My spirit is a kite, a diamond knight

A twisting and turning daring kite!

A high flying blue sky kite,

The light, the light of my soul soaring high!

My spirit is a kite, a diamond knight

A twisting and turning wandering kite!

A searcher on course for a date with the stars,

A dodger pop fly baseball kite heading straight for mars,

A cunning, carousing boxing kite weaving to avoid

  those hard-hitting punches of super hero flight

A stinging, wing beating, all fired inventors' kite

  flying dangerously near the sun on homemade wings

  of wax, paper, and wire;

A courageous and callous barnstorming kite

 bobbing thunderclouds clapping, a B-52 bomber kite

 skirting a thousand red rockets' glare

 as it goes gloriously by in the air!

Surely thine eyes have seen it, but could only stare,

For my spirit is a messenger to the gods eagle kite

  going places many do not dare!

My spirit is a kite, a diamond knight

A twisting and turning daring kite!

A high flying blue sky kite

The light, the light of my soul soaring high!

But even so, a kite like mine, a diamond in the light

Must at times be pulled back down from whence it came,

Or must fall of its own accord having bounced off heaven's gate,

And suffer in freedom's name some injury of pride and fate,

If it, (or I as the case must be), am to know,

To what heights or lows we are to go,

Or else, if only to avoid, the dampening rain

Which surely must fall, and await the winds of spring

In order yet, to fly again!

April 17, 1998

Chaos and Order in the Vast Rot of the Whale

Copyright, Terry R. Reid

I’d searched the chaotic waters and found them wanting…but from inside myself came the order I was looking for, the Jonah’s call and it said, "but from within, all the answers come, but from within…"  

 Sort it out they say, After Chaos and Order has swallowed me whole~

Like that’s a possibility ~ down in here, Like these things can be sorted out ~  

Do you remember a poor Cuban boy being dragged from his bed on national TV

In the middle o’ night. I remember,

I also remember a great gray whale washed up on the shore

dead as whales come around here.  

At first, it didn’t make any sense and yet there was a morphic awareness in me  About the inherent order of these things, an unfurnished awareness: this abdominal state o’ mind,  I stare at the ribs of the thing and find everything is relative, but far beyond my comprehension.  

Sort it out they say, like it’s a possibility in Politics and nature, in the sociobiology of the globe, In the physics of the universe, in the way I live my life, in and out of meaning,  The mammal, the boy, and me—we are one and the same and different too— It means something to me, but I can’t say what, and so, it means nothing to me… Except, that at times like these, perhaps, reason tends to sleep on the bottom of the sea.

 I know there is no solid state in the slow pounding of the surf; no rhyme or reason to these stories of mine, or to the lost and found love that Blossoms and fails between strangers, nor is there a scheme In the flight of monarch butterflies — no real reason that can I see—Just a thing they do now and then.

But there is some reason in the way dancers turn off their minds and attend to their bodies’ purring design while plying their audience with a sense of rapture, of their freedom and grace, (which is relished) amidst the sensuality and the workings of muscle and bones, yielding and unyielding and beautiful, a function of unrelenting mechanics and practice, and routine discipline—(relished, but invested with our own themes and conceptual meanings and then ignored).

 The dancer isn’t really the dance is she? Somehow she merely swims around and is swallowed whole by it. We are tantalized by the dancer, but somehow separated from her by the very reasons we are tantalized.

While I am alone in the belly of the great gray whale I find I enjoy this conjunctive relationship, this space between the dancer and the dance, between me and the whale and the outside world,

This phenomenon of movement and lyricism—it speaks to me about the way I live my life, In the affective exchange between others and myself, between absurdity and knowing I am blind.

At times like these all meaning and understanding become revelation or nonsense, depending upon the speed at which we travel and our willingness to connect, Or to learn the choreography of the dance, of the boy, of the butterflies, of the whale, of me.

I sometimes wonder as I am waiting here for the dance to begin, if there is a construction of questions lying in wait for answers to fall like raindrops in the desert in order to reconstitute the meaningful things in the spaces between us? Sometimes it seems that it is only with luck, coincidence, and synchronicity that any of the truly significant exchanges in life are made at all, for so very rarely is a truly creative question posed and as rarely does the rain answer the call to dance.

