The Experience Maker**

Gene Fowler

Walking brings me out
sooner or later
into your place.

Camp you set up by the stream
to get away
from it all?

Florescent bleached office
or musk dark cafe?

Bus bench? Or road shoulder?
The porch.

Lean close, out of
traffic and blood pressures
or people in other rooms
or crickets and mosquitoes -

Just passing through. Going
some place of my own

but a job along the road to do.

What is it? Well, I sing

the song

at the right ear
it'll build the
new City.


Before
history was sung, before
the places were

I sailed on a dark Earth.

The old sea people you call us
and make us ghosts
with your disbelief.

And I was the singer
the world maker
who gave shape and cry
to the winds
that crossed our eye.

The seer
the old sea people called me
and you'd call it
the "experience maker,"
though you'd shudder
a shaken ship
storm ridden
to see
the void I'd made
into sea and lands, winds and
fire-winds

and pull back
forgetting even the thought

man made the whole of it.

I've been around -
following prevailing winds
and sailing into those winds,
using an oar, when the winds lay slack,
coiled in the sea,
running with the tide over islands
and walking through valleys
and walking around
the sea basins.

I came up out of the Indian sea
and across the bone
to work in the dry as navigator
casting my charts
by the winds of season
for men to walk with or into.
I stood under stars, and read the winds
in men, and cast my vision
into the dark soils of men.

The Wessex folk brought me up to
build their sun dial, the Veekings had me sing back
and build a ship

The Hopi, too, noted my coming -
portrait scratched
in stone -
Up from those belly-currents in the south
my whistle with its warm breath-winds
my pack full of dreams, of
insightings and incitings, seeds
to plant in gray soil
in skull-pots, the pack
under my coat
drawn as a devious spine

as I humped over the thing I drew
in the ground mists or dust devils
of vision for those
who'd look past the hump
- the ghostly laws sung
into walls, then
the sites.

And everywhere, every place, planted dreams
and grew things and thinks
to leave behind as agriculture and culture,
as city and situation,
I hunted only that magic lady
never quite laid or seen
whose gusted tits
whip-brushed my cheeks, those earlier
sailings,
whose current thigh
hooked my hip
and threw me to love.

And I sang her those songs of number, and set sail
to the gnamer, took it to sea, before
I grew numb, stilled the live, birthed
numb-er, de-
entrailed, the gnamer, dropping
its game, leaving
the half fired
oil slick
name.
And wherever I waked, to sing
my charts
and birthe a "waking" place -
I hunted only that magic lady.

An oral art?
The painter's art, the sculptor's, the
film-maker's, yet
an oral art:

Walk beside your ear,
plant
my phrases and words,
help you make
SENSE
in the void, led
by song.

Hunt for my lady
of wind gust and current, dark
in sky cathedrals,

awash
in sea,
grottos of drowned pasts,

long sea trails and land trails
and wastes and folds of the globe,

pause where you are

and looking off to the road
I'll travel, stop
to make a song, one
for the road,
leave

the song

tucked lightly in your soil

full of things, not
words

it'll grow all right.
It'll all hang together



Gene Fowler
acorioso@earthlink.net