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

Review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

How do you review a melancholy book of essays by a gifted, world-weary writer like Rebecca Solnit? By impressions...

In "A Field Guide To Getting Lost" Rebecca Solnit has given us a wide ranging series of essays that begin by getting lost and end up in far flung realms of introverted ruminations ranging from the mundane to the brilliant. Four chapters are titled The Blue of Distance, "the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go." This longing is a major theme of the book, the longing of Spanish Conquistadors looking for gold in the New World, of whom she writes "no one will ever be as lost as those conquistadors ever again". She tells many little stories of loss and finding in this Field Guide, of her grandmother, having lost her mind in mental hospitals after the wrenching horrors of war and being a refugee from the Pale, appearing from a hospital to give her a lipsticked kiss that made her mother scream in terror, thinking she saw blood; of making a film in an abandoned hospital called "The Cure For Living" inspired by a dream of Joy Division; of her dazzling meteoric girlfriend Marine who was in a punk rock band and shared countless adventures with her in California before succumbing to the numbing allure of deadly street drugs... but what ties these essays together is the constant authorial voice, intense and focused even when examining the most rambling subjects, sharing nostalgic whispers from a time and space shared with so many of our generation, the lost suburbs of the '70s or the nostalgia of finding and reading essays like this in The Atlantic or Harpers or The Nation; and finding so many other treasures of history to share and personal stories to relate. Solnit has given us all a wonderful book to lose ourselves in, or find our inner introvert in.