Diane Frank: California Poets Part 10, Three Poems

Diane Frank

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Diane Frank

Three Poems

Appalachian Symphony

Drink this! Morning air and light.

Birdsong in an old-growth forest

at dawn, the moving shapes

of exotic butterflies – so many species

flying in from a dream of mountains.

The Red River Gorge,

arch of rock, ripple of water

under a stone bridge

where time unfolds in the touch

of an arm or a leg

under water.

This is where music

pulls you out of a dream

into the warm Kentucky air

into the cave of

memories of the mountain,

a picnic by the river

where you found the agate

that morning.

The river rippling silver

and the sound of a banjo

inside an early summer wind

where a symphony

reveals itself

in the voices of the birds

and a synesthesia of butterflies.

Listen to the music

your fingers reveal every morning.

Listen to the wind’s

mysterious song.

Prayer to the Invisible

                        For Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz

I write your name where no one can read it.

In the sky behind a cloud

on a stone. I write your name

in the footprints

of a tortoise walking back

into the ocean.

When you came to me in a dream

from the other place, 

I told you how much I missed you.

You let me know

you can do even more healing

where you are now, out of your body.

A year after the synagogue shooting,

you embrace your friends at the Tree of Life

as they are saying Kaddish for you –

where we sit all day and name the dead.

You whisper to your wife

who is living in a shadow,

sitting alone on the tapestry sofa

where she sat with you.

Our prayers grow out of the shadow

of necessity. Our music

floats above the burden we carry

even though you want us to release it.

I carry your spirit on my shoulders

as I walk into the synagogue

where we played music for you,

as I follow an eclipse north

as I walk into a dream.

I write your name in the sky after midnight

in the Leonid meteor showers,

in the penumbra of an eclipse

of the wolf moon.

Your name is inside the music

I play for you on my cello.

I write your name in the invisible

where you disappeared that morning

where your spirit flew into a cloud.

I write your name

in an ice halo around the moon

and my prayer that this planet

will one day, like an amaryllis,

bloom again.

Dream Horse 

            “Any fool can get into an ocean

            but it takes a goddess to get out of one.”  – Jack Spicer

A dream horse, or perhaps a crab,  

slept in crowded fields of light. 

Dream haystacks all around

and the dream wings of a nighthawk

flying into an eastern star.

In the distance, dream horses

stampeded over fields of winter wheat

under an ocean of sky.

Was that galaxy a vision of a Goddess?

The horse heard a lavender melody

from a distant star –

the music becoming light,

and in a cottonwood tree

an owl chanted from the twisted

sculpture of a branch

that was still growing. 

The blue notes of my dream

called to the owl

like chimes in a sky cathedral

as the Leonid meteors streaked

the edges of what I knew.

Above the owl’s wings, the northern lights

hovered over hay fields,

changing colors.

Every word I wrote that night

brought us back to a passageway

where a stone tunnel leads through coastal cliffs

to the ocean. Someone was playing a harp

and a thousand voices were chanting

the old rituals. In the sky,

we could see a dream horse,

the midnight muse, Pegasus flying.

All words have wings.

Author Bio:

Diane Frank is author of nine books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. Prayer to the Invisible was published in 2026 by Blue Light Press. She teaches poetry, flash fiction and memoir workshops at San Francisco State University and Dominican University. Her first novel, Blackberries in the Dream House, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her new novel, Mermaids and Musicians, is an unusual love story, full of music and a plea to save the Earth. Her website: www.dianefrank.com