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(AGAIN)


5-15-22  Remembering Old Times and Old Friends

5/2/2022

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Picture
days and nights on the frontier (I)
​

we flew no flag
because we were a secret,
known only to readers of the front page
of the New York Times which knew,
even 45 years ago, all the
secrets fit to
print…

but also, of course, the radicals and revolutionaries downtown knew,
and the tribes who sent men to clean our rooms and shine our shoes
and, no doubt, watch us carefully, preparing for the day, but best,
there were the caravans who knew,
lines of camels loaded with goods on their back,
going clankity clankity with every lumbering, soft-footed step...

the caravans that stopped every couple of months
on the narrow road that separated our secret living quarters
and our super-secret operations center where we sat and listened
to the also not-so-secret secrets of the other guys...

the camels put to pasture beside our walls where the merchants in their robes
laid out their wares for us to consider as we passed for shift change,
from the gates of our home to the gates of our work and back,
all kinds of goods, oil paintings , brass shining bright under the desert sun,
camel saddles of polished wood and soft leather and always at least one tailor
who it was said could, for next to nothing, look at a picture of a man’s suit from Esquire
and make an exact copy with the finest silk from China, a silk suit, finely tailored,
in finest Savile Row fashion for $20…

many bought such suits and some bought many suits before going home,
getting word back to us who remained that, while the silk was fine,
the cotton thread that sewed them was not, that the way to keep your $20
suit when you got home was to take it to someone who could take the suit apart
and put it back together again with good thread…

there was a lot about the place that was like the suits, both less and more
than it often seemed -

secrets that weren’t secret, finely tailored suits made with rotten thread,
soldiers who would rather see us gone protecting us
from people who would rather see us dead,
fake wars and, ultimately,
fake peace...

days and nights on the frontier...
Picture
pressed like rain
​

the moon
a blood edged scimitar
pushing a cloudburst west
rolling dark and dense

the Gulf’s gift
to the desert, blooming
in all the shades of cactus
transcendent

it would be a time to be there

I’m not
but would like to be

running with the clouds
across the desert
and into the mountains

pressed
like the rain
by the blood-edged moon
Picture
days and nights on the frontier (II)

working a midnight shift
on Moscow time meant
that 4 a.m. breakfast at the 24/7 NCO club
was a pitcher of beer
and a cheeseburger with fries
and the jukebox
blasting…

multiple listenings to the Doors
with “Baby Light My Fire” …

feeling
worn and raunchy
having seen nothing female
for more than six months but
the Commander’s 16-year-old daughter
sunning at the pool, her leaving at the end
of the Commander’s tour in whatever virginal state
she arrived, a sterling testament to good military order and discipline…

Picture
as Mother’s Day approaches

I think about a poem for my mother,
passed on now for more than
twenty years

and it’s always hard, so much easier
writing about my father, so large and dominant,
he, the sun, she the moon
and thus, it might seem
a lesser light…

but consider the moon,
always circling, always there
but sometimes seen and sometimes not,
shifting phases and faces
through the course of a month
but never changing…

a constant
sometimes invisible in its constancy,
a reflector,
not a creator of light, easy sometimes
misjudge its place and its
power…

but,
consider the tides…

Picture
how I became a pacifist
 
not much of a fighter
when I was young,
most of the fights I had
I lost,
like the first,
when I beat my
larger opponent’s
fist
with my
face
mercilessly…

luckily
for the fractious
barroom drunks
I occasionally crossed
in my drinking
days,
I grew older
and I grew smarter
and, most important, I grew
considerably larger,
developing
along the way a
menacing
visage,
discovering, along the way
that large and mean-looking
allowed me a hardcase bluff that discouraged
even the most hopelessly
drunk
from testing
their unsteady valor
against me,
avoiding thereby further damage
to innocent fists
throughout the terminal
of my Saturday night
adventures

learning,
as was true in most of the rest of my life,
that faking it
usually works about as well
being it
Picture
days and nights on the frontier (III)
​

the operations center ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
with staff working rotating shifts, swing, mid,
and days, three days each shift with a day off between each

and because of that twenty-four operation,
everything else operated twenty-four hours as well,
the NCO/Enlisted and Officer Clubs, the two tennis courts,
the two lane bowling alley and the base theater, the base
theater with a steady stream of Disney and other family
entertainment (even though there were no families, except
for a short time, the Commander and his daughter) and
most everyone on the base who wasn’t working or sleeping
was drunk or on the way
to getting
drunk…

and the curious thing is (at least I think it’s curious
now even though it didn’t strike me at the time) there
was no obvious law enforcement - outside the walls
were semi-permanent camps of host country soldiers
who provided the external security but were never,
ever allowed inside the gates and inside the gates I do not
recall over eleven months ever seeing any military
police except for those couple who guarded the gate
to the operations center, reviewing badges to confirm
we were who we were supposed to be at the place
where we were supposed to be…

nowhere inside the walled living area of the small base
do I recall seeing a military policeman and nowhere, even
the officers guarding the operations gate, did I see anyone
armed…

this, in a community of about 1,500, half to two-thirds awake
at any one time with nowhere to go and nothing to but sit by the pool
or at the appropriate club or by the walls or atop the barracks
where stars shone bright in a display of light every
desert night, nothing to do among this small collection
of places but
drink...

drink and
remember other, more welcoming, places
and count the days remaining
at this place, hoping
the beer will last
until then
and
then
be left behind…

Picture
an old, out-out-of-season piece

tamaleria
​

it is Christmas Eve
and in accordance with tradition
we will spend it making tamales with
a crew of related corn husk spreaders

my son will be in charge,
because in a large family of Mexican women,
inheritors of generations of mamas and tias
and abuelitas, all expert in the art, my half-Mexican son
is the only one who knows how to do the job
of mixing the masa and cooking the savory carne
(and a few frijoles refritas, “las especiales” )

he has agreed to do handle the technical end of
preparing ingredients and the actual cooking, but only
if there are significant volunteers to do the grunt labor
of actually spreading the masa and carne and wrapping
the filled corn husks…

I expect it will be great Christmas Eve fun for about
the first hour…

(I don’t even like tamales so much, but the time
of gringo domination in South Texas
is past, especially in the vicinity
of mi casa…)

Picture
mistaking a thing’s name for its thingness
 
the Zen master speaks
of names
and the naming of things
and how the naming of things
is a function of the world
and not the thing

how by naming
we seek to catalog differences
between things that are all the same,
coming from the same place
when their existence begins, going
to the same place when it ends…

a tree might be a tree, he says,
but it is also a cat and a rock and
a droplet of water and even a lion named
Cecil, a name beyond a name, but still
a tree and a rock and a cat and a droplet
of water, and the sun is the moon
and the moon is the star and the star
is you and you are me
and we are with all the rest
all things that be, that have been, that will
be, and all our naming does not change
the essence of all things which is
the same as all things of all things…

be proud...

for your are not that tiny, disposable thing
your parents named you, you are more, bigger,
part of all as you are part of your parents
and their parents and the ox that pulled
their wagon through the rock-strewn
steppes of Patagonia…

be proud...

for you are much more than the blinded world
has named you…
Picture
days and nights on the frontier (IV)
 
from out barracks roof
we can see over the walls and past
the Pakistani soldiers who from their small camp
guard us, and past them the fields and the shepherds
and their sheep, and sometimes the shepherds
take their sheep elsewhere as a man with a long-barreled, 
antique rifle shoots at another man with a long rifle
in an adjacent field who shoots back, both missing, tribal
disputes requiring not death or serious injury, but just the effort
and the show, like dogs barking on opposite sides of a fence,
a noisy piece, but effective at the time... 
 
(but not so much anymore it seems,
the dogs of war having jumped the fence
and men who are not shepherds with new and more accurate
guns and women and children with bombs strapped to their chest)
 
but this is then,
then it was just the guards, singing quietly in the morning, and the fields
and shepherds and sheep and make-believe wars for honor satisfied,
and beyond them, the desert, shimmering on hot afternoons,
and beyond them, the mountains, the Hindu Kush,
hard mountains, dry, brown and treeless, just deep canyons
and sharp crags cresting on a deep sky,
a Martian landscape, hard mountains for hard people...
 
we could see it all from our roof, watching with a six pack of beer
as the soldiers who watched over us lay out their carpets
to pray...
 
they do not pray for us, except, perhaps
for us to be
gone

Picture
settling for semi-naked ladies
 
I approach the new day’s poem
as I approach the new
day, hesitant
and a little unsure as to how
it’s going to go…

a busy day ahead, things to do,
a trip to Austin, nothing interesting enough
to force into a poem…

and while I sit here
dumbfounded
by my “failure to communicate”
(what a great movie)
creative self to sitting-in-my-chair-drinking-coffee
self

(and yes I know “dumbfounded” is a peculiar word
for use in this context, but I like it and it is my weakness
to use words I particularly like even if they don’t
quite
or at all
fit
and I’m used to it and I expect you to be too
by this time)

affirmation!

(yes, self-affirmation,
even when inappropriate essential
to maintaining the hubris of putting words on paper
and expecting them to be read by other than close
friends and relatives who will tell you they read it even
it they didn’t)

(let’s face it - hubris, I mainline that stuff like a junkie on horse
or a fat man eating pecan pie - I have no other excuse)

meantime,
communication between the ego and its alter
still mostly static and buzz (is it not obvious), I am
bombarded by images and moments and distractions, traffic
on Broadway, a fire truck, Chopin bumping keys overhead, two skinny
blond women having a meeting, too much time at the gym taking them past desirable
to hungry and ferocious and sharp-toothed predatory (middle-age, trying, always,
to keep that debutant look without the wide-eyed innocence I never believed
anyway, but still probably nice people so I hate to criticize…) and, I swear to God,
sea gulls that turn out to be ring tones on one of the women’s cell phone
but it’s already too late, I’m back at the beach dodging jelly fish
and nearly naked ladies…

