The Writings of Loren Stell

Cloroxed coral

broken from Key West’s dead reef, razor-sharp. Asymmetrical proof of the watery ancestral playground of our birth. Yearly, I bleach you free of daily confusion’s smudge,
as you shift position along my tidal poetry shelf. Rawboned you filter serpentine self -fantasies presented in person or digitally. We existentialists learn early to make parallel notes: thoughts of the witness dispensed judiciously on one side, juxtaposed to postures statements, gestures, dreams on the other. We follow your model coral—transparent, porous witness to calcifying flash-backs and flash-forwards in psycho-spiritual deliberations. Whatever grows in this liminal space, we’d wish to be nutritious—clear
of pollutants— where the colorful and playful may find relief.

An Office Walkabout

Ode to a green band

Mottled cream wax candlestick—your muted LED flickers make ordinary artifact holy. Halos and hiccups of chiaroscuro weave an interactive spume over numinous mementos. Overtones and undertones of history and wish pinball off each other. Meanings rupture. Morph. Dimly lit relics mellow into wordless wisdom.

An Office Walkabout

Flying root

hollow-eyed/earthtorn/seatossed leviathan, how many ancient questions you strew
across this sacred shelf. Blue-green Caribbean chaos sculpted your stump. Elemental tides—scrubbed, smoothed and burnished your grain, sun-whitening it. In your jaw
is a ritual arrow I clenched in mine tom-toming my way into manhood. The red-ribboned eagle bone whistle I blew sundancing to a bison head pole—to summon
the Great Spirit in the Crazy Mountains of Montana. Forgive me coral-fan bareback rider, I scubaed you illegally off a reef near Cozumel.

An Office Walkabout

Mariafix II

Ten generations of Peruvian
Thumbs smoothed Christ
into a silvery woman
converting this old crucifix
into a mariafix. Hail Mary’s
of devout peasants whorled

An Office Walkabout

Altartecture I

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.

An Office Walkabout

Smokescreen

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.
.

An Office Walkabout

Mecurial Butterfly

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.”

An Office Walkabout

Ponce de Leon_s Glass

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?

An Office Walkabout

Folk Cross

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?

An Office Walkabout

Sill Stones

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.