Aerial Muse: poems Read online



  Aerial Muse

  poems

  © Copyright 2013 by Scott Truesdale Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  Aerial Muse

  Contents

  Untitled

  Aerial Muse

  Wheels Up

  What I’d Say to William Stafford About “Ask Me”

  Voice of the Whole

  Looking Down at the Sun

  Flash

  Flash (2)

  Cloud Sliding

  Prayer for a Stranger’s Child on the Flight 4471

  Facing Her Face

  Flow

  Murmuration

  Tree-Told Tale

  Streaming

  Hidden Range

  Red On Gray

  No Hands

  Something More

  Unhinged

  Trans-

  parent

  Close Quarters

  Untitled

  About the Author

  If these words stream

  and pool among

  bone-white stones,

  a new rain may

  complete this sentence.

  Then dripping nouns

  and pouring verbs

  might leave the clouds

  for a new home

  on earth.

  Aerial Muse

  She lingers in cumulus

  meadows or rides aerial

  ice floes, like a polar bear

  released from gravity’s

  insistence – a seeing, sniffing

  cloud among the clouds.

  Sometimes I fly by her

  hiding place without quite

  feeling her breath on my nape.

  But so often she floats aboard

  and whispers inside and

  teases, saying, I’ll be waiting

  ahead if you wait right here.

  Without name or visage

  she glides diaphanous

  mingles in memories

  and leaves anonymous notes

  in some deep, white

  drifts of mind.

  Wheels Up

  Now soaring

  over gray and ebony ribbons

  curling through emerald clusters

  I float aloft

  and alert to concealed images

  that hover like chattering squirrels

  in the fields and mounds of cloud.

  A gray-haired man

  wearing a black baseball cap

  leans back into my knees

  while a disembodied

  female voice reminds us

  of valuable frequent flyer

  miles we secure

  on this journey’s leg.

  I stay conscious

  of a different altitude:

  my sky inside

  insinuates vapors and

  air streams and

  open oceans of cerulean space.

  There are worlds

  of new animals up here.

  Flying mammals

  with wholly mythic ancestries.

  They would paw

  with ink-wet claws the slope

  of snow that is this page.

  A colony of Purple Messengers

  rolls over scud cliffs

  and out into vivid rivers of flight.

  Shapes in ink link

  them into our world

  of gray trays and

  clinking ice cubes

  and murmuring passengers

  who ache to reignite

  their sleeping cell phones.

  What ropes and arcs of light

  shine like a thin bridge

  over miles of nothingness

  leading shadowy lurkers

  from inside out

  and back again?

  What I’d Say to William Stafford About “Ask Me”

  I read it one time

  on a plane and felt

  salt water drizzling

  along facial contours

  and losing itself

  in thickets of beard.

  I was not sad.

  Kneeling without reaching,

  I was touching

  a sunlit cave

  under each word.

  Each sliver of light

  slipped by

  the vigilant deflectors,

  reaching some moist

  dark soulsoil.

  Ask me how

  real that felt

  and how much I ached

  to thank you.

  Voice of the Whole

  On this sunny Saturday afternoon

  at the community swimming pool

  the air is crowded with colliding voices

  with laughter, talk, shrieks, and yells.

  The cacophony says something

  in another language – something different

  from the individual words and

  emotion-impelled utterances.

  This voice of the whole

  sings the rhythm of ocean surf

  and rises to a place

  beyond the reach of the highest splash.

  Beyond the reach of the loudest shriek

  a howling elongated silence

  surges in perfect stillness.

  A flash of lightning cracks

  the egg shell quiet of the universe

  and sliding inside: bright

  orange daystar.

  Looking Down at the Sun

  From the jet window I see

  the yellow gleaming orb

  of the sun moving along

  creeks as though residing

  under earth – the inner

  brilliance glaring through cracks

  in the brown and green surface;

  a world of light under the world

  we thought we knew.

  Would that be more remarkable

  than seeing the daystar

  from outer space reflected

  on the face of streams

  while at the same time

  it sears the silver jet wing

  with a blinding white ball

  that will not bounce

  or slip as we fly along

  at 544 miles per hour?

  Flash

  We burst through a cumulus ceiling

  into a blinding flash

  of aerial brilliance.

