Synopsis (by Ron Phelps)

     Swept Away is an epic Romance about the stormy courtship, eventual 
marriage, and adventurous honeymoon of a poet from Oklahoma and a young 
Art History student from California. The main action takes place in San 
Francisco, Berkeley, on California's Mt. Shasta, and in Texas and Oklahoma.
There are formidable obstacles to the passionate fulfillment of these two 
soulmates: she is engaged to a kind and understanding law student, with a 
secure and satisfying life before her; she, like her fiance, is urban and Jewish 
while her truelove is from an Oklahoma redneck background; and she is young 
and relatively unformed while he is approaching middle age and is becoming 
set in his ways, dogmatic and ossified- in other words, they belong to 
incompatible generations. The strategies of love with which these two unlikely 
lovers break through these barriers make the novel an optimistic affirmation of 
the supreme power of romantic love.

     However, as an epic Swept Away is about much more than this, somewhat 
as with the equally ambitious Romances Anna Karenina, Gone With 
The Wind, and Doctor Zhivago. The book is also a Social Realist novel that 
attempts to portray with cinematic detail the dying world of the oil-and-land 
aristocracy of Texas and Oklahoma, Zen Buddhism in America, the life of clerks 
in mountaineering equipment stores, the sudden violence of urban streets, and 
the comradeship of mountaineers and writers and artists.

     The novel consequently has a varied tapestry of subsidiary characters, 
from the poet's fiery and uncompromising wealthy mother to the wise old 
African-American cook to loutish environmentalist-bashing vacationers who end 
up needing a helicopter rescue on Mt. Shasta to a Jewish  Zen Buddhist teacher 
to the young woman's lively caterer mother to a writer friend of the poet who 
while snowbound with him in the mountains discusses everything from 
Coriolanus to wine and women, and many other precisely drawn characters, 
from African-American store managers to menacing quasi-criminal cowboys.

     Events in Swept Away include a near-death free-fall down a sheer rock 
face at Yosemite leading to hospitalization, several scenes of tender and 
intimate lovemaking, a violent fight with street punks, a detailed account of the 
colorful atmosphere and suspenseful action at a University of Oklahoma football 
game, a mountain snowstorm in which the two lovers are almost killed, a painful 
quarrel and eventual reconciliation between the young woman and her mother-
in-law, an elaborate insider's description of a Zen Buddhist communal 
meditation session, and much more in a restless, ever-active book.

     Above all, Swept Away is a poetic novel, about love and nature and 
memory and cosmic spirituality, attempting a visionary style of constant beauty 
and inwardness to complement the absolute movie-like realism of its action, 
setting and dialogue. Swept Away includes some of the poet's love poetry to 
his bride, as well as extended exhilarated passages on the sublime and terrible 
beauty of Mt. Shasta. Its goal is to be a novel that is always beautiful and at the 
same time easy to read and entertaining.

     Because it is a passionate and even obsessive love story, Swept Away 
should have immediate appeal to all those readers, many of them women, who 
love a good Romance. But in its epic variety it can also be of interest to nature 
lovers, enthusiasts of Oriental religion, mountaineers, and readers interested in 
an exactly observed depiction of many aspects of American society. In addition, 
its character as a kind of lyric poem, its wealth of journalistic detail, and its 
strenuous literary ambition may very well earn it critical support and a reputation 
routinely denied to the average Romance.

raining into one

Tapping softly at my hearing,
as if to catch my attention,
the rain skitters across the roof and
showers down on the fallen leaves.

The new grass trembles at its touch
but the rain is gentle and insistent.
It is a rain of sound, a rain of vision, 
a wet light quickly washing
slate grey shingles into blue,
streaking the wood fence and the
sycamore tree with fresh water colors, 
gently rinsing the apple blossoms.

A squirrel runs along the narrow fence
and shimmies briskly up a pine tree.
A fallen branch dangles by its tip
from a strong, spackled limb.
When the sudden shower is gone:
diamonds on every twig and stem.

A large circle of cloud turns bright
and glows like a hazy moon in the
delft sky of the winter afternoon.
The petals on the apple tree
cry with the joy of a first kiss,
held in the arms of the other.

As if I were their lover, tears rain down, 
as though I were the rain itself.

the veil

Like a jewel in the clasp of a silver crown
she sits and centers each breath upon
the farthest stretch of her silken gown,
knowing not by what is known 
and not with eyes but by her mind alone-- 
what flies or walks or comes across her way
is drawn only to her, and in a wheel
of lace she waits like a saracen blade, 
balanced in the swing of wind and rain.

Each thought here is a thought of silk unfurled
and like the sky, goes all the way around her 
   world.
In the center of this dome she spins and shines
and lives unknown, and dies, as does a wild 
   thing,
in a circle of nights and days, an open ring.

Beauty and the Beast

The older I get 
the more often
young women 
become nervous
when I flirt with them,
chanting their boyfriends' 
names
like magic spells
to ward me off

when all the while

like an old bear
who doesn't care
about the startled deer
I am simply enjoying
autumn,
tasting the berries
and breathing in the air.

I have already put on
enough fat for winter.

Smoke - for Tsvetaeva

Wow me, woo me over the years, 
across the miles--
You who were so personal
and so intense,
your mind like a child’s,
yet all grown up.

Show me again your sad
demon’s smile, your lost look
your pouting lips
the bruised swell of your eyes.
O child, ageless child!
Kindle the fire from within--

What smoke is this
drifting across the century
if not the incense of your
absurdly personal verse
quietly pervading everything
as it burns through the years . . .

What an all-consumning fire
that grows from within
like a smouldering flame
under a forest floor--
Wow me, woo me over
the years, across the miles
drifting through the centuries.

clouds

seeing that there might be
a cool September rain,
he left the car windows open
so that in the night
he could run bare footed
and shirtless outside
to close them,
where he would smell 
the honeysuckle and feel 
the heat of the concrete drive,
the small pain and texture 
of pebbles and twigs 
there on his feet 
and the cold rain beat 
against his skin before
he returned to his sleep.

July 1969

the horses ate grass
and the creek ran sweet
with cold water and pine
needles scattered on the
rocky sand bottom while we
drank from cupped hands great
plum-round mouths full of
ourselves from the ice streams
that crashed through the tetons,
taking us with it, our sweet 
youth gone to the sea.

the fox

Caught in the lights of midnight cars
On dark lawns framed by houses,
I disappear like smoke
among the scattered stars,
a dim shape you almost see
passing through the ruins.

I feel your eyes watching me
while you search your lives
for anything as beautiful and free.
It is not my fleeting shadow
but you who are the ghosts,
Gone like the Anasazi.