by Cauble, Don
Then, early the next morning, up came the sea captain and he had "Eden" with him. Jesus, he even talked like Eden. A slow, soft voice with strength, like the voice of movie actor Burt Lancaster. But this Greek "Eden" is a university student home for the holidays. His mother lives here. He seemed a bit bewildered, or amused, maybe even mystified, by the whole situation. And how like Eden!
The captain warned me the sea was dangerous that day. He said I shouldn't venture out. The day before, Angelina and I had gone with Bubu and Labés to a little village up the coast. Bubu has a friend back in Germany who keeps a sailing yacht moored for winter in the harbor of this village. Bubu wanted to make sure everything on the boat was in good order. He hired Labés and his fishing boat to take him to the village and asked us to go along. Bubu wanted to show us the ruins of a Mycenaean temple in the hills overlooking the sea near the village, and the nearby ruins of an ancient wall and doorway that had been built long before human beings understood the concept of an arch. But to go out that morning never entered my mind. And why, of all people, should the captain have chosen "Eden" as our interpreter? I'm sure he had a perfectly natural reason. And yet—and yet—.
Bottoms up! It's a mystery to me!
How the world came into being
Once there were three Divine beings. One called Man, one called Woman, and the other called Child. Man went out to put on airs. First he built a fire. He forged an arrow to penetrate the mysteries of time and overcome space. He analyzed a tree and invented the wheel. Man traveled in grand circles and wrote a book on Chance & Circumstance and called his designs to control the world "The Great Purpose." (Man feared death, he feared to be alone; but most of all Man feared the unknown.) He imagined his destiny among the stars and played very serious games with names that Child could never remember and which bored Woman to tears. Man suffered with great pride and would not give up his arrogant ways.
Soon, Woman grew weary of breathing dust and stirring the coals. After all, Woman could envision a totally different world. A world of feelings and relationships and ever-changing forms and colors. The color red she envisioned for the awakening of desire and green to herald the Earth and the coming of Child. Yellow she gave to the intense summer Sun and to the flowers that loved her gladness, and blue she gave to the sea and to the reflection in Man's eyes whenever he looked upon the world without lust or impatience or greed for power. (To edge Man onward she called her vision of a new consciousness NO MORE WAR.) Woman needed orange for balance and for the autumn leaves that delighted Child when they fell from the trees and whirled about upon the garden path; and pink she created so the mind would not freeze in abstractions. Purple she placed on the inner rim of the rainbow, and in the amethyst she wore over her heart, and in the bedroom curtains near the fireplace. (Woman was never quite sure of purple.) Then, without wavering an eye, Woman appeared in radiant white.
This mystified Child, who stared in wonder.
Child longed to be like Man in all his marvelous adventures, but Man would not speak of the great mysteries, but only repeat what he had been told with great authority. Child turned to Woman for comfort, but Woman looked too busy putting spring flowers in her hair and wishing Man would come to his senses.
Child felt utterly alone.
"I will not play these games!" cried Child. "I will not memorize names and ancient causes and I will not be deceived by appearances."
Child vowed this intention with such clarity and with such boldness that, like a dream that awakens the dreamer, or like a bird of pure light, the desire within Child's heart instantly cut through Man's circular reasoning and startled Woman from her enchanting arts.
Deep within consciousness, a leaf trembled. The wheel burst into flame and the flame into a human heart.
This is how Man and Woman saw each other for the first time.
And this is how the world came into being.
Remembrance of you
They say you were born when the earth & mountains
turned green and bright yellow,
& bees swarmed the hills to gather flowers
for their Queen,
& goats with singing throats
roamed the rocks.
The blue morning sea and sky
were one
in the moment of your awakening.
You saw the oneness of life,
& you saw the oneness
dissolve
before your eyes
into so many streams,
& the streams into an unwavering light
within you
I stopped, not knowing how to end the poem. I was sitting alone at Johan's big table, using his old manual typewriter with the Danish alphabet. It was late April and the hills on the road between Sparta and Monemvasia had turned bright yellow with tall flowering shrubs. These fragrant, bright yellow flowers reminded me of the Scotch broom growing along the freeways in Oregon. The singing goats came from that incredible evening as the sun was going down and a goat herder with his dog was herding more than a hundred goats into a canyon corral for the night. The sound of the goats in the wind at dusk in the shadows quickly darkening into night, and a starry sky with a crescent moon, held us motionless, enchanted. In the near distance, the lights of Yephra twinkled and we could hear the sea lapping the land with soft, dark, unending waves.
