Art returned today
slipped in while I wasn’t looking.
One moment the canvas seemed
a fine white cottonwood with colbalt shadows
that must fall just so.

The next moment, a yellow square
unbidden –
and a sheer purple glaze
blending space to unify
a pale skeletal snag,
roaring smoke,
fire and sky.

This is new art
and I ask
myself once again-
where does art come from?
I look under my skin; I look at
the memories of artists past.
I ask my sisters, my brothers, my mother,
and I ask my friends.
Where does art come from?

12/28/08 Crazy Larimer Eyeglasses, a hermit for over 20 years, holed up in a cabin in Estes Park. Known to be a brilliant but mad professor, he finally broke his solitude to have a chance to eat, drink and talk with the reknown Shakespearean scholar, Peter Jensen. Rumors that Larimer might do harm to visitors proved to be false when professor Jensen was found unharmed drinking a latte and eating croissants while sketching in his journal at an Estes Park coffee shop.

The Blue Door is an illustration for the book Journey Through the Blue Door, written by Nancy-Rose Meeker and Angela Cecil, compiled by Sandy Jensen. The poem expresses my feelings about the passing of Angela Cecil December 28, 2008.

January 16, 2009

GRIEF

How does grief find me?
A visitor camping at my door.
She pitches a tent, rolls out a bag
waits for many days more.

At first I do not hear
the soft tap, tapping.
I‘m busy and the guest
continues
she continues softly to rap.

I do not sense, I’m unaware –
as the first dark days go by –
I know the guest is calling
but I do not cry.

I am not feeling well now
my body twists and cries.
I think I hear the door now,
what is on the other side?

Grief finally tires of waiting
disguised as a really bad day.
My guard cannot match – she enters and
I, disarmed cannot delay.

My friends lost a daughter –
we all have daughters
we openly and deeply grieve.
Together we drink down the bitter
None will turn, no one will leave.

Tonight I cannot turn grief away
necessary as tornados
certain as the birth of lambs.
Tonight I sit with her and I pray.

Cheryl Renee Long

I Ask My Students to Remember and I Am Still Writing Long After They Have Left the Room

I remember being surprised when the saw
came up to meet my face,
by the log truck in my lane,
by the sound of a storm cloud cracking open,
how the rain stripped the roses from the vine.

I remember screaming when I saw my own blood,
when the truck wouldn’t swerve from my lane,
when I realized part of me was dead
and part of me alive, when I was overwhelmed
I screamed, and I screamed when I panicked,
and once I screamed for joy.

I remember the smell of ozone after the lightning strike,
the faint whiff of skunk on the wind,
the landfill in the distance. Then the smell
of orange blossoms filled up the valley. When
I came in from the snow, the smell of
peach pies on the stove.

I remember the first time after that time
I was afraid of the dark
and it occurred to me
there might not be a God,
that the soul and the breath and the moment
might be all I got this first time,
this only time.

I remember dreaming my father was alive,
that I could fly, that I still
lived in the big house on the hill.
I dreamed the silver fox, the golden dog,
and I dreamed the yellow spider on my sleeve.


–Sandy Jensen

“Write a Map of Your Spiritual Journey”

But childhood was not a plateau,
birth was not a low point
from which all other points
arose; childhood is not a bar graph
or a Gantt chart,
nor is it a star chart
of comparative brightness:
it is the soul’s bright geography,
the dark woodlot where my sister terrified
me with a headless snake
still writhing toward me
fifty years later.

Do you remember the place on the hill
toward which all people
streamed for twenty years
that flashed green and bright
as the Emerald City
then snuffed out
as if it had never been?

The soul’s journey has
her animal companions,
the repetitive landscape
of nightmare and dream,
murky with memory.
This journey needs a map
with rivers that run underground,
that run backward through time,
that loop through
reconsiderations,
love affairs that blossomed and fell from the tree,
evenings that dazzled,
trees that burst into flame still standing as
landmarks in a burning swamp
where St. Elmo’s blue breath
throws the antique shadows of ibis
into time’s rippling stream.

If we speak of maps dangerous
as these, you must know there is a man
holding three fingers in warning;
there is a crossroad almost unseen
out of the corner of your eye.
This is populated wilderness—
even the desert has its signs of banded gold,
as sand shifts down into the dune
of geologic time.

My hair has stood on end
in an electric wind.
The sealstone on my wrist tells a story.
Helen, the world’s treasure,
has spoken personally to me, and I
have tried to turn her away.
I follow my own dreams—
a silver fox, a golden dog,
a woman named Nightwinds,
and a soul boat on the River of Stars.
I have been stopped by barriers of height and stone,
by fire and snake.

I have been known to turn
reasonably away, and thus
a map is shaped, some neat
and faded label re-inked,
strengthened on the page:
“Here lies true north,”
and south–I’ve been there,
to the east, memory,
to the west, terra incognita,
the calling land
and the road ahead.

–Sandy Jensen