  It fills our tubular cabin

  provoking squints and half-conscious

  gasps at the suggested influx

  of transcendent stillness

  like a fleeting dance of angels

  in the parlor of consciousness.

  No one speaks of this.

  No one says how will my soul

  accumulate such winged horsepower

  to outpace gravity

  and flow light and quick

  into the radiant whiteness

  of endless light?

  Blinded, we grope

  for flashes of news

  in our papers.

  Flash (2)

  Farm patches –

  trees, a barn,

  a green-striped field –

  pass through the gap

  in the clouds like

  a cognitive flash or

  an island of consciousness

  in a white sea of dreams.

  Cloud Sliding

  After an hour sliding, spinning, streaming

  and spilling together down

  the snow slick hill at the high school

  you say, This is like being on a cloud.

  Yes, absorbed in white magic

  we travel nearly weightless

  in sky islands from which we wing free

  dive screaming through boundless

  cushions of white, barrel through scud

 
bank alleys, cling to each other’s mittened hands

  you on orange saucer and me on

  red toboggan until our afternoon cloud

  sinks into surrounding darkness

  like the marshmallows melting

  in steaming hot chocolate

  that we now sip in the kitchen

  of what is not quite

  the same old home.

  Prayer for a Stranger’s Child on Flight 4471

  Sweet Serenity with your hot pink warmups

  white and yellow bunny

  and skin like coffee with cream stirred in

  may the doors of your days open

  wide as you go

  and may your learning be as rich

  and fertile as the dark soil

  of a prolific garden

  and may the dogged inequities

  that insist otherwise

  be squashed.

  As you sleep now

  on the generous lap of grandmother

  whose head is bowed for a nap

  may your future be serene

  and wildly prosperous

  and may this feeble prayer

  somehow miraculously widen

  to encompass a world

  of needful, deserving

  children.

  Facing Her Face

  Flying over brown wrinkled land

  feels like facing the face

  of the old woman I photographed

  in Antigua, Guatemala.

  Her copper-brown skin

  yellow-washed in slanting

  late afternoon sunlight

  was contoured from the hard

  decades of gripping to survive.

  Was there still a smile

  in her soul, somewhere underneath

  her sorrow-darkened eyes?

  The canyons beneath

  our flight path reveal hints

  of green where water

  underground trickles

  through the stones.

  1Flow

  We flow so steadily above wisps of vapor

  you could nearly mistake this cruise for stillness.

  We’re scarcely aware how the steel shell

  containing us rips the sky as casually

  and relentlessly as a child rips

  pictures from old magazines.

  In this high capsule

  thought finds a flow apart from terrestrial avenues

  and crowded thruways. Thought can ease and sail

  like the hawk’s drift through invisible streams

  spread out in the wind’s flow

  over the face of the land.

  In this moment consciousness effortlessly rises

  as Adam’s hand in the sky of the Sistine Chapel

  nearly touching the finger of God.

  Murmuration

  peppered sky and effervescent

  coalescence of aerial surf

  black whale shifting

  into expanding eel

  lateral pour

  dragon girth

  free forming murmuration

  undulating schooner slipping

  continually into the magic

  of transformation

  the flap and glide

  of a million starlings

  moving through iterations

  not one seeing

  the dazzling dance

  the splash and flow

  of the one everchanging

  whole

  Tree-Told Tale

  Thousands upon thousands of seasons ago, before the beginning of the first

  season, a perfectly round seed floated in vast darkness. A perfectly round clod

  of soil floated in vast darkness. A drop of water floated in vast darkness.

  When the seed and the soil and the water joined together, the darkness was

  overcome by light, and the seed germinated and grew into a perfectly round tree.

  This was not simply a round trunk; the tree as a whole was spherical. This primal

  tree grew over many seasons, and in certain seasons it scattered seeds, and in certain other seasons seeds that lodged in clods of soil and sprouted into new round trees. Clouds formed to water all the floating trees, and the universe was filled with light. Trees hardened into planets, and the planets wandered. Occasionally planets collided, and when they collided there was fire. The fire caused the colliding planets to melt together into a single burning sphere. The core of such spheres seethed with molten energy. These spheres became white hot suns. These suns attracted planets. Planets that gathered around suns learned to circle without colliding. By the time Planet Earth had found its sun, all of its dry land was covered with round trees. These trees were free to roll over all the land. Each tree had a root system covering a portion of its outer sphere. Every so often the trees needed to find a patch of soil, sink their roots into it, and suck up nutrients. Over time the places with richest soil became well known among the trees, and they congregated in these places. When these areas became congested, conflicts and confusion broke out among the trees. Aggressive trees would intentionally roll into other trees, trying to push their way to some desired plot of soil.

