What others are saying about Adam’s Dream:
Outcasts of Eden will find the garden again in Adam’s Dream, where ancient tongues, modern talk, eternal truths, and temporal moments intertwine. Pleasingly tangible—towhees, bones, water, sunlight—Talley’s poems sing of love, nature, and holiness. “The days,” he writes, “are often drab and dull / but I never tire of rethinking the miracles,” which he finds in scripture and simple acts like shaving or talking to a child. Adam’s Dream is a vision.
—Jim Richards, poetry editor, Irreantum
Adam’s Dream is both learned and accessible, inviting us to look hard at the world and take delight therein: a child wearing cereal bowls for shoes, a meatloaf sandwich a blink away from being loaves and fishes, tumblers in the kitchen sink taking flight like “a flock of cardinals.” Each thing is both object and emblem, each transformation powered by celebration, by the desire “to drive a nail with words.” Prepare for spiritual forays and inscapes. Prepare to dream you are riding to China on a bike to become a poet.
—Lance Larsen, Backyard Alchemy
Talley . . . takes up language as a form of worship—not only does he use his poems to praise God, but also to emulate God, whose words create worlds out of chaotic mater . . . . [W]ith Adam’s Dream he has crafted an altar of words around which we might gather as he translates “the language of angels” into an eloquent, extended prayer that our souls and our families might be touched and transformed by the simple beauties of holiness.
—Tyler Chadwick, editor, Fire in the Pasture
These poems are masterfully wrought, and unabashed in their devotion. There is a wilderness in them, a loosing of the faithful tongue. Talley has moved Mormon literature forward
—Javen Tanner, Curses for Your Sake
Douglas L. Talley
Published by Parables at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Douglas L. Talley
Cover art copyright 2011 by Whitney Johnson
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
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PARABLES
PO Box 58
Woodsboro, MD 21798
To my wife April,
quella donna che a Dio mi menava,
for her own labors in the garden.
O voi ch’avete li ‘ntelletti sani
mirate la dottrina che s’asconde
sotto il velame de li versi strani.
Contents
Perspective on Greater Eternities
Parable for the Pulse of the Wrist
Freedom of Choice in Blueberries
Story with No Beginning and No End
Parable of the Still, Small Voice
Confession of the Sometime Lost
Autobiography of the Flesh as Grass
Each Truth Independent in Its Sphere
How does one design and build a temple of the spirit? Adam was the first man, radiantly distinct from the first hominid, in part because he built an altar to develop and refine his soul. He was also the first poet, who named the animals and kept a record of his illuminations and built his altar in a clearing of open air, because the whole earth was then still a temple and the house of God. In the temple of the Latter-day Saints one learns how to return to the presence of God and how to offer that same information to ancestors, although such knowledge by necessity remains deeply rooted in symbol. There in the temple, where the center point of the universe is found as earth and heaven meet, eternity will course through time like a gloss of past and future on the present, and a trace of that spirit called Holy is sewn through the flesh like a thread of words to illuminate consciousness. So the poet of one’s soul must necessarily assume a role and labor and interpret.
The beauty of holiness begs a tongue, and while the Saints in some particulars must hold their peace, the very stone of our nature at times will nonetheless still cry out in celebration for what God has revealed in his house. The family is eternal. A husband and wife and their children may be united and sealed together not only for this life, but for the life beyond, worlds without end. This bond and covenant will vest the simplest act with significance, whether snapping beans for dinner or toweling dry an infant, because in the symbols of our love and sacrifice, one for another, we render a cipher to the very nature of eternity. If, then, the words of this book fall short, because any such cipher may ultimately prove impossible to articulate, consider this failing the outcome of a modest gesture only, presented with good intention, and little more than a whisper to the ear inviting the reader past the veil that shrouds this world into the templed world that never ends.
—DLT
I.
In an early light the beauty of holiness is manifest . . .
Morning spreads across the sky.
Birds begin to sing.
Their voices raise our thoughts of praise
to Thee, our God and King.
Who else gave the sparrow breath?
Crocus its blue song?
Or gave us choice to add our voice
in worship all day long?
Who but Thee, O Lord, our God,
nurtures each good seed
and answers prayer with patient care
according to our need?
Give to us an angel’s bread,
though a crumb or trace,
and then we’ll sing an offering
as with an angel’s grace.
Suggesting the need for illumination . . .
