2nd Site

Alaed, only just opened,
unfolding deoxyribocean blueprint,
life flight encode— Explode!
Dry air alarm
These fractured fissures,
pupal sarcophagus broken,
air and light rending—
cosmic cracking—
seismic shell quaking through fault lines breaking where weakest—
waking lepidopteron, moist,
recollection tightly coiled—
unsprung forelimb waving, its twin pries, ragged-edged, the rivening cell—

Polyhedral dazzle—
sensory shower—
sparkling atomic antennae taste breeze,
ancient agonies echo, crawl forth—

Late returns.
wavering, thick, wet-limbed,
numb for newly washed eyes.

Unfolding slowly,
Dorsal chakra flexing— Wings?!!?

Rare, rain forest flight into the face of an Age endangered— Is it too late to return?

Just read nursefusion’s June 30th 100words.
Put me in mind of the good doctor’s red wheel barrow glazed with rain, no ideas but in things, concrete context, or gravel, actually, the white chickens scratching the moist barn yard. The old G.P. called for home delivery, arriving with the thunder and lightning of labor, a midnight crowning and the storm breaking. Like Eliot’s “Objective Correlative”, all of this tacit to a weary William Carlos Williams standing on the stoop early after sunrise the next morning, pleased. Always relieved and grateful for another new and safe arrival, another day to breath in.

Second Sight

The room of rooms, second sight,
innermost holy of holies. Animate thought.
Will-o-wisp wafting, owl-winged through dreamtime hollow.
Thalamic mole in Beelzebub’s brain,
undercover commuter crossing corporate corpus callosum. Behind the eyes of Mammon, bird tribe plant in pineal colony
shake a silver branch, stem tide: Avarice.
Hippocampal witness when the DNA code broke down the formula for the masses, beyond the heart of the monster, riding a lunatic light beam, St. Valentine animate, will-o-wisp dream dance, the mistress to magicians in robber baron gardens, strategic, minimal beyond ken,
cultural intervention,catalytic lever, the agent change, harbinger come!

Second Sight

Gabriel, on no more than wings of thought, incites with the least pituitary whisper,
an endocrine wash,
And all in a moment the chrysalis planet is borne awing.
The curtain of such fullness that polestars pirouette the zenith,
while the Aurora Borealis rends midnight's ghost dance pupa asunder.

Stunned,
we are yet emerging in a series of double take late returns, diving in the double helix deep end, hoe down rodeo second sight jamboree gene pool drift net work whirl pole stars spiral in a trumpeting conch’s galaxy reel; there-not-there, do-si-do, golden gate chromosome barn storm call: Promenade!

Second Sight

In the Mojave, Joshua bloom.
Iron walls come tumble in Europe.
Blood stains remain in Tiananmen Square.
The City of Angels’ thousand points of light,
once blazing,
smolder,
waiting for the world:
To see through geo politico nightmare, the hostile fear net Babylon fabricates: DRUGS, AIDS, RIOTS, RAPES, GUNS’N’GANGS, VIOLENCE, RACE, S&L, WETBACK, NAME YOUR GATE SCAM—
HATRED is no more
than this deeply seeded fear of one another.

All peoples and creatures,
all minerals of Earth, as one,
We move and live—and die—one body animate, one thought dream Will-o-wisp wafting eternal in a dreamtime hollow.

Funny work, the iterations of July’s 100words:

First, Max Blake tried to catch the WAVE.
Max is anchored in sensory specifics and concrete details of history, that “real” world everyone seems so stuck on. Then I crafted thanks to Michael Cheeseman and our 100word hosts for helping me focus, but the muse intervened.

Diana, hunting the Dragon…, took aim through a 2nd Site shutter, the aperture of hope: Delicate, a butterfly tongue uncurling slaked in morning dew, condensed moon rays snared in a grandchild’s dream catcher. Waging the struggle to make it real, I ask,
“Compared to What?”
“Eddie who?”