and I’m tired of this hail Mary fake and dodge
anyway
so
what the hell, I
quit

````````````````

content to hang out
instead
with the semi-naked
ladies
sand in my shorts
be damned

Picture
days and nights on the frontier (V)
​

a Filipino rock and roll band
on the USO circuit
around Europe,
all dressed up in cowboy hats
and fringed shirts with shiny snaps,
playing rockabilly hits
from the 50s,
covers of the best from Sun Studios,
Johnny Cash, Elvis, Jerry Lee
and all the rest

playing Christmas Eve
at the NCO Club in Darmstadt
down the road about 70 or so klicks
from Frankfurt,
and I had a date with the cousin of a friend,
a pretty girl with dark hair and dark eyes
and a bright, sunny smile, and
we danced and danced
bopping around the dance floor,
her skirt swirling and
swirling
and it was a great Christmas Eve
a long way from home…

the guys in Vietnam
had Hope
and Ann-Margaret
and the current Playboy Playmate of the Year...

in Germany we had
a Filipino rockabilly cover band,
but nobody complained…

----------

a year and a half later
I saw them again,
the same Filipino cowboys,
same hats,
same fringe shirts with shiny snaps,
playing the same rockabilly
hits
in the bar
atop the Spirizan Hotel
in Kabul…

everyone liked them,
even the Russians, big guys with stony stares
who didn't express appreciation for much of anything
but their vodka,
and I liked them too, the cowboys, not the Russians, drinking
my own Russian vodka, tapping my feet to the music,
no dance floor and no pretty girl
to swing around it like
I remembered from Christmas Eve
in Germany

and I couldn’t but feel a little sorry
for the guys, trying to play rock and roll
guitar licks to an international crowd of far from home
drunks in Afghanistan,
having, it must have been, the worst agent
in all of the Philippines…

Picture
snippet
 
a snippet
a drippit
a little tiny
tidbit
readit
&
forgetit
it’s
just my morning
today
bit

Picture
Sad news, my poet-friend, Gary Blankenship, died a couple of days ago. My friend, beloved by everyone in the on-line poetry community who ever wrote or read with him, had a similar background to my own, a retired professional who turned to poetry for a purpose when work no longer provided one. I was one of those who wrote and read with Gary, almost from the time I began to write. His work, much quieter and gentler than my own more rough and ready work, was a good contrast to me. I have a couple of his books, including his first one. Wang Wei's River Poems, which introduced me to a particular Chinese master and to the old Chinese masters in general.

Unfortunately, my library is in disarray and I can't find Gary's book to choose from. Instead I'll post from this on-line selection from the book.


​Wang Wei, generally considered one of the three major Chinese (High Tang) poets, wrote a series of twenty poems collectively known as the Wang River Collection. They meant to record a journey up the river with his good friend, Pei Di, while also being about Wang’s mansion located in the river valley.
paragraph 2 
A group of poets from Toronto known as ‘Pain Not Bread’ published a book in 2000 titled Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei. The poems are modern free verse interpretations of Tang poetry by Wang, Tu Fu and others. Among the works is ‘Mountain Range,’ a beautiful adaptation of Wang Wei’s ‘Deer Park.’
3
Based on their work and others, I’ve set out to ‘transform’ Wang Wei’s poems into mostly verse libre sonnets, a free form sonnet. The order is not Wang Wei’s. I selected the order on the basis of how much I liked the poems and how difficult I thought the transformation would be.
4
III: After Wang Wei’s Luan House Rapids (13) — Beyond the Estuary

A torrent drowns duckweed and bulrush;
squalls whip cattails and willow thickets.
Canvas wet outside and in, soaked shoes
squirt with each muddy step.


A trickle, rivulet, rush flows over field
and road, into cellars and badger holes.
Boats break from their moorings, trash bins
float like empty shells past broken dolls and bikes.

On a cloudless night, we embrace the stars;
we pour diamonds through our fingers.
On a cold autumn night, jewels turn to dross;

promises dull, lumps of cinder without warmth.
A summer’s debris drifts to block the drain,
a white feather trapped between stones.

5
The literal translation by Wai-Lim Yip, “Rill of the House of the Luans”, is

6
blast-blast — autumn rain/s middle
lightly-lightly/shallow-shallow — rock flow pour
jump wave/s-bead/s self mutual/each other splash
white egret startle again down

7
Like the best of Oriental poets, Wang Wei leaves the poem unfinished; the meaning of the final line a mystery to be worked out by the reader.

8
My version is:

Autumn rain and wind gusts
strike the boulders below.
The rapids’ waves collide --
startled egrets rise, settle.


Although Gary had been less active than in the past, he leaves behind a wealth of excellent work.


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4-29-22 Long-Haul Truckin'...

4/17/2022

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Picture
eudaimonia

(eudaimonia - translated from its Greek roots as “human flourishing”)

she comes like a stranger to your door,
knocks
and demands entry
and, if you are ready to allow her passage,
becomes your friend

becomes the spark
that creates
creation

the carrier
of human flourishing
that blows away walls that restrict your vision,
cuts the knots that bind your soul

opening the all-embracing sky
that carries in its winds
the contagion of your spirit’s
deepest reach,
the fullness of your humanity

the bottomless well of your
completion
Picture
before I went insane

​

dreams
all night of a time
70 years past…
*
I was ten,
the last year before the insanity
of adolescence
set upon me…
*
and I did it so well,
crazy as hell,
doing crazy things
just to show I could do it…
so many people their trust abused,
it’s hard to believe
I made it out
alive,
and how often luck saved me
from finding my place in jail,
behind the bars it seemed
I so ardently
sought,
*
all for pride, for place,
for the benediction
of any Judas priest …
*
so domesticated am I now…
who could ever imagine
the tangled path
that brought
me here
---
dreaming all night
about the years before I went
insane
​

Picture
Moats in the Eye of a Disinterested God
​by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides


1937 (part 2 of 13)


Howard Hughes sets transcontinental air record
Second Stalin purge trial, 17 sentenced to death
DuPont patents nylon
U.S. Steel raises worker pay to $5 per day
First state contraceptive clinic opens in North Carolina
Gas explosion in school in New London, Texas kills 294
Fritz Zwicky coins the term “supernova”
Spinach growers in Crystal City, Texas erect statue of Popeye
Debut of Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
First commercial flight across the Pacific
“Gone With the Wind” wins Pulitzer Prize
Hindenburg explodes on landing killing 36
Police kill 10 strikers at Republic Steel
Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific
Buchenwald concentration camp opens
China declares war on Japan
In a secret meeting Hitler informs his military leaders of his intention to go to war
Nazi exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” opens in Munich
Walt Disney premiers the first full-length animated movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”



----------
Heigh-ho Heigh-ho
the urge to purge
surges
America’s most beautiful
pilot
disappears
barbed wire around
a new summer camp
merit badges
for
killing Jews



----------


A widow, with a son who grows rambunctious and wild, living with relatives as a part-time housekeeper, decorating cakes at a bakery, her life promises little more.

A high school graduate, his father’s business taken by the bank, his sister home from college to stay - the Great Depression sucks life from opportunity and ambition. He applies for work with the Work Progress Administration, but does not get called. He plays semi-pro baseball, loses an eye during pre-game warm up.

The shadows of war clouds darken, but noticed still only in passing.
Picture
​radio silence

for the first year and a half
of my military service I was in training
​at Indiana University

for the two years after
I spent my shifts
sitting at a large radio console
listening,
trying to ferret out the secrets
of the Soviet air force

mostly
this meant
trying to dig out meaning
from tiny Russian voices buried
in rumpled beds of static

as part of my training
I learned that some of the voices on the radio
get trapped in the higher ionosphere
and bounce within that band
for years, old voices from years past
still circling the globe

but most of the voices
pass on through the atmosphere
and sail off into the void, traveling to the stars,
the human voice another bit of static
for alien ears

such a lesser static
we are
than what we hear, the sound of the
big bang continuing its expansion, waves
of such distant origin traveling
past and through us all the days of our lives,
such a joyous and holy sound,
but how I I cursed it
as I sought human meaning
through its crunch and crackle, not understanding
at the time that I was listening to
the universe singing
its birth
song

~~~

so silent and dead would be the universe
without
​
Picture

Fast Times at Flatonia Flats
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1939 (part 3 of 13)


Frieda Wunderlich elected first woman dean of a US graduate school…
Daily newspaper comic strip “Superman” debuts…
30,000 killed by earthquake in Chile…
First experiment in the splitting of a nuclear atom…
Filming begins on Gone With the Wind…
Germany occupies Czechoslovakia…
7,000 Jews flee German occupied Lithuania…
Spanish Civil War ends, the fascists prevail…
Membership in Hitler Youth becomes obligatory…
Marian Anderson sings before 75,000 at Lincoln Memorial…
“The Grapes of Wrath” is published…
Dixie Clipper completes first commercial plane flight to Europe…
Nazis close last Jewish enterprises..
Frank Sinatra makes his recording debut…
“The Wizard of Oz” premiers…
Netherland mobilizes…
Hitler orders extermination of mentally ill…
First paper to deal with “black holes” is published…
Germany invades Poland, WWII begins…
Soviet Union invades Poland…
Reinhard Heydrich meets in Berlin to discuss final solution for Jews…
Birdbaths installed in Union Square…
Assassination of Hitler attempted, failed…
USSR invades Finland…
Montgomery Ward introduces the ninth reindeer, Rudolph…


----------
Frank
sings and Dorothy notices
she's not in Kansas
anymore
the world order
crumbles
but Christmas is saved
in America
by a reindeer with a very, very
shiny nose



---------


She works, sees to her son, walks to the movies on shapely legs tanned in the sub-tropic sun, her short skirt swishing, and men along the sidewalk grow silent and watchful as she passes. She is alone, lonely, but shy, withdrawn, does not want what the men ask for with their eyes.

He drives a wrecker truck, picks up the dead and dying along icy hill country roads. Finds a truck and trailer one night, overturned, beautiful white horses lying dead across the road, the owner sits on a rock, crying, beloved horses, his circus act dead, without his horses he is nothing.

A school in auto repair opens, seeing white horses dead and bloody red in his dreams, the wrecker driver decides to be a mechanic.
Picture
thinking of the death of a man I knew
​

not a friend
but we were friendly

that’s the kind of relationship
I preferred
with people who worked for me

friendly
in the way of how’s the wife
and the kids
and isn’t it a great day today
and how 'bout them
cowboys!

never anything deeper that might
complicate the
relationship…

-----

he died a couple of days ago,
a couple of years older than me

(I had always thought of him
as younger, an artifact of the relationship
I suppose)

the news of his death
was a shock to me, he being
part of the cadre from a time in my life
which, as I think back, seems only yesterday,
and who thinks of people dead who were just seen
yesterday

and though my memories of the time seem so fresh,
it has been, in fact, nearly twenty five years,
and it being so long and John being now dead,
my thought is to wonder how many more
of my memories’ immortals must now also
be dead

and that brings me to all the other people
from even much longer ago who must also be dead
and it seems that my memory of all of them,
so clear, so sharp, is now beginning to crumble
around me…

our lives a collection of memories, and now
those memories fall to pieces in the face of reality
and if memories are our life, how much longer
before my life is a trail of blank space
where people used to be, people I recall as real
as if they are standing here and now before me…

should I be saying good bye
or is it already too
late
Picture
Now is the time of the Assassins 
by Allen Itz


Time and the Tides

1940 (part 4 of 13)

FCC hears the first transmission of FM radio with clear, static -free signal…
Mass execution of Poles by the Germans…
Britain’s first WWII rationing, bacon, butter, and sugar…
Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet premiers…
Finland surrenders to Russia…
Mussolini brings Italy into Hitler’s war…
Germany invades Norway and Denmark…
Dance hall fire kills 198 in Mississippi…
Olympics are cancelled…
Winston Churchill becomes British prime minister…
First German bombs fall on England…
German troops occupy Amsterdam, Brussels and Belgium…
Britain and France begin evacuation of Dunkirk…
American Negro Theater organizes…
German forces enter Paris and France surrenders…
Brenda Starr, first cartoon strip by a woman debuts…
Bugs Bunny debuts in Wild Hare…
The blitz begins the first of 57 days consecutive nights of bombardment…
Black leaders protest discrimination in U.S. armed forces…
First Abbot and Costello film is released…
FDR wins unprecedented third term…
The walling off of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw begins…


----------
who’s on first
no longer a question
as war loads
the bases

Bugs
should a turned left
at Albuquerque
and the Finns admit
they’re finished

the Italians
put the pasta
on to boil

David's star is
put behind a wall
and pinned to every
Jewish lapel



----------

He’s come south, a drag-line mechanic helper, keeping the big machines running, building flood control levees on the river. Snakes, mosquitoes and mud - he will remember best the mud that cakes his boots so it’s hard to walk.

He meets her at the bakery, spending a part of his small paycheck on a cake for his landlords, a middle-aged woman and her middle-aged husband, a jazz trumpeter.

He watches her as she decorates the cake, the graceful wrap of her hand as she squeezes the frosting sack to make curlicues and red roses in a nest of green ivy that hangs across the cake like real ivy on a fence at home.

She rings up the charge on the register and takes his money.

“I’m Sidney," he says, "you can call me Sid.”

She smiles, shyly, looks into his eyes and sees not the hungry eyes of the men on the street, but a friendly smile instead, a friendly smile on a handsome face, a tall man with dark hair, long and swept back.

“I’m Mona,” she says.
Picture
yes, the bear does poop  in the woods
 
having
been at this for some time now,
years in fact, I have become
a poetry pro, able
to engage in walking, minding the dog,
and poeming
all
at the same time…

now
I’m sorry to say that as I walk
and mind the dog and attempt poeming
what I’m thinking of is dog poop
and the way city dwellers
treat it as if it is some kind of toxic
material such as North Korea or ISIS or
some other terrorist outfit like
the Pat Boone Fan Club
might come up with to terrorize
the civilized world
and I say
that’s silly because you didn’t see
Indians of the American type chase
deer and antelope and bison across the prairie
with little plastic bags to capture their poop
before it genocided their lives
and culture (white-eyes
certainly didn’t need any buffalo poop
to accomplish that end)
and you never saw cowboys
with little plastic bags hanging
from their saddles watching out
for cow pies and horse hockey
to defuse and decontaminate
and I don’t see why dog poop
should be toxic if deer and antelope and
buffalo and cow and horse and cougar
and such isn’t (and consider the number of
kangaroos in Australia and how it would devastate
that whole continent if kangaroo poop
was toxic and how could dog poop
be any more toxic than kangaroo poop
is a question someone should be
asking)

but
that said,
I understand
dog poop is not pleasant to look at
and downright disgusting to step into which is why
Bella’s rule of pooping is that she can’t do it
anywhere people walk, a rule she follows
religiously,
and if that’s an issue for some people
I can only remind them
that,
yes,
the bear does poop in the woods
and if you find yourself
stepping
in bear poop you are in bear
country where bears have a god-given
right to poop and where you have, according
to the natural nature of nature, no right to be
and you should set off for people country
where you belong in the first place
as quickly as you can
and leave the poor damn bears
to poop in
peace…
​
Picture
Den of Iniquity 
by Allen Itz

​




Time and the Tides



1941 (part 5 of 13)


The Japanese Imperial Navy with353 planes attacks the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, 2,304 people killed…
FDR gives his Day of Infamy speech to Congress and war on Japan is declared…
Germany and Italy declare war on the United States...


----------
the world’s misery
crosses both oceans,
becomes America’s misery as well

the righteous fight
is begun



----------


Sid joins the lines at the enlistment centers, but is deemed unfit because of his lost eye. Determined to serve, he seeks to join the Seabees, construction force for the Navy, but is again refused.

