Susan McCaslin

A Glosa for Toni on Her Sixtieth Birthday

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell.  As you ring….
            Rainer Maria Rilke

After years of inspecting teeth,
gums’ erosions, molars’ chips,
the unflossed places where the floss Nazi
never comes, something inside you
turned, not knowing why, to another
profession, another form of attention.  Like a jar
the hold of your spacious mind
cupped all manner of folk, like us
who sought the pivot of your steady star,
quiet friend, who has come so far.

So you listened, making room for all sorts
of ragtag tales, sitting with fresh green grief
and loss, that dragonish weight, and darkness
of the body shedding time; then,
Eureka!  Ecology and psychology wed
and you brought many to aurora-borealis dew
on wet cedars, opening the coffins of moths
spilling perfume of broken wings.
You taught them on island retreats to
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

It’s never simple venturing into the world.
Yet causes collected you, who served them well.
This one and that, Mary and Martha twirled,
and all became another offered cup,
until the rhythm in and out compelled
you to return to yourself some latent power,
the mystic life, a hidden poem rising
from fertile dark, the sweet transforming the sour:
Let this darkness be a bell tower.

Now on this fete-day of your sixtieth year,
we gather here to celebrate your being,
past, present, future, a unified display,
gentle original face within your faces.
A singer wants a partner, you with yours,
a sweet duet; add more to that—more sing.
Call it a quartet; it morphs into a choir;
a grand concerto plays in a grand hall.
Where voices dim and flare, you are the music’s wing,
and you the bell.  As you ring….

Xanadu Two

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
            Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Turning love’s planetary sphere
within your palm you feel its heat
from cataclysmic tumults past.
Human contaminates rise up
searing the earth’s protecting rim
where silent greenhouse gases brew,
till science geeks and Oxford dons
cry out again, “beware, beware,”
and corporate kings, egoic crew,
new Kubla Kahns build Xanadu.

In a vision once I saw
that sunless sea, now sunny bright,
piled skeletons of polar bears,
new northwest passage gaping wide,
and malls with walls of plexiglass
where elites stroll endangered breeds,
rare lynx on a designer leash;
huge freighters nuzzling to and fro
to tweak, not sate an endless greed
and stately pleasure domes decreed.

Some lands flooding, others too dry,
fragments vaulting low and high,
the have nots suffering the most
from car emissions in the west.
Capital the central measure,
private enterprise the span
of every heartbeat, value, pleasure,
until the cavernous waking heart
leads the bardic woman, man,
where Alph the sacred river ran.

Pine beetles, apocalyptic,
infect once-thriving Cariboo trees.
Tar sands’ rank emissions hover
in a landscape’s angry howl;
prophecies of war continue,
glaciers peeling back new land 
ripe for further exploitation
of our mother Gaia’s house,
guarding ice’s treasury that ran
through caverns measureless to man.

If we could revive within us
shamanic ice song’s flow,
pass into being when passing,
constrain the human maw,
the pulse of evolution
might move through us and be
a spiralling interspecies dance
that tethers arrogance,
our alphas and omegas free
within the ancient sunless sea.

When the Stones Rise Up

I speak not in hyperbole,
I speak in true words muted to their undertone,
choosing a pebble where you would a stone,
projecting pebbles to immensity.
           P.K. Page, from “The Understatement”

You thought about the nested worlds,
but wanted more to see, hear, touch,
to be, if only momentwise,
earth music—since a single phase
can make a maelstrom in the heart
and empty the stony self into sea
or dustpool where the open eye,
wry, enchanted, voids the void,
gazing and gazing—such clarity!
I speak—not in hyperbole.

You speak in gardens,
seeding blooms of sleep,
where primrose disarranges time, the wild
musk rose’s aromatic hush
stirs a geometry of stunned hearts—
this earthly paradise, slowly inverting cone,
mountain, hut or vortex overturned,
a sentence slides across the bone.
I speak in true words muted to their undertone.

Something prefers the miniscule—pattern in broken
pattern, something whole lingering, who knows?
Adults look twice at an infant on the lawn,
remembering things lost, things round
in the palm, when body knew most everything,
something shaped to the hand, something on loan.
You want no flying bolt or bomb,
but vibrating signature of rock,
earth token, living koan,
choosing a pebble where you would a stone.

Now is all particular, particulate:
what the eye sees through you
and you through the eye, unknown,
a laser sharpening, dissolved.
These bright periwinkles under the window—
on their exact colour our words may not agree. 
Yet outside, rough bark of the draughty Douglas fir
conceals a Persian miniature,
secret calligraphy etched into skin.
Distilling words, you open each sound free,
projecting pebbles to immensity.

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