It’s a touch and go world, a harsh and beautiful truth of a world in which a god of infinitesimal detail lives, but it’s a chaotic god that rules with endless Confusion, heaping loads of unanswerable anxiety upon us, which can only be relieved by the tacit acceptance of life’s randomness, (which is sometimes rational and sometimes not).

 As for the boy separated in the middle o’ night I have tried and tried to join the Conjunctive medium of television to his pain, the loss he suffered to the salty sea, the treatment he received to his sleeping dreams, the terror of being torn from his weeping life to the experience of being swallowed up by the whale of television, and his perplexing joy at his strange new connection to the world.

 But TV records neither the boy, nor the pain, nor the real separations he endured, only the conjunction of events and objects in time and space—all of which Might have occurred in limbo for all we knew, for it was only with the death of the whale and its emergence from the deep that I did stand there finally, exhumed,

Looking largely in the face of things and understand how I was connected to the child's Plight, I to the great gray whale and I to the salty sea, felt at last the true weight of the thing brought up from the depths and all-together around me, Whose misunderstandings of life was betrayed—

There in the vast rot of the whale.

Copyright, By Terry R. Reid

THE JOURNEY

Teacup moon is riding low in the sky in a western saddle upon a steady mare.

I watch her as I drive through the San Miguel Mountains with her at my side,

Her crooked little smile suggesting I hold on to the moment just eight seconds more:

Just eight seconds more: as rodeo highway turns into El Camino Real.

I eat an apple on the old highway following a blue Chevy pickup into Moab, Utah, which I suspect is a town out of old Judea, and I wave at passing motorists while singing along to my favorite hymns, but I have to stop and consider my voice and ask myself if I really cared for Utah as a state and whether or not if I had stuck with music in school, would I have been a singer right now?

In red, red Colorado, I head into the rising sun and see my teacup moon getting ready to depart behind Tierra Amarilla; please, won't you stay for tea, and listen to the beating of my heart?' 

I want to show you something unsettling, something that was left unsaid back there underneath the stars: see how I got my sad bout at Bittercreek, how I got my dark shades at Telluride, how I packed Jade down a hillside on my back along the continental divide, and how I sat as if there were no tomorrow way back when along the Nisqually Delta north of Olympia, Washington with my life stretching out before me, like the open interstate.

But I want you to know that I have lived to see the sky queen fill the heavens with golden eagles from summits high to canyons deep and I have cried real tears that fell into the Royal Gorge like rain.

And driving south now, into the land of enchantment, pitching to and fro with you at my side, I throw the apple core on the dash— careening country in the neck of the Sangre de Christos—        

I am in the rolling high roads of New Mexico now, destined for awhile to be forgotten by all, except by you, at least that's the idea, Route 66 and all that, the solitude of loneliness, and the destination or the lack of one, where everything is cool with Jack Karouac and Jimmy Dean, the exploited symbols of today, the katchinas, the matachinas, the dancing man behind the wheel that's me.

Stare thru the windows at the road passing beneath us, at the road runners darting out, but racing back at the last moment, at the roadside stands of viejos selling pinon, where the strength of a poetic thought is brushed aside in an instant, cuz' you and I can't hardly stop to consider it all, and so many things have passed us by already,

and I'm still preparing the green leaves for our tea, I'm still spooning honey in our cups, placing muffins on a tray and the teapot whistles at the brown skinned girls cruising around and ‘round the plazas, and turistas are taking pictures of the missing Indians in the barbershop and I cannot hear what's being said by the realestate agents whose job it is to sell off America.

Look here, take the wheel from me, feel this, the sore spot on my side, it's the open wound where the Pueblos have returned underground; listen to the beating of my heart and you can hear them the katchinas, the matachinas, the dancing goes on and on…

And a teacup moon is watching me as I put the honey jar aside like some little part within my memory, and listen still closer to the dancing within, to the rhythm of the land beneath the road—

and the steam rising gently from my cup

tips that teacup moon ever so slightly upon its side.

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