by Tammy T. Stone
a morning just
before rain,
under a swelling grey sky
an incense dome enfolding
gauzy
hands brushing dreams to face
monks in procession in a
world of honour and
not forgetting
chanting, the souls of
the sweet dead and discarded
my bursting heart
listens to a mournful
purple elegy
little beings piling up below
on the pyre
readying for ascent
Showing posts with label Tammy T. Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tammy T. Stone. Show all posts
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Come Find Me
by Tammy T. Stone
Come find me,
The world depends on it.
Meet me at the stepped rock
You know the one
Atop Pure Land Mountain.
You say you haven’t heard
Windhorses rustling in holy height
I say, find your way to
Remembrance.
The air is so thin up there
That skin and bones fall away
Leaving everything we need,
The space between us.
Come find me,
The world depends on it.
Meet me at the stepped rock
You know the one
Atop Pure Land Mountain.
You say you haven’t heard
Windhorses rustling in holy height
I say, find your way to
Remembrance.
The air is so thin up there
That skin and bones fall away
Leaving everything we need,
The space between us.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Lone asylum behind me
by Tammy T. Stone
Lone asylum behind me
Perched on a hilltop
The walls have long disappeared
To join the other
Naked inhabitants, and it
Gets so cold at night,
So dark, especially when the
Moon has hardly grown
Which explains all the wailing
And ahead of me, the
Mountain which is not a mountain
High peaks razed trees
Luminous points like eyes, like
The full moon,
The growing, which we have
Had the fortune to witness
Most nights the sky
Has been clear
Though things change
So fast as we watch,
Clouds now, and
The trees which are not trees
Grow walnuts and sour
Cherries under the fog,
You can watch them
Be eaten by
The birds which are not birds, who
Welcome us early to the day.
Lone asylum behind me
Perched on a hilltop
The walls have long disappeared
To join the other
Naked inhabitants, and it
Gets so cold at night,
So dark, especially when the
Moon has hardly grown
Which explains all the wailing
And ahead of me, the
Mountain which is not a mountain
High peaks razed trees
Luminous points like eyes, like
The full moon,
The growing, which we have
Had the fortune to witness
Most nights the sky
Has been clear
Though things change
So fast as we watch,
Clouds now, and
The trees which are not trees
Grow walnuts and sour
Cherries under the fog,
You can watch them
Be eaten by
The birds which are not birds, who
Welcome us early to the day.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Godly Things
by Tammy T. Stone
Who knows why things happen? There are so many things, large and small – in a day, a life – it’s almost overwhelming. As a huge film lover, I’ve seen thousands and thousands of movies, and somehow they haven’t thought up everything yet.
Things like people reaching out in any number of small, necessary, non-cinematic but so-monumental ways.
It’s dark. I’m on a bus. Incandescent lights fill the night with warmth. A student with straggly blond hair sits next to his friends and a very thin woman who seems to be a nurse. She has a Bible she reads with fingers arched down as she skims the page.
A moment later, without taking her eyes off the page, she reaches into a pocket and turns to the scraggly-haired student and offers him a “Love Jesus” pamphlet without a word.
He takes it, smiles slightly beyond her to his friends – she can’t see this – and puts the pamphlet into his backpack. She reads for a moment and reaches for another pamphlet – she’s thinking and reading at the same time. Or she’s not reading at all, but wanting to share the Word.
She points it in the direction of the guy’s friends, and then to me. No one takes it. She nods and puts the pamphlet away, continuing to read the whole time.
It’s darker now. A little girl is almost buried behind a newspaper on the bus, her little bobby-socked legs not nearly reaching the ground. Her little fingers chubbily grasp the edges of the paper, which covers her body from tummy to sprouting braids with the pink and green elastics. Picture-perfection.
Her father reads from a file to her right, across the way. Her newspaper slowly falls to her lap. Her head lolls in sleep. I see that she has Down’s Syndrome. When her father notices she’s dozed off, he cradles her under his arm and reads the file over her head.
These are pictures I recreate with language. The sound has been lost in memory, because I am not a musician and my eyes feed me more strongly. Who remembers the drone of a bus except in movies, when it has been added onto the soundtrack?
But I’m seeing, always trying to see more.
I’m at a café. A thin man sits by himself in the corner smoking and drinking a small coffee. He looks like Henry Fonda, Easy Rider days. Blue tank top, loose-fitting grey dress pants. Near him a couple sits, legs intertwined. Two women sit down in front of me and speak in Japanese. Henry Fonda starts talking to them.
“Sometimes people say they’ve seen God and are blessed by God. I don’t want to be a part of the world. I trust God. People don’t keep their promises, don’t follow through. They say they’ll pay you tomorrow, tomorrow never comes.
