Dick Coanda

Dick Coanda lives with his wife in Hollywood. Retired, he has five children, 11 grandchildren and a great grand-daughter. Raised in Milwaukee, he worked for a newspaper, attended Marquette University, where he helped edit RENASCENCE: A Journal of Letters and The Newman Review. As a student, he had poetry and scholarly articles published in Michigan’s Voices and American Literature, among others.

He got his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin. For the next 15 years he taught English Literature at various colleges (among them USC), then worked for 23 years as a Public Relations specialist and in other capacities for his church.

He continues to write poems and essays and is working on a cookbook, which he says is "...based on Plato's Ladder of Love, a tool that's been recently sorely neglected. The tag line is ‘If you love food, you can love others.’"

He can be reached at richardcoanda@yahoo.com or visit his website at www.geocities.com/richardcoanda/index.html.

SISTER AMADEA AND THE BOY WHO
WOULDN'T COMB HIS HAIR

"For the love of God, Montresor!"
"Yes, for the love of God."
--E.A. Poe, "The Cask of
Amontillado"

From her dark wimple
pokes a nose
bright as granite
as she spots a haystack
shaking despite fair warning,
so quick as a wizard
loosing doves from his long sleeve
dumps a pint of water
over Henry, his strewn papers
and the books his mother paid for
while classmates glance aside
still chanting
"Swinta Maria, Matka Boja"
stolidly, like citizens.

It's the same nostril she strokes
with the Cross hanging from her throat
while gabbing about an Angel guiding
each Polish-American. But where's Henry's?
Or the brats' she pounds on?
Language lessons come in a foreign tongue.
The Virgin keeps silence -- how can we know?

But her nose is clean -- it only itches.
She dwells on holes in Christ's flesh
where our sins hide
and -- stuffing gratitude,
terror and fantasy into her class --
tells us a Hand from the Holy Tabernacle once
slapped a girl for chattering in Church
and left a red bruise there like a birthmark.

Decades later this same box
in another church
startles me, whispering,
"Skip the mythology!"
and telegraphs again
despite my rash mix of unbelief
and smoldering piety
"Skip the mythology!"
till I ask myself if the Holy Spirit's
at last unstuck from the dark sleeve
of the nun who broke Henry's calm
and picked at her nose with a Cross.
_____________________________

TITANIA AND THE BROWNIE

Like 3 hummingbirds darting round
to block the goldenrod from floating
over hedge into the Dame's croquet game
I, Eustace, wag filmy wings
frenzied and wish I could taste nectar.
A Messenger arrives on chipmunk's back
shouting, "Hail! You're needed at the Court!"
I pale. My grandfather once disappeared like this.
Leaving my dustbag by the Dame's jasmines
I ride off tired and dusty toward the Queen.

Three days hence I kiss Titania's toe.
"Get this boy washed," she beams. "Give him silks
and food." I've never seen such dainties.
In 2 more hours I kiss her other foot.
"Arise, my boy. You'll be my Lord of Revels
since you are fair." "Fair?"
I catch my image in her glass and muse.
"Laugh," she beams. "Drink up.
You may kiss my hand, my wrist, my cheek."
She hugs me to her like a marshmallow
and leads me to her alcove, laughing,
saying I make her happy.

Beside her on a throne I review troops,
judge races, tell musicians what to play.
When I've drunk my fill, she leads me to a couch,
her bed of petals. I sleep like stone.
At dawn I find Lord Oberon
grinning over me like Pussy with a herring,
asking if I'd eat, ordering dragonfly eggs
with nectar better than the previous day's.
"My private stock," he urges. Lionized,
I grow to like this and take it as my due.

Servants titter at my every word.
Girl-fairies gaze as if I were a dream.
I tell musicians how to tune their strings
and coach the cavalry in saber swings.
Oberon shakes my hand as he goes hunting --
it is goodbye. Titania beckons me
once more to her petals. These revels -- held
once every generation -- I wish
would last forever. But all things end.
The Messenger coughs, "Depart." Titania
delivers a final marshmallow hug, her eyes
sparkling like nectar. I inch home on a snail,
gold dust in my pockets, and find my hand withered,
vision blurred, my hair bone-white.
I'm growing older every inch -- until I've died
from giving Titania my youth and all my pride.

____________________________________

THE SWAMI AND THE CHOCOLATE-COVERED RAISINS

How many chocolate-covered raisins
can you eat? Well, so can I --
but not this time.

Mom had a yogi living with us,
a swami -- that's equivalent to a bishop --
when the only yogi anybody knew
was a baseball player named Yogi Berra.
She told me he was so advanced
he could leave his body and travel
in space and time and thus could know
both past and future. I forget what else she said,
as I put little stock in her friends --
Ray Kemp, chinchilla dealer from Arizona
whose guarantee for an unbreeding pair
was "another pair of the same quality,"
and Mark Prophet of L.A. (whose wife wrote a book
on Jesus), who accepted fried chicken
without thinking to feed the author and their 5 kids
waiting in his old Ford (Mark said I'd been a monk
for 5 lifetimes and taught me a chant from Atlantis).

Another swami visited us later,
but Chidananda was the intellectual one,
so we chatted a few times.
Our neighbors called the police when they first saw
him greeting the dawn in a sari on our lawn.
"There's a lunatic out there in his nightshirt
at 6 AM," they complained. The yogi told the officer,
"These are the clothes people wear in my country."

I asked the swami about God. He was kindly,
like Montgomery Clift in steel-rimmed glasses:
"The common Hindus are superstitious
and have thousands of images of God,
but these get refined the higher you go in wisdom.
The ultimate concept is that God is imageless,
and wise men of all religions agree on this."
I was impressed, although agnostic at the time,
a rebel at a Jesuit school of journalism.

I asked if he was vegetarian. He responded,
"I have never eaten meat, and none of my ancestors
have eaten meat for the last 2000 years."
"How do you know that?" I asked, astonished.
"We are all Brahmins!" he replied.

Mom grouched that he spent 1 1/2 hours in prayer
upstairs each morning and didn't
like being disturbed. Without much thought
she fed him orange Jell-O without telling him its
source.
When I called her on this, she shrugged,
"What he doesn't know can't hurt him."
Chidananda spent hours reading, walking, thinking
and watched Hopalong Cassidy sometimes on TV.
I don't think he and Dad had much to say.

I came home early one Saturday
and saw a candy dish in the kitchen
with chocolate-covered raisins whispering,
"Eat me." After nibbling on 3, I felt full --
which is impossible, it being so close to dinner
and me being a big eater.
("Dickie the glut," Uncle Felix called me.)
I forced another down like a proud Milwaukeean
but, with a sense of awe, couldn't touch another.

On Mom's arrival, I asked, "Did Chidananda
do something to those chocolate-covered raisins
in the kitchen? I ate 4 and had to quit."
"I don't know," she smirked, "but he has the power
after blessing food to make very little
satisfy the body." I couldn't disbelieve --
I'd felt it myself and realized,
"This could explain the miracle of the loaves and the fishes!!!
But -- what can explain this?"

The next time I found him in our Egyptian-green living room
I asked reverently, "Do you have any special powers?"
The swami touched his hands as if in prayer,
bowed and said smiling, "I can only serve you."