Night Journey

I make a journey

through deep dreams….

Collecting the strands of many past lives
To build a map, a path, a way through
The jungle of memory…

spanning lives, centuries
Millennia….

to come to this place of golden leaves,
Pure bliss, each second a cosmos of ecstasy….

Riding Arjuna’s desire to see the world with Krishna’s eyes….

the unfolding of eternity
In each moment….

To be ever exhausts the need

for any reason.
Motives evaporate in
The infinite flower
Of what is.

A.T. Wood 9/18/2015

Psychogogue

something I wrote for Percy in 1983 on the inside flyleaf of a copy of the "Magus"

Psychogogue

You, old necromancer...
Your passage beggars description.
Plant priest, psychogogue
Obsessed engineer of fear and beauty…
You will never escape....
I shall chase you from galaxy to galaxy.
And in each one I shall be born
As your son.

Breakfast with Dennis

I scorch my hands on the steering wheel,

Burn my bum on the worn out green vinyl of the front seat

of my 1969 half-ton Chevy pick-up….affectionately dubbed

Tom Joad… I Cruise through the morning miasma of suburban

Dallas on a sweltering Sunday in early August of

1979….on my way to breakfast with Dennis…

Any meeting with Dennis reminds me that I have been fasting…There he sits, a benign Celtic panther, in a booth next to the window giving us both a magnificent view of the parking lot…his ruddy complexion, sandy hair, penetrating blue eyes all contribute to his lively and engaging demeanor.  “Hey Al, I already ordered.  Hope you don’t mind.”  “ No problem. I am tracking on sausages, scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes and some coffee.”

As our buxom waitress approaches, Dennis twinkles.

She says, “More coffee, Hon?” Dennis replies, “Fill er up please!”

As she heads back to the kitchen and through the swinging doors we follow her with our playful eyes.

With the menu established we launch into the trade winds and maelstroms of western civilization: politics, religion, philosophy, metaphysics and poetry all punctuated by our particular stories…

Like a master juggler or superb acrobat…. a virtuoso conductor:

Dennis wields his encyclopedic knowledge of the West.

At our Table at Denny’s Restaurant we hold court to Homer and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dante.  We join in the wrath of Achilles before the walls of Troy. We are lashed to the mast with Odysseus as he listens to the Sirens implacable song.

We look over Jung’s shoulder as he swallows Freud’s doctrine.

We stop with Dante in the middle wood….long enough to catch a glimpse of Beatrice calling him and us on….

Dennis sings and hums…vibrates with “I and thou….”

When he slows down…. we both take a breath in the caesura of the moment ….I find Thomas Merton erupting ecstatically into our midst.  Now with us, 11 years after his passing, he continues to encourage us in our raids on the unspeakable…

Blueberry pancakes notwithstanding we turn our gazes toward Titanism  …Moby Dick and Ahab… Vengeance posing as the servant of justice …the age old nightmare of military power and Empire….The phantasy of perfection and purity forever luring the innocent into the armies of the night…

At the end of our breakfast we come down from the mountain tops….down from the high heavens…..back here into the three dimensional world of space –time….back into the present…

Where all of these ancestors mythical and real, call out to us….

“Remember, Rise up, Take heart….it is you!

You are the one.”



I am Bound to the Center

I am Bound to the Center

I am the many who have become one.

I am you, I am me, I am he, I am three.

I am the mirror, the face in the mirror,

The thought of the mind, thinking of the mirror

And it’s face…

I am what was, what is and what will be.

I am here, I am there, I am everywhere
…
Catch me if you can, Catch me if you dare

Or set me free

….
I am bound to the center by an oath which forces me to explore the periphery…..

I am the infinite regress which begins and ends here.

I am the witness and the cause of all thought and all action
.
I am the memory of all that has been forgotten
.
I am what is going in and What is coming out……

I am the top of the bottom  And the bottom of the top…
.
I am a little boy standing in the rain under the awning of Skirm’s Smoke Shop

on the corner of Palmer Square and Nassau St in Princeton

on a late afternoon in April of 1952.