“God keeps his words. He’s never going to leave me. Sometimes I say that out loud but most of the time I don’t have to. Gifted people do a holy dance to God. God takes care of every race.
“God is in every race. We are all children of light. Kay? God bless you. I’m not trying to preach you, just tell you about the love of God.”
He takes a sip of coffee and meets my eyes. He comes over and asks if he can sit down. I say yes.
He tells me he’s been in jail on and off for twelve years, since the age of sixteen. He had a cocaine habit for eighteen years. His parents may not have been perfect but they at least tried to teach him the difference between right and wrong.
He still faces temptation, he says, and it’s hard for him to resist it, so he goes home and to the Word, to read the Bible, because the minute your eyes leave the page they are away from God and that’s when bad things can happen. He wants at least to tell others about God’s love …
When I get up to leave, he says he’ll say a prayer for me tonight. He isn’t the first to say this to me, and his words bring back a memory.
My sister, two little cousins and I once played with the Ouija board all together, when I was about fifteen. My cousins had never played before; they were too young and had no idea what was going on. My sister had a tendency to cheat, but not with Ouija, she didn’t know how yet. I was earnest. I was always reaching for what was beyond my senses and I wanted to be invited in.
Moments later, my maternal grandfather appeared to come to us – he was our common ancestor.
We were scared and in full belief. We asked him if he had anything he wanted to tell us, and we were all shaken by his reply, which not one of us could have invented.
“I’m praying for you girls.”
He was not a religious man for any number of possible reasons. I don’t really know, I was so young when I knew him. I never found out what kind of person he wanted to be, or wanted us to be, or what kind of world he wanted to leave behind for the rest of us.
I’m sure it was a beautiful one, full of godly things.
Things like people reaching out in any number of small, necessary, non-cinematic but so-monumental ways.
It’s dark. I’m on a bus. Incandescent lights fill the night with warmth. A student with straggly blond hair sits next to his friends and a very thin woman who seems to be a nurse. She has a Bible she reads with fingers arched down as she skims the page.
A moment later, without taking her eyes off the page, she reaches into a pocket and turns to the scraggly-haired student and offers him a “Love Jesus” pamphlet without a word.
He takes it, smiles slightly beyond her to his friends – she can’t see this – and puts the pamphlet into his backpack. She reads for a moment and reaches for another pamphlet – she’s thinking and reading at the same time. Or she’s not reading at all, but wanting to share the Word.
She points it in the direction of the guy’s friends, and then to me. No one takes it. She nods and puts the pamphlet away, continuing to read the whole time.
It’s darker now. A little girl is almost buried behind a newspaper on the bus, her little bobby-socked legs not nearly reaching the ground. Her little fingers chubbily grasp the edges of the paper, which covers her body from tummy to sprouting braids with the pink and green elastics. Picture-perfection.
Her father reads from a file to her right, across the way. Her newspaper slowly falls to her lap. Her head lolls in sleep. I see that she has Down’s Syndrome. When her father notices she’s dozed off, he cradles her under his arm and reads the file over her head.
These are pictures I recreate with language. The sound has been lost in memory, because I am not a musician and my eyes feed me more strongly. Who remembers the drone of a bus except in movies, when it has been added onto the soundtrack?
But I’m seeing, always trying to see more.
I’m at a café. A thin man sits by himself in the corner smoking and drinking a small coffee. He looks like Henry Fonda, Easy Rider days. Blue tank top, loose-fitting grey dress pants. Near him a couple sits, legs intertwined. Two women sit down in front of me and speak in Japanese. Henry Fonda starts talking to them.
“Sometimes people say they’ve seen God and are blessed by God. I don’t want to be a part of the world. I trust God. People don’t keep their promises, don’t follow through. They say they’ll pay you tomorrow, tomorrow never comes.
“God keeps his words. He’s never going to leave me. Sometimes I say that out loud but most of the time I don’t have to. Gifted people do a holy dance to God. God takes care of every race.
“God is in every race. We are all children of light. Kay? God bless you. I’m not trying to preach you, just tell you about the love of God.”
He takes a sip of coffee and meets my eyes. He comes over and asks if he can sit down. I say yes.
He tells me he’s been in jail on and off for twelve years, since the age of sixteen. He had a cocaine habit for eighteen years. His parents may not have been perfect but they at least tried to teach him the difference between right and wrong.
He still faces temptation, he says, and it’s hard for him to resist it, so he goes home and to the Word, to read the Bible, because the minute your eyes leave the page they are away from God and that’s when bad things can happen. He wants at least to tell others about God’s love …
When I get up to leave, he says he’ll say a prayer for me tonight. He isn’t the first to say this to me, and his words bring back a memory.
