
Deep as its garden's soil
Where I watched a headless snake circuit
And weave its own wake, zapping out
Its cord of life
High as its lofts, where when I'd climb
Patchouli women, widening subdued brown light
Burned yesteryear's incense, the integer of delight
 
A whiff of tomatoes and mint
And I'm wandering the backyard gardens again 
Where goats scrape sawed-off horns
Against dirty grey metal sheets
While the ire of meanest, bucking momma goat
Promenades beyond that fenced yard 
And whistles through my spindrift years
Of afterglow turned indigo - 
Those were the days of seeming kindness

Desert highway utility poles, ink-black wires
Disappearing, like my brother in a billow of dust
Bound for Benson on the morning school bus
A real bus! Toward a real school
While I was stuck to dabble and dance
Within the arena of my broadening sight

Planes are dropping fly eggs from the sky
Black larvae pools that splay and squirm
And wiggle across the split-opened box
And glint silvery with specks of the sun

Night seeps in, sets, envelopes 
And meal time commences at the House 
Hands together held 'round the circle 
Form one commune, unbroken chain 
Surrounding the mighty brown wooden dining table
While our eyes were closed, in repose and prayer
Though at times I'd peek
At that mandala of auming adult faces
Aaahhhooommm.......
Sound around the table humming
Prerequisite to feast

All just memories now, a falling leaf away
From the sound much later to emerge:
Signals from the vale, such discordant music
That leaves this rush of phantasmagoria, at last...
Mute
Then draws back, to fifings from distant mountains
Rain within the cloud
Blight within the seed

Alone once on that wending path
A black bull blisters! Snorts! Chases me down!
Flit of paranoia jiggling through my brain
In dread of trampled-under death
From the rancher Gillespie's runaway cow!

But I'm just shuffling again through dust 
Writing in my college apartment Boston night
As doubts slither in with the steampipe's winter hiss:
Does this altar, language-lifted
Reach, grope, through memory's helix
To feel mere shades of forgotten cliffs, meals, moments
In the hearth of my flesh and blood
Stand revealed as moments sloughed through, like any other?
Or transmuted in the scheme of time
To yield a time of myth, child of bliss
Image of Cascabel picaresque, a paradise
So that I will not forsake
Touching something, just once - in life - 
Transfiguring?

Light of day casts over the cakes of clay
Spanning the San Pedro

Like memories crying to be excavated
To be felt again in full measure
To return and arc my life
Oh life of sin, spun away from the light of life
Bright from what was once

One fine flash that everything else 
Gladly, gushingly reverberates from
Rush of spring, and I was the one who felt
The tinge of nectar!
The suspicion that the sunflower
Grows by God's grace

IV

And so the morning came
Harbinger of entropy
Yet still leaving time, an immutable moment
For signs of the sublime:

A roar from afar crashes, cascades
Through the canyon's clay walls
The portals of sound are loos'd
No leashing can there be, for this colossal Immanence!
I dash from the House, tumult pulls me forth
To behold:

Flashflood wonderment! Thundering, eruptive
Brown and muddy rolls of rushing water!
Sundered trees caught in the thrashing race
While a child's seized by direct touch
Of what silvers the stars
And molds all else in its wake

And walks in the light of dusk
With the sun's slanting red glimmers 
Over the curled mud crusts of the river's bed

Through the stained glass specks of lighting shiver 
To deliver a message from the hawk who encircles
And brings the night of Gethsemane unto a man who quivers
And suffers in the hall, wrapped in his woolen shawl
Wracked with a toothache's riveting agony
He was eclipsed by the night's strange arc
And the unknown patterns of the circuitous hawk
While the windows glowed from beer bottle's ends
All in colored rows, pulsating with the mystery
The coming of seasons of pain
As indomitable rain keeps on coming

Living room light blooms when daylight comes
As loungers in lofts reside with memories of cocoa beans
And a song from the speakers drifts on through:
"Jesus Christ, Superstar
Who in the world do you think you are?"
Light that cast that shadow:
A stranger then, by name

Seahorse on a glide through time
Peers at the pantomime of forms
Elongated around the glass bowl
In waves of undulating fantasy
Wooden kitchen bowls brim, shelves teem
The freshly mopped floor sparkles and gleams
My father sits there, bandana around his hair
And no one else may come in
Until his self-admiring meditation is done

The eyes of the lotus legged yogis are closed
Their breaths silent and serene 
Lords of the zone between dining room and lofts 
The earnest meditators who drift off
To somewhere, somewhere lift
And do they float, milky and unfettered 
When they arrive on that silky astral plane?
All the while, a child watcher sees, stares
Spectating ecstasy

But I'm bashful, naked
Standing in the blue-tiled shower room
With a little girl, another little boy
And hairy grown-ups accompanying
As we wash ourselves clean 
After a stroll through the wet San Pedro
And I wonder, steam pipes still hissing:
Who was it, in this desert arcadia
That I romped and rumbled with
Soaking up the delicious term of the sun?

Now way down in my cavernous depths
Hidden in a dug up hole of earth
We watch the pick-up truck come barreling in
With a cactus on the flatbed, tossing up a cloud of dust 
It's so cool down here, so moist, and dark
With my older brother, in the shadows

V
Mesh of bodies weave the trees
The whole commune's naked
Dancing for Life and the Knowledge
That I'll catch you when you fall
"Come on along, come play Trust!
And let's fall back into each other's arms..."
While a child watches, transfixed, from the sides

School bus mesquite shade
Sitting on summer's doorstep 
And Alphonso saunters my way, bearing a gift
My mother's favorite turquoise plated spoon
Twisted into a wristband, made just for me:
"Theese is for Thody!"
Dear soul, how could she be angry?

Alphonso, you who slipped down the well
I tumble back the years to reach you
Melee of frantic faces gathered 'round
As rescuers plunged down to save you
I could've ridden the rope down, down
(Was tiny enough to fit inside that tin pail)
Though terrified I'd never come back up
I passed it by

Alive, in the bleeding dusk, they pulled him up, up
Carried and laid him in the Pinto's backseat 
Then the last minute hassle:
The mustach'd, red-haired driver, knife at his hip
Who refused to take the wounded man - 
How could he be so cruel?
They shifted Alphonso to the pickup truck
Fed him a hearty chunk of anesthesia hash
Then roared away toward Benson

Sky overcast, a day for dreaming
A ride to Benson, windows down with whipping wind
From a stitch unraveled in the clouds
A perfect beam, one rectangle of golden light
Blesses the field, privileges our eyes

Benson high school gym, bell-bottom rock and rollers
Booming Chuck Berry neon orange music
Never dreaming my own yet unstepped trips
Through other hallways, other days
A freefall through time

Resplendent colors of the town parade pass my eyes
Shriners in tall funny hats ride, turn, and wave 
From the perch of the glimmering red fire truck
And pieces of candy tossed by their endless hands 
Fall into the tarred street
Where little kids scamper, and scramble for more, more
More from the engine of spinning time

VI

Tucson came back again, I can't recall or trace exactly when
We left the settlement, dust blown again to the wind
Never knew I'd return in dreams, again and again
And each time to seem so real, closer, realer than before...
Until I'm finally spun back, and there at last - 
Upon waking, morning slays the traveler's bliss
And washes clean imagination's wish