The Writings of Loren Stell

Hymn for Tony

Three days before 11/11/11. Three days before his 70th birthday. Before the child prodigy’s first public piano concert—one he’d been rehearsing, in a way, all his life—came a leukemia diagnosis. After three transfusions, Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition slipped elegantly into a black-walled living room overlooking New York’s Central Park before dozens of friends. Tony’s decades delay for bucking his father’s rule: no practice, no supper; when my friends come by you come play, coppice. Tony rebelled. Finally. Became an accomplished psychiatrist—helping others find their way, as he found his.

An Office Walkabout

rainbow eagle

Ribbons blowing in the sanctuary door, mock the eagle feathers flaming up
in your dream, father. The psychic bonfire in your sleep burns not far from
the sliding barn door of your church. The one your inheritance bought, that a bishop officially bequeathed to you as a monastery sanctuary. Where two brothers, ex-students, join you in offering a folk music mass for disgruntled Catholics, married ex-priests and nuns. Lively homilies, guitar melodies rebirth dusty liturgy. Yet, sadly, you say, more than once you have dreamed of an eagle, its wings roasting on a fiery grate, trying to rise. . . and though we’d just begun the session you requested, our eyes meet, your voice fades. Trembles. “Our meeting is best postponed.” No discussion of eagle farsight.
Leadership of those who wear its feathers.

An Office Walkabout

Drum Talk

Walk the talk, I’ve been practicing in this office. Flap of footfall after footfall.
Prattfall of consonants and vowels, tripping over tongue and teeth. Parades
of words without accompaniment from the Yorba talking drum under the altar.
Two tones that stretch from B to F# on an electronic tuner. Five keyboard notes
apart. Miles for untrained fingers. Beats. The patter of consonants. The slide
of vowels make human weather under the crack of lightning, roll of thunder
and whistle of wind. Murmurs in search of meaning. Plucks on the harp of joy.

An Office Walkabout

Losing the pine Orchard Race

On Long Island Sound a signal cannon saluted the sunset, as Bengal crossed
the finish line last—but winning the day for seamanship. A boy helmsman
on a gaff-rigged dingy—crewed by his Commodore dad—pushed hard before
the wind, was knocked flat and foundered. Diesel snapped on. Towed in. Race over.
An SOS vetoes racing. But the final boom of the cannon brought a last place trophy,
an offer to join a lively sailing club. Bengal’d become a 22-foot-long life coach.

An Office Walkabout

Temple Trapeze

It can’t be a red-robed wanna-be bishop swinging from skyhooks
on the rote ropes of patriarchy. Too much swing for priestly history
where millennia-woven hawsers of habit veer back and forth headed
to candle lit altars. Yet the play in this painting’s sway, promises life
hereafter—or laughter hereafter—

An Office Walkabout

Hios chapel warp

First Mass in 51 years—probably last—
for a bent matriarch
and handful of her family huddled inside.
Col-lab-o-ra-tor . . . col-lab-o-ra-tor . . .
The bell tolls in five ring bursts
col-lab . . . col-lab . . . co-lab-o-ra-tor . . .
a steel tongue prelude for the Orthodox chant
rising from the chapel’s blue and white walls.

An Office Walkabout

The Fire and the Rose

“the  crowned knot of fire. . .  and the rose are one” T.S. Elliot

After my infant baptism eight decades ago, my father and namesake cradled
me in the Carolina sun on the steps of his church and triumphantly predicted
which college and seminary I would attend; that I too, would be ordained.
His heavy Roman fingers, like mine, sprinkled my dark hair. But this Texas
rose was a gift after a conscious baptism in Don and Deborah’s creek—hair
now white, fragile, thin like this russet keepsake rose, aged, since I came up ritually clean in a pebble-lined stream. A Lone Star branch of the sea of chaos.

An Office Walkabout

Sharded Portrait

Perfect velveteened frame for a fallen hero: Melbourne Langston Arvin, cavalry- riding great-grandfather. Fine horseman—flouting the entire Union Army
at Gettysburg by galloping around it, Your unit capturing a 40-wagon supply train—instead of following orders and bringing Lee reconnaissance he’d ordered—that might’ve won the key battle. You helped your flamboyant Captain lose the Civil war.
Thank God.

An Office Walkabout

glass thinker

Translucent contortion, frozen echo of Rodin’s sculptural ode to human intellect, how apt
you twist, before Merwin’s translation of Purgatorio. A gift from Tom, a raging alcoholic,
do you puzzle how English might approach Dante’s terza rima? Or ponder Tom’s trust
marriage will awaken and enliven his bride? Difficult to parse as tercets the warning
in the dream that shook him awake a week before the wedding: wrong music, wrong ritual, wrong wife-to-be. And a Purgatorial allusion of a high church ceremony that strands
the bride at the altar, as Tom dances away with an accordion-playing gipsy lady and her band.

An Office Walkabout

La Chalaca

Pelé Pelé Cosmo! Cosmo! –-beered shouts over the VW Thing’s roofless sides ping
into the Lincoln tunnel roar on the way back to Manhattan from the Meadowlands.
The soccer legend danced around New Jersey turf. No Chalaca. No goal even. But Pelé filled me—the whole stadium perhaps—with flickers of the world’s most beautiful game. Brazil’s World Cup sorcerer orbiting to North America, dribbling with favela tuned foot-work, bringing joy to Europe, South—and now North—America. A conquistador rising
out of the new world.