Fragments of Vanished Peoples

The following were written to accompany works by Joan Anderson (www.Joanandersonarts.com). To me, her work so poignantly invokes lives of vanished beings in unknown, but slightly familiar worlds.


1) DRAGON TABARD

Radiant but silver banded and aloof
He humbly received his father’s throne.
He raised up altars and made offerings to the sky.
He raised up altars and made offerings to the mountain gods.
He raised up altars and made the offerings of living beings
To the rivers and the streams.

2) PHOENIX and DRAGON

The Golden Dragon
Dwells in the hidden tree
That holds the earth and sky apart
And is the resting place of thirteen suns.

The phoenix,
Unconscious as a rainbow
Dives upward
Through the leaves and branches of the sky.

3) SMOKE AND WATER

Where is she;
Her small feet dancing,
Her small hands holding offerings
On upturned palms?

Where did she go?

4) GOLD CLASP and OJO GRID

The old slaves, sisters
Seized far off and many years ago,
They have served her.
The sisters have bathed and dressed her.
They have oiled her hair,
And they have watched,

5) WATER TRELLIS DRAGON'S ROBE

Even a mountebank has a moment
When beauty transforms him.

“This verse was etched on the grave stone of a magician, reputed to be able to enable others to see spirits. He was brought to court by the king. He gave the king give many foul tasting brews which made him ill. But, the King, rose from his fever and deliriously danced across the floor as if he were a god. When the King recovered, he remembered nothing and had the magician executed.”

7) HAWKMOTH

“The King gave the master of the hunt a robe so beautiful that all envied him. Later, during a hunt, A jealous courtier shot the master of the hunt with an arrow through the heart. He claimed that he thought he had aimed at a golden pheasant.”

8) OJO

Oh,
The new consort looks down
And shyly smiles.
Oh she blushes.
Oh how we are charmed.

9) CLOUD ROBE

The blind weaver felt the movements of the sky,
Imagining range on range of white mountain clouds,
Snow rising in the air.

Her clattering shuttle
Echoed like sure footsteps as she wove.

The king received the robe she made.
He held it silently, then had it hidden.
"No human," he said, "can wear it."

*

Bugaku, Japanese Court Dance- Tokyo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFErNl3FvM4&feature=related

PASSAGE -Addendum

Often as I sat with Nico in his final decline, I sensed that we were sitting on a bleak shore by a languid sea as bits of imagery, memories, phrases would bob in the waves.I tried to interest him in using these to write poems once again. He was uninterested, so I wrote the poems myself.


TWO POEMS FOR NICOLAS CALAS


NON-EXISTENCE

No.
No peace with that.

The habit of a thought
Arises in response
To an unmade bed;
Tea with a small amount of milk,
Husky Russian vowels amid the kitchen crockery.

The lure of tonalities rise
Like the memory of a white sky above a purple sea:

A breeze from the shore of the exile’s homeland
Where culture vanished long ago but remained
Enough to mirror, in a delicate and incisive way,
The great doings
Of brasher nations on the go.

Still a vague yearning for the atmosphere
Of a pale horizon poised on promise.

But seated in shadow on remembered subway steps
A charcoal-black man
Suggests the sultry wealth of Africa
And dark barbarian threat.

Again the familiar tickle of a riddle
Beloved
Teasing to continue –
What?

To continue
In the familiar and seductive texture
Of what can be said and still resists being known:
The tip of a tongue.
Still yours?

Desiring, at the wet tip of a tongue
To taste continuing desire,
So subtly to be loved.

In form that increasingly eludes
Form
Like the pink opalescence
Shifting in a bank of clouds above the sea.

The skin of experience adheres
To the habits of mind
Knowing and being known:
Waves thus watch waves
Dancing light in light.

The question
Questioning
Questioner
Dissolves enigmatically
As a sparkling play

In a luminous sea that never was,
That was never known by anyone,
That never began,
Nor never ceased

Resting an exhausted mind
In that.

Love to you.


***


N.C. IN TRANSIT
For Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Heroism
Or the memory of heroes
Befriends him waiting vainly to cease.

Dyed in the brittle multi-colors of this age
Not holding fast now, he swims upstream
Through the dark river of ancient ink
To the elusive instant of release
Or source
By way of remembering
As his own memories slide off
And elide with Homeric history
Or dream.

Falls then of its own luxurious waste
As off a high shelf
A bolt of night-black silk,
Rustling to the floor
In enveloping swirls.