Twelfth Of September

Twelfth Of September
© Surazeus
2018 02 25

After walking home from elementary school,
where I wrote one-line poems from list of words,
I take notebook and pencil from my room
to sit at the park bench in our back yard
and write white clouds shimmer in curving sky,
which I imagine is round like my eye.

We call the warm land Texas where I live,
which means friends and allies in the language
of the Caddo tribe who came from the cave
they called Chahkanina, the place of crying,
and I see horses gallop in the sky,
who were born from the apple of my eye.

Looking through row of six thin apple trees,
I see our horses grazing in the field
surrounded by barbed wire along the road
where I ride my bike Sunday afternoons,
and I feel time turning across the sky,
photographed by the blinking of my eye.

Just at that moment, far across the land,
Robert Lowell, my cousin from Anne Bradstreet,
dies from a heart attack in the black cab
after flying from England home to Manhattan,
and his vatic soul spreads across the sky
in Apollo-shaped cloud outside my eye.

With husband and father young Anne Bradstreet,
still dreaming of Castile and Aquitaine,
sailed from England to Massachusetts shore
where she sang poems for our lost Fairie Queen,
and she saw God as sunlight in the sky
who creates the world through our dreaming eye.

Twelve days away from my thirteenth birthday,
I think about Jesus, the king of fools,
who watches me from bright palace of light,
woven from crystal beams on high sun mountain,
who will descend in star ship from the sky
to take me to paradise in my eye.

Wrapping myself in my long green wool cloak,
I declare to my dog, who wags her tail,
that I am the elf bard Solarian
who invented Dream Runes I made from sticks,
and I will hand-glide in the clear blue sky
to see the world like toys inside my eye.

Since I was baptized in the Adventist church,
one year after my singing grandpa died,
by the pastor who was a young street punk
in Brooklyn, I think about gift of heaven,
how I will rise from death into the sky
and see Jesus on his throne with my eye.

The old gray-haired lady in Sabbath School
explains that each person who goes to heaven
will be given their own planet in space
where we will live for all eternity,
so I walk home, gazing at the vast sky
and feel my planet spinning in my eye.

The gray cat Whiskers, with short crooked tail,
jumps on the table and stands on my book,
so I scratch his head and nuzzle his nose,
and invent new words for language of elves
that describe the sun, the Earth, and the sky,
and everything I perceive with my eye.

I name my planet as I map its lands
Ranika for the father of all tribes,
named Ranian as Reynard the wily fox,
and I am his grandson Solarian
who flies silver star ship across the sky,
dreaming history in my omniscient eye.

Since Jesus died two thousand years ago
his descendants ruled the kingdoms of Europe,
but we sail to land of America
to escape tyrants in castles and churches,
for Jesus will not descend from the sky
and I dream the world as song in my eye.

We are the prophets who write riddling spells,
ten thousand poets sea to shining sea
who chant subjective visions on the stage
and glow with light of truth in the mute void
till we lie down and die under vast sky
and our souls vanish from our dreamless eye.

These are my thoughts never written in my diary
on the Twelfth of September in Seventy-Seven,
though I wrote a thousand pages of words
to record observations of my mind
because those clouds are still there in the sky
and I still dream the world inside my eye.