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…