Carol Adler's Poetry

Throughout history, every culture has always held poetry in the highest regard.

States Wikipedia: "Poetry as an art form may predate literacy. Thus many ancient works, from the Vedas (1700 - 1200 BC) to the Odyssey (800 - 675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.

"Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, rune stones and stelae.

"Poetry was employed as a means of recording oral history, story (epic poetry), genealogy, and law.

"Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and much of it can be attributed to religious movements. Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are a form of recorded cultural information about the people of the past, and their poems are prayers or stories about religious subject matter, histories about their politics and wars, and the important organizing myths of their societies."

Poetry self publishing is perfect for ebook reading devices

Since the world was created neither by corporate publishers nor by a semi-literate contemporary society, it was time for cosmic intervention and the creation of a new delivery system to preserve one of the world's most prized literary art forms.

Enter the world of ebooks and smart phones, laptops, PDAs, Kindles and other reading devices that are perfect for reading poetry ebooks-and for poetry self publishing.

Dandelion Books is now e-publishing poetry

Setting the trend, I decided to re-issue some of my published poetry through my own company, Dandelion Books.

In Arioso: Selected Poems by Carol Adler, I combined three formerly published poetry collections that were out of print. Arioso is also available on Amazon Kindle.

Naked in Daylight is a potpourri of poems written over the past 20 years. Here is the Amazon Kindle link.

My most recent collection, Jesus & The Tooth Fairy, includes several experimental pieces. I was delighted to receive the following feedback from one of the first readers:

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Carol, your poems are magnificent. They are most thought-provoking and require time to read. Your life experiences provide insights and wisdom that is the property of very few people.
--John H. Brand, D.Min., J.D., Author
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Here are some excerpts from my poetry:

Arioso

arioso bells
sepia
moon-beams
an afternoon sun blanked by rain
and the mountains rising nowhere
the sound returns
the sound and the silence chimes

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Starting Out

anywhere is wide enough
as long as you find it
already reserved by
readiness

a leaping clear
to the feel of it
reassurance
that this is you

any space
even God
will do

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Tea at the Everglades Bath & Tennis Club

Ignoring the valet, I park my Toyota at the end of the lot
slip off my badge and straighten my wig.
Even though the trek through the desert
takes longer than planned, I'm still early
but the cucumber sandwiches
are already next to the samovars,
six penguins standing guard.
Why had I come--just to prove I could pass?
Even the chefs are Aryan. Hair bristles on my tongue, my
hands grow breasts. Two pigs squeal out of my shoes like
popovers, taking my toes with them. I stand nude in a
marble tub extending my nipples to the host. The mirrors
turn black. Is there some mistake, I wonder, as an angel
hands me a lyre. Psalms cleave to the roof of my mouth,
rosehips become blood. As I limp down
the golden staircase, the Red Sea parts
indifferently. Outside
I crawl on my knees over burning cinders.
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Age of Uncovery: April Fool's Day

Someone must have turned on the light
or maybe it was just a feeling.
I woke to the sound of turtle-doves
not just cooing, but singing an intricate
Montiverdi-like madrigal. I know even the most gifted
conductor couldn't teach turtle-doves
to master four-part harmonies, or even
sing in unison. Birds are birds.
I'd like to dream in continuous swoon
knowing this wish is my only reality
like the reality in sex that seems to
intuitively seek hidden intimacies. Dreams
that force two souls to shed their separateness
zap, dropping them into a reflecting pool of

touch and taste that scatters the heart
forcing it to enlarge itself
in widening rings. I've scoffed at the lover
who spends his life trying to effect
a perfect orgasm, the addict who won't give
up until he finds the Truth.

Armies have polluted their dreams
in order to purify rivers of blood
and return to the bed of love
with suitable charms. How many Crusades
ended up as ritual slaughters? Flashing metal
from sharpened blades pleasurably ripping
at flesh; convolutions of
maimed bodies rotting in the sun. "Amo, amas
amat" in tasteless wafers. Communion
of lips and tongue.

Monteverdi was no saint
nor can any artist control
his emotions if his lover steals
the key to his strongbox. We're only
human. Even turtle doves drop their excrement
wherever they can.

Perhaps Freud was wrong. Perhaps
we take pride in needlework, the tatting
of intricate affairs, lacy wristbands
of black adorned by peach-colored roses. Simple ticket for
immorality to anything that lasts
longer than a kiss, spray-painted initials whitewashed
from the mind.

I know the assurance I need each day
is nothing more than my own affirmation mouthed
in language my body understands: simple gesture
of peeling an orange, keeping the rind intact
without puncturing its delicate skin.

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It's All The Same

To my father

X-Ray was my father's passion. Driving long miles on country roads
in the Snowbelt of Upstate New York to hospitals, clinics and
rural outposts, he was the physicians' Clark Kent zooming
in from another planet to fix broken tubes, fluoroscopes, diathermies...

On wintry nights I listened to my mother tossing and turning until
finally long past midnight my father's Studebaker would
chink-chink-chink up the snow-packed drive...

It was 1944, before MRIs cat scans and ultra-
Sound... X-ray was the only way to see inside. Newton was
the celebrated scientist of the day after the AMA had
its way with homeopathy and any other treatment
dealing with The Foreign Entities of Energy and Vibration.
Humans were turkeys to cut, slice, dice and sew up-
easy to break and fix. And if you died, so what?

Seated on a stool next to him, I watched my father tinker
with his clutter of tubes and wires, and
if I listened long and hard enough I could almost hear the
ionosphere humming...

In fifth grade science class, I demonstrated how X-rays
work. "What cannot be seen appears to be magic!"
Bristling with self-importance, "but actually it's only a
tube with a gun that shoots high energy electrons
at a tungsten target."

Dressed in Tartan kilt and matching sox, new white
sweater and birthday pearls, I pointed to my diagram
and cardboard box.

"What we don't see can still be Real. So the
Miracle is not that X-rays can show us our
skeletons, but the fact that we humans are
nothing but a combination of
unique vibrations!"

This of course was too much for the class; the
teacher also let it pass.

Meanwhile, the Germans were defeated and so were Tesla,
Rife and others who knew X-ray was not a god but a
dangerous predator with a sting that could kill.

Yet even when radiation created cancers as
toxic as the tumors they burned out, doctors
refused to give in. The goal was not to become whole
again: "curing" had nothing to do with saving lives.

My father, a heavy smoker, retired to a nursing home
after a stroke, two heart attacks, Alzheimer's, diabetes...
sharing the room with my mother, long addicted to
doctors and drugs.

"As above, so below," declared the teacher who was
crucified with a hammer and nails. Did he really die for our
sins, I wondered, or did we pound him up there on that cross
to prove he was only an X-ray that could easily be
resurrected?

Or, like every other Jew, was he nothing but dust?
What was that part about faith and trust?

Images glow on the screen long after the lights are
turned out and I can still hear those tire chains chink-chinking
up the drive, still see my father on his knees
checking for twisted wires and burnt-out tubes...

By the time he died, his blood had turned yellow as
the nicotine on his fingers.

"Light is everything," he whispered at death: "Skin, bones,
blood, hair, teeth, birthmarks, sun, moon and stars... everything in
this God-damned universe.

"And another thing." Wheezing and
hiccupping: "Happiness, sadness, pleasure, pain...
It's all the same..."