  The wisest tree in the universe was the tree who sprang from the seed that floated in vast darkness. This was the Tree of Wisdom.

  The wisest trees on earth gathered in an undisputed place to enter into dialogue

  concerning the fate of their planet. When they came together, the Tree of Wisdom visited and offered them a choice. The trees of Earth could retain their

  roundness and the freedom that comes with being round. In this way trees might form into factions and battle over choice plots of ground. The other way would be for the trees to be made vertical and forever rooted in the soil where the seed of their being had fallen. In this way, the likelihood of peace among trees of the planet would greatly increase, but it would come at the price of their roundness and their freedom to roam. One of the wise trees of Earth asked the Tree of Wisdom if peace could only come at the price of their freedom.

  The Tree of Wisdom replied:

  I never spoke of giving up freedom,

  but rather the freedom to roam across the land.

  The Earth tree protested:

  The freedom of roaming is the only freedom we know.

  The Tree of Wisdom replied:

  A standing tree might come to see how standing

  in peace for a lifetime can be freedom itself –

  the freedom to respond to each shift in breeze

  the freedom to shiver in pouring rain

  the freedom to lean, shaking in high winds

  the freedom to rise skyward from its roots

  the freedom to dream from one season into the next.

  Let me ask you this: Have any of you wise trees of Earth

  spent a full moment in contemplation of the sky

  or its rain-spilling clouds?

  For some weeks a dispute simmered among the Earth trees as to certain nuances in the Tree of Wisdom’s observations, and while a few arguments

  for retaining roundness were floated, the trees all felt the one answer in the very flow of their sap.

  Streaming

  Dive

  fly out

  of the dream

  driving into an actual

  cloud-dotted sky.

  You drop like a rock

  until the vast umbrella

  unfolds and sends you

  floating along thermals

  an empty canoe drifting

  on the surface

  of an easy creek.

  You dive into the flow

  of words and stream

  into the blur

  on your flying bicycle.

  As you power pedal

  into rivering green

  of fanning leaves

  so flow invisible crimson

  currents within.

  Arch your neck and gaze

  at a l
ong, lone white line

  jet streaming

  the azure canopy

  atmospheric umbrella

  never fold.

  Open us

  drifting under you.

  Underneath the visible

  surface the river

  keeps streaming along.

  The current pulls, flowing

  farther and farther

  from the source.

  It goes with the flow

  catches the drift

  rounds the bend

  and rivers along.

  Day in and day out

  river does its flow work

  reflecting, changing

  being a liquid body

  in motion. The flow

  of life -- the feel

  of a compelling story

  with its unspeakable

  mysteries and

  declarations of mood. 

  Light pools on the dark

  estuary surface and

  slides sideways into

  whole luminous rivers

  of lit language.

  I close my eyes

  and there is a blanket

  of light inside.

  I see it blind.

  Dive clean in the spring-clear

  surround of aqua world

  fish house, swirl of weeds

  filtered sunlight and

  green pines on the other side

  of the surface like objects

  leaning into a magnifying glass.

  Stand-up bass

  and large-mouth bass.

  They go deep and pull

  into undertow

  a pulse in the shadow

  of a great rock shelf.

  The soul itself swims

  well below the surface

  carrying a treasury that

  we keep losing hold of.

  It slips from our hands

  like an oily trout that we held

  for a moment and prized.

  Go into the quiet and wait.

  It will find you in its own

  aquatic time.

  Hidden Range

  Under this light gray

  scud soufflé

  spreads a magisterial range

  of mountains

  you cannot see.

  A white shaft of sunlight

  is like the snow

  on the high peaks

  of that hidden range.

  You remember again

  how much of yourself

  is hidden from yourself.