A.T. Wood    June 2012

FOR LAVA WOMAN

On a rooftop in the Mission District
Framed in succulents and red wood
Her laughter and frankness and three burritos
Easily outdistance
The misfortunes of her wayfaring guests.

Recast, their plight becomes art.
And pain that threatened
To close in, opens out into a kaleidoscope
Of iridescent possibilities.

Late she came into the world,
Not quite fitting
Into anyone else's plans.

Mothers, sisters and lovers
All argued their cases.
Each buying time for her/his dreams
With her heroic compliance.

Finally stretched, rubbed, torn
And pulled over the stones
In other people's lives,
She forged weapons
Out of scabs and fragments of light
Salvaged from journeys deep in the night.

Now from the center of her own Realm
She touches and crosses many borders at will.
.
In sum it seems fair to say at Nina's house
The canvass is off the wall.
And even dim souls like old Al-Dog
Get the sense that in her presence
Light becomes the servant of its source.
December 1987

The Druid Prince

My father lies dying
High in the green mountains.
He, mute, eloquent, irresistible,
Calls to us.

We approach the aleph of his exit
empty handed.

He, the spider friend, brings hemlock boughs
To burn at the temple of his beloved.

His spent form ignites a fire storm
In memory. We may bury or cremate his body…
But he shall never rest…

A druid prince dancing at midnight on the forest floor…
He stamps his feet and claps his hands…
He sings the meaning of the ocean’s roar….

Yes! Yes! We shall let him go…
But in truth, Can we ever let him rest?

Eliza Rising

She dances past Cerberus

She out distances her ancient prototypes Persephone and Demeter

She woos the Lord of the Underworld putting him, the King of Death, to sleep...

She wanders through the high grass of Middle Earth

and comes into the Definite and specific Loka of Wounded Memory

She turns her eyes away from the Screen of the Mind...it's just another horror film...

And Boom like that !!! she soars again

Gina

Forty times you have run with Gaia
In her mad dash around our Solar Disc.
Your dark hair waving in the wind
Has electrified the night with
The possibility of Desire.


With cards and stones and incantations
And a loving heart
You pull the mysterious future
Into the present…. for a moment.


Laying aside the tools of your prescience,
Placing your hands on the task before you
Your gaze pierces the four points of the compass
And sees in the world
The treasure you hold in your heart.

THE ARMS OF BESTIAL NIGHT

I Pierce the heart of remembered rage
I find myself …him… her…. It…: a playful child.
I Chart the days in dance of thought,
I Run pell mell
Through fields of mind,
I wing my way through streams of light.
Oh! The Glory!
Hidden in the arms of bestial night.

Dear Mom and Pop,

thanks yet again for letting me take shelter with you under the writhing and erotic beams of Los Colanchos. I don't think I have the name of this most recent castle quite down yet. I think you two must be related to Kubla Khan.
Wherever you are, I find you living in a "Sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice" each house a temple, each room a shrine, each object a sacramental vessel.

Did I ever have a choice about becoming an ecstatic??? I think not. Immersed
from the day of my birth in your joyous celebration of beauty and courage, I
began my fitful dance....skipping and running....a lifelong battle with enchantment...dreaming dreams of the awakened one...

Here now in this present moment I find myself incarnate at the heart of the abyss offering lotus blossoms to those who dream of fire and smoke. In this dragon fight I am clothed in beauty like the night.

Love Aldog

The Glory of The Wounded Body

My friend, your wounded body has become for me an ark a vessel
To cross the imaginal seas of this phenomenal and fantastic world.

As Shankara said in his prayer to Lord Shiva 1500 years ago
“ how shall I cross the ocean of the world?

Here late at night now I know...now I know!
I shall cross the ocean of the world in the bark, the vessel of my friend’s wounded body.
His body, cut and open, bleeding, torn, returned to and remembered
Sings the great song of the soul’s dance...the soul’s feast here on the surface of the earth,
Here in the great forest of forms which we call the world.

I have found my friend singing of his wounded body
Like a pagan priest chanting in the night before a great fire.
Chanting the names and the deeds...the beauty and speed of the animal
Which in the light of day the hunters will catch and cut, wound and kill.

