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Lansing Day Poem
Carefree in leisure time, one blasé tourist,
almost happy, I once had collected a complicated stone;
after the sunny hours had ended and last opportunity
for keepsakes began.
In my hand the stone had kept all of its mouths sewn shut,
holding its amalgamated story, and likewise in the car,
on the plane, through US Customs where it was not
in the least suspected.
A thumbnail identity I now should guess at, marking an old date,
and fixing it to, with reasonable estimate, a map location:
Plot No. 243, East end of the island, slave sugar plantation,
the stone from the corner of a ruined windmill stair—
broken free by my criminal hand, having liberated a vine.
The stone looked like a bleached out mini-monolith, square-rectangular,
able to be stood on end, leaning back and swollen at its center
like a pulled cork.
What could have moved this sequestered world to opening?
That was not for me to discover, except what came on Christmas Day,
two days after my returning.
Slave watercourses, the sight of innumerable Dutch ships,
ballasted with human flesh and hewn rock for sugar works buildings.
The drop at arms swish of the Driver’s bullwhip.
Flecks of spirit splayed on vegetation.
A mongrel dog barked beyond the windless wall of sugarcane
in centipede and mosquito heat.
Seaside, beautiful seaside impressions;
distant coral light shadows, etched deep azure;
snowy colored breakers that pencil-marked the sea.
The staid, vibrant, mocking power
of visual symphony backdrop.
So little of aid for the slaves, but for those dangerous secrets,
unhoused in the fallen coolness of the night:
demonstratively crystalline heaven of stars;
a ragged moon, clouds scudding eastward toward Africa
before freshwater rainsqualls came. And there
Orion’s Belt, mid-sky, illustrious bright, with its three
centering star points in rational line, as if
Hope could have flung such a rope anchor onto Life
engendering sanctified resistance.
Christmas morning, 5 a.m.
I had awakened from a stuck place, shapeless and dark,
half in dreaming and half in knowing I was in no dream.
I was sobbing, yet strangely, because there were no tears.
I had only put the stone inside my pajama top onto my heart.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2013
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Lansing Day Poem
Hands awaken! Speak out! Answer to sacred shouts,
subterranean whispering, to stars above rooftops—
thread sunlit branches with the chattering of a thousand leaves.
If fluxes and urgencies of confusion or death
should drawn you into your self-box, I say,
remember when one constructed self-prison fell away.
However you helped this forward,
do more of the same.
Be rain-hands, weeping, steeped in earth fragrance.
Be fingers in blossom, faces turning upward,
loves innumerable, rough-cut bedazzled—
unafraid to be splayed open.
Be pocketed hands, released to the welcoming wind—
multiplying there in mid-air,
riding the four directions.
Be hands of smoke and fire, descending and ascending like ragged bird-song—
effulgent, double-charged with surprise
and now even with mock surprises.
Start at the beginning, where you are.
Don’t be satiate with loll-lolling
recede wave’s tide, retreat back and back
into yourselves, until grown utterly intellectual and lumpish!
Now, you Human Being—you come awake also!
Sweep the furnishings from table. Upend the table lawlessly.
Bring the muscular, fleshy, feminine against the masculine and muscular.
Bring the masculine to the feminine. Bring friend to enemy,
estranged neighbor to the confidant. In a dance of pressing hands,
let subtle conversation play.
Ring all the tiny bells.
Stir the King and Queen of Remembrance.
In over-arching restraint, holding back one iota, so pure notes sound—
bring sunburst, sphere and harmony.
Make your entire body a listening board
forming therein—tender shape around which love
seed unfolds infinite spaces and then…
Spring awake! All to better dreaming
where hope and faith are undashed, not this dying.
O, hear me now! Hands, every which one of you,
with every human—never again sleep,
never abandon!
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2013
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Lansing Day Poem
Last night I believed I saw three Witch Beings
relent and cast down from their winter moon
Orpheus, free riding.
Happy all he was with his magical lyre.
Not trapped with bereavements of old,
no lures set with any crying,
he called to me.
His sun-gold limbs were elegant intact.
Feet swift where night wind took him.
Blood red were his cheeks and marked,
telling where he’d been.
By fate or by chance that night he came
into my darkened room, my bed.
His whispered song tenderly to hold me.
Orpheus, my valentine, not dead.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2013
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Lansing Day Poem
So what's the running hubbub--hot-toot's Shangri-la?
Our fear of death's gone wacko. It’s crowding up the bar.
Let's drink to obfuscation. Annihilation’s hip.
Roll out the tequila sunrise.
Go down with the black-sail ship.
But could it be, O, could it be
that we had just forgot,
or we'd missed that day of Bio
in high school's tommyrot?
At work and seeming happy,
our cells in superb supply--
exist but a day, others for a week
or more, then die.
Perpetual dying and birthing
is the body’s oldest art.
And so--which you is the
You of you?
Conglomerations of cells a-croaking
in requiem symphonies of death?
Or halleluiah songs of the lively new?
Neither or both?
Then there's considering the case of old Bob Kelly
who, in his downward slide, one brilliant morning
awoke to exclaim: I myself can never die!
I just change and I fly!
So when we're saddled up with terrors,
believing love is far behind, or the Blues
is all we're singing, and our watches
won't tell time--we might recall
that magical Kelly, busting the walls
of citadel.
And we could believe it true.
Is fear of death and dying
the hell that we do make?
