Driving with pink angels

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Driving with pink angels

Pink of the dissolving petals, pouring out of the tree
and pink in the palms of my hands. Pink dangling
tongue over lips,
coffee spilling into my throat;
spring and pink allergic eyes
tearing in the presence of fragrance.

Sing for us, Joni,
with packed pink linens
in your traveling bag.
I do not move
here in this weighted world
but only through our music.

Your pink sunset is my sunrise
ahead of the weekday road, what lowers
my feet into slippers
morning by morning; black crow
wings and a beak tearing pink breakfast;
rise again, pull again, lift the
pink-skinned sun across the sky
into night as satin as your wings.

April in wind, April in rain.
April pansies and hyacinth;
phlox, quince, alyssum;
crystal vase on a black piano,
pink tulips opening, floating
like windblown hair, or
jet trails from California
to Michigan, traveling on
a blue string song.

My body pink under
freshwater pearls; the painted stripe
on rainbow trout in my rivers,
wiggling like ribbons;
hands spilling over ivory stones
in your memory, every song
a fish swimming into my next poem.

Mother, where have you gone,
pink woman of the keys,
white and even like your teeth?
My poisoned hands play jazz
out of your hymns
in this sobbing flesh of ours. Pink mother
with fragrant goodnight lips,
pink moon of hearts
cracked in crater-places
healing under black-winged nights
that rise with the crow
every time I pass.

An angel in pink walks up to me
in my satin wedding gown
with pink ribbon ‘round the waist,
her pearlescent high heeled shoes
bright as the diadems of her eyes,
pink lipstick and raven hair.
The rush of her wings says

Poems live.
Flesh from soul.
Sing, body.
Play the fractured song,
pour Brandywine and redbud,
maple fringe and weigela,
pink as a baby just out
of her mother’s bleeding peony.

April 2012


Poetry should be heard.

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Hejira Spring

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Hejira ~

a journey . . .

. . . the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 which marked the beginning of the Muslim era; the Muslim calendar begins in that year

. . . a cross country trip from Maine to Los Angeles by Joni Mitchell

. . . her album of that name written on that journey in 1976

. . . the title track of the album

Albert Camus wrote: "What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country... we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being... There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing... Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves."

~ Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1942

I love to travel, but I agree with Camus in this note. When visiting places away from home, it is as if I wake up with new, more expectant skin. Especially in the somewhat familiar strangeness of Paris, more than anywhere I have been, every sense is alert, intense, as if I am a china cup full and ready either to spill, or crack in the quake of each encounter.

Joni Mitchell is a traveler, always in some vehicle. She loves the wind from Africa blowing through a village on Crete under the moon, but soon gets back to missing her familiar white linens and California scenery. To, and fro, she goes. I don't know how many times I've listened to this song in the last couple of weeks on my drive to and from work on straight Meridian Road, farms opening like wings on either side. Countless times. It embodies just at this moment of the world how everything is everything, while everything is also nothing, and I think very importantly, how nothing is also everything, in the cycle of our life . . . between the forceps and the stone. Her melancholy minor melody, the dark tones, the strings touched in variance like the fragrance of parfum et fromage, her love of Paris that is always there even if unspoken, her freedom, her longing for the road — sometimes in strength and vulnerability as a hitchhiker, her concert tours where she is not always comfortable in her astonishing success, that clear voice sparked, like a car's red-eyed tail light at dusk on the Champs Élysées, or the lit end of a cigarette.

In Paris in May, the wind blows up the Seine, tearing horse chestnut blossoms from trees like snow, and our eyes fill with allergic tears, blinding every walker heading toward the setting sun. We weep in our human weakness, unable even to look upon the light, blinking, trying to wipe our eyes clean. Maybe it is necessary to filter that radiance from too much visibility. Maybe that much light would take us too early to the stone.

It's nice to listen to her sing in the YouTube below while reading her witnessing words. Or, just load it and close your eyes.

Hejira

by Joni Mitchell

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
There's comfort in melancholy
When there's no need to explain
It's just as natural as the weather
In this moody sky today
In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed
I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl

You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line
Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They're either going to thaw out or freeze
Listen
Strains of Benny Goodman
Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years
We're only particles of change I know I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
Until love sucks me back that way


© 1976; Crazy Crow Music

Rue St-Louis-en-l’île, Paris, spring 2003

 Musicians on Pont St Louis, Paris, spring 1997

Champs Élysées, Paris, spring 1997

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Meditation: Corner of a table

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Still Life: Corner of a Table, by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1873
Art Institute of Chicago

The following poem is not a judgment on this gorgeous painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, who is famous for paintings of flower arrangements. It is just a meditation prompted by the painting, that went off in a certain direction, deflected by a splinter in my head. As much as I love wabi-sabi pine, earthenware and distressed linen, I also love silver, crystal, damask and mahogany. And wine? Yes. And the yellow of lemons or pears that smiles upon us in a room when outside March rains darken the sky. I do love magnificence like this. It just becomes less savory knowing that not all can taste it. I know this is a bit heavy again. Don't worry, I don't feel morose, and I hope it doesn't make you feel that. As Shaista reminded me of Paul Simon's words in her comment in the last post, which was a reminder from my post before that, These are the days of miracle and wonder. Keep the cycle going.