My sister, two little cousins and I once played with the Ouija board all together, when I was about fifteen. My cousins had never played before; they were too young and had no idea what was going on. My sister had a tendency to cheat, but not with Ouija, she didn’t know how yet. I was earnest. I was always reaching for what was beyond my senses and I wanted to be invited in.
Moments later, my maternal grandfather appeared to come to us – he was our common ancestor.
We were scared and in full belief. We asked him if he had anything he wanted to tell us, and we were all shaken by his reply, which not one of us could have invented.
“I’m praying for you girls.”
He was not a religious man for any number of possible reasons. I don’t really know, I was so young when I knew him. I never found out what kind of person he wanted to be, or wanted us to be, or what kind of world he wanted to leave behind for the rest of us.
I’m sure it was a beautiful one, full of godly things.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Five Rupee Poems: GANGA
by Tammy T. Stone
A smile on the inside
The organ of body
And sounds together
Have an experience:
Expelled from
Yesterday, a quiet
Place inside,
The light can’t quite
Touch it yet, this place
That the future invites
Me into.
I start to see
A door: thick, wooden,
And two-sided
With etchings and reliefs
From a culture I
Can’t place at first, until
I hear music from
Renaissance Italy,
Like glass singing,
Graceful for the Courts.
This is the door I see,
The worlds through it,
Every desire for light.
They might be saying
Something because
I’m here to listen,
The paint is speaking
From this century,
Dressing the ones before
It, thanking
Gurus and Gods between,
The Beatles,
And everything that
Has made Love and
The stillness here, stillness,
The ashram is singing.
Round awake
And a perfect yellow
Leaf with death immanent
On the left side.
Still it curves majestically,
It won’t crumble,
The walls are not
Forever either, but
Still I can look through
Them, forty years in
Every direction
They are,
Having created,
Having got us together,
Nodding their approval
After a morning
Of Om, the chant of
Vibration and all sides, to the
Music of my childhood
Soul,
Gently weeping sounds.
Say it again.
The door asks, will you
Arrive, and what
Will you see as we move
Heavily and the river
Falls over rocks, carries
Secrets and prayers
Flowing past, but we
Can only see the
Body, and so mistake
Stillness
For gravity.
At Haridwar, the Ganga
Breaks away from the
Himalayas and begins.
Pilgrims flood daily,
Piles and piles of shoes
Rest happily, wearily,
As we find a spot
On the steps leading
Down to the moving waters,
The entrance to sacred origin,
People find
Ways of changing into
Trunks hiding in full view
Snapping photos knee deep
In the holy flow of things.
Getting here, wide-eyed as
The train sleeps,
Cloth from home turns
Seats into furniture,
Three hours late, meals behind,
Daylight still arrives on
Schedule,
So simple, so deep.
I sit, call your face and
It appears in full
Clarity, but it’s your
Eyes I see first, how
They are so large from
Taking so much of the
World into them, and how
They see into mine,
Not here, not to my
Person,
Somewhere else they have
Joined in full communion.
From a feeling its parts emerge;
The way the song reminds
You, I know, of your twenties,
The way they chose purple
Cushions and an orange
Tablecloth where our imaginations
Take us, and how you love
Those colours, standing out in
The clutter of a café space,
The way you still can’t
Believe you saw a body
Burning up into the Ganga
Sky yesterday.
One time, last words,
Unceasing creation.
Song and fire offered
out to friends
Everywhere, flower
Gods flow down current,
I reach an end looking
Down and there’s an artist
Drawing a young chai wallah
Who turns to see his
New creator, and soon
He sits to pose, serious,
Unmoving, brilliant.
A boat passes behind all
This, against every moon,
A lone vessel carried
By her mother, its master
Lit in his moving castle,
With Christmas lights and
All this grace.
A smile on the inside
The organ of body
And sounds together
Have an experience:
Expelled from
Yesterday, a quiet
Place inside,
The light can’t quite
Touch it yet, this place
That the future invites
Me into.
I start to see
A door: thick, wooden,
And two-sided
With etchings and reliefs
From a culture I
Can’t place at first, until
I hear music from
Renaissance Italy,
Like glass singing,
Graceful for the Courts.
This is the door I see,
The worlds through it,
Every desire for light.
They might be saying
Something because
I’m here to listen,
The paint is speaking
From this century,
Dressing the ones before
It, thanking
Gurus and Gods between,
The Beatles,
And everything that
Has made Love and
The stillness here, stillness,
The ashram is singing.
Round awake
And a perfect yellow
Leaf with death immanent
On the left side.