Upon a time once this same blue cup of morning
poured itself into the mind of a gentle saint
when a little bird flew to the palm of his hand.
This I learned at my mother’s lap and remembered
years later when a nuthatch plucked a peanut
from the feeder and wedged it for safekeeping
into the trunk of a nearby oak tree. For an hour
the peanut glistened in the bark like an odd wart,
and then the bird flew again to the oak and poked
at the morsel until it vanished, as if nothing then
were more natural or commonplace than pulling
sustenance upside down from the skin of a house.
Time passes and the bird ventures closer still,
skittering the rooftop, braving a flowerbed.
I keep my hand open, though odds are it may never
fly through the window, never with its tiny beak
scratch a cipher from heaven into my palm
or vouchsafe to me its small, sacred thunder,
yet I keep my cupped hand open, trusting the sky
to offer in blue some omen always within grasp,
some hint of the sacrosanct, as yet unknown,
and yet possible and always within arm’s reach.
Fostering a quest for the perfectly celestial world . . .
When searching for land, advised Cato the Elder,
be patient and take pains to examine it frequently.
The more you return to it, the more it will please you,
if it is good. This from a simple, ancient gardener—
Quotiens ibis, totiens magis placebit quod bonum erit.
One might consider this advice in any exploration,
a marriage proposal, a daily labor, literature, religion.
Heaven is not so alien a country we cannot recognize
the peace it issues when we venture upon its gate.
All signs point home to a glistening solace inward—
the goldenrod bowing in the wind when you pass,
the musky nectar of evening settling around the pond,
the six birds of a tree forming the words of the Kyrie,
that orange blue streak in the west, the crescent moon
like an ancient ark sailing dark waters toward heaven.
Every quest begs a threshold prayer . . .
thrumming through the sole of the foot
as though announcing the word of God,
cascading to earth, gathering
to a single stream of light.
On the way a swallow cut a line of silence
through the air, offering in that blue curve
a trace of melody to the wind.
Alpine buttercups raised
their flags of yellow song, brief, insistent,
and a pika trilled its descant before ducking
back to a house of rock.
All these were an oracle,
as Shakespeare put it, to rectify knowledge.
When I finally reached water and bowed
to the mountain, I understood:
I have done this before,
as though it were a perfect habit of prayer.
I have knelt to my own life daily to drink
as deeply as words allow.
Making love possible . . .
The waning moon sang like a bird,
a drifting owl from night to night,
and seemed to ask without a word
what might compel my song and flight.
Who would be my first love, who?
And who would love me at the last
and help me sing the moon, turned blue,
because a cloud had wandered past?
My hands declared, Why not a woman,
the wife of my youth and all her grace?
The needs I have are all too human
and heaven knows I touch her face
to teach my fledgling hands to fly,
to sing the moon from sky to sky.
Proving a source of all knowledge . . .
Through the days, the day-long skies,
God will clear the good circle home,
and I have come again, once more to the eyes
of the woman I married, the woman
of my home, my long circle home.
What will this old cloud finally say of himself?
I have found a home. I can rest in all her sky
and learn each day what there is to know,
a certain slant of sun, the beaded glass of rain,
the dying prayer of wind and dust settling on the day.
And what will the old cloud, the old cloud say?
Hello. Hello. I have asked of God
who clothed me with a rainbow.
From wind and dust, rain and light,
he fashioned a woman cleaving to my side
and gave her to grace me all the days of my life.
What more there is in this world to know
I can learn each day in the long circle home,
in the house of God, the temple of our home,
circling to her eyes to say forever, forever hello.
Yet love so readily lapses . . .
Leveled, the dead maple was so heavy
I had to buck it in place. The chainsaw
threw a steady spray of sawdust, the color
of skinned apple, against my trousers.
I cut some forty logs, each a foot long or so,
and before the saw choked for fuel,
had rattled a host of unnamed creatures
from refuge—ants, a blue beetle, a slug.
All afternoon the sun sank deeper
and deeper into the slumber
of the late summer leaves. Nothing
of breeze or twilight perturbed
the darkening green eye of the pond.
I carried logs four or five at a time
to the woodpile. Each surrendered
a slow, plaintive agony in my arms,
like the dirge of a stillborn infant.
I sorted the wood and stacked it
into a book of hours, and I had not,
I confess, thought of you, or of love,
the entire day until this very moment,
when I imagined the winter dark
and each log singing one last time
with its whole body in a blaze of light.