Enough

A meditation on the painting "Still Life: Corner of a Table"

by Henri Fantin-Latour

Spare me the entire
table spread like a paragraph
of Henry James
unpacked from a sea-going trunk

Don't even think that presenting
just the princess sugar bowl, arms butterflied
and head dropping in shyness, will not be too much

And god no,
not the full
goblet of wine, so blood-rich it has all but disappeared
into the genealogy of the glass

Hide, please hide
the vinegar cruet
better than that
I can’t bear its amber-gold liquidity!

What do you mean
exposing the skins of those plump lemons
as if the white compote
lessened them with her modesty?

What do you think
the empty elegance of a cup and saucer
on glimmering damask

can do to transcend the lace
of rhododendrons
like foam from waves of the sea

reaching up to wash
the fruits and bones and porcelain sand
from the table

all under a furtive crescent moon
peering from her crystal pitcher of Bordeaux
I beg you

spare me all
but the empty corner of a frame
on a dirt-brown wall

We have had quite enough
magnificence for a century or two
And by "we" I mean just us here
at this corner of the table

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Listen to Joni Mitchell sing "Banquet" from her 1972 album "For the Roses" in the Grooveshark widget below the lyrics, about the imbalance of greed and need on our planet.

Banquet

by Joni Mitchell

Come to the dinner gong

The table is laden high

Fat bellies and hungry little ones

Tuck your napkins in

And take your share

Some get the gravy

And some get the gristle

Some get the marrow bone

And some get nothing

Though there's plenty to spare

I took my share down by the sea

Paper plates and Javex bottles on the tide

Seagulls come down and they squawk at me

Down where the water skiers glide

Some turn to Jesus

And some turn to heroin

Some turn to rambling round

Looking for a clean sky

And a drinking stream

Some watch the paint peel off

Some watch their kids grow up

Some watch their stocks and bonds

Waiting for that big deal American Dream

I took my dream down by the sea

Yankee yachts and lobster pots and sunshine

And logs and sails

And Shell Oil pails

Dogs and tugs and summertime

Back in the banquet line

Angry young people crying

Who let the greedy in

And who left the needy out

Who made this salty soup

Tell him we're very hungry now

For a sweeter fare

In the cookie I read

"Some get the gravy

And some get the gristle

Some get the marrow bone

And some get nothing

Though there's plenty to spare

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Not getting to Woodstock

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In August 1969, a couple days after Woodstock ended, I turned 13. I would have my first real kiss the next summer. I was a straight kid, didn't carouse in high school and only went to one drinking party in a farmer's field one hot summer night where I took a couple of nasty sips of beer from a flimsy plastic cup. My older and wilder brother had taken me to the party, but he watched over me. That Michigan meadow party was about as close as I got to Woodstock, and the girl in this photo is about as far from my experience as she can be. For years I bemoaned my protected life, being a preacher's kid. But any secret grains of recklessness never took root.

For different and very annoying reasons, Joni Mitchell never made it to Woodstock, yet she wrote the song about it, which David Crosby said captured the gathering better than anyone who had been there. She said herself that the deprivation she felt not being there, watching it on television, provided an "intense angle" for writing it.

In writing classes, my mentor Diane Wakoski always said it is hard to write a good, happy poem. It's difficult to avoid cliches. Truly, I found it easier to write poem after poem venting angst about growing up in a churchy life. She also said the best art and writing comes from those who have had to overcome obstacles. Think of your favorite artists and writers and see if that isn't true.

One month after Woodstock, at the Big Sur Celebration, Joni sang her new song for the first time publicly. I wonder if she isn't partly glad now that she didn't get to Woodstock, so she could write such a song as this. Below is that Big Sur performance.

And no, I'm not sorry I was protected. I've gotten over the regret of being a goody two shoes. I also recognize the oddity of seeing the thoroughly good life of a pastor's family as an "obstacle." Another funny thing is that I looked the part of a hippie in my tattered blue jeans and long wavy, wildish hair, and many people - including the staff at the church camp where I worked one summer - were convinced I smoked pot with the best of 'em.

By the way, did you know that Joni Mitchell considers herself "a painter first, and a musician second"? See her paintings.

Happy Birthday, Amadeus

A celebration of the wonders of musical genius, the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a good day to contemplate my muse, Joni Mitchell (herself inspired by Mozart to begin piano at age 7).

If I'm trying to start writing a poem, and creativity lags, I can put Joni on the Bose, and words will come. They can't help themselves.

The 1971 “Blue” album has been a favorite of mine for 3 decades. My favorite song, “Carey” is on this album. "The wind is in from Africa . . ." -- oh melt me.

Another sweet song on “Blue” is “Green,” and who knew, besides Joni, who or what it was about?

Back in 1996, shocking the world and her family, Joni Mitchell announced that she wanted to find the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was in college, unbeknownst to almost everyone. Turns out that the song “Green” was about giving up this baby.

". . . Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed
Little Green, have a happy ending.
. . ."


Joni and her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, found each other in March of 1997 through the internet. Their relationship is complicated. (What mother-daughter relationship isn’t?)

Joni Mitchell calls herself a painter first and musician second. Many of her paintings can be found in her CD cases.



Joni’s voice has grown deep and dark with decades of cigarettes. The range is gone, the clarity suffers, but her soul is still evident in the lyrics of her recent CDs.

Joni Mitchell inspires me through creative expressions of who she truly is. She keeps digging. She’s fought it out in relationships over the years, she’s made mistakes. But she keeps digging down to her Self.


How do you bring that truth to the world?

Every day is new.