Koda's Place

Love on a Rainbow

by Koda

I know, nearly as fact
that Indians rode past
the large rocks in this stream
where I played as a child.
The rocks are twenty feet
below my feet now.

Right here in this glade
this same darkened sky
was once rainbowed,
and echoed with the exuberance
of honking geese
as mountain lions crept
under trees littered
with skittering birds.
I can almost see the cautious
deer, their soft brown eyes
and twitching ears, startled,
as I run my hands over the oil
soaked pavement and suck in
the fragrance of parking lot exhaust.
I caught small, shiny, fleeting fish
with eight year old hands here;
fast, slippery fish
that almost always got away.

You still cry about the abortion
and the would-be
eight year old not here to chase
the shiny, fleeting glimpse
of plastic bags blowing
between the honking, smoking cars.
Come now dear, dry your eyes.
Come lie with me naked in love
on this oil slick in the hot rain.
Let us reverse that awful decision.
The deer and the birds are not
nervous now, and look, there are
rainbows in the oily streams.

Desert Whales

by Koda

The whales in the lagoon are spouting
Deep snores of a troubled sleep.
They are swimming in a dream
School in the air-ocean
Above the red sedimentary rock
Of a stone-castle desert;
Rock merely mud
When their ancestors swam
These same currents, eons before.

Drifting out through the ghoul littered
Ramparts of the towering plateau
Their eyes shift nervously
Between themselves
And the sheen of large
Fossilized bones staring back
From the faces of the crumbling,
Heat-tortured cliffs.

Above them
The sun never cools
In the rippling waves that aren't there,
The air-ocean has no surface
To surface to
To breath,
The blue is too thin
And they can see too far.

They can see my wet form glimmering
As they twist slowly above
The pool of this shallow waterfall,
Pausing, as though amazed
By the tumbling stream;
By the eerie familiarness
In the feel of the spray.
I can almost touch them
As their large eyes roll toward me,
Eyes reflecting the depths
Of a growing distrust.

They move cautiously
Near my outstretched hand,
Communicating in glances
That seem to wonder
What their ancestors must have allowed
To transform their rich,wet world
Into something as impossible as dust.

Shoes

by Koda

The view is from the shoes of a dancing
madman laughing at the moon,
as he releases the captured spirits
of indians from mirrors
he submerges beneath stars
reflecting on the warbling surface
of a satin coated pond.
The lost souls drift up from the water
as twisting mist to crowd around
his one-legged hopping, pirouetting form
like a dim-witted group of lanky
teenage boys waiting for someone
to tell them the direction of their lives.

He tells them
Faith precedes knowledge;
Knowledge releases from faith, and religion.

They lose faith in themselves and disappear.

He baptizes himself, but once under
loses his face
which dies screaming against the surface 
of water sure enough to walk on.

The moonlight enlightens
His shoes, left upon the bank,
which turn in the mud to face the distant
approach of a dawn they believe in,
but cannot be certain will arrive.

Frozen Fog

by Koda

Cold descends shimmering yet unseen,
spilling from the dark vault of space
behind a guise of cascading mist
swirling into fog beneath the towering waterfall.
Within this wilderness of listless mist
Only the shadows of trees are moving.

The sound of hissing behind my back
is the campfire sinking
further into the snow; I think.
The fire warms my naked flesh,
the flamelight and smoke a thin tower
supporting a pale, flickering dome
of emptiness
inside the dense purity of surrounding gray.

The sputtering light projects my shadow,
cross-legged, into the creeping drift 
of the dome's fog wall.
Since twilight I have sat as a spirit in a statue 
studying the fog's spinning, halting motion
deep within my shadow's breathing.
After three days of fasting
I may be approaching delirium,
or perhaps the fire's heat has failed
to warm the shadow,
but within it, now,
the fog has frozen still.

Crystalized mists
hang like spider spun lace
within the rigid body of the shadow-form,
and a dull gleam ebbs and flows
across the angular forehead and chin,
framing the darkness where there would be eyes.
The shoulders and arms drape
like icy rain falling
between canyons of cloud,
and from the deeper dark of the shrouded heart
I sense the presence
of an ancient warrior.

I blink slowly, afraid
the breeze blown by my lashes
or the pause in my silence
may break the delicate
fabric of the frozen form.

But there are no words of illumination,
no gestures, no signs,
none of the insight
I had come there hoping to find.
There is only the living stillness 
>of a warrior's sternness.
Cautiously, I reach out
and firelight blazes in the crystal eyes
for a moment,
but I am left alone,
my hand grasping a skyfull of falling snow.

Winter Leaves

by Koda

The leaves turned
to look at their destination.
They always knew their time
in the sun would come to this end,
but the ground was not so dark
nor so cold in summer.
And when the touch
of their bright flesh fell
upon the decayed remains
of the others who had gone before,
it chilled them deeper
than their imagination could concieve.
They wilted and curled and became rigid
and the snow came
melting and freezing in cycles
grinding them to forgottenness.

The tree is old, and experienced
enough to await the certain spring
with accepting patience,
but when the first snow suffocated
the vibrant colors that were it's voice
in summer winds; and now as it listens
to the shrill hiss and howl
of it's body laid bare
to the careless eyes of the cold,
it's wisdom can not prevent lamenting
it's recent loss in spite
of knowing the new birth will come.

I knew you would leave.
But even in the dead of winter
the tree outside my window
still grips one last, withered leaf.