The human condition admits to imponderable solitude . . .
what was man’s first dream?
A woman, perhaps,
who then might say, Not me,
but the unseen moon of my thought.
The night may ask
why again she returns
to a man, and the woman will say,
Have you never seen
two eagles circle
in the sky? Even the moon
in the gold ring
of its song about the earth
is never, more than this, compelled.
And when the night wonders
what moon may shadow
her thought, the woman will bare,
as if forbidden fruit,
her heart: I was taken
from a man, to a man I return,
and though he manage
to shape, of my very soul,
a song, he will yet never know
what flies away,
what flies away
in a woman, like the moon
at every dawn.
Temptation from the beginning designs to sift the spirit . . .
These aspens speak of something golden, another Eden.
Somewhere beyond, a rainbow drifts in and out of view.
How do we know, the husband lifting a hand to his wife,
whether the bow sanctions that sweetness felt in the wind?
Whether in a kiss they then mistake temptation for love?
Was the threshold question of the garden very different
when Adam and Eve discovered their nakedness?
Their transparency one to the other was no prophecy,
nor even a suggestion, of only good or evil to follow.
Their kiss would begin the history of both extremes.
Yellow leaves fall away. Skin touches the lips.
Something, the inscrutable unknown, fills the mouth
where words would form—a mystery honored best
in silence—the tremulous flesh, the trembling word.
Our agency to choose becomes fully tested . . .
Night would be the perfect morning
to curl in sleep and drift forever,
wrapped in a blanket of your dreams,
while a hard snow taps against the window,
its voice in the wind a wandering stray
whispering the moan of first temptation—
Ye shall be as the gods, as the gods.
How peaceful it might seem to abdicate
your choices, how seemingly godlike
to rest far removed from responsibility.
On the other side of snowfall who knows
what exotic fruit your dreams might conjure
to help you distinguish good from evil?
In your room now there is only darkness
and the constant twisting of a candle flame
resembling the choices flickering in your mind.
You understand that this night, or any other,
might bring a morning change of heart,
the choice to rise at last and clothe a need,
or feed a want, or soothe a deep misgiving.
You might consider your dozing wife,
her ear to the pillow, dreaming of snowfall,
listening for the day of her exaltation.
Any number of your words will please her
and any number disappoint, and somewhere,
somewhere in your blood you know them all,
while the butter and honey of your breath
will be to choose the good and refuse the evil
in answer to the drifting wind that moans,
You will be tried in fire, and the sign will be a woman.
And the heart swells wide as eternity with doubt . . .
Often something is not quite right,
often a doubt snaking through the heart.
I feel compelled to quote her scripture—
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all
these things shall be added unto you.
Or Horace who wrote, Who lives on little,
lives well, and neither fear nor greed
disturbs his sleep—Vivitur parvo bene.
But she withdraws in silence for the night.
My piffling effort at reconciliation fails.
Our prayer before sleep is perfunctory
and ineffectual, and while I stew in bed
and consider the stars beyond our roof—
they belong as much to me as to any
who might think and make use of them—
there is not one particle of their cold,
dim light circling through the distance
I can offer for comfort or apology.
To heal all that has gone awry eternal sacrifice is required . . .
The fury of our quarrel still unsettled,
an angel dressed as the moon appeared,
slipping through clouds, the open window,
to fill our room with a whisper of blue light.
The moment that lone moon appeared,
we knew an agony that desired only night.
We knew a darkness we were tempted to crave,
a darkness full of sorrow for all our sorrows.
And the only witness of any light at all
was the angel moon with its simple history,
having long served witness to every darkness,
to every knife slashed across a helpless throat,
to every fist rapped against a child’s mouth,
to the mess of every mangled, aborted birth.
The angel sifted its blue light through all this
and once, through an olive tree in Gethsemane
and to every drop of blood upon that ground,
where men must finally come, and bow to sleep,
and dream beneath the moon, like the man Adam
who, when he awoke, found within his reach
a woman, the war and heaven of his own bone,
fashioned in the image of the one God he loved.
So divine possibilities rain down . . .
How often it occurs, this summons to light!
With each sunrise spilling blue and lavender inks
over the world’s edge. With each call of the peony
opening its tiny fist in a spark of scarlet flame.
Dandelions seed in white like bearded prophets
and scatter their divinations hourly to the wind,
and a voice of ancient water pours over stone,
as though Christ himself had returned to speak—