Encounter

The largest dogwood tree in the country is a half hour from my house. It was a beautiful late spring day in North Carolina. The blossoms had already fallen off the dogwoods but I wanted to go back to see the special tree.
It stands a stately watch over the Matthis Family Cemetery by a church near Clinton NC. I wanted to go commune with the holiness and ancient wisdom in it, to take a twig to pray by and pay my respects to the living and the dead in the place.
I parked by the road a hundred yards from the tree. There was a single mourner, a woman preparing to leave; the church was deserted. I got out of my car and waved goodbye to her and she left. I had the place in silence to myself.
I skirted the graveyard walking in that stiff, self conscious manner I adopt in such places and arrived at the plaque in front of it,  calling the tree the "largest known living dogwood in the USA"  certified thus in 1995,  31 feet tall and with a 48 foot branch spread.
I stood there feeling the silent electricity of the place.
To the left of the tree there's a fine little marble bench facing the largest part of the cemetery and I went over to read the inscription on it." Perhaps they are not stars in the sky but rather openings for our loved ones to shine down upon us to let us know they are happy."
I smiled and walked around the tree touching the bark and discovered a large cavity on the opposite side of the tree from the bench. Inside the cavity I found a geocache box. It had a notebook and a dozen tokens that people enjoy leaving in such things, but I had nothing to leave there.
I closed the box and walked away back to my car to find something, took a nickel from the dash and went back to put it in the box.
I was reaching into the tree to get the box when I saw it. Ten feet away on the bench there was something I hadn't seen the first time I looked at it. I went to pick it up and found it was a metal barrette or hairclip. It was dirty and rusty and I picked it up and rubbed the sand off it.
I am pretty sure it wasn't there before when I was looking much more closely at the bench and I am completely certain there was nobody else there to leave it when my back was turned.
It pleases me to think of a ghost little girl seeing I needed a token to leave in the box and putting it there for me to find, so that's what I did with it. I signed my twitter handle in the notebook and left the nickel and the clip inside. I embraced the tree, standing there for a long time listening to it and finally left the place, trying to figure out what just happened.
I will go back to speak with the spirit and see if the barrette is still there which I believe it not be. I think she ghost will take it back to give to someone else.

The spectrum of Love

The colors of the rainbow of Love, to my thinking may comprise

Infrared, for passionate lust
Red, for longterm committed relationship love
Orange, for the love of friends
Yellow, for familial love
Green, for love of The Earth and all living things
Blue, for love of Music and the Arts
Indigo, for Universal Love
Violet, for Transcendent Divine Love

Thoughts on dying and love

I am thinking of two people today. One is a wonderful widow woman I spoke with online about eight years ago named Anjolie. She was happily married and her husband slipped and fell in the shower and was dead in two days. She's living with his family in Scotland now. Another is a friend on Twitter named @siren_sweet who's battling cancer and not expecting to live much longer, she has two teenaged children she's leaving behind along with family and friends.
Death could arrive at anybody's door at any hour and I am thinking of the great tenderness and care I showed Angie and Siren when in conversation with either one.
It occurred to me that we should always be conscious of how fragile life is and of how much gratitude we should always show anybody we love or care about or meet in a day.
They could be gone tomorrow morning.

We are Love

We are Love.
Beyond questions of time or place,
Beyond the past, present or future, we are Love...
Amongst the stars, or floating
Together in a little boat
On the warmest trade winds
Across the sea together, we are Love.
Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

One lifetime, a poem for @siren_sweet

One lifetime

A heavy velvet curtain hangs
Across the last day of our lives
Hiding the unseen beyond
Never to be known or shared
We leave this forlorn vale of tears
In sadness, taking nothing with us
The pain of being gone is left
Unfairly to our too young children
And growing up is hard enough
Without your mother by your side
There can be no easy answers
To give a child whose mother's gone
The only comfort is to know
Your love lives always in their hearts
There's nothing else to say or do
But wonder when our own time comes
What we'll find beyond the curtains
Dark and heavy hanging down
Over this life's final day

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Night, A Poem for @Cheyarafim