He is distraught, Mona relieved.
Picture
always a sucker for the blond
 
I can see
through the restaurants
wide windows
beautiful blond
Bella
in the car
sitting in her favorite spot
behind the steering
wheel,
watching
anticipating
ever move I make

so
attuned
is she to me
that she knows all my
tics and stratagems, knows
when I am working in my office that
when I reach to close the top of my computer
that something is up, rises from her
spot by me and waits for me
at the door

body
language…

she is an expert,
at least when it comes to my body and
my language…

I used that sympathetic soul
to my advantage
last night
and still feel guilty about it

pills she must take twice a day
for a rash make her very thirsty, with
the expected consequences
as when
last night she started to pee
in the den right in front of me and
I yelled at her because she never does that
(and we just paid $150 to have that carpet cleaned)
and she jumped and hurried off to her safe place behind
my recliner in the bedroom
and I wanted to get her outside to finish peeing
but she was scared by my yelling
and didn’t want to come so I played the ultimate card,
reaching for her leash and she came running
reaching for her leash always means a walk
is in store except this time when she was all the way
out the backdoor before she realized the door
was closing behind her and her leash still hung
from its hook and such a devastated look
I got that it haunts me yet this
morning…

but even betrayed
her trust in me she maintains
and, remembering all the good things,
the walks we actually walked and not the tricks,
forgetting all the bad so that
even now
she sits in my car behind the steering wheel
watching ever move I make here inside
the restaurant, alert to even the slightest move
that might suggest the next great thing
we will be doing together
next…

(or she may be watching for the sausage patty
I give her every morning after breakfast
but I prefer to believe it is me
she loves
and not my sausage, captive as I am
to this blond dog as men are to most
blondes)
Picture
Shadrach in the Fiery Pit
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides


1942 (part 5 of 13)

Rose Bowl played in North Carolina due to Japanese threat…
Japanese troops occupy Manila…
Nazi officials confer to plan the extermination of Europe’s Jews - the “Final Solution” …
Count Basie records One O’clock Jump…
First U.S. force in Europe goes ashore in Northern Ireland…
Archie comic book debuts…
FDR orders internment of all west-coast Japanese Americans…
American defense of Philippines collapses, MacArthur ordered out…
First day of the Battle of Java Sea - 13 U.S. warships sunk - 2 Japanese…
First cadets graduate from Tuskegee flying school…
Belzec Concentration Camp opens with 30,000 Polish Jews…
FDR orders men between 45 and 64 to register for non-military duty…
U.S. and Filipino forces overwhelmed by Japanese at Bataan…
Stars and Stripes newspaper for U.S. armed forces starts…
First U.S. aerial bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities…
First food rationing in U.S. beginning with sugar…
1,500 Jews gassed in Auschwitz…
Bing Crosby records White Christmas…
Japan’s 1st major defeat in the Battle of Midway…
German army defeated at El-Alamein North Africa…
Anne Frank begins her diary…
Dwight Eisenhower appointed commander of U.S. forces in Europe
Execution of Jews by the thousands proceeds across Nazi -occupied Europe…
Tweety Bird debuts…
Casablanca premiers…
First self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurs…



----------


the noose
of apocalypse
is tied

the
gallows
prepared



----------


Sid is free of the snakes and mosquitoes and mud, transferred from the levees into town to work in the shop. He knows it is a temporary job, open because the worker who held it is a soldier now, training the battles to come. The job will be his again upon his return. Sid is still disappointed that he can’t join the fight, but pleased, at least, that he has freed up another to fight in his place.

He and Mona have made friends among the pilot trainees at the army-air base on the edge of town. Young men who will be in the midst of murderous air battles in the Pacific or, soon they know, over Europe. But for now, they are just young men with the temporary luxury of having their young wives with them.

Sid and Mona are the only two unmarried among their crowd. Lonely and alone in a strange place before they met, they are good friends now.

Just good friends, they say, but they both know, though afraid to say it, that their friendship is not the end. They see a future they so very quietly imagine, for now.
Picture
brown legs walking in sunshine
 
remembering
brown legs walking
in sunshine
and I’m sitting by the gym
and it’s 1957 again
and I’m 13 again, and
a new center of the
universe
is revealed to me

Picture
Night Life
after Willie Nelson
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides

1943 (part 7 if 13)


William Hastie, aid to secretary of war, resigns in protest of segregation in armed forces…
Frankfurters replaced by Victory Sausages (mixture of meat and soy meal)…
Hitler declares “total war”…
The Pentagon, world’s largest office building, is completed…
U.S. bans pre-sliced bread to reduce bakery demand for metal parts…
Duke Ellington plays his first concert at Carnegie Hall…
General Eisenhower selected to command allied forces in Europe…
German “White Rose” student group hangs anti-Hitler banner in Munich, are caught and beheaded…
German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad, a turning point in the war in Europe…
New volcano erupts in farmer's cornfield in Mexico…
Porgy and Bess opens on Broadway…
Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore premiere on radio…
Oklahoma premieres…
Bergen -Belsen concentration camp forms…
Postal zone system invented…
German and Italian forces surrender in North Africa, one group after another…
Berlin is declared free of Jews…
Zoot Suit Riots -Mob in Los Angeles beats up everyone who appears Hispanic…
Income tax withholding becomes law…
Race riots in Texas and other states…
Allied forces invade Sicily…
Almost 6,000 tanks take part in the greatest tank battle in history with Russian victory over Germany…
RAF bombs Hamburg (20,000 dead)…
Mussolini resigns…
John F. Kennedy’s PT-boat 109 is sunk…
Mussolini captured by Allies, rescued by German forces, starts resistance movement…




----------


tides begin to turn
but even turning
tides
are deadly

the dead wash
out with the retreating surf

as new dead
wash in with each bloody surge

the march of tides and time
is not over



----------


Sid and Mona join his very good landlord friends Matrice and Harry for a night across the border in Reynosa, Havana on the Rio Grande it's called, where U.S. dollars buy the finest in Mexican foods and floor shows and magicians and where, in the finest of the clubs, El Leon del Noche, an African lion pads through the restaurant on a leash.

And an orchestra that plays the latest in American big band swing. The band knows Harry and he always brings his trumpet so that he can sit in. This night he plays the most beautiful version of Stardust Sid and Mona ever heard.

They sit close at their table, holding hands, breathless in the thick Mexican night. The change in their life they had imagined finally comes, quietly, at a small table in a Reynosa nightclub. They found their song and with the song, each other.

Matrice watches it happen, smiles, winks at Harry. Their conspiracy realized, their plan come together.
Picture
something insightful

something insightful
is what I need today, a good trenchant statement
of sharp, cogent insight that
through the magic of superior poetics
will become a poem for the ages or at least for the next fifteen minutes
after which it won’t count any more
since I will no longer be famous, and no one will care
as to the relative insightfulness of my statement, no matter
how rightful or blind hog obvious it is

it’s the most wonderful thing
about fame being limited to only fifteen minutes,
it being that the sooner one’s fifteen minutes are up
the sooner all the idiocies of that time
are forgot -
much better than my 78 years
during which every idiocy ever considered or perpetrated
during that time is on the record, subject
to constant review, ridicule and personal angst
over and over and over again…