Still it curves majestically,
It won’t crumble,
The walls are not
Forever either, but
Still I can look through
Them, forty years in
Every direction
They are,
Having created,
Having got us together,
Nodding their approval
After a morning
Of Om, the chant of
Vibration and all sides, to the
Music of my childhood
Soul,
Gently weeping sounds.
Say it again.
The door asks, will you
Arrive, and what
Will you see as we move
Heavily and the river
Falls over rocks, carries
Secrets and prayers
Flowing past, but we
Can only see the
Body, and so mistake
Stillness
For gravity.
At Haridwar, the Ganga
Breaks away from the
Himalayas and begins.
Pilgrims flood daily,
Piles and piles of shoes
Rest happily, wearily,
As we find a spot
On the steps leading
Down to the moving waters,
The entrance to sacred origin,
People find
Ways of changing into
Trunks hiding in full view
Snapping photos knee deep
In the holy flow of things.
Getting here, wide-eyed as
The train sleeps,
Cloth from home turns
Seats into furniture,
Three hours late, meals behind,
Daylight still arrives on
Schedule,
So simple, so deep.
I sit, call your face and
It appears in full
Clarity, but it’s your
Eyes I see first, how
They are so large from
Taking so much of the
World into them, and how
They see into mine,
Not here, not to my
Person,
Somewhere else they have
Joined in full communion.
From a feeling its parts emerge;
The way the song reminds
You, I know, of your twenties,
The way they chose purple
Cushions and an orange
Tablecloth where our imaginations
Take us, and how you love
Those colours, standing out in
The clutter of a café space,
The way you still can’t
Believe you saw a body
Burning up into the Ganga
Sky yesterday.
One time, last words,
Unceasing creation.
Song and fire offered
out to friends
Everywhere, flower
Gods flow down current,
I reach an end looking
Down and there’s an artist
Drawing a young chai wallah
Who turns to see his
New creator, and soon
He sits to pose, serious,
Unmoving, brilliant.
A boat passes behind all
This, against every moon,
A lone vessel carried
By her mother, its master
Lit in his moving castle,
With Christmas lights and
All this grace.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
The Outpouring of Hearts
by Tammy T. Stone
I’m writing with a borrowed pen on
Brown paper towels from the bathroom.
A zombie or a sound poet? she asks and
Laughs. Her throaty voice from being sick.
I dream of coarser paper from gas
Station toilets. Of the movie Gaz Bar Blues.
Waiting and feeling good is all I need.
In due time means nothing but waiting in full,
Of fullness and with the future inside of it, the
Outpouring of hearts. This is the now that lives.
Major heart troubles, I imagine telling
The old Canadian actor down the street,
The bohemian barefoot one, after I nod hello
And he invites me in to get
High and get at all the meanings.
Better than brain trouble, I suppose.
No more writing myself out Love
Beloved.
I love her, next to me, old, Asian, taking a massive
Last drag of her cigarette. Her lungs
First filled with smoke in another country
Under the sun.
I’m writing with a borrowed pen on
Brown paper towels from the bathroom.
A zombie or a sound poet? she asks and
Laughs. Her throaty voice from being sick.
I dream of coarser paper from gas
Station toilets. Of the movie Gaz Bar Blues.
Waiting and feeling good is all I need.
In due time means nothing but waiting in full,
Of fullness and with the future inside of it, the
Outpouring of hearts. This is the now that lives.
Major heart troubles, I imagine telling
The old Canadian actor down the street,
The bohemian barefoot one, after I nod hello
And he invites me in to get
High and get at all the meanings.
Better than brain trouble, I suppose.
No more writing myself out Love
Beloved.
I love her, next to me, old, Asian, taking a massive
Last drag of her cigarette. Her lungs
First filled with smoke in another country
Under the sun.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
THE DAY AFTER ALLEN GINSBERG DIED AT THE AGE OF 70
by Tammy T. Stone
They were the children of glassy-eyed drunken house lords aging foxes in inner city world loose soiled undershirts hanging on saggy flesh these hidden gods of Ginsberg’s time
Who had sex in the hour of night when they couldn’t count the stars because the smog and drink took away the worst of the paranoia
With beer in their fingers cooling bulging blue sweltering necks cleaning their throats that gurgled and splattered acid words
While their women waddled from kitchens to men bound in spider creations sticky inviting obsessing and making
Mashing potatoes bought from corner stores where spotted young faces smiled and listened to tales of the ailments of aunts
At home the cleaned windows of the misguided insects who never got into the cluttered dens brightened by fading
Their children locked by fatherly spews and mothery tears that whispered coos of I was beautiful once but I’ve done good by you tell me I’ve done good by you give me a kiss
And the boys of Ginsberg’s time gave kisses seeing the madness knowing it crawled to them on their faded bedsheets where dingy lamps dimly lit their papers and pens and roaming hands
Leaving the spoils of their sutra weaving for another generation while they looked back on spirited bottles and shook the pillboxes on their mothers’ bedsides
And left the houses of mothers and fathers to seek their likenesses in other men youthful sexual bodies and benzedrine
Lying still in sunflower beds tiger orange recesses of primal state put into letters to Africa and poems and books that breathed through their beat clawing and saying no
And killing the sex driven love driven fantasies but not before the mad prophesies of the men of Ginsberg’s time came together and spoke again
They were the children of glassy-eyed drunken house lords aging foxes in inner city world loose soiled undershirts hanging on saggy flesh these hidden gods of Ginsberg’s time
Who had sex in the hour of night when they couldn’t count the stars because the smog and drink took away the worst of the paranoia
With beer in their fingers cooling bulging blue sweltering necks cleaning their throats that gurgled and splattered acid words
While their women waddled from kitchens to men bound in spider creations sticky inviting obsessing and making
Mashing potatoes bought from corner stores where spotted young faces smiled and listened to tales of the ailments of aunts
At home the cleaned windows of the misguided insects who never got into the cluttered dens brightened by fading
Their children locked by fatherly spews and mothery tears that whispered coos of I was beautiful once but I’ve done good by you tell me I’ve done good by you give me a kiss
And the boys of Ginsberg’s time gave kisses seeing the madness knowing it crawled to them on their faded bedsheets where dingy lamps dimly lit their papers and pens and roaming hands
Leaving the spoils of their sutra weaving for another generation while they looked back on spirited bottles and shook the pillboxes on their mothers’ bedsides
And left the houses of mothers and fathers to seek their likenesses in other men youthful sexual bodies and benzedrine
Lying still in sunflower beds tiger orange recesses of primal state put into letters to Africa and poems and books that breathed through their beat clawing and saying no
And killing the sex driven love driven fantasies but not before the mad prophesies of the men of Ginsberg’s time came together and spoke again
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Bird at the Window
by Tammy T. Stone
She didn’t talk on the phone anymore. The phone was still installed, but it sat on a little stand on a faded plastic chair she found at the back of a Mexican restaurant. The phone gathered dust she never removed. The alleyway at the back of the Mexican restaurant, which she walked through once a week on the way to an appointment, was full of concrete and the colours of dead regal things. Wires and electrical ditties sprouted everywhere, from porous brick walls to the cavernous bottoms of doorways and crown molding like veins that pulsed the sun itself.
Some were cut and hung limp without this kind of life in it and when she saw these sprigs of former circuitry she thought the city must have died.
(In a dead city there is no room for phone calls.)
A bird came to sit on her windowsill, the one in the kitchen with its yellow walls and junk pile of dried out spices. She didn’t use her spices anymore because once her eyes started to well up
at everything she saw outside on her weekly walk, she realized she couldn’t smell or taste anymore. Her throat was closed. Her eyes had become wide gaping receptacles and the world knew all about it. Sometimes she thought the world flocked to her because she was the last one to see.
Every colour and shape forced themselves into her until she screamed and threw up and had nothing left inside of her that was originally her own. The dead city was deep inside her now. The bird that sat on her window wanted to poke her until she bled the city back into life.
She didn’t talk on the phone anymore. The phone was still installed, but it sat on a little stand on a faded plastic chair she found at the back of a Mexican restaurant. The phone gathered dust she never removed. The alleyway at the back of the Mexican restaurant, which she walked through once a week on the way to an appointment, was full of concrete and the colours of dead regal things. Wires and electrical ditties sprouted everywhere, from porous brick walls to the cavernous bottoms of doorways and crown molding like veins that pulsed the sun itself.
Some were cut and hung limp without this kind of life in it and when she saw these sprigs of former circuitry she thought the city must have died.
(In a dead city there is no room for phone calls.)
A bird came to sit on her windowsill, the one in the kitchen with its yellow walls and junk pile of dried out spices. She didn’t use her spices anymore because once her eyes started to well up
at everything she saw outside on her weekly walk, she realized she couldn’t smell or taste anymore. Her throat was closed. Her eyes had become wide gaping receptacles and the world knew all about it. Sometimes she thought the world flocked to her because she was the last one to see.
Every colour and shape forced themselves into her until she screamed and threw up and had nothing left inside of her that was originally her own. The dead city was deep inside her now. The bird that sat on her window wanted to poke her until she bled the city back into life.
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