On an East corner shelf Durga waves her six arms conducting spirits gathered there, as she did temple-size, near Rishikesh, where Swamaj Chandrasekaranand blessed her mala bead necklace. The 200-year-old Peruvian peasant cross was a gift from
a shaman on Macha Pichu with hair streaked white from two lightning strikes.
Mementos. From spiritual tsunamis. Iceburg calfings of my psyche.
Pipes un-smoked for 60 years reek with history. The one sporting a white dot still rank from my father’s favorite Dunhill leaf curling over sermon outlines. Mine, pungent residue from archetypal pursuits from apeing Carl Jung, my psycho-spiritual guru.
“But do you really know how to smoke?” Jack, a dapper colleague once asked, shoving forward a 6-inch cheroot. “Danneman Lonja—World’s best smoke! Take a mouthful. Don’t inhale. Very slowly let smoke trickle out your nostrils.” And—voila—a hazy love rolled in with the first pecan-scented bite. Cheroot out-smoked pipe! Tobacco fumes abet and haunt many sherlocks of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud, his cancer-riddled larynx removed, insisted on smoking his cigar in the recovery room. Jung and followers puffed pipes in and out of sessions.
.
airborne still in a two-sided glass sarcophagus. Paraglider spots of orange and yellow flung from your double flutter soared over office shelves from Manhattan to Texas.
A powdery promise of resurrection for a crumbling King James Bible with eighty-six inked dates in different tones and slants. One for every year—starting in 1891—
that great-grandfather Peyton Irving read the Good Book “kiver to kiver.”
Peering into the glass bottomed boat, we watch Henry, an old bass, pole vault a fallen log at the guide’s command. So he claimed. Nearby a bottomless enigmatic eye wells up prompting my mother to say, “Ponce de Leon and his conquistadors came to Florida searching for the fountain of youth.” FSU’s divers’ longest line couldn’t hit the bottom
of Wakulla Spring. “On that white rim’s where they found my Spanish wine bottle. Carbon-dated it to 1517.” Gift of Florida’s chief supreme court justice, the sand-dulled glass became her most treasured possession. Symbol, perhaps, of her own lost quest?
retrieved from Mexico on his honeymoon by my Jewish pianist friend—just married
to a Catholic—your offbeat grace manifests life following art. Uplifted arms implore
and meld into the crucified body. Mary’s grief upthrusts feminine imploring onto
the cross. What bend of branch? What twist of knife re-storied this fruit wood?
Re-imaged the old-rugged cliche?
Cry Patmos Aegean rock! Pilfered off island by a lighthearted friend seeking revelation.
Are there ecstatic echoes in your pockmarks from St. John’s galloping visions? Persecuted,
exiled, John walked among your dark pebbled companions. Perhaps your sea-polished beauty
inspired his poetic summary of what Jesus brought to Jewish tradition—before Constantine converted and ushered in Christianity, as the favored Roman empire religion!
Now we, like you, parading various densities—can wash, roll, sand—our hardheartedness. Compassion’s saw-through of our petrified geodes can be burnished, as we perch on the edge
of inside and outside. Book ends, we squeeze together pages of possibilities.
Now that constitution, age and family won’t let me drive, stick it to me!
Not like a stiletto stab. Just ease the burl into my wobbly grip. Gnarled
beauty born out of a tree’s distress. Polished waves of pain like mine—
if going lame shines.
Walkabout on this continent of days and dreams.
Look at these objects—daemons—lining shelves and walls.
Lovely, once lively.
Found or made.
Hanging with me —inside me—wherever I landed along our butterfly migration.
Moving haven, re-shelved wherever I lived.
A surround where patients—mutual sufferers—
unmask hell and heaven.
Inner and outer.
plucked out one-by-one. White down. Drawn on black paper. Floating between right forefinger and thumb, penciled in seconds, by the left hand. All ten thousand four hundred and eighty-three feathers. A long masquerade celebrating the airy insulation
of dinosaurs evolved 100 million years before birds took flight. Before pillows encased plumes, as head nests for any who might dream of an uncomplicated world.
In this Scorsese/Michelangelo pieta— Mother Mary or Mary Magdalene—
enfolds the lolling body. The movie flickered over Harrison Burn’s studio
from a small box TV. Burns, dying slowly himself of chronic illness, stood
before his easel daubing oils over canvas and taking snapshots of the video.
Mixed-media squares quilt surfaces. Mary’s cry shatters all pretention.