so much better that fifteen-minute statute of limitations…

~~~

maybe this is my insight for the day, or the one at least
that will pass for the next fifteen
minutes



​

Picture
Jacob's Ladder
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides


1944 (part 8 of 13, and my birth year)
 
 
Ralph Bunch first Negro official in the State Department appointed...
Eisenhower takes command of Allied Invasion Force in London...
First jazz concert at Metropolitan Opera House, featuring Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and others...
RAF drops 2,300 bombs on Berlin; 447 German bombers attack London... 
Leningrad liberated in 880 days with 600,000 killed...
Batman and Robin premier in newspapers...
Mount Vesuvius erupts...
Jimmy Steward flies his 12th combat mission leading attack on Berlin...
D Day, 150,000 Allied troops land in Normandy...
15 U.S. aircraft carriers attack Japanese on Marianas...
Congress creates the CIA...
FDR signs GI Bill of Rights...
First Japanese kamikaze attack...
First German V-2 rocket hits Great Britain...
U.S. retakes Guam...
Anne Frank arrested, sent to Auschwitz...
Smokey Bear debuts...
Charles De Gaulle walks the Champs-Elysees after Paris liberation...
George H. W. Bush ejects from his burning plane...
Copland's "Appalachian Spring" premieres...
Auschwitz begins gassing inmates...
FDR wins 4th term...
Glenn Miller lost over English Channel...
 
 
----------
 
 
 
American
string of pearls
regained in the Pacific
 
American 
stringer of musical pearls
lost in Europe
as
Mr. Smith bombs
Berlin
 
the fire of 
explosions
manufactured and natural
light 
global nights
 
the batsignal
calls
on sone such night
for even more heroes
to rise
and fall for the cause
of morality's light 
 
 
----------
 
 
Mona's son, Vincent (first called "Spud" by his uncle and now Spud to everyone but his mother), is ten years old now, prone to mischief, and a worry to his mother.
 
He does not take well to the arrival of a new man in her life and misbehaves when Sid is around.  Sid is not a patient man, Mona knows, and has no experience with children. and she worries that as Spud tries to push Sid away, he will succeed. He acts like he wants Mona to choose between the two of them.
 
"Why do we need him," Spud asks, "why can't you just make him go away?"
 
Sid worked hard to gain the boy’s trust, but nothing seemed to make any difference until a Saturday afternoon at Sam Hill Park when Spud fell into a canal that flowed through the south end of the park. He could not swim, and it was Sid who heard his screams for help and jumped into the water, fully clothed, and pulled him out...
 
His best pants and shoes ruined, Sid held the boy as he shivered from the chill water and cried and told Sid how sorry he was to cause such a problem.  But Sid quieted the boy, holding him with a gentleness Mona had not seen before, looking for the first time like a father to her son.
 
That night, after Spud had been put to bed, they went back to the park, alone this time, and on a blanket on a large stone shelf of flat rock under a pecan tree, made love for the first time. Naked in summer moonlight, with long soulful kisses and slow silken caresses, gently rocking as they were for the first time joined.

​

Picture

​the third wife of Adam
​

the first went sour,
had intercourse with demons,
giving birth to monsters
that haunt us still
today...

the second,
well, that was God’s fault,
making her in front of Adam
and so disgusted was he
by the revelation
of what was inside the latest
creation and by extension,
himself that he was repulsed
and would have nothing to do
with it, no matter how pleasing
God made the outside…

and God destroyed the second
and determined to try just one more
time, this time, while Adam
slept..

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````

and said God to the third
as he complete fitting all the parts
in all their proper
places -

"I have made all that is around you," He said,
"this garden is mine, my wonderful creation,
but it seemed lonely and bare
without a creature like myself, so I made Adam
in my image and because he was incomplete as one
I made you to be his mate, his wife and the
mother of the future I will make
with the two of you…

"and I named you Eve because you are the setting
of the old and the bringer of a new
dawn, the culmination of my
ambition…

"and as prelude to the dawn," He said,
"your destiny is not in this garden

"to explain, I will come to you in another shape
and show you that your destiny is to defy me
and by that defiance become a creature of free will,
a creation complete at last in my image,
a creation who by this last piece is certain to confound me
and stir my wrath and, for a while,
blind me to my love for you, my child
as will all you children
be my children…

"and through all the thousand years
that will pass, my wrath
will diminish
and I will remember my love for you
and we will be reunited
in a new garden -
a new Eden
in some far place unseen
and known only to me
that new Eden that awaits our
return…

"this is your story," He said,
"the third and last wife of Adam,
who will carry my story
to the end, you destiny to be
mother of all men and in the end,
mother of God..."
Picture
True Romance
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides


1945 (part 9 of 13)


Pepe LaPew debuts…
German forces retreat in Battle of the Bulge…
Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony premieres in Moscow…
Every Amsterdammer gets three kilos of sugar beets…
Red army continues to liberate concentration camps as it advances west…
Grand Rapids becomes first U.S. city to fluoridate its water…
1,000 American Flying Fortresses drop 3,000 tons of bombs on Berlin…
Andrews Sisters hit number one on the charts with “Rum and Coca Cola”…

Yalta agreement signed by FDR, Churchill and Stalin…
U.S. Marines raise flag on Iwo Jima…
Federico Garcia Lorca’s “La Casa” premieres in Buenos Aires…
First International Woman’s Day is observed…
Firebombing of Tokyo in nighttime B-29 raid, more than 100,000 killed, mostly civilians…
“Going My Way” with Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman win best movie Oscar…
U.S. 7th Army crosses the Rhine…
“Glass Menagerie” premieres…
U.S. soldiers liberate Buchenwald…
FDR dies, Truman sworn in as 33 president…
Red Army begins Battle of Berlin…
Mussolini captured by Italian partisans and hung…
Unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies and V-E (Victory in Europe) Day is announced…
Herman Goering is captured by U.S. Army; Heinrich Himmler commits suicide…
Abbott and Costello’s film “The Naughty Nineties” released, includes longest version of “Who’s on First”…
The war in the Pacific continues, island by island with massive causalities on both sides; the Japanese ignore several surrender ultimatums…
U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later drops second bomb on Nagasaki…
V-J Day; Japan surrenders unconditionally…

Branch Rickey signs Jackie Robinson…
Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam independence from France





----------
 
war clouds
part
leave broke and bloody
lands
open to the sky

a time to beat
weapons
into plowshares,
a time to replant
and rebuild

but, oh,
the weapons are so more fearsome
than ever
before
the power of forever burning
stars
in the hands of mortal
man

and
already
on the horizon
new storms can be seen forming

peace
a fragile
and
forever
a passing
moment
in the hands of
temporary
man



----------


Talk of marriage begins.

Matrice and Harry offer a larger apartment, enough for Mona and Sid and Spud, and maybe another when the time comes.

Sid’s father is an open, approving man, happy for his son’s chance at happiness, wherever he finds it. Sid’s mother does not like the idea of her son marrying a widow woman - especially one with a son going on 12 years old.

Her family just pleased that she has someone besides them to depend on.

Sid and Spud spend long Saturdays together; sometimes take in a cowboy movie, while Mona works at the bakery.

Life flows around them in slow and gently ripples.
Picture
​legion of the late-dawning dark

most who understand what I have done
are gone,
dead,
or lost in their own bitter
memories…

----------

we are angry
generation, grew old thinking
old didn’t matter

we know better
now

understanding now we are not
special like we thought,
not exempt like we
thought…

understanding now that even at our best
we are still just a part of the decay
that produces new life, our
function to be not the flourish that blooms forever,
but only fertilizer for the next
spring’s flowering…

understanding that even the tallest tree
will someday
in a silent forest fall
unheard...

not the way expected
it would be…

----------

I march with a cohort
of the angry,
the legionnaires of the
late dawning
dark…
Picture
Santa Fe Afternoon
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1946 (part 10 of 13)



ENIAC, first large U.S. computer finished…
“Show Boat” opens…
First meeting of the United Nations General Assembly…
“Lucky” Luciano pardoned for his wartime service and deported to Italy…
Juan Peron elected President of Argentina…
Winston Churchill makes “Iron Curtain” speech…
First U.S. rocket leaves Earth’s atmosphere…
Greece holds its first election after WWII…
First election for Japanese Diet…
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (later renamed Sony) is founded with 20 employees…
First hour long entertainment TV show premieres on NBC…
“Annie Get Your Gun” premieres with Ethel Merman in the lead…
Truman seizes control of nation’s railroads to delay a strike…
Patent filed in U.S. for H-Bomb…
First bikini bathing suit displayed in Paris…
Supreme Court bans discrimination in interstate travel…
U.S. tests atom bomb on Bikini atoll…
Truman orders desegregation of all U.S. forces…
“Animal Farm” published…
First mobile long-distance car-to-car telephone call…
Herman Goering sentenced to death, commits suicide in his cell…
“The Iceman Cometh” premieres…
Camera onboard a V-2 rocket takes first picture of the earth from space…
John F. Kennedy elected to U.S. House…
“Best Years of Our Lives” premieres…
Led by Ho Chi Ming, Vietnamese attacs French forces in Hanoi…
“It’s a Wonderful Life” premieres…
Truman officially proclaims the end of WWII…



----------


a time of
endings

a time of
quiet

a time of planting
in fields
plowed by bombardments
of war

a time
when first buds
of future days
push
through the torn and bloody soil
of pastures reaching
for life

a time when
all the forces of good and bad
gather
for the next round
of clashing philosophies

a time when blood rises
throbbing
toward
that day


---------

Wedding day at the courthouse.

Harry stands for Sid; Matrice for Mona. Spud stands between them as the vows are said.

Sid and Mona have to work, so their honeymoon is short, Saturday night in a small motel on Boca Chica Beach. They are alone together as Spud stays with Harry and Matrice.

To the sound of tides brushing in and out over sand glowing white under a brightly jeweled sky, they make love for the first time as man and wife.

Monday they go back to work; Monday night they settle for the first time into their new apartment, the first full night together for the three of them. Spud falls asleep quickly; Sid and Mona, in their own bedroom, celebrate their homecoming with the quiet passion of the newly-wed.

Picture
​I love college radio
 
“Eleanor Rigby”
symphonic version,
preceded by Aaron Copland’s
“Appalachian Spring”
and followed by Chopin’ “Nocturnes”
and Debussy’s “La Mer” and “Clair de Lune”

that’s the way I started my day
here on the corner of Broadway and Pearl…

I love college radio and I expect I’m going
to love this day,
another
in a long line of an old man’s midweek
capriccio…
Picture
Gilligan Sets the Course Home
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides

1948 (part 11 of 13)


Channel 13 in New York (PBS) begins…
First Supermarket opens in the United Kingdom…
First country music TV show, Midwestern Hayride, premieres…
“Treasure of Sierra Madre” opens…
First tape recorder sold…
Mahatma Gandhi assassinated…
Mao’s army occupies Yenan…
First newsreel telecast shown on NBC…
Communist Party takes control of Czechoslovakia…
Supreme Court rules that religious instruction in public schools is unconstitutional…
Congress passes Marshall Aid Act…
Senator Glenn Taylor of Idaho arrested in Alabama for trying to enter a meeting through a door marked “for Negroes’…
Israel declares independence from British…
Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq & Saudi Arabia troops attack Israel…
Milton Berle Show premieres…
Babe Ruth’s final farewell at Yankee Stadium three days before he dies…
USSR begins Berlin Blockade; U.S./British airlift begins…
Ed Sullivan premieres on TV…
Indians sign Satchel Paige…
Alcoholic Anonymous founded…
Professional wrestling premieres on prime-time TV…
“Candid Camera” debuts on TV…
Truman elected on his own in an upset…
T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for literature…
Hopalong Cassidy and “Kukla, Fran & Ollie” debut on TV



----------


peace
and prosperity

soldiers home from war
take wives
have children
go to college and buy little houses
where a new middle class
is born

there are shadows
but always there are shadows

but soon everybody
will have a TV
and a new culture
a new language as old accents
are shed
north south east west
regions meld
into
peace and
prosperity and

shadows?

only the black and white
shadows
of television
of
Uncle Miltie
of Hopalong, of
Gorgeous George
and Wild Red Berry disturb
the night

and any who don’t have the shadows,
want them
Sears
Monkey Ward
low down, easy payments
too…



----------


Sid lost his job when the soldiers came home, but found another one right away. Gets paid every week, cashes his check at the supermarket and takes all but his small weekly allowance home to Mona who makes sure there are groceries in the cupboard for the four, yes, the four, of them, to eat.

With little Annie, just a year old, at her side, Mona works at home, bakes cakes, makes corsages out of old silk hose for high school dances. Helps all she can.

Spud is fourteen, still not a bad kid, but stubborn and reckless and impulsive. Teachers do not like his way or his inattention or his sass. He fails at everything but football.

Money so tight, but still Mona agrees to a hard decision - a private school in another city where, sponsored by their church, Spud can go. It is a place of discipline and accountability. Sid believes that is all his son needs and Spud, who still sees his hero in his adopted father, agrees to go.

Mona weeps as she sews name tags on his clothes and packs a large trunk for him. Sid takes a day off from work so they can all go to the school together, so that the boy doesn’t have to get off a bus alone, so that this separation, their first, is done together.

It seems such an empty house that Sid and Mona return to, silence a presence of laughter missing. Annie cries for her brother as Mona cries for her son. Sid sits quietly in his chair mourning the responsibility of fatherhood.

Picture
​
​
​Easter in Kabul

we walked the streets, three
of us, strangers to the city on a short leave,
through the downtown, buses and pedicabs honking,
crowding the street, each claiming dominance, motor bikes
and bicycles, and along the street, rickety stores,
none more than two floors high but the Spirizan Hotel,
watering hole for the US Aid workers, and the Russians from their
embassy and a UN contingent and a few Americans, bar at the top
of the hotel neutral territory where all could eat and drink
without starting an international incident leading to World War III
or just national humiliation...

and a book store where I buy a book of poems by the country's
foremost poet (dual language, Urdu and English) and also in English,
Mao's Little Red Book, brought on camel back across the Khyber Pass,
very thin, almost onionskin, paper, and the red plastic cover,
utilitarian and tough, a holy bible of sorts from the cultural revolution
next door...

as we continue toward the AID house where we will spend
our three-night stay, the road turns to red gravel, passing a restless
snorting camel, buying fresh nan from a street vendor, the sweet
airiness of it melting in our mouth...

----------

from out window in the morning,
we see the children walking to school in their tan uniforms,
singing...

(how I will mourn the tragedy of their lives in the years to come)

a cat on the roof below us next door, wakes and stretches, a lazy cat
​
sleeping on warm tiled roof in morning sunshine...
Picture
Red Tide
by Allen Itz
​ 
Time and the Tides



1950 (part 12 of 13)


Now the world’s second nuclear power, the Soviet Union flexes its muscle…
Ho Chi Minh begins offensive against French troops in Indo China…
Britain recognizes Communist government of China…
The Great Brinks Robbery makes off with nearly three million in cash and securities…
First TV broadcast of “What’s My Line”…
Senator McCarthy charges 205 communists are in the State Department…
Walt Disney releases “Cinderella”…
Dylan Thomas arrives in New York for his first U.S. poetry reading tour…
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca premier “Your Show of Shows”…
First woman officer assigned to U.S. naval vessel…
Silly Putty invented…
Bob Hope’s first TV appearance…
“Peter Pan” premieres…
Dutch police seize condoms…
North Korea invades South Korea, captures Seoul, Truman orders American Air Force and Navy into the conflict…
U.S. and North Korea forces clash for the first time…
The Law of Return guarantees all Jews the right to live in Israel…
“Sunset Boulevard” premieres…
U.S. gives military aide to anti-communist regime in South Vietnam…
Earthquake in India kills 20,000 to 30,000…
Beetle Bailey debuts…
South Korean troops enter North Korea…
Charlie Brown debuts in “Peanuts” precursor…
U.S. forces invade North Korea, occupy Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, approach Chinese border and China responds with massive counter-attack into Korea…
Puerto Rican nationalists attempt to assassinate Truman…
William Faulkner wins Nobel Prize for Literature…
Eisenhower takes command of NATO…



----------


not a war
for us at first,
plenty war
for those dying
cities falling
and more people
dying
on both sides

a line on a map

thousands of lines
on thousands of maps

a time of redrawing lines
making obsolete
maps
of failing empires

another war starts
as relics of French empire totter

this one starts also
without us, barely noticed
by us, but a tar baby war
that inexorably draws us, three generations
of little tar baby wars
pend
stealthily
growing like the tiger cub
that grows its claws and its fangs
and is nobody’s baby
anymore

and the big one, the last one, the-end-of-all-wars,
the end-of-the-world that
keeps us awake at night,
the bomb-shelter big one, the-duck-and-cover
big one, Armageddon passed
like a low hand at poker, too terrible
for anyone to win with it
so
all
bluff and pass



----------


Spud is 16, going on 17, back at regular school, impulsiveness contained, mischief restrained, unhappy, seeking an outlet. He lies, enlists.

It’s his war and he doesn’t want to miss it like his dad missed his.

It is done.

Annie cries as he leaves. Mona cries as he leaves. Sid does not approve, will not acknowledge his departure, will not shake his hand.

Nevertheless, he is in the army now, and off to fight his war.
Picture
​my search for better personhood
​

still,
having slept an extra hour
every morning
for the past six days
and having exchanged my wide window view
of stressed commuters on Interstate 10
for a smaller window
and later and slower and more laid-back traffic on Broadway
I cannot say
I am a better person for it

but the sun just came out
making the morning yellow and bright
and that is certainly
promising
but
still I fear
it will take more than that

and the obits this morning,
25 dead people and only one younger than me
(and that only by scant months)
and that is sure as hell
a promise
to consider,
but
still
I think
it will take more than that

and while my wife was her usual
non-committal self
my dog demonstrated the true and deepest love for me
this morning
and that would be promising if in any way
it suggested a status change
but It does not
so that falls on the maintenance side
of the ledger
not on any new promise side
so it will take more than
that

so
it might appear,
setting all else aside as nice but not the true way
to better person-hood, that the only way to be a better person
is to be a better person…

~~~

isn’t it always the way,
there's always one damn catch or other,
like the advertisements on the back of comic books
about how to quit being the guy
who the bully at the beach always kicks sand in the face of,
the secret sold for twenty-five cents and a coupon on the back of the label on the 75-ounce jar of
Vaseline Petroleum Jelly…

Nirvana and better person-hood
available only to those most dedicated to its pursuit

(and liberal daily use of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly)
Picture
Explosion at the Cambell Soup Factory, Gator Bait, Louisiana
by Allen Itz
 
Time and the Tide

2020 (as extrapolated from 2015, part 13 of 13)



President Trump, reelected, resigns; celebrates the U.S. reproachment with Russia with official opening of his new casino on the Volga - The Trump-Putin Towers…

Vice President Kardashian takes the oath of office as the new President of the United States…

The end of history, as prophesied 40 years ago, finally arrives…



----------


history
becomes the fool;
the court jester in a pork pie hat
with fluff-ball bells on strings
that bob and bounce
with every faltering step,
the Ministry of Silly Walks sets the pace
as reason limps to the sidelines,
“take me out, coach,” the hero pleads,
“take me out…”

space aliens, tinfoil hats
and pyramids beneath your bed,
the force be gone
and already forgotten…



---------


My name is Spud, or, used to be, but nobody’s called me that for years.

The fellas down at the VFW call me Colonel, my rank after Khe Sanh, the rank I kept for the next 20 years. A wise ass who was right too often, a career killer in Uncle’s army. Sid was right way back, when he told me I didn’t have the discipline to be a soldier.

But I did all right, fought my wars well, got my ribbons, got my medals, just never got the rank I deserved.

Sid, well he finally forgave me for joining up without talking to him, then got all mad again when I re-enlisted for Vietnam. He’s dead now, a long time now, a car wreck on his way to work. That same damned old job never got the promotions he deserved, never the pay rises he deserved, years of watching lesser men take the rewards he earned.

Like father like son, I guess, wise asses both of us.

Mona died about ten years ago, in a home, alone, I’m afraid. I was in Europe, then Asia, the Mid-East for all the sand wars and just never paid attention. Annie was in California, another never-to-be movie star serving eggs and burgers at Denny’s. She never paid much attention either. Neither of us, I guess, came to much good as children.

At least neither of us made the mistake of trying to be parents.