Your limping and your lost hip have carried me back to Oedipus
And further still to Osiris, mangled , lost , mutilated and finally remembered by Isis who would
not give him up....though he was invisible and dead.
She remembered him so well that he became a
Bridge between the worlds.

Your cut flesh, your body’s insistent song , the lost bones of your left hip
Drag me, summon me to the sacramental table, to the inescapable presence of the soul’s food
to remind me that I have been invited to a feast.

There is only one way to leave this table hungry.
And that is simply not to eat.



A.T. Wood April 17th, 2000

The Eater of Hearts

I know the King of hearts.
He has silver hair
He's a Czech from out West
He lives down stairs.

He loves Aphrodite on the run and all her daughters.
Sprung from her loins
They have become prodigal,
Like the galaxies Quickly moving away
From the moment of conception.

The Eater of hearts gathers them up.
He finds them on the street,
Just around the corner, behind the counter,
On the bus.

His devotion is not diluted by plans.
Bathing in beauty, Courageous and merciful
He delivers each one back to her Self.
He takes great risks. He heaves convention out of the boat.
He leaps dolphin -like into the tide.

With one hand he has subdued the muse
With the other he commands the wind.
From these two he fashions a mirror.
Then through Her grace
He illuminates and heats the vast caverns
Of a beating heart.

January 1998

TO SING YOUR NAME TO THE MOMENTS

This mind I point toward the Divine Mother
Oh Mother! Now that the mind's eye sees nothing but you,
Carry me across the ocean of this world
Or drown me in it's fierce waves.

The water that kills this body I will taste as milk from your breast.
The breezes blowing on the other shore are your breath.
Mother let me hold you and you alone
In thought word and deed.
Send me into battle or use me to feed the sparrows.
Crown me or send me to wash dishes in a flop house.

I am here only as an occasion for you to sing your name to the moments.
" I come to dance on the surface of your prayers,
A little girl playing hopscotch on warm flagstones
In a sea of grass in a back yard hemmed in by white birches."

Oh Mother! I will pave over the entire yard.
Dance! Dance!
As your bare feet polish the stones,
My prayers grow personal and conspiratorial.
Now you are the little sister who knows what she does not know.

"When you forget to pray, I can not dance.
I grow fickle and hide in the grass
Or behind the birches. And then I make you think that,
'Perhaps I only dreamed her'.

When you forget to pray
You leave me without warm stones upon which to dance.
When you forget to pray your mind goes blind
And your eyes see nothing but the world.
Open the lids of your mind's eye!
Pray!that I may dance."

LITTLE GIRL AMY

Little girl Amy
I will wander you out of my mind
And leave you framed in a doorway in Calcutta.
In your rags you'll crawl the streets
And bind the feet of Brahmin rats
With tales of little dead dogs.
You'll hold your father's last cigarette
To their rodent mouths
And choke them with his dying smoke.

Fluttering enthusiasm's memory wings
You use your mind to spring a trap,
Extorting vision from living maps.
Tinkering among the folds of brother Al's malodorous mind,
You seize the hem of Shankara's cloak.

He tortures your mirror with infinite time.
He fills your eyes with equal grace.
He leaves Ishwara in his place.

Little girl Amy, I will wander you out of my mind
And leave you framed in a doorway in Calcutta.
There, in the Indies, hunger's gnawing teeth
Will eat your glossy wounds,
And words, your drowning swimmers, will be still.

And you twice born teeming with stars
Will step down from the mind's high promontory
To forge the weapons that your daughters will carry
Into distant battle.


OCTOBER 1980 & 1992

Attempts At Immortality

While I in darkness slept
Playing host to death's brother,
My soul with joy leapt
Free from body, no longer a prisoner.

Many were my visions of life,
Though never one could I recall.
Endless meanders through molten streams of strife
Only add to my sensuous delight

FEBRUARY 1963

REALITY

Underneath an autumnal sky
A young warrior stood
Still as the naked birches and hemlocks
Which framed his form.

His effortless poise
And godlike grace
Betrayed no sign of the furious battle
Raging behind those Adamic eyes.

