INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART + HAAG'S BIO
Posted beginning: June 28, 2002
To the music school she wore a cap of golden pearls
and played an
instrument of gleaming wood,
a strange instrument played by a bow and
oddly cut,
with a tone, in the North Indian Classical Tradition, of
ineffable sweetness.
She was beautiful as a goddess,
Saraswati,
perhaps, with golden hair. I hardly dared speak to her.
When I did it
was to ask the name of her instrument.
"It's called an esraj," she
said.
I knew no more.
By a circuitous route along paths of
pain, we became friends.
We walked in the woods, we walked the Golden
Gate,
we went to meetings, and the beach.
We were full of
adventure
as we talked away her anguish and my own.
She wanted
to manifest a mate.
For a woman who walks on the earth,
free as a
goddess, it is hard to find a match,
but she managed it:
a man of
gentleness, kindness and sweetness. In Robert,
noble of head and
soft of manner,
one feels Daniela has met a man as
sweet and
melodious as the music
she plays upon her esraj
When Daniela
told Robert she felt
as if she had manifested him by her desire,
he laughed and said:
"But I remember existing before I met
you."
Daniela Birschel + Robert Manis
In North Indian Classical
Music only one raga
refers specifically to ni and ma:
Da ni ela Ma
nis.
From Bhupali, ni and ma are missing.
No doubt they ran off
to paradise to be married.
Or, another way of looking at it is,
there are now two nis,
Da ni ela Ma nis,
where before there was
only one.
Ni to ni, so to speak.
Are they komal or
shuddh?
Are they in madra or madhya?
Only time will tell, as
only time
will tell how much more of the sargam will be born
to Ma
ni s
and in which raga.
As witness to the wedding,
I look
forward to walking, sometimes,
with Daniela and Robert, in the years
ahead,
across the Golden Gate, through the woods and along the
beach,
in friendship,
witnessing as their love leads
them—
after this ceremony upon Mt. Tamalpais
where a few friends
and all the beauty of Marin's landscape wish them well—
along paths of joy and through the saptaks of living.
of your night hides
wide plains of love
from the gazelle of
my heart.
All highway communities are the same
and they will be
too
the day after tomorrow
the Sheriff's car parked at the park
the old
hotel too old to be much used
the Airport Cafe where they hang out
at the
airport
to watch the Cessnas fly in and out
with all the commotion of
locusts
where grasshoppers hop
and cicadas buzz
*
Where the
school house of concrete block
replaces the old one of sandstone and
sand
where everyone knows every child by name
in the town square
and
after dark
*
Where the sun comes blazing over the hollyhocks
ten
feet tall and the
dogs bay at me
returning here today and
the day after
tomorrow
squinting into the darkness
of the locked-up tavern
where the
handsome local young men drink beer
until their bellies swell to bull frog
size
burping and bellowing
*
Too much peace
too much
contentment
too much work on the railroad
on road gangs
pumping
gas
pretty well peripheral to the technological
society
welfare
recipients
all depending on civilization
someplace else
represented by
bars in San Diego
bars in the City of the Angels
bars across the
border
*
Contentment and boredom
and the white hot sun
it's a
good life
they have time to
"Set a spell"
under the cottonwood
trees
hard muscled
gentle voiced
named Cary
like the movie
star
wearing boots
like the other movie star
*
Life imitates
art
and the day after tomorrow
will be the same
and the stars
will
glitter overhead
the day after tomorrow
with the grocery stores
full of canned goods
the diet full of starch
yards full of rusty
cars
peace and contentment of the gods
Baptist Chruch
Methodist
Church
Lutheran and a camp for the Catholics
*
Driving through
America
one knows God came from a noble lineage of
poor white
trash
upright and angry
singing Rock of Ages and having
Just a Closer
Walk With Thee
God sings in the mines and the saw mills
he hums along the
railroads
he whirls in dust down the dry river beds
nods in heavy headed
giantism
along with the sunflowers
craning their necks to follow their
maker
and the morning glories
opening on command
*
Oh
yes
God was born poor white trash
and he lives in the dance hall on
Saturday night
and rises on Sunday morning
pure as a virgin
purged of
her boredom
and after church
appreicates more than anyone will ever
know
the too large servings of shortcake
with strawberries and fried
chicken with gravy
all highway communities will remain the same
the day
after tomorrow
*
And those of us who want to
will dance around
the rims
of the rusty wagon wheels
on resurrection day
among the hollyhocks
When Fray Francisco Dominguez came to Picuris
in 1776
Juan
Arguello, at ninety-nine, or ninety-eight,
walked nine miles to
ask
him for alms to help build his church
at Trampas.