One morning, late in February, I had looked out over the old fortress walls of Monemvasia and gazed into the bluest sea and sky that I had ever seen. For a moment I stood still and quiet, becoming a part of the blue oneness I gazed upon. I decided this sparkling azure sea could, indeed, have been the birthplace of Venus. Like the Venus I had seen in a painting by Alexander Cabanel. The Goddess, in all her soft and sensuous beauty, lies sleeping (or perhaps she dreams?) on the ocean froth. Frolicking above her in the air, little winged cherubs are blowing conch shells. I could well imagine that she must have been the most gorgeous woman Alexander Cabanel had ever painted. Probably he fell in love with her and that was the death of the artist as a normal man. For a moment, I amused myself with this thought. Then it dawned on me how much this blue Aegean sea and sky reminded me of the gemstone we found in a shop in Athens.
It was a small shop on one of the winding streets that eventually leads up to the Acropolis. Angelina and I walked into the shop by chance, or so we thought. We were looking for a fire opal to have set in silver as a wedding ring for Angie. She had combed the little jewelry shops in the Flea Market area of London, but had seen none she really liked. Here in this little shop in the Plaka we found what she wanted: a lovely and brilliant Australian fire opal in a simple silver setting. It was a beautiful ring and, no doubt, symbolic in some way of our marriage. As for myself, I seldom wear jewelry. Not even a watch. I don't care for metal things on my hands. So I was just curiously looking at the rings inside the glass case when a blue sky stone, set in a man's silver ring, caught my eye. I had never seen a stone like this before. The blue was as blue as the Aegean Sea, but with a hint of white clouds. Like the earth seen from outer space. I asked to see the ring and it was a perfect fit. As perfect as my large knuckles allowed. The proprietor of the store—a man who looked more Turkish or Middle Eastern than Greek—motioned for his daughter, who spoke good English, to answer our questions about the ring. She called the stone Larimar, and said it's found in only one place in the world—a mine recently discovered on an island in the Dominican Republic
She looked at me curiously, or so I imagined.
The woman was about my own age and had coal black hair and luminous eyes and an earthly, sensual beauty in her face. "It is a stone of free will and free joy," she said, articulating her words slowly and precisely. Her eyes glowed with an inner light, as if she were seeing into the heart of the stone. "I see this to be the Child's Stone. A stone of being who you wish to be—and doing what you wish to do—with the freedom of the child. A stone of knowing how you feel and what you want—as a child knows—instinctively."
I slipped the stone on t
he ring finger of my right hand and imagined myself wearing it. For me, this blue stone was the stone of the warm shallow seas and the white cloud sky. The stone of the wanderer who finds joy and never loses his way.
The woman, still looking at the ring with warm, dreamy eyes, raised one hand to her neck and pulled a thin silver chain from beneath her black wool sweater. On the chain, set in a delicate silver loop, was another blue sky stone.
"I love this stone," she said to us, almost in a whisper. "I keep it with me all the time. It is the stone of a Dreamer."
A quiver of excitement showed in her voice. Angelina squeezed my hand. We both felt honored that this woman had shown us her personal power stone. Glancing at the ring still on my finger, the woman said, "These are Dreaming stones. They carry a new message to the world."
What did she mean by that? I was afraid to ask, afraid the question would break the magical spell. Looking at the stone on my finger in that strangely warm and dreaming way, the woman said, "I feel this is your stone. Yes. The Child's Stone is your personal stone."
Perhaps she was just saying this to sell me the ring, quibbled the doubter in me. But I don't think so. She was not a woman to lie about such things. Besides, I had made up my mind to take the ring right from the beginning. I felt that the energy of the blue sky stone was closely connected to my heart. I bought the ring and Angelina took the fire opal and we walked back down the hill, both in a slightly astonished dream.
But the inspiration for the poem…?
The elusive chemistry, the subtle indivisibility of this remembrance, felt to me like a fleeting dream in the early morning light; like a moonbeam in the grasses or the shadow of a hand against a tree limb; like the dancing flitter of light among trees or the pattern of reflections in water or the movement of a young girl passing by a window: all these things that come and go, that you see and do not know if you really saw or not.
