the poem I am working on these days

Tourists at tea



I was drawn to the flourite talismans,
their ornate bezels and the silver tassels.
I cupped them between my fingers.


The news about bloodroot was timely.
We never used sun screen.

The trace of cynic in the tension tamer tea was not lost.

A pale Klimt lady in a trance most days
consciously reports
I bet it all on a seer, landed here
With a little bay …
She needs to believe beyond doubt
in that expanded circle of love that radiates
miles around her.
Scary to follow the whim of a seer and to lay around daily in a trance.
It isn’t ordinary. .. But that is what it is.

Motionless tours were not as exotic
without the transcendent component,
Though the extraordinary is becoming more common.

There is heart in the pretty little bay, she chimed.

What about the city shelter with screams into
the dark night where people stay to get a subsidy or a hot meal?

Desperate is a matter of degrees.
The scientist asks for twenty or thirty and gets twenty five.
Her need for precision is lost on us.

When bent on the true.
and by that I mean the resonant, all stones are upended.

At the retreat, no singing in the shower allowed.

The curtain is torn.

Susan Chandel 6/17/09

Nothing to do with the poem except I was tossed back into the scene this past weekend. One summer ( maybe the summer of 1981) on Ellery St in Cambridge my friend Wally Butts had just come back from Montana and was looking for a place in town to stay. even though while living in the city I often had great rent controlled one bedrooms. I enjoyed sharing them so I offered him the day bed in the living room. He remebersa the parties on the roof and how he almost fell off one time. He reminded me of this fathers day as we munched quiche and sipped 8 o'clock coffee.
I said that I would not have the stomach for roof side parties these days. Perhaps since having been a mother. Wally is now called Walter. Poetry fans know him as W.E. Butts the new Poet Laureate of New Hampshire.

gps world healing 101

The dimple I crouched in seemed like a quarry, shards of feldspar everywhere with a faint smell of gasoline. I could make out roads along the grid over the lip, but I dare not venture too far. Coordinating dreamscapes with GPS marks was only a decade new and I could not afford to miss my rendezvous.. The dark misty sky slowly became paler. I felt damp and somewhat impatient. I could hear the kids in the distance as the sky started to reveal its true color. Smells began to shift gingerbread, jalapeño, tar in varying values. There was often a bite to the mingled scents. It was never immediately sweet or homey.. A few bugs were left to work out with this new system. I had only found out about it a few years earlier in a hospital waiting room. A young man was talking about reenlisting as there was not other choice Lots of people were feeling the same way there was just no money. . As we talked and waited some video screen flyers were distributed. They were the new ones about the size of a quarter inch thick plastic placemat. Are Your Visually Attuned? Spatially Perceptive? Join us. An older guy recognized the program. “Heal the world with your dreams.”

He was brought into the program in its early experimental stages. On the pretense that he was indeed a risk to himself or others, they took him to the initial labs and validated his fears that he was unto something. The presence of snipers in the trees on the edge of his yard were more than a delusion. So he had signed up for the gig and reported that he and his crew had started on agriculture reviving barren apple orchards and turned deserts into wheat fields. “Yes sir wonderful landscapes from the mind’s eye to the ground.” So he was glad to see that the program was expanding and that there was perhaps a new peaceful goal for the armies of the world to focus on. Because when you can imagine abundance and create that sort of love every where in your minds eye , what need is there for war. Most of us signed up for the program that night. We thought might as well, we had nothing to lose really. Houses in foreclosure, no career but the army.



We had no weapons. Last night when the wild boar ran through the bivouac lit by the embers we were startled. My fear vanished as she seemed to smile over her shoulder. It is good to leave a trace of the past behind. The complex fabric of GPS World Healing 101 were laid on a soy gauze base. The new course of study a melding of art, science and spirituality fell under biochemistry in most university catalogs. The primary function coordinating individual dreams so they lined up with the satellite codes was elusive to all but a few. It was however one of the greatest innovations of the century.

Some times the instructors would wait for hours in dead zones where the faint grids rolled over the dimples to coordinate “picnics“ a term for revived war torn areas. Skies the unbelievable blue of a June day. You never know what can happen when restructuring the world in such remote areas.

We have learned to move beyond the past. It is getting better and better every day. New picnics are sprouting up world wide.