Context.
Compared to What?
Eddie Harris climbs down the ladder of abstraction. Trying to make it real and concrete requires clarity, self-assurance like Hemingway writing one true sentence after another; simple, straight forward— unquestioning?

These submissions comprise a self-conscious quest. I test a humble postulate: The human context includes and transcends the water from the tap, my Oral B and a refreshing Colgate cinnamon rush. Product placement is concrete. What of dreams? Their contexts can defy logic; the laws of space and time unravel in vivid terms: falling or flying. Can they be captured with one true sentence after another?

Dragon Baby Dream

1992, the conundrum of dream held a baby and a Komodo dragon together. Shaken, my sleeping witness compelled transcription. I made the dream a performance piece, first with GAIT, later with RATIONAL MAN or solo, but HEALERx put a spin on the “Dragon Baby Dream” twelve years later, and the riddle I had read countless times, the familiar enigma chiseled on my cranium wall, the indecipherable parable of consciousness, Jungian and impossible, became true.

“Enter the dragon, baby. Dream:

Height of morning, brilliant, eastern sunlit, blinding white, cloudless sky receding, endless blue, our globe serene. Telepathic coastline…

Cooling shade,
the air through beach house screens,
polarized light reflecting sand below;
the sheer rock ribbons,
a stark wall raveling some fifty feet above the sea shore.
Calm.
Switch-backed stairs climb the cliff face.
Three or four enter, parting shadows
in aerie retreat.

[A spinal chord quivers, tribal,
cresting the medulla oblongata.
Depart material plane, enter Dreamtime.]

Suffuse gray light runs a length of table underneath the screening. The old one translates runes. Oversized, antique leaves present characters in a cone of light.
The ancient comes round slowly, comes round easily, “These runes sign portals, gateways to unseen realms.”

Outside, down below, relatives and friends share the beach, playing or resting, pursuing separate pleasures, volley ball or solitaire, reading or simply sunning.

Across the ancient’s table,
up the crescent shoreline where the corrugated bluff runs near the sea, a small party walks into view, four or five in consort, strolling a giant lizard. They’re natural. They’re normal.
Moving loosely. Slowly. They come round easily. No leash tethers their Komodo dragon. Shortly, they pause. On the cliff, a legend of runes.

Unnoticed,
the dragon is advancing along the lip of surf.
The lizard comes round slowly,
comes round so easily.

100words nips the heel of my “batch in progress.” It’s Thursday, July 12, 2007.
I double checked my morning submission.
Doh!
I forgot to exit italics when the Dragon Baby Dream ended. Rats. My mistake makes a difference.

Formatting 100words is fun but I blew it.
I meant to return to normal type face after “Awake !!!” when the …Dream ends
but didn’t.
I made the same mistake on May 11th in my first batch and the rest of the month was in italics.

Can July dodge a similar fate? I’ll learn tomorrow when I enter Friday the 13th’s 100words.

I think I have derailed the italics
and regained layout control. SO,

What’s next:
ShaMen Street? Mansa Musa’s Hajj?
Max Blake‘s childhood?
Study Dragon Baby... archetypes?

More travel looms.

Sustaining 100words‘
continuity entails stretching.

Three days just passed.
(See what I mean?)
I broke momentum and lost my place.

Perhaps I should focus on the end of the month. The Michigan Hemingway Society conference in Petosky, Buddha & I plan to attend. MHS has called for “vignettes” styled after Papa’s powerful little “CHAPTERs” that precede some fifteen or sixteen of his short stories. Very much in the spirit of 100words.

CHAPTER II

Wong and his pals adopted us. They helped us find our apartment on Hsia Men Jie, “Sha Men Street,” right in the barrio, not another Westerner in sight. An unfurnished fourth floor walk up but we were paying local rates. Straw tatamis made our bedroom and a hot plate made our kitchen. For breakfast, we’d often descend to fetch a small pail of hot, sweet soy milk and “yo tiao,” light, deep fried dough strips from heaven.