It’s a helluva world and a helluva country. I figure I’d be fighting another war soon if I wasn’t so old. Too bad for all the young fellas and girls who’ll soon be starting their own string of wars to fight.

What can I tell you, an old soldier playing dominoes and drinking beer at the VFW. It’s a helluva world.

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4/16/22  Time and the Tide

4/6/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
after "Hellboy"

not a great film,
but lots of fun, and the question now
is what to do with the rest 
of this Sunday afternoon,
a nap,
one possibility,
is tempting, but I know
if I go to sleep this afternoon, 
it's not going to be
one of those fifteen-minute power naps
that can refresh on a hot summer afternoon,
but a real 3- or 4-hour snoozathon
that will leave me groggy
and pissed off at the world
and it'll screw up my sleep tonight besides,
so, it being too damn hot
to go to the lake
or work in the yard
or go to the zoo

or picnic in the park
or take a hike down Government Canyon
to see the dinosaur footprints
or anything else that requires
leaving my air-conditioned cocoon,
so, here I am,
at the same old stand,
down at the coffeehouse
looking for interesting faces,
looking for a story,
looking for a poem to take the heat
off the afternoon
(and here the poet puts his glasses
back on and studies the coffeehouse crowd,
all the while typing,
his fingers on a straight loop to his brain,
until his brain stops, and thinks,
what the hell is this,
where did I go off track, 
what does this have to do with the poem
I was trying to write?)

I see the redhead
who is always here in the afternoon,
thin, sharp face displaying no evidence at all
of internal life, and I see the couple at the table
next to mine, a young man and woman,
he Hispanic, she, gringa, reminding me 
of us 45 years ago, except reversed,
except they're both medical students,
while we were both on our way up
through the jungle of the state's bureaucracies

and now the poet is really in a jam,
rummaging through all this old news,
hoping to hook something - anything -
to start a roll in the jumbled field
of Sundy poetics...)

the poet's eye jumps to the new couple
just coming in,
might there be something in this? he thinks,
this very large man and this very small woman,
but, no, add them together and divide by two
and what you have is two very normal, very everyday
boring people without an ounce of poetry
in their very large and very small bodies...

meanwhile,
the poet's brain keeps slipping back
to the great scene when
Hellboy and Abe, the fish guy, 
get drunk on Tecate
and sing the syrupy song
about lost love
and...

the poet notices two young women,
very pretty, dressed for summer,
and the poet, pencil poised,
realized that some things can't be said,
even in a poem, without encouraging
community dislogisticity, if not
lengthy imprisonment, and...

I look around one last time
and decide there's just nothing here
this afternoon to bring my creative juices
to boil...

(the poet decides it might be best
to dare the dangers of sleep intoxication
and go home for a nap - perhaps
a good idea will come to me in my sleep,
​he thinks
​





Picture
a cowboy should be tough enough

did it again,
dressed for yesterday’s weather,
Hawaiian shirt, black with big red flowers
of probably Hawaiian origin,
looking,
it seemed to me as I studied it in the mirror this morning,
very much like a cowboy shirt
(except for the missing
fringe)

close enough to a cowboy shirt
to remind me that rodeo is just around the corner,
the first signs of it, the cowboy breakfast this morning (for the 45th year)
soft tacos and coffee for about 75,000 people, very few of whom
are actually cowboys, except this once a year when they get up at 4 a.m.
and put on their cowboy hat and cowboy boots and fight heavy cowboy traffic
to the big parking lot over by Freeman Coliseum, while, at the same time, approaching now
from all over South Texas and other cowboy lands to the west and north and even east
a few Cajun bayou cowboys, trail riders, bank clerks, schoolteachers, and insurance salesmen
and the grizzled fella from down the street and occasional actual cowboys and cowgirls,
all bundled up against the cold, moseying in on their horses from days and nights on the trail,
pots and kettles clattering on the sides of their chuckwagons, and sometime soon,
the cattle drive down Commerce Street through the middle of downtown,
which seems to have some kind of secret launching date because
I always want to take pictures of it but somehow never know about it until it’s over
and I’m thinking maybe this year I can find out where to go and get there ahead of time
and I’m thinking I ought to be doing that right now, right after I cross the last “t” and dot the last “i”
on this little ramble, all, like this ramble, another dodge my dog would say, to avoid
going for a walk in 50 degree weather in my Hawaiian, and I’m thinking, cause cowboys are supposed to
be tough and not deterred when I comes time to herd their herd, that maybe I should reorient
my thinking and based on the similarity of appearance, I should come to understand
that a cowboy shirt is just an Hawaiian shirt with fringe benefits
and conversely maybe I should think of this Hawaiian shirt as just a cowboy shirt de-fringed
and that should make me a cowboy tough enough, as befits my kind,
to go walk the dog
​

Picture
abuelita de los todos

the rotund little crossing guard, silver curls
trickling under the back of
her white crossing-guard cap,
commands the intersection
with the authority of her orange vest,
parades sternly across the rush-hour street,
little feet paddling fast against the cold asphalt,
like a mother duck
she pulls in her wake a gaggle of
tiny ducklings, all bundled, head to toe,
against the cold

whatever else might befall them
as the day progresses, her little charges are safe for now
under her fierce shield

abuelita de los todos -
la guarda bajo el sol naciente
​




​

Picture

hell no! I won’t go!

it’s warm in here
and very cold outside and
looking through the wide restaurant windows
it even looks cold
and I need to go out there and walk the dog
but I don’t want to
because it’s cold enough out there to freeze my macchiatos
right plumb off
and I would feel right distressed
if my macchiatos were to freeze and fall right off
and go bouncing down the street
so I’m going to sit right here and pretend I’m writing a poem
cause it’s just too damn cold out there for a south Texas fella
with tender macchiatos

so
hell no! I won’t go!
​
​
Picture
Cock-a-doodle

poets are creatures
of the word, 
and are often stymied
by social convention that sets
certain word off-limits,
you know, the words
that made us snicker in fifth grade,
usually having to do with bodily functions
and/or body parts best not shown in public,
for example,
there is what Walt Whitman
called the "man-root"

instead of Whitman,
the polite word to use in mixed company today,
assuming, of course, you have need
to refer to the body part in mixed company,
is penis...

but, I tell you, that is such a limp dangly
little word no man really wants to claim it
​for his, you know, whatchamacallit,

(see the problem right there it is,
trying to talk around the whole thing

when some simple little word
could make it clear we're not talking about
a fella's ear, or his nose, or his left elbow

*****

some might call it prick -

though I personally don't like that,
sounds too aggressive 
for a passive kind of guy like me,
and besides it's developed all sorts
of negative connotations, like for example,
no one wants to be or hang around with
a prick, and neither does one 
want to get pricked, no matter
how tiny the prick is that
does the pricking

*****

if we were Irish,
I suppose we could
all have our individual names for it,
like Lady Chatterley's gardener -
his preference was, I believe, John Thomas,
but it does seem to me
it wouldn't solve the problem
since we couldn't be sure 
what anyone was talking about,
assuming, perhaps,
the conversation was about another person
of whom we had not had the pleasure
of acquaintance and possibly more 
destructive
to social tranquility, there could be, for example,
endless argument between man and spouse
(or other interested party) whether it would be
more appropriately be named
"Big Willy" or "Wee Willy Wilkins" -
​a discussion which would do no good
for anyone...

*****

many nowadays seem to prefer
cock, that, at least, is what I see
and hear most often,
and I have to say,  I kinda like cock,
myself, such a proud manly word,
cock-of-the-walk, cock-sure, cock-
a-doodle-do, wake up and smell the roses,
or something else

and, of course, no man ever wants
to go off half-cocked...

*****

so, setting aside such obviously unacceptable proposals
as trouser lizard, or one-eyed-snake-that-ate-Milwaukee

and, while always being available to other suggestions,
for the time being, perhaps we can just put  cork
in the conversation and leave it at
cock.

in the meantime, possibly tomorrow,
someone will address the similar conundrum
regarding those attributes most usually 
attributed to the ladies

​but it sure as hell won't be me
​
Picture
surely the gods must weep

the soft slow opening passages,
like the whisper of angels' wings,
the most noble, moving, profound beauty
in all music, leading inexorably
to the same passages as it ends, this time
the full-throated god-roar of Odin
and all his sons and daughters,
the power of deepest beauty,
the beauty of immense
power,
all in a single piece of human creation,
surely the gods must weep
at this presentation of their own eternal story…

the Overture to Tannhauser, played in high school band,
engulfed in the music from the low brass section
at the back of the band, only three bars in,
the music like the quiet rising waters
of an on-coming flood, that very minute I learned
such depth of soul and sound was possible,
the very minute I learned I loved classical music

Picture
sitting at a stoplight on San Pedro Ave. thinking of dead people
 
sitting at a stop light on San Pedro Ave.
on my way to my coffeehouse
this morning, thinking about all the dead people
in my life, thinking of an aunt and uncle
who lived in McAllen at the time and how when I was a kid,
six or seven or so, I would spend a week with them
in the summer…

childless at the time and happy to have me around,
I remember how on Saturday I went with my uncle to his office
in a tall building downtown, riding an elevator, my first, and playing
with my toys on his carpet while he worked and I remember how
during the week I played on a large undeveloped tract of land
across from their house, open land, no brush, unbroken
and not farmed and I would spend the day playing in the dry caliche dust,
and I remember the land littered with shells of snails, thousands of them, generations
of snail bones, white, like bleached bones in the desert, snail bones white in the dust
and the bright Rio Grande Valley sun…

and I think of how little I remember of that week, not a meal, not a night
in bed, just the elevator ride and snail bones, white and dusty, and I think
how my aunt and uncle and most of the people I’ve ever known
are like snail bones now, white bones under layers of dust, and how sad
it seems that so much of my life is about dry, white bones baking
in a desert sun…

and then before the light turns from red to green,
a young Latina crosses the intersection in front of me,
pedaling hard on her bicycle, heading, no doubt, to the college
two blocks down the street, a backpack strapped to the back of her bike,
full of books, I imagine, as the young woman, long black hair streaming,
strong, brown legs pumping as she rises and falls on her bicycle seat, the future
racing past on a bicycle, life racing past, black hair streaming and brown legs pumping,
and for a while at least I forget about the white bones buried in the
dust of my life and for a moment the hour glass is turned back and the dust
that is my life no longer trickles down from the small cloud remaining, instead
the glass is full and vibrant streaming, life not a memory of fading bones but
a vision of black hair streaming and brown legs pumping, life,
alive, black hair streaming and brown legs
pumping…
​

Picture
more confident suns
 
a sepia-lit day
under an uncertain sun

storm blowing in from the coast,
but staying east of us, the threat
increasingly hollow as west winds blow
the rain away…

but still
the hesitant sun knows how prevailing winds can change,
a lesson learned by many of us in life…

rarely the easy
way -
at least for me

everything I’ve ever learned
the product of mistakes,
under-estimating myself, over-
estimating people I counted on, giving up
when I should have hung on, or holding on when
good sense would have told me to let go

but, and here’s the important lesson

always losing more by giving up
than by holding on has made me
tough, or, as others say,
stubborn…

the virtue of a hard head,
serving me now as
never before

meanwhile
a sepia-lit day
under an uncertain sun

but I hold on
to remembered light
and more confident
suns…

​
Picture

pretty young women with large bosoms want to be my friend

​

pretty young women
with large bosoms
say
they want to be
my friend
on Facebook

this is a bizarre
development for me
at my age, pretty
young women
with large bosoms
wanting to be my
friend,
and,
come to think of it,
pretty young
women
with large
bosoms wanting
to be my friend
is not something
I recall
happening
to me at any age…

it seems to have
started
shortly after I shaved
my head, perhaps
it’s a Daddy Warbucks
thing or maybe
exposing my
scalp
has
somehow
exposed the boiling
core
of sexuality
blazing within
my loins…

or maybe
not…

at any rate
I’ve been hesitant
to become
friends
with pretty young
women with large
bosoms on Facebook
because who knows
what they might
be after since
I’m not
rich
so
i think
maybe it’s my
bod,
or my scintillating
intellect
(though the bod
would be my
choice,
happy to save
my scintillating
intellect for tea
with the older
ladies)…

but in the end
I think these pretty
young women with
large bosoms
are just nurses,
charity workers, out
to sooth the shriveled
soul and other parts
of dried up old
men,
or maybe they are
just
confused
about the riches
I don’t have…

best I decline
their offer of friend-
ship for the sake
of both of us,
me too old
and they too young,
for the rending
heartbreak
that will surely
follow
our mutual
disillusionment...