I wanted a good ending to my poem. Something solid, final, unshakable. To be the few notes of a melody heard faraway and not the complete song, this felt most unsettling to my mind. I was used to thinking in terms of tight, defined structures, and the routines of daily life, and concrete forms that seemed to defy the changes of time and the tides. In my belief system, I judged things right or wrong; real or not real. The undefined: all those things that you couldn't touch, and that have no continuity, belonged to the world of illusion and fantasy and to the dangerous and watery realm of Neptune. But not to the planet Earth. I could not imagine that the essence of the life force might happen randomly from day to day, here today, somewhere else tomorrow, a bit of this, a pinch of that, a little piece of sunray, a little rainbow, a dewdrop, a flower, a butterfly's wings traced against the sun. I could not believe that these things might contain any real meaning, expressed in a way that only the peripheral of my mind, the edges of my sight, the inner ear, the half-beat between my heart beats, could understand. Nor could I see that these elusory impressions and fleeting images and memories that could not be made tangible, or stuck into some rigid category, or confined in a system, or explained by a theory, or controlled by the laws of this or that: all these things that come and go, that slip past the corner of your eye, that you see and do not know if you really saw or not, contain the essence of magic and beauty and playfulness and are just as real and meaningful and alive as the life animals live or plants live or human beings live; that these things are more than just frosting and adornment and ornaments solicited by a none-too-real imagination,—or temptations that would lead me astray into sloth and indolence and false longings; but they are living strands of energy and power and essence that help to keep the mind from turning rigid and cold and going dead; and through these things that come and go, that you see and do not know if you really saw or not; that through these flights of fantasy, these delicate ribbons of light, these rainbow colors, these fleeting dreams, I might cease this ancient war with myself and bring a great opening to my heart and to my mind and to the other energy centers of my body, and create within and around myself a kind of healing spaciousness and a gentle passage that would bring me home to the truth of my being, to the wholeness of personality and self, and to my unremembered identity.
The big iron gate
I see a man in pain and a man who wants death,
and a man who asks, "Why?"
He turns to me in anger;
and I hear an old man talking to the stars.
"What do the stars tell you, Old Man?"
The old man mumbles under a great moustache,
"Tonight the stars are joking with me!"
And I hear the guards closing the big iron gate.
Beyond walls
To see you for just moments—
my heart turns to rage.
I'm in prison, guards at every turn.
I see you through an iron screen.
I love you beyond walls,
beyond rage and the guards.
Remember, they shot Garcia Lorca.
They tried Blake for treason.
Who escapes?
To be free
The greatest wonder in life,
and on earth, is this:
to see, to love, to be free.
Anger, greed, selfishness, pride:
all are prisons.
They limit my spirit.
Only love does not limit my spirit.
The cry
for Douglas Blazek
Love- being an essential word—
Begin this song, envelop it all.
—Carlos Drummond De Andrade
Love!
The very stones cry out,
as poets make old hats
& twist sur-
realism
into a mathematical
landscape.
Bravo,
worn out history
& women in dreams.
Bravo, the everlasting sonnet
—a corpse
on rue Saint-Lazare
where the River Seine
overflows black oil,
misery
& initiation into death.
Love!
The very stones cry out
in so many languages,
surely the stones
have retreated into the desert,
or sank into the poisonous sea;
as work horses transform
our dreams into a cellular fog,
& love turns the other way,
seeking the heart
clear of smoke and relics.
Melancholia: over-indulgence;
anger & bitterness.
Some mornings, I swear,
my soul will not bear
another day in this prison cell.
Ten times worse
Look, here I am in a Greek prison,
& workers are hammering
yet another roof over my head,
high above the walls.
I find distraction in symbols,
while my neighbor groans in his sleep.
One man worships a cross;
another man kills his mother.
Each moment is a replaceable part
in this prison;
each act a play for mercy.
We walk from one cell to the other;
we pace the concrete yard
& with nervous steps, we wear out infinity.
The world bitches without pause.
There's no end to misery!
We're prisoners of the past, the future,
of everything we know
& of all that we do not know.
We're prisoners of thought.
In stillness comes the fire
The Farm...Will I ever see the Farm?
Evergreens and Oregon rains...homemade peach ice
cream...peppermint tea and Naomi and yellow
wildflowers by the stream....
Day and night in this prison
I dream.
Enough!
Be still and flow.<
br />
I am here,
and truth is just this.
Only the earth
Christmas comes and goes,
& now it's Easter time.
Look, here comes the priest!
Aw, he's old and fat,
he looks like death warmed over.
Around him, candles burning,
chant a dozen prisoners.
The seven locked gates
he sprinkles with holy water.
Inside, we quietly celebrate
our beer and cakes,
& the sacrificial entrails
we throw to the cats.
The wind whirls ashes before my eyes,
clouds gather in the sky.
The night falls in rain.
And only the earth—
this earth that catches
& transforms my spirit—
only the earth is my resurrection.