Buddha could walk to the Chinese-English newspaper where they taught Mandarin using patriotic grade school textbooks. My Olivetti kept me happy.

CHAPTER IV

Strange, to remember hammering away on my slim green Olivetti. Weighed the same as a laptop, little more, tad bulkier, but it could handle carbons and made my office anywhere. The keys, light and quick, weather sturdy beneath my heavy touch. Easily read Courier. Sweet carriage return bell, too.

The Olivetti and I burned in QWERTY, writing pages every day, correspondence with Dean and Mick and Cheeseman. Taiwanese News was a KMT propaganda exercise and Newsweek’s updates paled beside Dean’s apocalyptic audiocassettes: Spiro speeches, his resignation, OPEC gas lines, Watergate, the Milhouse arcade, “I am not a crook!”

CHAPTER V

Strange, indeed, to be abroad, Armageddon ramping up, the Vietnam domino about to tumble, turn the world to ruin. We had hoped to travel through Southeast Asia to Borobudur and Bali but near the end we wondered if we could afford the ticket home. Would there even be gas?

Those worries aside, our sojourn in Taiwan held no end of discovery: The Palace Museum; the USIA Library; Mongolian Barbecue; The Temple of One Thousand Steps; Yang Ming Shan; Lions Head Nunnery; Taroko Gorge; Ooluan Bi (Goose Quill Peninsula); pan-seared guotie (pot stickers) at the train station market downtown.

CHAPTER VI

Brightly lit, the circular market’s white tile framed the eel vats and great tanks of living fish and turtles for the day’s hungry customers jamming the restaurants. We usually stopped with pot stickers.

From that central station, we could bus to the Palace Museum nestled at the foot of Kuan Yin’s eastern slope. Chiang Kai Shek built the museum to showcase antiquities the Nationalists rescued from Mao Tse Tung’s advancing hoards in 1949. A million Kuo Ming Tang supporters fled the mainland bringing the Republic of China’s democracy to Taiwan province, until such time as they could return.

Twenty-five years later, the KMT fiction of imminent return to power on the mainland was wearing thin, but the threat of a communist invasion served to justify the government’s grip, and the nineteen million Taiwanese who gave safe haven to the KMT hoard of ‘49, saw their island lurch into the first world of global trade.

Life was good, and the folks we met knew how to give thanks. The whole island was fit that way. There were exceptions. Eerie leaps from high rise towers, but on balance people were grateful and found any number of ways to show it.

CHAPTER VII

One day we negotiated a series of bus transfers out to The Temple of One Thousand Steps on the northeast rim of Tai Pei. At the fringe of the city, our last stop was mercifully shaded and green. We left the bus and walked through a quiet workday in the urban outskirts. A cooling breeze moved in the trees over the lane approaching the first flight of steps. These were well-worn and occasioned with vendors, but few other pilgrims were with us that day climbing the foothill under the dappled old growth canopy up from the bus stop.

The second flight was a little steeper and longer. The vendors were gone. Gradually, the flight of steps was pulling even with the tops of the trees, the slope falling away on either side of the broad, parallel ranks of the way, long sighted, running straight up a ridgeline’s shoulder to this modest mountain’s temple. We paused in the last of the shade on a landing, wondering at the architecture’s implications, certainly the engineering, but the labor! And to what purpose?

We felt, then heard, a low, slow movement coming from a gong’s well-tempered wave length rolling from the summit.

The tone of the gong stirred us and we resumed our climb, now into sunlight.

We passed an old woman kneeling, eyes closed, palms aquiver, pressed together fingers pointing upward to her wizened lips ablaze in all but soundless banter, unknown supplications, thanks for mercies tendered, offerings, devotions, “Bai-Bai,” grace, connection, surrender in some other, calm within a greater peace. All beyond understanding.

Softly walking round her ring of prayer, we heard a second resonance, the gong once more, woven in and out of wind, modulating space, we inside its pull, Western travelers out beyond the sorrows of our homeland.