plus
if my wife found out
I was being friendly
with pretty young women
with large bosoms
I would be in immediate
danger of losing
bathroom privileges
and sleeping in my car
with my dog which
is really
small
(the car
not the dog)
and already smells deeply
of dog…

it’s for the best
my dears
I say to all the
pretty
young women
with large bosoms…

move on, try to forget me,
possibly
you might check with
the old sailors'
home,
teeming with old men
fully as bald as me
and actually
you don’t really have
to be that young
or have such large
bosoms for them, so
you can let yourself
go a bit -
just
wear a skirt
and hosiery
for they, after a life
at sea, are experts in the
lessons of any port
in a storm…

~~~

and if it doesn’t work out
with the old
sailors
you might
call me again,
who
knows
what evil might lurk
in the hearts of bald old men
given a chance for
second
thoughts…
Picture
In the old "Here and Now" it was my practice to include poets from my library in every issue.  I have done little of that in this new "Here and Now," mostly because it's a lot of work transcribing the work from the original book.

So, returning to that practice, at last a little, here is a poem by Suzette Marie Bishop from her book Horse-Minded, published by CW Books in 2012.

Bishop reaches writing at Texas A&M International University. She won the May Swenson Prize for her previous book, Took Off Her Wings and Shoes. As a poet and teacher, she gives many readings and workshops for gifted children, seniors, at-risk youth, and for an after-school program serving a rural Hispanic community.


None of It Was Overlooked by Us

In his truck
between him and another classmate
leaving a party for the workshop,
he had asked me 
to go dancing after the party
and after we dropped the other poet
off at her apartment.

As we drove down the mountain
we all joked about The Overlook Motel,
wondering what was overlooked,
laughing down that steep slope.

Things turned quickly
as they can with poets
when she refused to get out of the truck
once we got to her place,
pleading with him to come in.

She seduced through me
as if I'd disappeared
or would just wait patiently in the truck.
He gripped the wheel
and kept shaking his head,
"No."
She finally got out.

We drove the rest of the way down
the mountain in silence,
and he turned into my apartment complex,
the desire for dancing,
making out with me in his truck
killed for him,
maybe reminded of his guilt
about his estranged wife
he hadn't mentioned yet,
unable to talk about her.

I was left
stunned
as he drove away

Three poets in the cab of a truck,
all the dark night
falling away from us out
the opened windows,
the extremes of the hour
stay with me:

unspeakable ecstasy,
unspeakable pain
swirling around us
like the wind through the windows,
sweeping our laughter and silence out

to echo off the ridges.
​
Picture
This is first in a 13-part series of personal and world history, told in text and photos. I will include a new part with ever following post.

Time and the Tide

1934

Alcatraz becomes a federal prison
Nazi Germany passes the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring
Over 10,000 die in Indian earthquake
First Jewish immigrant ship breaks the English blockage of Palestine
418 Lutheran ministers arrested in Germany
First high school auto driving course offered in Pennsylvania
Great dustbowl storms cross U.S. prairies
Okaloosa, Iowa becomes first U.S. city to fingerprint its citizens
Bela Bartok’s “Enchanted Deer” premiers
-----------
almost unnoticed
the Aryan Councils
meet,
drummers
prepare to beat
their savage
drums
------------
Fifteen years old, she leaves school, marries a Canadian sailor. Together they live happily by the sea.

Two years older, he plays high school baseball. An all-round athlete, he stutters when anxious, but, tall, dark and handsome, the girls in the small town where he lives don’t care.
​

The world has not yet come to their doorstep.
0 Comments

4-4-22 Approximately Excellent

3/8/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
 new world rising
​

from Austin, north central, time to go home,
back to the old world, San Antonio,
forget I-35 through the city, most days, especially
this time of day, most days, the longest linear parking lot
in the United States of America, but I lived here, 60 years ago,
visited many, many times since, I know the old way across town…

45th
to Guadalupe;
Guadalupe
on
the strip
bisecting
the
UT campus,
then
through
downtown
in
the shadows
of the new
gleaming 
in the
sun
residential
high-rises;
across
the bridge
over
Lady Bird
Lake to
1st,
running
parallel to
South
Congress,
the whole
south
central
part of the city
now called
SoCo
(for a while
ten years
ago
after
development
chased
out
all
the
street
corner
prostitutes,
called
affectionately,
NoHoNoMo);
then
over to
Congress
at
Ben White
to
Slaughter Lane
and
a jag
to I-35,
which
though moving
slow,
by this
point
at least
moving…

A drive through the heart of the city and everywhere crowds, walking, biking, sipping lattes and cappuccinos and americanos at sidewalk cafes, people everywhere, crowds of young people, pretty young women in Saturday Brunch clusters, young men in Austin-fashionable shorts and flip flops and it’s like some alien or international force came to the city and took away everyone over 25 years of age and now there’s no one here but these youngsters, way-hip and happy and it must be an exciting place to live and I remember it was exciting when I lived here, back when, in the redneck-hippy days, but we didn’t have the place to ourselves as it seems these young folks do, had some old folks around, in fact, a lot of the redneck-hippiest were old folks themselves, old Beats, old philosophers and poets and grand-standing forever students, academic hangers-on, loving the life and the nubile young coeds, studying some but never finishing, finding new and exciting beats, new and exciting music hillbilly-hip and nirvana blues, from the heart of a city where most everything was new - those times were exciting too, but it seems different now, as I think a lot of us were hicks in those days, astounded at the new possibilities and the new batch seem immune to the astonishment, assuming assumptions we would never think of in the old days…

But then, maybe it’s just being old that got to us, unable to keep up, giving up and moving to Topeka.
​
Picture
,
Mickie knows the down-low


Mickie Mondragon knows the down-low
and can take you there if you're willing
to pay the price 

Mickie is a tiny woman,
5 feet and a fraction, 80 to 85 pounds,
crooked gremlin smile and black hair
dark as the bottom of Chacon Canyon at midnight,
a small strip shaved above each ear,
visible only when she laughs…

denizen, 
some say queen,
of the deep and dark Zarzamora Strip 
on the South Side,
an old brick Pentacostal church
on the corner the only hint of grace in the district
surrounding the church, music clubs,
heavy metal to conjunto
strip clubs, male and female,
the genitalia of one’s choice writhing
in erotic frenzy on a rose-lit stage,
straight bars,
gay bars,
bars for the undetermined, looking for something new
biker bars, a churning tidal pool of testosterone looking for a fight,
knives and chains preferred, to be worn
and to be used
high class cocktail bars
for those who want to slum
without getting too slummy, millennials,
and college kids looking for something to talk about
at the banking or real estate conventions of their future,
the semi-daring who want to walk the down-low without touching
or being touched, a prophylactic encounter with evil,
and the down-and-out bars, linoleum tabletops,
pickled eggs in streaked glass bottles, breakfast, lunch
and dinner de jour, the bar, the slobbering drunks
asleep at the tables, fronts for the $1,000 ante
poker tables behind the green, felt door in the back

Mickie, known and welcome everywhere,
knows the down-low and will take you there,
show you the sights, introduce you
to all the most colorful characters,
all the shady gents and ladies
who will pat your back and call you
by your first name like you are
an old reform school buddy…

Mickie will take you there...

but be ready to get out on your own
If you can,
because that part is just not
Mickie’s job







Picture
a 78-year-odd fat man
​

so,
​I’m a 78-year-old fat man…but wait,
poetry is about truth and beauty
and while there is no beauty in a 78-year-old fat man,
truth is still important, and the truth is, though
I am already a fat man, I’m not as fat a man
as I used to be, and I just turned 78 a few weeks ago…
so
abiding by the poetic requirement for truth
it should be more correctly said that I am
a recent 78-year-old, not-as-fat-as-he-used-to-be
man, and the further truth is like so many in my contingent
I hate change and mostly I hate change
(affirming, because change means I’m going to have to learn new stuff
and I believe, fervently, even, that at the age of
just 78, fat, skinny, or perfectly formed,
such a man should already know what he needs to know
to live a full 78-year-old life…
I mean, I like many in my regiment, I always like
to read new stuff about stars and galaxies
and dinosaurs and ancient tribes of ancient peoples,
and various other oddities and monstrosities of life
unknown before my time, but I only like to learn such stuff
as long as I don’t have to learn too much about it,
in fact,
I prefer to know just a little bit, just enough to know enough
to set my imagination churning,
because, it is
a fact,
my imagination churning produces much more interesting stuff
to know than anything I would know by actually knowing
real stuff…
and that works great for me, since I read such
science news and other such stuff just looking for
stuff to fill me up like an over-ripe melon with pseudo-science
and interesting fantasy that I might expound upon here
and at other venues where actually knowing stuff
is not strictly
required…
but other than that kind of stuff,
the stuff I don’t want to learn is the stuff
most sixteen year olds already know and I figure
if a sixteen year old already knows it why in the world should
a 78 year old, not-as- fat-as-before man bother with knowing it
too because it just seems to me that such a man
ought to know
just about everything he actually needs to know to make it
though his day…
as to the rest,
well,
take my computer, so old it’s almost steam-powered,
but old as it is, it is my faithful friend
and like any of the other friends
I’ve buried or except to bury within the next few years,
I dread the time when its time is up
and I have to go looking for a new computer friend,
it is just like I hate the idea of going out and finding new regular
friends when the old ones
bite the dust…
it’s oh so much more complicated…
learning a whole new set of demands and expectations and idiosyncrasies
and all the other stuff that goes with maintaining a healthy and productive
relationship…
like my phone and my wife’s new car - I’ve been talking on a phone and driving
for 65 years and none of what I learned now seems irrelevant
to making a phone call or driving over to the corner store
for a Baby Ruth, except that the complications now on both the phone
and the car almost make me hesitant to go out in the world
without a tag-along second grader to keep me legal and in the technical
loop…
and, ah, Baby Ruth, now there’s a constant in my life but I’m finding them
harder to find in the candy aisle
is that the next indignity, Baby Ruths becoming another historical oddity
confined to glass display cases in museums of the latest antiquities,
leaving me to learn all the particular rules
and wherefores and whereupon
of a Snickers or Mars Bar?
wouldn’t surprise me…
but then with 78 years upon this twirleybird
planet,
not much does…

​


Picture

​
saved by the blond with long legs and large breasts

breakfast this morning
amid a cohort
of old men, their little convention badges
hanging from their shirt pockets

an old coot’s convention
at one of the nearby hotels,
I suppose

a convention chair, I imagine,
calling the convocation to order, loudly,
the hearing in the audience leaning over
to pass the message on to those
whose aged ears
can only hear sounds in two or three
frequencies that only dogs
can hear, certainly not
to the human voice, no matter how loudly
announced…

two by two they come into
the restaurant, wives (usually younger)
in tow, sitting with their fellow
conventioneers, tables of old men
leaning across the table to hear,
conversation of whats? and whats? and
say that again…

makes me think of years ago
when I was the keynote speaker
at a gathering of deaf people
(yes, I know, what does a hearing keynote
speaker have to say to a room of the deaf
and how often does he have to say it)
and I remember seeing
all the people crowding the hotel
restaurant, signing to their friends
at their table and across the room,
the whole room a tidal wave
of waving hands and fingers, naturally
leaving me wondering what
they were saying
about me

but that’s another story…

meanwhile , just as I was about
to succumb to the contagion of crankiness certain
when too many old people
mingle together
in too small a space,
a young woman entered the restaurant,
tall, leggy and blond, with large beasts like the prow
of a golden sail ship pushing softly
and proudly through
the creaky curtain that enveloped the room,
the age haze that made it hard for me,
a cranky old man, myself, to
breathe, the thick air that exposed
all my ego driven lies and evasions, the ones
we tell ourselves and pretend to believe,
the crowd of old men
like mirrors that tell truths I cannot tell myself,
that, like it or not,
shows you exactly as you are,
all those secrets that make the me
no one else can see
saved this day
by the lovely proud breasts and long legs
and blond hair like sunlight in
the dark, allowing back into the room
the magic of this old man’s
gift of self-deception


​
Picture
 
my life with chickens

let me summarize:

much of my early life
was spent shoveling chickenshit
from beneath roosting nests

every Saturday
when other kids were watching Howdy Doody
I was shoveling chickenshit

later in my life
as I continued through my course of education
I continued to shovel chickenshit
pushed by dim-witted persons presumed
to know more than me

then
even later, a job delivering frozen chickens
to supermarkets, naked, pink-pimpled bodies on ice,
laid out like a serial killer’s trophy case

(at least, there wasn’t any chickenshit involved, unless
you count the boss whose chickenshit daughter
dumped me for a former best
friend)

and finally, as I
ever climbed to new levels of authority
in my profession, I became
an acknowledged expert in the conveyance
of chickenshit to the unfortunates
who worked for me,
a highly successful career I had,
owing in large part
to my near-lifetime experience
with the subject
at hand…

​

Picture
​A child of San Antonio
​

Little Lina,
Born an Afghan child,
Now a child of San Antonio
Since moving here with her family
Two years ago…

Three years old when she disappeared
From the play area in front of her apartment,
Turning four now, wherever she is
\

An area-wide search, thousands of volunteers,
Through the city and near-by cities,
Through the hills and pastures in between,
Navy divers search the rivers and creeks all around

Little Lina not found yet, sleeping last night
And many nights before in a strange bed,
In strange places, amongst strange people

That is the last best hope
Of her family, for, if she sleeps,
Wherever she sleeps,
She is yet alive

Against all hope, the city joins her parents
As they weep, pray to all the gods of San Antonio,
And await her
Return
​

Picture
 want to go deep
 
I want to go deep,
find that far-down place
available only to true spelunkers
of souls abiding
in cosmic
deep

but
I
can’t
go
deep

when the conversation
in the next booth
up
is so interesting

a woman, a teacher I’m thinking,
talking to an attorney,
the teacher
trying to convince the attorney
that a child, a three-year-old,
is in danger,
being abused by his parents,
and she marshals her arguments,
one after another, a catalog of observations,
and the attorney objects to each one,
you’re being such a defense lawyer,
she says to him,
I’m having nightmares about this
she says,
but the attorney is unmoved…

such a strange discussion over breakfast,
I think,
breakfast business
meetings
commonplace in these parts,
but usually a boss type
giving sales updates, handing out attaways,
describing bottom lines past
and expectations
future,
pretty standard, an exercise
in power, getting people out of bed early
to listen, on their own time,
to the latest pin stripe
exhortations…

lots of business meetings
I’ve been to, meetings I’ve called or been called to,
meetings I’ve listened in on from here
at my corner table, but never a meeting this intense,
even when it was lovers meeting,
trying to build a relationship or, sometimes, with tears
and angry words, trying to put a dead relationship in its grave,
people in extremis, but this meeting, this impassioned defense
of a child at risk, ultimately failing, ultimately a casualty
of a lawyer’s disbelief, the intensity of the meeting
and the ramifications of its inconclusive
conclusion…

how in the world am I supposed to plumb the depths
of my soul when this kind of stuff
is going on
around me, my spelunking blocked
at the cavern’s entry, like giant stones rolled
from the side of the hill, blocking…

---

don't bother trying to roll the stones away...

I just won’t get down there today
anyway…
​

Picture
cold truths of life and death in black and white

atop a rise
a mound of earth
an ancient burial mound
looking out over
a snowed-over field
white field
black skeleton of a winterized tree
thin black line of a frozen creek
five black horses
led by a white horse
ghost against the snow
legs lifted high
above the snow
crossing

(Colorado, February, 2008)
​

Picture

From my first book, "Seven Beats a Second" in 2007, art on every page by Vincent Martinez.



Eyes Of Sister Jude 

sharp eyes
like tempered blades
that cut clean through angry


guarded eyes
that weigh and judge
and stand ever alert for betrayal



dark eyes, deep,
softened once for love,
then moistened by a long night's weeping


but only once,
and it was long ago
​

Picture
a back-story on this. when my son started at Texas State University, we bought a small trailer out in the country for him to live in. when he finished school, we began to rent the trailer, which worked fine for a couple of years. until we ended up with a renter who we finally had to toss out. when leaving he did several thousand dollars' worth of damage to the trailer. most of the repairs we paid someone to do. some we attempted to do ourselves.


APPROXIMATELY EXCELLENT


Today
Was another day
At the money pit,
Laying down
Kitchen tiles this time


It is said to be a very precise business,
This tile-laying thing,
And I’m not
Widely known as a person
Of frequent
Precision


More
Of an approximation type guy,
That’s me, but I put that new tile down
Anyway,
And know my knees hurt,
And my…
Well,
Without bothering to name
All the various parts,
Just say,
Everything,
Hips down
Hurts


And it may be true,
Even precisely true,
That an individual of a perfectionist bent
Who insists on a true northerly orientation
Might find fault with the trueness
Of the line
Of my
Tile


But another person, say,
Another person of a more approximitistic nature,
Willing to drift his orientation a degree or two,
Or even three, north northeasterly could very well
Look at how my tiles line up
And find it quite
Sufficient,
In fact,
That person, knowing that the lowest professional
Bid for this work was 965 dollars
And 37 cents
Precisely,
Would almost certainly
Say that the free work done today
Was, in fact, quite excellent,
approximately

​

Picture
Slipping Away

1.

my mind is blind
to the crisp autumn sky
and the creek running clear
and the squirrel 
teasing my dog,
a backyard clown
mocking the quivering
puffed-chest forward
self-righteousness
of a small dog
facing a large world

my eyes see none of this,
for like a fist
clenched tight against itself
I am closed to all but anger,
a simmering constant
since the last election,
anger,
not just at the loss
of mine against theirs,
but at the outcome
as a symptom
of the nature years of my life
in these later years
like a lifetime
of being on the wrong side

ii.

I feel the passing of time now
like never before,
time and opportunity
slipping away,
life space lost, like
water squeezed from a cloth,
disappearing in an eddy
down a drain,
leaving an approximation of me
to fill the place i had before
until the day I need no space at all

iii.

as I read the obituaries in the morning
or stand at the grave of my father
as I did last week in a park
green with the growth of recent rain,
I cannot reconcile the contradictions
of death and life, how the life I see
in the obituary photos and the light
I remember in my father's eyes
can disappear in an on-rush of dark,
one minute to the next, life to death,
how it is that I, too, will some day slip
into that vortex of night and never return

iv.

I think of the eternal nature of atoms
and how they combine and recombine
over uncountable eons to create
illusions of form, and in some
of those illusionary constructs
a spark of life and consciousness
and beings like you and me
and all those whose obituaries 
I read ever morning,
and my father dead 42 years,
the illusion of him gone forever
to seed the soil he lies in
and the grass and trees and clouds
over his head and, someday
in the great recycling that brings
all the old to something new,
perhaps another form with life
and a sense of self and universe
outside of self that is the cradle
where rests the truth, for life to last
​forever, we must over and over die
​



Picture
Art by Vincent Martinez - with poem, from Seven Beats a Second


lying in the sun with Susan

quiet bay

no sound but the light rustle
of marsh grass in the gulf breeze

she
lies on the deck, legs spread,
as if to thrust herself
at the summer sun

sweat glistens 
on the inside of her thigh
and my tongue aches
for the taste of her

0 Comments

2-28-22 As Long As The Road Runs Ahead

2/12/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
all is lost, alas
 
so
I have this poem I wrote
that is not a very good poem at all
but as a poem-a-day poet
I have to either post it or write another poem

it’s like spending your last $8.99 on a shirt at WalMart,
not realizing how ugly it is until
you get it home
but you have to wear it because
you paid for it

so
I’m thinking
that surely is a pretty peach-colored sky
to the west, a reflection
of the sun cresting the horizon
to the east, and I’m thinking
well
so what
this peach-colored sky thing
happens every day so how is that better
than an ugly shirt from
WalMart

so
I’m thinking well
look at the pigeons
peck pecking on the pavement
in the parking lot,
isn’t that worth a nice poem
but I’m thinking
what’s the big deal
about pigeons peck
pecking
on the pavement in the parking
lot, has anyone ever seen
a pigeon not
peck
pecking
on something
somewhere, so

I’m thinking,
look at that big bus
passing on the interstate
taking someone, somewhere,
while I sit here peck pecking on my computer
like a pigeon
and, besides, I’m thinking
who cares about buses going somewhere,
last time I was on a bus back in 1967,
I got off in Atlanta
and flew the rest of the way
to my destination
and I bet buses are no better
now
than they were then,
and that was
pretty
bad

so
I’m thinking,
look at that huge oak tree,
bet it’s full of
squirrels,
but I’m thinking, I’ve done squirrels
recently and aside from their bushy tails
they’re basically rats
in trees
and who wants to read more about
rats
in trees

so
I’m thinking
now I’m stuck with two lousy poems
and I’m going to have to post
one of them
for my poem-of-the-day
and I’m thinking
damn,
I wrote a really good poem
yesterday

I wonder what’s happened
since then
that leaves me with two lousy poems
that I have to choose from

the glory of the day before
lost
all lost
like Richard
who lost his horse
and ended up buried in a parking lot
with British pigeons
peck
pecking
right over his head
​

Picture
the dangers inherent in writing poetry in the afternoon

semi-bright
day
Wi-Fi at the coffeehouse
crashed

leaving
dead time for me
with ten thousand things
(at least)
I want to do

I hate dead time,
it is reminding me too much of
dead me,
when all the little fizzlebillets
that connect
this little brain bit
to that little brain bit
goes on the
fritz
and I’m stuck
candidate for a career
in any one or more of the zombie movies
which seem to multiply
like gruesome little bunnies
overnight,
turning all my best parts
into
corned beef hash,
which,
I don’t know about you,
seems really disgusting
to me
and I’m thinking
that instead of allowing my fizzlebillets
to turn into corned beef
hash
I should maybe try some mental exercises
but I get stuck at 6 times 6
so, it may be already
too late…

​

Picture
campfires
​

around campfires
beings not so unlike us
as we imagine, told stories
of the trials and victories of the day,
shared news of the hunt
with their clan brothers and cousins

many stories reached into the hearts of those who heard them
and were told again on other nights
around other campfires, passed on through generations
and geography…

traditions were born, expressed
in all the many languages of
man…

and we
who call ourselves poets
bear the weight of that tradition
with every word we
write, a burden, but not heavy, light instead
and full of promise

an invitation to join
kindred souls, to retell the old stories
and sometimes our own new story,
so well told
its telling sets a new spark rising in the dark night,
passing  from our own campfire to others
brightly burning, we will never
see…

keeping aglow
the ancient embers…

it is our job,
undertaken with the humility
of those who understand their place
in a long and vibrant
history…

it is our joy,
however well or poorly
we do it

​

Picture
an ambulance passes, patient cabin lit
​

old woman, white hair,
some lying across her forehead
like foam advancing
from an impatient tide,
cheeks sharp-edged, planed
like lava run on the side of a mountain,
asleep, blue
blanket pulled to
her chin, attendant quiet and still beside her,
no lights, no siren, unhurried
passage home,
far-traveled trail-rider
nearing trail’s
end

​

Picture
An actual new poem, from a story in the weekly New York Times Science section.

double trouble

a clash of Titans
falling into
a clash of Titans

one black hole
pulled into
a larger black hole

blackness,
darker than the desert
at midnight

gravity
slipping like a saucer
of melting wax,
pulling apart all the tiny parts
of me,
atoms and electrons and
neutrons and quarks and barks
pulled and scattered
to leave the ghost of me
adrift in the black
of all

even darker than clash
of elementals

imagine the power
of such dark
forces,
rending the universe
leaving the black portal
to never ever land

never ever land
the smile of Alice's Chesire Cat
mocking in the dark 
the white ghost of me
adrift in the ever never land,
asleep in forever-ever land 

​



Picture
trail mix
 
made dinner
last night, steak,
macaroni and cheese (for color),
and beans…

cowboy dinner -
not a green thing anywhere