There in that Innerland
The Archangel hurled shafts of Light
To tempt, to blind,
But I, I tricked them both,
Kissed his sight with my leprous smile,
Claimed his heart
And sent him on to fight for me.



ALLEN WOOD , 1991

AMY'S 42

Ame,
the chorus, worn out, have bowed their heads. Among their still
voices ....
The one clear note rising is your choice of love
Right here..... in the heart of the battle....
Right in the belly of the beast.....
Against all odds and the meally mouthed
mantras of the dedges in the closet........

The tight forbiding pattern of black and white between your bed
and the bathroom door,
you awaken to find that......
you are the one....
you are the one to pull the sword
from the stone....
you are the one to pull your children from your swollen womb
and give them to the hungry world.
You are the one who utters the syllables of love with holy dread
and wild abandon.

You are the one rolling in the caracol
of a great wave
As it breaks relentlesly
on these conscious shores...
You are the one who digests memory on the tongue(like a
translucent host),
Before it ever reaches the belly.

You are the one
I call Duga...Peluka..... Amedog
You who bestow peace and grant boons on all sides
Have come into our world riding a dragon, blowing your conch shell
And wielding weapons and missiles
in your hundred arms....
You are the one who makes a place for us...

You prepare soup....
I drink your labors and sing
as I go into battle...
"The goddess seated on the tiger,
The Lady of the Crescent Moon....
She is my sister...Beware!

My Sister, Caroline
Lady of the Beasts


Only the gulls know the fury
Of the seas she has sailed.
A dark Celt, she cast her lot
With a fair-haired Irishman, another far flung Celt.


Together they opened the gates for a saint and a prince.
She crosses borders at night.
She hallows the days with her devotions.
She has stood still, poised
As the typhoon of human frailties
Assaulted her eyes and heart.

She loves stories and the people
Who inhabit them.
At the hint of her approach
The monsters give up their groanings.

What we at first thought in her to be
A kind of disciplined civility
Now unmasks itself as an ocean of mercy.

Here, now, she comes to us again
a warm star filled night
Reflected in a hundred pairs
Of deep luminous jurassic eyes.

DECEMBER 1998

Percy Transcendant


Young Knight, can I number the battles you have fought?

Can I count the risks you have taken to see us through.

The dark days that all of us have known…….were made bright by your indefatigable energy and élan.

Your war cry at fifty years distance quickens my blood still.

Your laughter, dark humor and wounded compassion
Mix with the breeze on warm July nights.

The rustling hemlock boughs and waving wild magnolia leaves…the barest hint of gardenia

Call me back to the city on the great river. There in Memphis thirty feet above the ground from the doorway of a treehouse you built

I shall launch myself into the stream of time and
Fate…As I go into battle, I look into my heart.
There I see my father shining, warrior,
knight, King and friend…

SHADOW BOXING

"Tell me Oh great King
What I have suffered."

"Whether shadow boxing in 'Lord Weary's castle',
Or off on some expedition into the hinterlands,
You bore the mark of Cain on your forhead.
You carried his fear of love
To the heart of innocent worlds.

As minister plenipotentiary of a dread Lord
You moved into the future
Guarding the sacred knowledge
That it was already doomed.
Your life and body became a cenotaph,
A shrine, a temple to the perfection
Of your father's despair.

And now as you come up out of Gomorrah,
(my daughter) you are tempted to believe
That the only thing you ever loved
Was the night mare that ruled
The black hole of my faithless heart.

As you leave Gomorrah, don't look back,
But carry and keep the silverware and plates
Else how will you cut
And eat your father's heart?"
January 1998

Dear Pop, Here I go

Riding the giant Sand Worm of the past

Hurling myself willy- nilly into the next wind mill on the horizon...
This hell is the only heaven I know...
Here I'll worship the chains,
Thank the kind gods for my cell....scarf up with gusto the gruel slid under my door...
Look at this prison, this body, this mind,
these feelings, this cascade of rainbow memories...
How did I become this butterfly
hovering over a garden filled with flowers?


Love Allen

LAST DAYS AT LINDENWOOD

Not many are the days
That we can call the last at LindenWood.
We count these burning days of July among their number.
Days whose heat shrinks the mind
And expands the body 'til
We seem ready to break forth into a new dimension:
No thought, Sensation rampant.

The generations commingle
And rehearse the Blood's passage through time:
Flight,battle,passion,sacrifice.

Our bodies prepare themselves
For this latest disintegration.
Imagination begins to sharpen
Memory's haphazard freight.

We shall build temples at every turn in the road,
To mark our passage,
Never guessing that
We, ourselves, are the gates of Heaven.


July 1986

FOR BARBARA UNDERWOOD

Dear Barbara:
You tear from heart a cry of love...
The strange joy of your fearful journey
Bends the knee of the beast in me.

I bow my head and burn my hands on the thought of love left undone
I shrink in horror from the fear of life
That in the past I called prudence.
Now I race heedless toward the battlefield
Freed from thoughts of victory or defeat.
"Lo, I am become death the destroyer of worlds..."

Our father who art my God bend your glory down
To touch my pitiful and aberrant imagination...
Now I lay me down to the triple world of densely populated sleep.
Oh hallowed Name brush your bright wings
Against the eyelids of the deep.
Send a tremor through idiot grammar.
Save the words that we murder for the sake of community.
Save the souls crucified on the dead words.

Ah! Eurydice, at last you sport with Orpheus
Here in the Upper World.
I rejoice in your dark passage
And see in it the only light I know.

JUNE 1980

HEY MOM, HERE IS A FOOT NOTE TO THOSE NIGHTMARES

The outer world is a dream cocoon, a feather bubble, a translucent shell, a
compendium of glass beads and bits of string, a series of endless mirrors in
which to catch the gleam of that most ancient one: the self-luminous,
self-effulgent, birthless, deathless occasion within which Allen or Alice or
anyone can take a peek into the looking glass and behold! What?The infinite
peregrinations of one's own mind. There's the field, the fight and the foe all
tightly wrapped in one. Imagine looking anywhere else, when all the while this
human form is home to endless dragons and is temple to Gods untold. Here I'll
make my stand and fight and worship each day. At night I'll wade into the
arms of sleep singing battle hymns and chanting psalms of praise.

And when little Ali-Bugs raises his sleepy head and says " Who are you Oh God
and what about the nameless deep? Something will murmur from within,

"It's not who I am but where I live and as for the nameless deep,

you remember it as the sheep dip, Foster Falls, Fiery Gizzard,
the ocean at Squirrel Island, Quogg, Tibie Island, the Lagoon of Yalku,

the pool at Hodge Road: these are all but the shadows of that deep

whose real name is MOM.


SEPTEMBER ,1991

Verna’s Passing

Ame called and told me about Verna. I am sorry she is going….and also a
little bit annoyed. It seems to me that with the passing of all these great souls: our parents and their peers, Olympos will be empty. Or do I have that backwards?
Maybe it is just filling itself up again…..Any way, as you can see, what ever
happens seems to set me off on some jacked up “religious trip”. I am thinking of my next book…..it will be titled, “The Deeper Meaning of Every Little Thing”.

I see Verna always standing right in the middle of hers and everyone else’s mortality with such grace and beauty. She is unlike any one I ever met. I see her presiding over you and me and Eliza in the bathtub at your house on Valley Road.
I see her marching across the backyard at Hodge road sheathed in a one piece black bathing suit, playing the tuba….heading for the bat chairs under the grape arbor where she and Wilder will summon Dionysis with wine and word and song.
How can she ever leave us? She never will!!!

Love Allen

Caroline, January 2007

How does one dance the pea vine? What is the relationship between watermelons and bears? What could a fly say that you would find so upsetting....I see you peeking out from under your frog hat....mincing across the stage floor at Macarter Theatre in 56 or was it 57...your bright eyes reaching out into the audience...
I see your bravery and fear dancing together as you faced the dark God who reached his hand into your childhood...
I see your love holding worlds together....I see your love...tangible, visible, resolute ready to cool and sooth the bitter bee stings of life....
I love you Cal and hold you in my heart where I dance and sing and celebrate your decision to be here amongst us ...your brothers and sister: the monsters.
Love Aldog

MARTY LICHTERMAN

Quick the smile to ease the mind's delay
Even tempered straight lips fall
across white teeth....
Catholic boy of Jewish blood...