Upon noting
this in his report, Fray Dominguez
added
"And since I have nothing,
I gave him that, with many
thanks,
for his devotion." From the
whole realm Arguello gathered
alms,
amounting to nine pesos,
six reales, and built -- it took him
twenty years --
his church of
San Jose de Gracia, which stands still after more
than two
hundred
years. He built it with sweat, he built it with the help of
his
Penitente
brothers, and when it was done it stood, massive,
towering. From 1760
to 1780
a peso could purchase one
plain,
bronze
candleholder. Like Fray Dominguez,
most
settlers
of The Traps had nothing.
She lives at the Bluffs of Barton,
a complex overlooking
Austin,
that complex, old, boomtown
of a city, rising high, too
high
for the Colorado
River to support it, too
widespread
for pure water to reach
it. Austin floats on
nature's aquifers
made deadly by the wastes
of man -- and
woman. Effluvia
floats where the redbuds used
to float, where
blue mountain laurel blooms
too late, too high smelling
to keep
her happy. She's turned, twisted,
she's worn bluebonnets, she's
smiled 'til her eyelids crinkle: cirrus
clouds on a winter
day,
a cold front coming down, hurting. O
God, hurting! The
pain's red
hot, the land's gone dry, there's drought. She
fasts
--except her wine, her beer,
her chocolate pie -- she
fasts, she fasts.
"Divide," he said. "Have it
all!" she
cried. One more noxious body
in the aquifir can't
hurt anyone,
least of all her.
She'll let you know what complex to name
after the Bluffs of Barton, after her.
I don't know when it happened.
I've had two, you know -- one
my
father got for me, from a
boy I never lived with -- but
did
love, the other husband
got his when I was out of
town, on grounds
of desertion
-- I thought that a charming cause --
he, having
driven me to
New York in our little red
car, dropped me in the
Village,
gave me a peck on the cheek,
ending ten years of
worthwhile
wedding, not one of them bliss.
It's a setting free, you know,
it's a turning round, a letting
go,
it's a dance, done modern style.
It's a change, quite small,
from day to day
for other loves, others gone.
It's a little
training for death.
You'll be happy when you're eighty,
you know,
having had a little
experience of letting go
from day to day, of
others gone.
There will be others' love.
There will be others
gone.
Divorce is two
a voice is won.
After my divorce I spent
ten years being famous,
three years a
poet,
two a nanny,
a sadhu,
and all
eternity being
happily dead.
O, it's so peaceful in
a narrow, single
grave.
The flowers
grow softly,
their roots
fingering down, acround
my
nipples, all pale pink with
disuse, sacredly,
sassily
mine.
Mom never
told me
about pure, celibate bliss.
What
if she'd discoved
the truth, too? Only
had two:
brother,
sister, and
not one
I.
I opened my hand, the bird flew off
I opened my heart, and all flew
in
I opened my eyes, the world was mine
No bird did not sing
for me
No heart did not beat for me
No eyes were closed againt me
This world was mine, could have been thine
Cold
Volga
flowed the dark,
purple, blue, black
night,
red sunrise
when it began.
The carved
marble
bridge, rich as an emperor's
tomb, lifted,
oiled and
smooth, the great
revolution. Horses fell
with their carriages,
stars
through the embryo
of time in up-
side-down
worlds,
flowered
white,
bright
cheeks, dolls
twirling
like tire irons: you
could hardly see their
sex or imagine
their
consciousness. Yet a certain
gaiety emerged:
outside
gravity, the river flowed
swift, thick in the dawn
or
the dusk or the day.
Automobiles,
old,
oblong,
jumped
time,
windscreens
fragmenting,
into
frost, trailed
laughter and dusters,
Milky Ways among
stars.
Large hats, lilacs a flower
showered the white horses, hobby
horses, substantial
buildings,
squared energy. Gnarl legged,
over the bridge
they
lept, nutcracker
figures
and
sugar
plums
of
high hats
and high hue,
booted,
furred, foxed
fairies. Apogee:
the bridge yawned down,
marble
crumbling, alabaster, time
fluted, garlanded, heavier
than
steel. The horse righted itself.
The carriage
disappeared
into corrected
time, sucked back toward
the moon.
There
was no
sight,
no
place for
forgiveness,
no
where to swim,
for the oiled surface
reflected, mirrored,
shown.
Afraid to jump or float, the
overcoated gentlemen
knelt
up, down, stood for joy. It was
a surprise, a vague, dear,
surprise. The tree lined
streets held iron
benches.
The
bridge closed.
cats
crept,
baby
fish
wiggled
upstream. The sun
broke through, a balloon
went
up, the weather's test
was fine up high; below, damp.
The capillary mountains like a lizard's back,
the dragon's march as
the Chinese saw The Wall,
like the plane of a liver on the butcher's
block,
the orange tinted purple of a day's death
haunt the
insides
as well as the soft pink tongue
and the blue-eyed life
of the iris' pool
where swim the perceptions of the day
and the
block and The Wall and the
saurian's horny back.
INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART