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Courtesy mysweetcherryblossom.blogspot.com

HOW THE RAINBOW WORKS

for Jean Cook, on learning of her mother’s death

Mostly we occupy ocular zones, clinging
only to what we think we can see.
We can’t see wind or waves of thought,
electrical fields or atoms dancing;
only what they do or make us believe.

Look on all of life as color—­
vibratile movement, heart-centered,
from invisibility to the merely visible.
Never mind what happens when one of us dies.
Where are you before you even get born?
Where am I and all the unseeable souls
we love at this moment, or loathed
before birth? Where are we right now?

Everything that ever happened either
never did or always will with variations.
Let’s put it another way: Nothing ever
happened that wasn’t dreamed, that wasn’t
sketched from the start with artful surprises.
Think of the dreamer as God, a painter,
a ham, to be sure, but a divine old master
whose medium is light and who sidesteps
tedium by leaving room both inside and outside
this picture for subjects and scenery to wing it.

Look on death as living color too: the dyeing
of fabric, submersion into a temporary sea,
a spectruming beyond the reach of sensual
range which, like time, is chained to change;
the strange notion that everything we’ve
ever done or been up until now is past
history, is gone away, is bleached, bereft,
perfect, leaving the scene clean to freshen
with pigment and space and leftover light.

© Al Young
— from HEAVEN: Collected Poems 1956-1990

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© Karen Johnson

Backstage of My Song, an evening with Harry Belafonte, a KPFA benefit held on the 30th of November at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church

BELAFONTE FOR BEGINNERS

Three years before “I Have a Dream” got preached,

the 1960 March on Washington

propelled us into DC. Once we reached

the Saturday when you were going on,

mean horseback cops reared up to stomp us. “Stop!”

one hollered in a trembling southern drawl.

“Let them kids live!” We thanked this rebel cop

with gut sighs, then we cut straight for the Mall.

You, Harry Belafonte, sang our songs.

You let us know you came down on our side.

Green college kids, we knew what rights, what wrongs

forced us to see you, hear you, while we died.

No caving in. No turning back. Just home.

Calypso? All we heard was: “Daylight, come!“

–Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

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When she explained how she was set free

but her boyfriend and best friend weren’t

(“I don’t know what it was about him and her

and I”), you loathe the fool who would collar

her and say: “About him and her and me!”

So you shine it on, the same as you’ve given up

whom and less and fewer and good and well

and was and were as in If I Were a Bell (not

If I Was a Bell) I’d go “Ding-dong-ding-dong, ding!”

Well, look at where you’re coming from:

the grammar Nazi who knows subjunctive mode

(or, better yet, mood), knows indirect object

pronouns, verb-needy nouns, lie, lay, laid, lain.

You know its and it’s and neither, nor, further

farther, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.”

Besides, she’s younger than you. Bitten, mother

tongue suffers. Language, gauged and negotiated,

sends thumbs fumbling and twirling unjustly.

She compares and contrasts sweethearts and cohorts.

You feel their pain and her shame. You lighten up.

– Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

© vozamer

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Courtesy Tissa Eddy Stein, Roger Eddy, Glen Eddy

In memory of Edith Eddy | 23 July 1919- 3 January 2011

Light-years ago: Chapala afternoons,
a lake-like feel and smell, the way we met,
three children California-born, full moons,
the world not yet as gone as it would get.

Lifetimes ago: Kauai, Sri Lanka, France,
the U.K., Switzerland and Italy,
the island of Madeira, China. Once
upon a time you told all this to me.

You grew up in these places, went to school,
learned languages, then found the U.S.A.
Your sisters didn’t follow. You, uncool,
fell fast and hard in love, and there you’d stay.

But all too soon your voice, an earthy purr,
wore down. Still, where your love took root, you star.

– Al Young

© 2011 by Al Young

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The Billy Taylor Trio

for Nana

What’s most fantastical almost always goes

unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.

Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee

your night, creameries your dream factories.

Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest

means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave

of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth

can still be the same earth our ancestors walked.

Chemistry strains to connect our hemispheres.

The right and left sidelines our brain forms

in the rain this new world braves—acid jazz.

The timeless taste her tongue leaves in your mouth,

stirred with unmeasured sugars, greens the day

the way sweet sunlight oxygenates, ignites

all nights, all daytimes, and you—this jumps.

Sheer voltage leaps, but nothing keeps or stays.

Sequence your afternoon as dance. Drink spring.

Holding her hard against you, picture the screenplay.

Take time to remember to get her spells together.

Up jumps the goddess gratified, and up jumped spring.

– Al Young
from Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006

© 2006 by Al Young

Spring Awakening |© John Fleshman

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Gini Savage’s Shape-Shifter | © Al Young

Bluebirds Bathing | © Vivian Torrence

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