Aerial Muse
poems
© Copyright 2013 by Scott Truesdale Thompson
All rights reserved.
Aerial Muse
Contents
Untitled
Aerial Muse
Wheels Up
What I’d Say to William Stafford About “Ask Me”
Voice of the Whole
Looking Down at the Sun
Flash
Flash (2)
Cloud Sliding
Prayer for a Stranger’s Child on the Flight 4471
Facing Her Face
Flow
Murmuration
Tree-Told Tale
Streaming
Hidden Range
Red On Gray
No Hands
Something More
Unhinged
Trans-
parent
Close Quarters
Untitled
About the Author
If these words stream
and pool among
bone-white stones,
a new rain may
complete this sentence.
Then dripping nouns
and pouring verbs
might leave the clouds
for a new home
on earth.
Aerial Muse
She lingers in cumulus
meadows or rides aerial
ice floes, like a polar bear
released from gravity’s
insistence – a seeing, sniffing
cloud among the clouds.
Sometimes I fly by her
hiding place without quite
feeling her breath on my nape.
But so often she floats aboard
and whispers inside and
teases, saying, I’ll be waiting
ahead if you wait right here.
Without name or visage
she glides diaphanous
mingles in memories
and leaves anonymous notes
in some deep, white
drifts of mind.
Wheels Up
Now soaring
over gray and ebony ribbons
curling through emerald clusters
I float aloft
and alert to concealed images
that hover like chattering squirrels
in the fields and mounds of cloud.
A gray-haired man
wearing a black baseball cap
leans back into my knees
while a disembodied
female voice reminds us
of valuable frequent flyer
miles we secure
on this journey’s leg.
I stay conscious
of a different altitude:
my sky inside
insinuates vapors and
air streams and
open oceans of cerulean space.
There are worlds
of new animals up here.
Flying mammals
with wholly mythic ancestries.
They would paw
with ink-wet claws the slope
of snow that is this page.
A colony of Purple Messengers
rolls over scud cliffs
and out into vivid rivers of flight.
Shapes in ink link
them into our world
of gray trays and
clinking ice cubes
and murmuring passengers
who ache to reignite
their sleeping cell phones.
What ropes and arcs of light
shine like a thin bridge
over miles of nothingness
leading shadowy lurkers
from inside out
and back again?
What I’d Say to William Stafford About “Ask Me”
I read it one time
on a plane and felt
salt water drizzling
along facial contours
and losing itself
in thickets of beard.
I was not sad.
Kneeling without reaching,
I was touching
a sunlit cave
under each word.
Each sliver of light
slipped by
the vigilant deflectors,
reaching some moist
dark soulsoil.
Ask me how
real that felt
and how much I ached
to thank you.
Voice of the Whole
On this sunny Saturday afternoon
at the community swimming pool
the air is crowded with colliding voices
with laughter, talk, shrieks, and yells.
The cacophony says something
in another language – something different
from the individual words and
emotion-impelled utterances.
This voice of the whole
sings the rhythm of ocean surf
and rises to a place
beyond the reach of the highest splash.
Beyond the reach of the loudest shriek
a howling elongated silence
surges in perfect stillness.
A flash of lightning cracks
the egg shell quiet of the universe
and sliding inside: bright
orange daystar.
Looking Down at the Sun
From the jet window I see
the yellow gleaming orb
of the sun moving along
creeks as though residing
under earth – the inner
brilliance glaring through cracks
in the brown and green surface;
a world of light under the world
we thought we knew.
Would that be more remarkable
than seeing the daystar
from outer space reflected
on the face of streams
while at the same time
it sears the silver jet wing
with a blinding white ball
that will not bounce
or slip as we fly along
at 544 miles per hour?
Flash
We burst through a cumulus ceiling
into a blinding flash
of aerial brilliance.
It fills our tubular cabin
provoking squints and half-conscious
gasps at the suggested influx
of transcendent stillness
like a fleeting dance of angels
in the parlor of consciousness.
No one speaks of this.
No one says how will my soul
accumulate such winged horsepower
to outpace gravity
and flow light and quick
into the radiant whiteness
of endless light?
Blinded, we grope
for flashes of news
in our papers.
Flash (2)
Farm patches –
trees, a barn,
a green-striped field –
pass through the gap
in the clouds like
a cognitive flash or
an island of consciousness
in a white sea of dreams.
Cloud Sliding
After an hour sliding, spinning, streaming
and spilling together down
the snow slick hill at the high school
you say, This is like being on a cloud.
Yes, absorbed in white magic
we travel nearly weightless
in sky islands from which we wing free
dive screaming through boundless
cushions of white, barrel through scud
bank alleys, cling to each other’s mittened hands
you on orange saucer and me on
red toboggan until our afternoon cloud
sinks into surrounding darkness
like the marshmallows melting
in steaming hot chocolate
that we now sip in the kitchen
of what is not quite
the same old home.
Prayer for a Stranger’s Child on Flight 4471
Sweet Serenity with your hot pink warmups
white and yellow bunny
and skin like coffee with cream stirred in
may the doors of your days open
wide as you go
and may your learning be as rich
and fertile as the dark soil
of a prolific garden
and may the dogged inequities
that insist otherwise
be squashed.
As you sleep now
on the generous lap of grandmother
whose head is bowed for a nap
may your future be serene
and wildly prosperous
and may this feeble prayer
somehow miraculously widen
to encompass a world
of needful, deserving
children.
Facing Her Face
Flying over brown wrinkled land
feels like facing the face
of the old woman I photographed
in Antigua, Guatemala.
Her copper-brown skin
yellow-washed in slanting
late afternoon sunlight
was contoured from the hard
decades of gripping to survive.
Was there still a smile
in her soul, somewhere underneath
her sorrow-darkened eyes?