Ancient dreams
Hung like dead bones
around the leathery neck
of the blind seer.

Your belief writhes ready to be born,
Moses on the Mississippi....
The deliverer eager to smash
the insidious testimony of the flesh.
Old friend which Jordan do you cross?
And to what Caanan do you go?




August 1972

UNDER A TREE OF THORNS

(for John Pretor Gilbert)

Under a tree of thorns in Bell Buckle
Halfway to Baldy, I sit watching my friend
Who will die of brain cancer before he is 28.
He reads Gregory Corso's Happy Birthday of Death
To me out loud.

I hang on his rapier like diction,
his passion for words, for language,
for meaning.
In him that mysterious power which calls young men out
To war, to love, to sacrifice was revealed.

In him that knowledge was full blown:
a ten thousand watt halogen lamp
Shining at midnight from the school parking lot
On the gymnasium wall.

John, at 18 you sang "the emptiness of retaliation"
Like one spent from centuries of vendetta.
I miss you and mourn you now 20 years after your death.

Some part of me is sitting with you still
Under the Thorn tree and you,
As you recite Lawrence Ferlingetti to me on a hillside in east tennessee
Are already west of the Golden Gate.
And moving westward still.

April 94

MEMORIA

MEMORIA

Now memory! Sing of all those almost forgotten things
The nakedness of those first journeys.
Falling down out of myself to swim
In the round green pool of the lover's eye.

That great green stone, childhood's companion,
Fed my nights with an unwinking luminosity.
The radiance of an inner sun stood sentinel
Above the tides day and night.
And I ran and swam
And hid in wooden boxes outside under maple trees
In thunderstorms.

My sleep was deepest in the worst of weather.
Thunder and lightning were the covers
I pulled over my boy's head.
I lived with the sad God and the sad Goddess
And a torturous brother named Pete.

At seven I had fallen far down from Heaven.
Let loose in the world, I sought the lost light.
Looking over my shoulder I wandered down the days.
Many times I looked with wonder at my empty hands.
And said to myself, " What for? What for?
Where the sword? Where the stone?"

Woman came to me with arms widespread.
She made of time a burning fountain.
And out of heart's blood a joy yearning to be bled.
Fearing blood and it's future,
I tore my hands from love's eyes and heart.

And now I careen
Through jungles of streets searching for love
And a Green Stone.

JUNE 1978

Caroline in the Dark God's House

Caroline, who made thee,
To thee I sing and give thanks for a sister.
Dark eyes, dark hair, Watermelons and bears,
Brothers and princes, princes to spare.

For seven years you kept her in the dark God's house.
There she became the vessel of his blind ecstacies.
What did you straighten in twisting her child's body so?
Near the eighty-fourth moon you set her free.

Remind her now of the favor she has won!
Love her, whom you use to join the worlds!
Part not the waters before her, lest she imagine
A promised land:
But rather let her swim through the tropics of the mind
Befriending the monsters as she goes.

SEPTEMBER 1979

FOR AMY, CHRISTMAS 1975

Amy, light from the source shines over my right shoulder.

My face is in the shadow.

I hunt the darkness for a mirror

When I look into it, what will I see?

A face in the shadow lit up by light from the source?

Light from the source?

Or just a shadow?

I remembered your birthday

But gave you no occasion to see

That I rejoice in your journey through the days.

The river whispers over the stones that sleep

In it's path across the land.

When the fire goes out gray ashes remain.

They are clean and they require no explanation

Now sitting on a low wicker chair,

The light all before and around me,

I look toward the horizon's radiance:

The effulgent glory of father and mother,

The passion and pain of the eternal brother,

Caroline, sister of the hearth, whose dark eyes

Peer into the red wine of a full golden cup.

And Amy, whose eyes in the cradle saw beyond the grave,

Does clench and unclench her fists sifting and resifting

The substance of the abyss: the rainbow whose arc

Inscribes the imagination with the possibility

Of each succeeding breath.