Now, enough with these perambulations!
Let us regard the drink.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2013
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Lansing Day Poem
Dare to live!
Stop insisting on chasing after death.
Stop trying to die!
Quit the grand delusion.
You shall never die!
Grow your wings and fly to the mountaintop
of your world. Breathe stars.
Bravely go alone. Only you can do this.
Regularly in your day–exercise conviction,
visualize. Take in
golden, fibrous threads
of starlight, of sunlight.
Take them in through the nostrils.
This is nothing less than soul’s power-fuel.
Inhale slowly and experience
the gentle music of love’s fire,
as flames would pull up
a chimney stack, up pipes of ovens.
Faith builds with such breath practice.
Greed cooked away.
Anger melting.
Ignorance surrendering
to ways of knowing.
Transformations to flowers.
To gratitude.
To generosities.
Prepare that your purpose
shall speak to you.
Breathe starlight.
Are you surprised
that you feel no heat?
Your unique timelessness
awaits your recognition.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2019
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Lansing Day Poem
This hand which moves and rides some voice is not mine.
I give it over to you, young boy. This is what makes it fly so,
traveling out, tripping along in dance of shape and sound.
I acknowledge your presence in this fashion.
You tell me by the messages beaming out the back of your head,
you are the very boy who has waited an eternity
at some upper railing. You sit and peer through the spaces,
down the twisted stair. Your hands, they grip the vertical rail.
Silent. Silent. Waiting you.
Let this right hand of mine be your secret voice.
Let this scrawl and scratch be your gravelly tongue—
Ick-nicking, ga-chooing, click stutter.
What languages may I shape for our own sake?
With you, may I follow, setting trail markers just so.
Will others come mistaking their ways for yours?
My hand is opening and opens wide.
I remember you. I am returning.
Let it be.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2025
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Lansing Day Poem
a tick of your distant heart
and for me the wheels go spinning
golden spires in evening breeze dip
and you, gripping, reach to the river
what do you see
with your hunting eyes?
what tastes come
in memory?
i see only peace all about,
your wings of splendid silver filigree
tail tilted to the setting sun
many suns within your heart of hearts
do you know i forever run toward you
and to all your dragon friends?
do you feel me smiling laughing
my joy my welcome?
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2026
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Lansing Day Poem
What we have named Fire Escape
(an ordered, angular tangle of ladders and rail)
had made picture geometries in my west window
well-framed and flat–set foreground and background
in two dimensions, as the sun hid,
and my round eye opened.
What we have named Fire Escape
was flaked-paint brown orange, as if
first it had been born of flame
and then had long taken up living as metal–
tempered itself into usefulness,
which I should trust now, in case of the yelling
and the engines.
What we have named Fire Escape
was happy Jungle Jim or Jungle for Jane
for the sparrows I saw this morning
which flitted and wildly played
within, rising up, arched and coming back again.
Made of the square pairs of ladder rungs–
a tunnel entrance or ducking posts,
or highway bridges to clear;
the birds like small plane, daredevil pilots
each following each, going under.
And I supposed that no sparrow would ever crash.
And what was this I remember now?
How one bird eased its engine and perched there to stay?
As if to offer me, with a little turn head gesture,
a thank you for the bread I’d left on the sill? Or to say
I’d better shut the curtain and make my exit?
Either prideful guess gets me nowhere fast.
Failed even is speaking in any sparrow language
from my recline stuffed chair; again, but now imagined,
to draw beady eyes to fix on me, telling me much less.
That morning, with the last sparrow gone,
I remember that nothing in my sight moved,
save an American flag at a distance in the wind,
with its one red-white striped wing
waving toward the cold north,
as the white church spire,
framed in an open quadrilateral,
held its position.
(Written one day before the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th, 2013)
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2025
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Lansing Day Poem
Cat three-tooth, cat stone-deaf, cat sidewinder walk,
Old Bealman stalked the croaking, the croaking,
with forepaws meek stroking
airs of a summer cool night.
Bealman, Bealman, Meow & Sealman,
Pacing, still racing, one two three man.
Bealman—frog fisher & free.
Delphinium, the roses, lupine interposes
a shadow of fortressed green leaf
disguises the notion my Bealman supposes—
to seize, dismember it through,
make self-concocted, dishering frog stew.
Bealman, Bealman, Meow & Sealman,
Pacing, still racing, one two three man.
Bealman—frog fisher & free.
Night hours accounting, morning’s surmounting,
a bird warning Bealman, his patience to thin.
Croaking still blending, a flower stalk was bending,
two legs, peaking out, sent Bealman straight in.
Bealman, Oh my Bealman, Meow & Sealman,
Pacing, still racing, one two three man.
Frog fisher & free.
I saw Bealman beaming; I saw Bealman beaming.
How cats manage beaming I’ll wonder again.
Since Bealman was twenty, any beaming is plenty.
I loved my old Bealman, my frog fisher friend.
Bealman, Bealman, my meow dear Sealman,
Frog fisher & free.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2026
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Lansing Day Poem
You see every bit of me, my morning star.
You pour life to me, no matter what.
I need not ask.
I open to receive.
Turn the bucket of me
right side up.
When you fill me with your golden fire,
you bend my edges wide and this
is ecstasy.
Pausing, breathing, I grow into my new skin.
Is there no end to this?
One part of me cries out–please stop!
Another part sings all glory.
Copyright © Lansing Day | Year Posted 2025
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