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.