We could see the massive tops of bold red, round columns holding the temple’s tiled roof down as if it were otherwise going to sail off into the clouds. A lift of totemic animals lined the graceful, winged curve of corner seam lines running to the ceiling beam above the sanctuary. Brightly defined geometries of turquoise, white and cobalt with gold trim traced these features above and below the ocher echoes of tile ribboning in calculus sway.

Growing slowly down from this sheltering permanence, a deep, receptive shadow drew us. The gong again, our diaphragms massaged; incense quickening our nostrils.

At last, the final steps opened onto a broad, stone slab patio. Two great cauldrons filled with ashes framed the scene, prayer money burning in the late morning sun. Recessed into the cool shadows, a more massive cauldron held scores of incense offerings, smoky rivers curling, desire and regret, penitents and pleaders, sinners and saints from any culture drawn to hope and dream, driven through guilt and nightmare, all of us, wherever we are lost or found.

We knelt before a shrine to legendary scholars and monks, to animistic spirits, a nearby spring, the mountain itself, a confusion of deities.

An amalgamation of faith, an acceptance: Secure. This Asian aerie reserve, a gentle hollow apart from the hustle and thrall below and behind us, Buddh’ and I paused. A mystery guest was now traveling with us, unseen.

The gong, one final resonance, its monk, nameless, turned, hung the mallet, and wisped away, invisible.

The Palace Museum had offered Buddha a modest yet promising position. Since March, we’d shared rent (with Kate Beelii and Miguel Chen) on an idle estate well up the sunset slope of Yang Ming Shan, “Bright Sun Mountain,” “Green Mountain” in the Yankee lingo of many residents.

With the intrigues of expatriate life, our stay in Taiwan could have been longer. Kate was a Newsweek stringer; Miguel, a reformed street radical and outstanding artist. A host of possibilities loomed, but with Buddha now expecting, our hand was tipping toward home.

We turned and looked out at the sky as if from a cave; at its mouth, at the lip of the Temple’s shadow by the patio, all of Tai Pei fanned out south and west beneath a low and jaundiced ceiling, a mustard blanket hanging just below eye level, smog sealing the city from a lapis sky.

CHAPTER VIII

In Taiwan, English was sine qua non of business, education and visas. Teaching English, we could earn a living anywhere and before we met Wong and settled on ShaMen Street, we traveled south to scout Tai Chung. For hours, the bus ran an unzoned checkerboard of brick factories and rice paddies. The rush of careless progress amazed us. Dumbfounded, we eyed clusters of power lines, knotted Gordian bundles merging overhead at intersections like snakes in the nest of a phoenix. I kept hearing Joyce,

“The West shall shake the East awake,
while ye have the Night for Morn.”

CHAPTER IX

Hsia Men Street was a gaping excavation. Steel rod cage walls framed a furious crew laying cement, spreading the mix with shovels and boots, wading up to their knees, women and men, filling the frame cage. At street level an endless wheelbarrow train delivered the mix, pulverized rock, gravel, water and stone, hand-blended on a tin sheet, shovels turning it, tireless, over and over to satisfy the infinite loop of workers running barrow loads to the shoot slanting down into the cage. The ancient fragrance of open sewage would soon run underground.

A bean curd vendor called, “Cho-Doe!”

“Cho-Doe,” garlic, hot pepper paste, soy sauce and chewy deep-fried rotten bean curd, made an impossibly delicious stink. The sweet potato man twirled his ratchet like New Years. “Y Ping Pi-Gio,” cold government monopoly beer to complement.

The tinsmith hammered, molding stove pipe; tonight his welder would flash shadows on windowless buildings.

Hsia Men Street used to empty into a street market ghetto. Now, Ho Ping Shih Lu, “Western Peace Street,” was alive there. Flower bright funeral wagons carried banging, blaring bands scaring off demons, a dizzying Doppler dirge, racing the curve of the broad new boulevard lined with palms.