Night

By the Universal Light, 

  You are not alone

The world of Energy Divine, 

  Fills your heart with Love

If you but allow it so,

  There can no heart roam

The world of Night is quiet now, 

  Just the stars above

Cold and clear and twinkling, 

  Calling out your name

The world is full of Joy and Life,

  Every heart plays love's grand game

Let your heart rest easy now, 

  Lay your head down lightly

You can never be alone by Universal Light

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Review: Ordinary Substance by Zayra Yves

NOV

21

Ordinary Substance by Zayra Yves

Zayra Yves is a California based poet who reads, writes and travels the world and nearby satellites reading her work. In Ordinary Substance we see a woman writing with abandon, leaping into the sky of inspiration...

Impressions:

Zayra Yves presents a surprising difficulty in reviewing her book of poetry Ordinary Substance. There are both abstract poems of love and very concrete discrete imagistic Impressionistic poems. She writes of lovers yes, but they're not coming to her bed, they're coming to the beautiful sun-drenched flower at the center of her being.

There are four chapters, chapbooks perhaps, combined to one unified whole. The highlights of the first book are Becoming Abstract, where the poet begs to be concrete and whole and prefers 

"to be held more often" and Bodies of Angels, fallen people like you and I perhaps, who

"wait for their voices of transmutation while ancestors shake the rattles, cast healing bones into a circle" and "we remember being born dying falling... Our salty hearts torn from shells"

 The Dream That Love Sent is maybe the best of the volume, her lover a dream who

"came from the waters of ancestors/ ancient wonder, dust and isolation"  he is

"open hearted without tears/ like a soul shaped in a Mandala/ that circle of fire burning from within" and together they became "light swimming toward more light"

Part two yields gems like What I was not Counting On and What Cannot Rest in Peace and the poetry takes a darker turn, graveyards appear and love is sometimes lost, lovers leave before or after her heart has seen to protect itself, she gives an ex-con a name on the subway and lets God roll you in a joint and smoke you.

The third book is heavy, freighted with lust and the scent and surrender of sex, as in Thrust of Sky and Bittersweet where

 "in the heart we move undiluted, uninhibited"

Sheba's Song is another memorable verse, her

"heart is a vineyard of grapes ripe and full" 

and Discovering Agamemnon followed by Temple Dancing where her

"body uncoils, unveils coral hues, sapphire blue" is another treat of the third book.

The final book starts with a collection of portraits, as Island Goddess, Street Monk, Healing Hands and At Ugly's Saloon all work enchantments of the poet's vision. She writes an ode to Pilgrim Hitchhiking on the Road of Life, in

"gratitude for sharing this road of phenomena, where I too am lost sometimes in the unknown" 

and speaks of being

"abandoned to your song as a first and last kiss / of immense awareness while our lives / circle around each other / to meet again at the crossroads."

The volume is finished with a powerful chain of poems, she vanishes between water molecules in Dissolving, sees all the stars of heaven in Pinholes, writes of

 "uncharted love just waiting to be discovered"

 in The Heart Moves into the Body, or begs to be allowed to

"cultivate the light (the sweet songs from your voice) and bloom in the night like magnolia" in And, it was going to rain... 

The volume finishes with the bold statement of Sanctuary, a poem about her love who

"arrived in a dream / and left the same way", 

who rises

"like a sweet fragrance in the strangely lonesome field / I call "myself", to populate it with love"

and when she starts to think it is dead then

 "Suddenly the selfless joy of our embrace / emerges like a rose in sunlight / ... and once again / I am surrounded by flowers / in full bloom." 

Zayra Yves is described in the introduction as a Mystic Poet and this work contains many such flights of fancy but she's also sometimes very down to earth here, especially in the second book. But for the most part this is an ambitious work, these are poems to read at the beach perhaps, when you can close your eyes after each one and let the sun bake their dreams into your brain.

They intoxicate the careful reader like opium.

Clifton Goodwin

Autumn Twenty Twelve

Ordinary Substance is published by Magdalena and Co, Santa Clara Ca Copyright Zayra Yves 2007