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Dialogue

Marilene Phipps

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-Return to your home--in your childhood, in your heart.
Beyond the present of your being, that is where you live.
The desire for sleep overwhelms you: it is fear.
-But what peace can there be in this dizzy of sensations?
-Sing, and you will recognize your voice:
in the charmed, puffed-up tutus of ballet dancers,
many sounds await their time in you
since the beginning of your sun.
-When will my poem end? How can it end
while fruits from my childhood still hang on trees
like ornaments of an inexhaustible Christmas?
-Understand that a lustrous, fat cat's paw
will deliciously strike them down in one distracted, dry pat.
-So, just like mice, we are its daily fare? And yet, before
I must leave, I want my friends' voices to return to the foliage,
see their large faces hang like talismans on my wide open arms,
hear their love tell that for them I have lived.

Chapel Space

by Marilene Phipps

In a space where beings are transparencies of color
or born out of a stone-chiseled struggle for form,
hard and pale and with a better aptitude to go through time,
then elevated to a pillared position that establishes a difference
between us below--uncomfortably sitting, recognizable through
an illusory temporary favor that reveals us
as wrapped, robed, stiffened, uncertain, shifting mounds
bound within thread-stitched layers of charismatic cloth--
in such a space, is there place for prayer that burns to rest
in a candid dance for the remembrance of those flimsy and slight
who carry in their changeable faces the body of my heart's life--
these memories woven through them, born out
of solitude and born out of bliss?