Trancendant Ritual Storm Dance

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Mystic Vision

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SHIVA’S DANCE

I remain the soul of their ancestors

In my heart the memory stays

I shall reclaim my drifting descendants

At the end of forever days.


Beneath their busy hours

My mystic life it runs

Once reborn as strangers

All I shall claim as sons.


Above them in the heavens

In the star strewn endless sky

I whisper subtle mantras

Returning them all to my side.


Musk of my union in twilight

Perfume of rain in the night

In atomic realms and billions of worlds

I submerge their souls into light.


In a deep blue beam of nectar

Quelling forever mortal fears

I shall flood each heart with remembrance

As I drink from their eyes the tears.

Early Pacific Impressions

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WITNESSING THE SURF RIDERS / OAHU, 1798

The Island harbors subtle airs,

Zephyrs, wherein

Scimitar shaped reefs arrest

Sleek billows aqua

Almond cavern’d eyes

In soaring wings, where

Liquid curtains fly

And bend in graceful

Arc’s caress, like folding hands

Upon which strides, in soars

And sweeping fans

The gold hued dancers

Feline in finesse and form

From deeper sea to distant shore

Their fragile steeds do

Race each fringing crest —

Of all earth’s pleasures,

Is this not the best?


Richard Arthur Love 07/07/1998

FINDING MY GRANDFATHERS MUSIC / 1965

FINDING MY GRANDFATHERS
MUSIC / 1965


My Grandfather went slowly mad

Lighting small fires on the driveway

I was but fourteen, naive and unprepared

By life for such strange behavior, not

Wise enough to be subtle, and he

Could no longer teach me, tell me

Of his real greatness, of his fighting

The Kaiser in France, of drinking with

His fine Iberian buddies, Dali and Picasso—

Driving women to passion with his elegant

Mastery of the piano, his strong

Spanish face, his magnificent prose, all

Too late for me, a fledgling surfer from

Another sun-washed California beach town.

And yet, as he descended into

God knows what delusions that come

On the wings of age and infirmity I was

Privy to this mans most inner mind, revealed

In a dusty rack of LP records, of which

To sooth his troubled soul I played repeatedly;

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Vivaldi’s

Four Seasons, Vaughn Williams variations on

Thomas Talus, each sweet, indestructible piece

Inundating us like some rare soma

He in his private terrors, and I

In my hapless, innocent folly, both transported

By the superb genius of dead men’s

Symphonic dreams, in deathless perfection

Ringing out across the fragrant sage covered

Summer hills, shimmering in the heat

High above the blue bays of Laguna.


RICHARD ARTHUR LOVE... .11/7/98

BIBLIOPHILE’S KUDOS


Colorful, balanced upright, and proud

They stand in irregular rows

These legends bound, tapestries

Of solitary labors, each

Imprinted page a reference

To complex inner perceptions,

The slanted eye of other

Ways to see, puzzles locked

Piece by piece, card house

Of sentence, metaphor, and verb

The Artist, the Craftsmen works

Sweats and smokes, word by word

They toil until the soup of

Tepid prose begins to heat

Then, rewritten again and again

Rolls, bubbles and boils — a pinch

Of mystery spice? Perhaps some paprika

Of passion? Keyboard stirred by hand,

Space, tab, shift, return, again, again

Until, after roaring press

And rolling pulp we hold

The to be treasured or forgotten

Tome, from head to hand,

From hand to heart, our eyes

Behold this blessed passport to

Other lives, times, hearts, lands

In vision made, in vision read

That wonder, Books, fills my head.

- Richard Arthur Love

THE GHOSTS OF WADI-HAFAR
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Before there was poetry

There were drums; thin sticks

Played like one string

Vibrating violins haunting

When once the Sahara

Was a soggy crocodile

Infested bog, and rhinos

Charged the fires of

Drunken nomads and half

Naked swimmers, artists who

Had perhaps contemplated poetry

But in primitive fits of

Calculated desperation and trance

Resorted to chipping rocks

And painting caverns in oddly

Modern dried blood ballets

Stylistic visions of beings

So strange as to appear

From other worlds, heads

Like exploding tulips full

Of tiny stars, which forces

One to wonder, what were they

Thinking, knowing, before

The drums told them the rains

Would vanish, the sands would

Shift, and cover here forever

Leaving only these paintings,

Specters carved by phantom hands

From a time before time was

Born, before the drummers knew

Before there was poetry.



Richard Arthur Love 5/22/99

The Other Tiger


A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.

It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.

We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

Jorge Luis Borges

I am pleased to introduce you to the Land of Unknown Wonders, a serene adventure into that gem like word world of poetic importance, snapping sideways EmoLit that cracks the clouded surface with maps of truely meaningful language, Banging off your heretofore unembraced breath & eyeful of Life. Be pleased to ENTER…for I have gems for you to spend, & at the end of the rabbit hole you will swim in word wonder, yet only if you will linger here. Things we least expect often become our life’s salvation. DRINK ME said the tiny tag on the bottle…

Your Own Brilliant Mirror Mirror On The Wall

Your Personal Invitation to Enter Herein
Is Gladly Being Honored

You May Now Ascend
Amidst The Luscious Gems