The canyons beneath
our flight path reveal hints
of green where water
underground trickles
through the stones.
1Flow
We flow so steadily above wisps of vapor
you could nearly mistake this cruise for stillness.
We’re scarcely aware how the steel shell
containing us rips the sky as casually
and relentlessly as a child rips
pictures from old magazines.
In this high capsule
thought finds a flow apart from terrestrial avenues
and crowded thruways. Thought can ease and sail
like the hawk’s drift through invisible streams
spread out in the wind’s flow
over the face of the land.
In this moment consciousness effortlessly rises
as Adam’s hand in the sky of the Sistine Chapel
nearly touching the finger of God.
Murmuration
peppered sky and effervescent
coalescence of aerial surf
black whale shifting
into expanding eel
lateral pour
dragon girth
free forming murmuration
undulating schooner slipping
continually into the magic
of transformation
the flap and glide
of a million starlings
moving through iterations
not one seeing
the dazzling dance
the splash and flow
of the one everchanging
whole
Tree-Told Tale
Thousands upon thousands of seasons ago, before the beginning of the first
season, a perfectly round seed floated in vast darkness. A perfectly round clod
of soil floated in vast darkness. A drop of water floated in vast darkness.
When the seed and the soil and the water joined together, the darkness was
overcome by light, and the seed germinated and grew into a perfectly round tree.
This was not simply a round trunk; the tree as a whole was spherical. This primal
tree grew over many seasons, and in certain seasons it scattered seeds, and in certain other seasons seeds that lodged in clods of soil and sprouted into new round trees. Clouds formed to water all the floating trees, and the universe was filled with light. Trees hardened into planets, and the planets wandered. Occasionally planets collided, and when they collided there was fire. The fire caused the colliding planets to melt together into a single burning sphere. The core of such spheres seethed with molten energy. These spheres became white hot suns. These suns attracted planets. Planets that gathered around suns learned to circle without colliding. By the time Planet Earth had found its sun, all of its dry land was covered with round trees. These trees were free to roll over all the land. Each tree had a root system covering a portion of its outer sphere. Every so often the trees needed to find a patch of soil, sink their roots into it, and suck up nutrients. Over time the places with richest soil became well known among the trees, and they congregated in these places. When these areas became congested, conflicts and confusion broke out among the trees. Aggressive trees would intentionally roll into other trees, trying to push their way to some desired plot of soil.
The wisest tree in the universe was the tree who sprang from the seed that floated in vast darkness. This was the Tree of Wisdom.
The wisest trees on earth gathered in an undisputed place to enter into dialogue
concerning the fate of their planet. When they came together, the Tree of Wisdom visited and offered them a choice. The trees of Earth could retain their
roundness and the freedom that comes with being round. In this way trees might form into factions and battle over choice plots of ground. The other way would be for the trees to be made vertical and forever rooted in the soil where the seed of their being had fallen. In this way, the likelihood of peace among trees of the planet would greatly increase, but it would come at the price of their roundness and their freedom to roam. One of the wise trees of Earth asked the Tree of Wisdom if peace could only come at the price of their freedom.
The Tree of Wisdom replied:
I never spoke of giving up freedom,
but rather the freedom to roam across the land.
The Earth tree protested:
The freedom of roaming is the only freedom we know.
The Tree of Wisdom replied:
A standing tree might come to see how standing
in peace for a lifetime can be freedom itself –
the freedom to respond to each shift in breeze
the freedom to shiver in pouring rain
the freedom to lean, shaking in high winds
the freedom to rise skyward from its roots
the freedom to dream from one season into the next.
Let me ask you this: Have any of you wise trees of Earth
spent a full moment in contemplation of the sky
or its rain-spilling clouds?
For some weeks a dispute simmered among the Earth trees as to certain nuances in the Tree of Wisdom’s observations, and while a few arguments
for retaining roundness were floated, the trees all felt the one answer in the very flow of their sap.
Streaming
Dive
fly out
of the dream
driving into an actual
cloud-dotted sky.
You drop like a rock
until the vast umbrella
unfolds and sends you
floating along thermals
an empty canoe drifting
on the surface
of an easy creek.
You dive into the flow
of words and stream
into the blur
on your flying bicycle.
As you power pedal
into rivering green
of fanning leaves
so flow invisible crimson
currents within.
Arch your neck and gaze
at a l
ong, lone white line
jet streaming
the azure canopy
atmospheric umbrella
never fold.
Open us
drifting under you.
Underneath the visible
surface the river
keeps streaming along.
The current pulls, flowing
farther and farther
from the source.
It goes with the flow
catches the drift
rounds the bend
and rivers along.
Day in and day out
river does its flow work
reflecting, changing
being a liquid body
in motion. The flow
of life -- the feel
of a compelling story
with its unspeakable
mysteries and
declarations of mood.
Light pools on the dark
estuary surface and
slides sideways into
whole luminous rivers
of lit language.
I close my eyes
and there is a blanket
of light inside.
I see it blind.
Dive clean in the spring-clear
surround of aqua world
fish house, swirl of weeds
filtered sunlight and
green pines on the other side
of the surface like objects
leaning into a magnifying glass.
Stand-up bass
and large-mouth bass.
They go deep and pull
into undertow
a pulse in the shadow
of a great rock shelf.
The soul itself swims
well below the surface
carrying a treasury that
we keep losing hold of.
It slips from our hands
like an oily trout that we held
for a moment and prized.
Go into the quiet and wait.
It will find you in its own
aquatic time.
Hidden Range
Under this light gray
scud soufflé
spreads a magisterial range
of mountains
you cannot see.
A white shaft of sunlight
is like the snow
on the high peaks
of that hidden range.
You remember again
how much of yourself
is hidden from yourself.