Insidious Pathways

Quaker Bridge road winds toward Mercer Street
Oblivious of the connections it makes.
Memory trails off like fragments of a conversation
Overheard but unlistened to.

Smooth black tar knifes through misty fields.
A trap set for small animals by men who no longer hunt,
A dark artery designed to contract space and multiply time.

Who will inherit the time that is saved?
Will we save enough time to remember
All the little things we have crushed under our wheels?

We have paved the world with insidious pathways
Whose numbers outstrip possible destination.
Symbolless we hurry down the Labyrinthine highways
Of imagined deeds.
At the end of the road we find Ariadne,
A black spider attending a derelict gas station.


AUGUST 1976

The Lady of The Lake

OH! PRINCETON, MY PRINCETON

And... have I ever left Princeton? ....
It's green sycamore canopies,
The intimate midnight warmth of it's asphalt streets
Caressing the soles of my bare feet deep in July.....
The unmarked paths over fences, through back yards
To waiting swimming pools... and eager mermaids...

The giant oaks and maples and hemlocks,
The sheltering chestnuts and elms guarding our relentless play...
A labyrinth of palaces
Spread out around a seat of learning,
Perched on a hill above a lake...

Oh Princeton, my Princeton... You are not a Prince....
You are the lady of the Lake who calls to me...


A. T. WOOD
1999

For My Father

Dear Pop, This is a happy birthday letter for a man for all reasons:
His thought speeding like Apollo's shaft
Cuts through the tropics of the mind
Leaving the Garden of Eden guacamole for those who come after.

A young God who leaves his foes stunned on the canvass
Floor of a ring on the deck of a giant battle wagon.
There they dream of Kansas and endless avenues of corn.
Heedless beneath these contestants
Leviathan lunges toward Japan.

Friend of black widows and silk spiders
You walk through forests and over mountains.
Never far from Hemlock boughs,
You sip the scream of things to come
And fall down dead for hours.

You nurse the wounds of Judas
And mind the petals of broken flowers.
You dance and sing and find yourself
At home among the monsters.
You mix memory and desire
In a living cup.
You guide the fronds of each day's end
And bend them back
Toward the true crucible,
The human form.

Master alchemist, tyrant, teaser, Master Preshy, Percy and Peach,
Mama's boy, Knight errant in a foreign land.
Close your eyes now
And open them again and see once and for all
That all your days have been spent in praise
Juggling the oxymoron of mortality.


JUNE 1989

Mama

There is a look of nightmares about her face.

Or is it the fact of many days?

She dresses for the days.

Each foot in a special shoe.

A great blue stone for the third finger,

A silver asp for the fourth.

In the labyrinth of her heart

She crushed the supple power and single loin of serpent love.

She is a priestess, Virgin, Queen.

She is a little girl on a hill

Overlooking a river in Tennessee.

She is the orphan of her parents muse .

And yes! the child of their love.

The white wine she pours in the casual visitor's glass

Gives meaning to the errant pilgrim's fast.

And sets his feet on the road to canterbury

Or is it Marrakech?

When but a maiden she found her man in the mountains.

Their vows said, deep in the marriage bed

She found he bled

From wounds his armor gave.

Risking the wrath of the ancestral gods,

She tore it from his body...

He rose from the bed, a young healing wizard

Naming the name of his mother's curse.

She has sent her four children out:

Two into fall, one into winter and one into spring.

Summer she holds sacred for her young healing wizard.

And now in retrospect we see

Nightmares are but minions in her quest

For the serpent's head.

Perfection

The soul's descent into the dark labyrinth
of the unconscious
Into death, night, disintegration and hell....
into forgetfulness,
Fear, anomie... that lightning like hatred whose coiled
Energy stands ready to rend and tear,
to destroy any hand
That would violate the perfect darkness of utter despair.

Utter despair like other perfections is subject to decay.

Maha Devi

O great Goddess,

With one hand you bind me to the world.

With one piercing look

You burn away all desire.

I long to hide from this relentless tension

In some polar extreme

Or some holy ground

beyond contradiction.

Teach me to love the demons

And their karma,

To see in their fury

Your gentle hands,

compassionate dharma.