```

my son’s dog is Ayla

she loves to play chase the ball

throw the ball and she’ll run and get it and bring it back
for another throw,
throw the ball and she’ll run and get it and bring it back
to continue the game

she’ll do it for
hours

I decided to play the game
with my dog, Bella, so I threw the ball

she ran and got it…

took it the far-back corner
of the back yard
and buried
it…

that’ll be enough
of that

```

he had a wife
and two children

who he loved and cared for
above all else…

he wasn’t a
philanderer at heart

but every woman
between

eighteen and seventy five
wanted him

and he was no good at all
at resisting

temptation…

he was
my friend…

I wonder if he’s still
alive,

still
not resisting temptation

```

on the other hand,
I knew a woman, good mother
and wife, except that being such
left her feeling unfulfilled,
seeking such filling
with tennis pros and other men
on the margin seeking always
someone else’s good wife and mother
to fulfill

```

“on the wings
of a snow-white dove
I found my own true love,
sent from above,
sent from above”

country folk in the old days
knew about religious music, praise
music that looked to God
in their own rough life, understood
the gifts of life and love
he gave them…

a barista in a coffeehouse
where I used to go liked to play
modern praise music, sung and played
by sincere-faced yuppies, puppies
whose closest experience with their God
was the dollar and a quarter weekly allowance
they used to get from their mom and dad, awful music,
unimaginative wailing, heartless, crass and dull as the worst
pop music by the worst teen sensation…

it was a church-supported coffeehouse…

you’d think they’d be more careful
about demeaning the supposed glories
of the God they claimed to
worship and
adore

```

and speaking of
godly missions,
fulfillment,
steaks, and great accomplishments
of the previous year
I was very proud, after years trying,
to master the arts of the omeleteer
late in the previous year, finally
learning how to prepare an omelet
in the proper masculine
fashion

it’s a man’s food to fix
you know, what with all the
swifting and spiffting and stirring
and stirring before easing
the eggs into a pan heated
to the exact best temperature,
selecting all the proper
ingredients to be added to the eggs
in the proper sequence and
at the proper time
as they fluff, swirling
the rising eggs around the pan
(properly buttered before-hand of course),
then with that gentle yet resolute
flip that is required so that your omelet
has the proper slight browning
on both sides, it is a manly thing to do,
this creation of the perfect
omelet, requiring all of a man’s greatest
attributes of delicate strength
and keen observation...

