PhillySound: new poetry

Carol Mirakove and Jen Benka have THE MOST amazing tree I have ever met in my life! Well, I say THEY HAVE, meaning that it's right next to their home in Oakland, in fact it's so huge you can see it from many blocks away. Jen said pointing, "Yeah, see that giant tree over there? That's where we live." When she said that I had this image of them living up in the tree towering over Oakland.

There's a hertz exchange that I like to do with trees, and I've been doing this for many years, but have NEVER encountered such a jolt as I did with the 120 foot redwood growing next to Carol and Jen's bedroom window, NEVER experienced anything like this before, EVER. It was my first morning in San Francisco when in town with Frank Sherlock last week for a reading. Actually Frank was arriving later that day.

But I did, just I've done many times over the years, plant my feet firmly in line with my shoulders, and lean with BOTH HANDS into the bark of the tree, head down, between the arms, chin touching chest. Usually this is a calm, pleasant experience, feeling the entrance through my left hand, filling me, and any excess frequency put back into the tree through my right hand. It's usually a 15 to 20 minute meditation. But AS SOON AS my chin touched my chest BANG, I felt filled, and kind of queasy. I climbed back up the back steps to their balcony and sat in a wicker chair to steady my dizziness. A blue bird landed on a railing right next to where I was sitting, and chirped. I mimicked the chirp and the bird hopped closer, then hopped to the floor of the balcony and came within a few inches of my feet, turning her head to look up at me. Then flew off. Was her visit related to the shock of ingesting and fucking with the hertz of a tree I clearly knew nothing about, clearly was fucking with something much bigger and wiser and older than any other I have exchanged with in the past?

Last night I had a splinter of dreams. One of them was waking at Jen and Carol's and walking out to the balcony to sit and stare up into the vast canopy of the giant redwood. Way up in the distance of the canopy I saw branches shifting and shaking, one at a time, as though something was falling and hitting them as it came down toward me. Here it was Jen Benka coming down one branch at a time, like a jungle gym. She jumped onto the balcony and breathed deeply to catch her breath. WOW, What's up? I asked. "Oh, this is how Carol and I work out now, we take turns climbing up the tree and gliding down." Gliding down? "Well, I didn't want to scare you so I came down on the branches, but yeah, we've learned to glide at yoga class, it's kind of great. You should try it sometime." I thought, WOW, Carol and Jen can fly, how fucking cool!

The other splinter of the dream was a news item on the radio that Elvis and two other men had escaped from prison, and one of the two men with him was and expert raft maker. And they had escaped from prison on a raft over a swift flowing river to the ocean. I went to the prison fence where the river started, to follow. The river though looked MORE LIKE water does when it runs in rivulets off your skin in the shower. It was a powerful flow of water, flowing over immense fields of thick buffalo grass, and it battered down the grass, but the water didn't have a groove of dirt, it glided over the surface of the earth, it was a ribbon of water. As soon as I threw myself into the water it carried me like a water ride at an amusement park. At one point the ribbon of water I was riding collided with another ribbon of water, and the force of this flung me high in the air, and balanced me for just a moment on the top of the roiling collision of water, then I was carried down into the ever more powerful body of combined ribbons, down a steep hill which emptied into the ocean. I could see Carol and Jen's tree in the distance. Later I heard another news item on the radio that a Chinese tanker had spotted bodies floating out at sea, and everyone assumed one of the dead was Elvis. NO, I thought!

CAConrad