Irrational as a Premonition

by Koda

Father Sabastion is standing atop the thick
Adobe arch of the hacienda's gate, in the center
Beneath the higher of three white capping curves
Of masonry. His right hand sweeps toward the clay
Courtyard in a gesture of divine indifference
Initiated by the same whatever which inspires
His expression of imitated rapture.
His left hand is pulling the hilt
Of a sword toward his heart; long since pierced
By the blade exiting under the buttocks flap of his armor.
All this relief in but two inches of extending mortar

Releases the gaze of the hombre under the sombrero.
His one eye strains open beneath the straw rim, and briefly
Follows the upward-forward jerking motion of a shape
Like a web-thin silk handkerchief moving from the gate
To the shadows of the alley where he siestas. His half-conscious
Vision slurs with the sound of the plaster wall humming
The introduction to the Tonight Show, and the handkerchief

Passes through his ears as he helps Father Sabastion down the stairs,
Into the cellar and onto his cot. They both know the Father is dying
In the flush of emotion where terror and tears become certainty
And sobriety. Uttering his last smile
The Father whispers acceptance in a question --
"Did you ever hear the story about
the board that burned down the house?"

A sombrero falls to the floor atop a yellow handkerchief
And a tear falls from the eye of Father Sabastion
As massive raindrops pound the courtyard dust to mud.

Wedding of Grief

by Koda

Her mother was rather tall,
strong, big boned and over weight.
She wore long, loose, cotton dresses
that made her look like an elongated pyramid
hovering over the slippered shuffle of swollen feet;
which seldom left the couch.
At the peak of the pyramid, her long sagging face
was both round and rutted 
with deep lines in her jowls
and around her troubled eyes;
a mothers' eyes,
filled with excessive care and anxiety,
nestled in the wrinkled folds of years
of frustrated ineffectuality.

That's how I remember her
the last time I saw her.

My girlfriend flew back to L.A. alone
to help her mother through the chemotherapy,
So I didn't see her loosing her hair and her weight
Or see her cry from embarrassment
when her daughters had to help her relieve herself.
Nor did I suffer through the moaning
the pain
of being so close to her,
yet so far from the suffocating touch of the morphine.

I was told very little about these things,
but when my lover returned home to me
she would often stand alone at the window.
I remember watching her beautiful blue eyes,
focused upon nothing,
sitting in belligerent profile above cheeks so limp
I couldn't help
but picture her mother's face.

Days would pass, consumed with regular routine,
then suddenly tears would be running into my ears
as she hugged me long and hard.
"Your mom?" I'd say.
She would just nod, her cheek against mine.

She had been back less than a week when they called.
She sat alone in our bedroom, and cried.
I sat alone in the kitchen, and chained smoked,
Studying the table before me, for hours,
Never once seeing it.

She returned from the funeral a few days later,
saying that several people had mentioned
her having a pleasant glow;
like that of someone newly pregnant.
"I checked and discovered this lump in my tummy,
Do you think that could be what it is?"

Yes. Definitely. How could you not know?

Both of us unemployed,
Barely able to keep ourselves alive.
Second trimester, barely, 
But enough to force the drive back to L.A.
We spoke only to her closest friends--
Her family had dealt with enough sadness as it was.

Alone in the car, in the parking lot of the clinic
In a part of town I didn't feel safe in
I waved at the little kids with their broad smiles
And avoided older ones with their hard stares.
There was no doubt.
We couldn't create another life
More painful than our own.

As we drove away, the silence
in the car was thicker
than the rattling whir
of the old VW motor and bald tires.
I asked how she felt.
She called her empty gaze back from the pavement;
said . . ."OK" . . . and honestly 
tried to smile.

Both our hearts were dragging on the road behind us.

The Loneliness of God

© Koda 1997

Before the Beginning
There was a total absence of everything
Where even nothing did not exist
Nor any thought or feeling whatever.

In this timeless, placeless place
Here and there are as much the same as they are different,
Now and then a now where no one knows such things.

And then a mystery beyond the conception of God occurred --
Something conscious knew there was nothing.

We call that consciousness God
And the first thing this consciousness knew
Was that It was everything
It was the totality of all the nothing there was.

And so this consciousness conceived of somethingness
A place where nothingness could exist
Which we now call space
And within this space God recognized something that wasn't nothing
Filling everything; It's own consciousness.

God is everything.
God is utterly alone.

And when God realized with greater and greater clarity
Just how alone It was
It recognized it's awareness of aloneness had not always been the same.
It realized that space was filled with time as well as consciousness.

As the time passed God's awareness of aloneness grew steadily
And It desired, creating the concept of value,
Something that was not Itself.

And so God divided Itself in order to experience Other
And gave Other a form, but Other knew it was God
And God was still alone with Itself.
Then God removed It's memory of being God from Other
And as Other, God experienced Other experiencing God.
Through Other, God experienced not being alone.

But soon God noticed that Other longed to know it's source
Just as God had longed to know Other
God experienced empathy, and allowed Other to know itself as God.

Again God was utterly alone.

So God created a multitude of Others
And removed their memory of being God
And God felt their great joy when each of them became one with God
Till they all felt God's great loneliness.

The Others remember their paths and choose to return to separateness
Because they know they will always return to God
And share their joy at returning.

We are all God, struggling to overcome our forgetfulness
Afraid to return to the knowledge
That God is the loneliest being there is.