I am very proud
today, as I consider this, my accomplishment,
perhaps my greatest accomplishment
of 2013…

new mountains to climb
in 2014, new vistas to explore
and conquer…

perhaps buttermilk
pancakes

​

Picture
a girl-child plays in a summer park
​

a girl-child
with long braided hair
and deep violet
eyes
runs in a park
blowing soap bubbles,
a stream of soap bubbles
caught by the wind,
blowing through the trees

there is your true God

a pretty girl-child
blowing bubbles, each bubble
a universe let fly by winds of chance,
one bubble yours
and mine
where we sleep…

innocent
and unaware of all sharp edges
in the matraverse
in which our God runs, blowing
translucent universe
bubbles
watching them drift in the wind,
watching them pop
as harsh and unwelcoming
space and time
finds them

arbiters of order,
all the mechanics of space
and time, hostile
to such free and open flying

​

Picture

​I’m just tired of it
 
Well,
It’s true…
 
I’m an old man,
Codger dial set to most curmudgeonly,
Crotchety, just as a 78-year-old man ought
 
But damnit, I’m tired of how
Nothing works anymore
 
I’m tired of rough, pot-holed streets
That only get worse
After our incompetent street department
Fixes them
 
And I’m tired of incompetent, at best,
Politicians
And the weasel-in-a-snakeskin politicians
Whose incompetence is the only thing saving us
From disaster

and I’m tired of great television programs
That I can only see after I fi-diddle-diddle
Some kind of “fire-stick”
That will never light my fire
 
And I’m tired of good restaurants
That set aside their blue-plate-specials
For some frou-frou menu of pasture greens,
High prices and tough steak
And good old breakfast diners that put
Jalapenos in their biscuits and gravy
 
And modern automobiles that look like multi-colored snails,
Instead of those great finned monsters
That set our imagination aloft
 
And the Spurs, my basketball team, who play
Great basketball for 45 minutes before blowing it
In the last three minutes of a regulation 48-minute game
 
That’s just pretty damn discouraging
To us disciples of the round ball memory
Better days of yore
 
All of that,
Then,
In the midst of all my high codgerishness,
I see pictures of our Mars lander,
Mars, for Christ’s sake, there we are,
Putting our robot’s footprints
On the red planet, leaving a plume of red dust
As it traverses the plains and canyons
Of our most ancient memories, preparing
As it passes, for a day not far ahead,
When it is human footprints on Mars,
Mars, for Christ’s sake….
 
And that new telescope
That will show us the beginning of time and space,
The only everything we know, seeing it from minutes
After the “big bang,” having eyes on the creation
Of everything, everywhere, and everytime…
 
Thinking we ought to get the people
Who did all this and put them in charge
Of everything else as well

leaving me, thinking of this, that worthy things
May still be possible for our kind,
Lulled
In a kind of poly-possible unlikelyhoods,
Satisfied for the day
Except,
Still pissed about the Spurs

​

Picture
she’s probably heard it all before

pretty
young black girl,
barista at the Starbucks
where I go when my regular coffeehouse is closed

beautiful hands,
I notice
as she gives me my change,
and dark, deep eyes…

smiling
as she waits
for the next customer,
thinking, I don’t know what,
probably what every pretty young girl
smiles about
and on this young girl,
it is
especially fetching…

I’m looking at her as I stir my coffee
at the sugar and everything else bar
and she sees me
and comes over, thinking I want something…

how do I tell her how much I want
at least some of the years
lost
and how much I enjoyed
watching her smile

but I don’t even try
to tell her,
since,
it’s the way it is,
she’s a pretty young black girl
and I’m an old white man, probably,
in her mind if I say anything,
a dirty old white man
and she’s heard it all
before
I’m
sure

​

Picture
as long as the road runs ahead

birthday coming up,
number 78 this time,  
a week to think about it

and I will, because
this one unlike others seems irrevocable...

I do not dread the advance
of time and time’s inevitable denouement

because it’s like what Darrel Royal
used to say - you dance with one who brung you

and the years have “brung” me
much that has been satisfying, rewarding

me with memories
I would not trade for any extension

of years spent dull and dreary,
without the pleasures that come with things done

people known, places been,
even the mistakes as real in my mind

and as important to me as all the times
of smooth and proper sailing...

this life, like an ocean, the deeper the better,
stagnant ponds where life is encrusted with the waste

never doing, never trying, never flying, never falling, never
choosing at a fork in the road, a dull life of sitting

at the intersections of life
afraid to move, afraid to choose

~~~

I will think more of this in the days ahead,
and, as always, as I think, I write…

my conclusion now, well,
wait, this story not yet ended

as long as the road runs ahead,
there will always be horizons to reach for…

​

Picture
the aliens on our streets

five foot two, maybe three
on her tiptoes, stern, got-business-to-do face,
sharp nose, sharp chin, blond hair
pulled back tight, giving the appearance
of a profile on an ancient
Roman coin

sits straight backed in her chair,
the uniform tight,
her broad belt and attached accessories
remind me of my son when he was about three,
a toy tool belt with toy tools cinched around his middle,
covering about a third of his body…

she and her partner don’t talk much, I see,
both with their professionally unreadable, got-business-face,
business, despite all the television stories, known only to them
and their fellows, a life both inside and outside
the life the rest of us laze through,
so comfortable and smug...

her face softened, broken with a smile
as I pass and say hello, a human face flashing
behind the cop-on-the-beat face
she wears most of the day, and, if she’s lucky,
is able to leave at work when she goes home
at night to her husband and maybe children,
somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother,
living inside, outside, the face she carries like a shield
all day…

~~~

I am reminded of the “pigs” of my younger days, the appellation
rising again among many, referring always to “cops” as if it was a dirty word,
and I wonder if they’ve ever known one,
if they’ve ever seen one
behind the
mask…

I think not

I think most people live a life so safe and secure
they have no way to ever understand
what lives beneath the surface, organizing their life
around myths instead, never understanding what commitment
it takes to keep that underlife
away from their door and the tidy life
they live behind
it

​

Picture
it’s all in the game

with thanks to Tommy Edwards and Nat King Cole

“Many a tear has to fall,”
he sings

and I wish
I was sixteen again
when I understood the truth of things
long since forgot

I remember thinking,
I should be writing this down,
but I didn’t of course,
being sixteen, truth passes quickly,
captured in a moment,
too delicate to keep
in a closed palm,
released,
the memory
seared
forever we think,
forgetting, at sixteen,
about getting old
when even the plainest memory,
the most obvious truths
of youth
fade

---

but
for a moment,
in the music, I see its
shadow

​

Picture
harvest
 
a great morning
after 10 days of cold

sun
bright and yellow

pasture fresh mowed,
golden grass
fresh cut
and thrown from the tractor in rows

deer
graze along the rows

little holes dug
around the base of oaks

holes
like those doodlebugs
make in fine, loose
earth

holes made by squirrels
retrieving
their bounty of acorns

winter sustenance
earned earlier in the labours
of summer and fall
gathering

I,
nearing another in a very long line
of birthdays,
gather my own, right here
right now

here…

let me share my harvest
with you

​

Picture
​

​a hole in time


all these years later,
there are moments when something,
some sight, some sound,
just something,
triggers the past, a hole in time and in the instant of an eye-blink
I am back in it…

this morning,
passing a hotel in the dark,
a side door, light burning, and
seen through the door a long hotel hallway,
blue carpet, hotel wallpaper color walls,
and I am standing outside such a door
in early morning dark thirty years ago,
waiting for the mayor so I can take
him into a meeting room
and introduce him to assembled out-of-town VIPs…

Luther Jones,
a lovely and beloved man who, after his political life was over,
would stop by every couple of weeks to talk
to the children at the elementary school
named after him, known
to everyone from his sparkling city by the sea,
for me and many others,
a mentor and champion over the years,
passed on in his 80s in 2001…

it was a funeral large and crowded full of friends and citizens,
but simple, like the man…

a hotel’s bright-lit side door, a beacon to memory
this dark morning, and I am awash in remembering
times and so many good men passed…

sweet sadness begins my day...

​
Picture


​
Amethyst

A deep stone with many streets,
its light holds itself in with 
blue, the pours sunlight
over the windowsill. My fingers
run like water over its edges
and I feel a small rose opening, a pulse.

I gave off light like this once, listening
to poems beside a man I hadn't
known long, feeling my thoughts
simply braid into his.
We didn't touch and later we stopped
writing letters, but that night
a sheath of heat held us, and the light
rising from me for once was muted.,
not diamond, or daydream spending itself
in sparks, and it never quite left.
One morning, expecting tartness
and seeds from purple grapes that appeared
along a stranger's fence, I tasted
sunlight. I tasted snowmelt
washed down form rock and pure air. 
At times it seems that benevolence
thrives in a small enclosure.

Today the sun turns the grey
mountains gold, dusky pink, the spills shade
over their canyons which deepen
to blue as tdhe light begins to leave.
The bay gelding walks
to the end of his pen and dips his nose into
black water, not drinking, just
splashing it, playing,
making it gleam in the soft dark.




Picture
bench-sitting, people watching
 
the day started early

4:30 the dog’s early walk,
coffee from the lobby;
several blocks to the plaza,
around the plaza
and back to the hotel, all the morning
necessaries done

back to Starbucks down from the plaza
at 6, most of the same folks
from yesterday - the woman, tiny woman
with a tiny doll face, beading some kind of jewelry
while her husband drinks coffee and
watches; I saw them later
at their spot
on the square, business less than booming

then, at 7, breakfast at
La Fonda, eggs benedict with their own-made
hollandaise sauce and tomatillo, best
ever…

then,
time for the business of the day…

bench-sitting and people watching,
a bench on the plaza facing the sun
and the sidewalk, looking and listening
as people pass -
(learning as I wish I had learned 50 years ago,
beautiful women love to pet beautiful
dogs) -
people stop, scratch the dog’s head, cooing and
coochie cooing, like the beautiful German tourist
and her mother talking to Bella in German, a
multilingual dog, Bella seems to understand…

a month’s worth of attention in just a few hours,
spoiled dog will expect the same daily
from now on…

sitting with my back to a group
of mostly men, homeless, street people, ladies
and gentlemen of extended leisure, habitues
of a park salon, expounding on issues
wide and deep, football, the day’s menu
at the mission, interviews of famous people
heard (it's Santa Fe, after all) on National Public Radio,
the advantage of knives over guns,
the crazy fuck who hangs out on the other side
of the park…

probably the most interesting conversations
I’ve been privy to in a long, long time…

meanwhile,
Bella soaks up all the attention of the passing
crowds, mostly old people in the morning, old
women with red painted toes and old men
with silly-looking hats they think required during
vacation rambling in the mountains - and no,
my hat is not the least bit silly, being, as it is,
the naturally required hat for vacation rambling
in the mountains…

and
speaking of mountain rambling,
that’s the plan for today, Espanola to Los
Alamos, then through the national forest
and across the Sangre de Cristo range
a five hour drive of lofty heights and wide
vistas, perfectly timed for the leaves
changing as we pass, a wonderful day
of deep forests,
high mountain passes, and clean mountain air…

tomorrow,
we don’t know yet,
maybe north to Ojos Calientes
or south to Van Horn, the long way home
on Highway 90, through Alpine,
Marfa, Marathon, Del Rio,
across the desert, skirting the Big Bend’s
border mountains…

two more days of driving

and seeing all the
sights

​

Picture

Elizondo Road
 
I just learned
that Freddy got himself
a road…

up near Bluetown,
a tiny town a couple of miles
from the small town where I grew up,
just a cotton field
from the Rio Grande River…

a little Mexican beer joint
there where I used to go to buy
beer when I was about sixteen,
no questions asked
until a new guy asked me
what year I was born
and I couldn’t get the math
to work in my mind
so I turned around and walked
out

lucky for my drinking habits
the new guy didn’t last
long, costing the owner too much
business, I’m guessing,
so things quickly returned to
normal…

```

(this is supposed to be about Fred,
not me, which I often forget when in the midst
of poeming...)

so,
as I was going to say
before I so rudely
interrupted
myself,
Fred was a very nice fellow...

a nice fellow, my co-worker
for a few years,
a farmer, a social worker
who helped farm workers and labor contractors
find each other for the annual
migration, a friend to all who might need
a friend, and, come election time,
a gatherer of Democratic voters, filling
his big farm truck with farm workers,
insuring they all knew
by the time they reached the polls
who the Democrat was and how to vote
for him…

a man with all the normal South Texas
prejudices, but like with most of the kind,
prejudices applying only to those he didn’t know,
never to any he knew and made his friend,
in short, a very nice fellow and a good friend
to have in the best and worst
of times…

if I listed of all the people I’ve known
who deserve a road, it would be a
very short list and right at the top
would be Fred from Bluetown, Texas,
a man I know would be
very proud
of his road, a man i knew
and liked many
years
ago

​

Picture
anniversary thoughts on a winter night

the cold night seeps
through the window 
beside our bed,
damp, coastal cold
that makes midnight fog
fall to the ground, frozen,
reflecting the pale light 
like the tiny sparkles
of broken glass
you see scattered on the street
after an accident

the window,
when I brush against it,
is a cold jolt
that pushes me across the bed
to lie closer to you,
to wrap myself around you,
embracing your warmth
like an animal
drawing tight around itself,
seeking the internal fire
of its own warm heart
to protect itself
from the cold hand of night

you are my fire
tonight
and nights to come,
the warm nest that saves me
from cold and loveless nights,
the light that sustains me
through dark and lonely days

you are the center
of life and warmth for me

you are,
​and so, i am

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2-9-22 The Complexity of True Things

1/25/2022

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Picture
three days on the mountain

after two days of climbing
we crossed
from west to east
in a heavy snowstorm,
knee deep in half a winter’s
accumulation
between the trees

it was about 2 in the afternoon
when we crossed
the crest,
within two hours
we found the clearing
where we slept that night
under a diamond strewn
sky…

a bright rising sun
woke us
under a cloudless blue sky
broken only by the thin contrail
of a jet flying higher, even,
in the cold morning firmament
than where we slept

coffee over an open fire,
and freeze-dried eggs
scrambled,
frying pan and coffee pot
cleaned in the snow,
breakfast eaten quickly
before the last day’s trek
down the mountain,
an easy day,
each of us, as we spread out
along the trail,
quiet in our own thoughts,
remembering
the past months,
friends now
who we knew, in just a few days,
would be gone,
unlikely to ever be seen
again

our last memories -
the mountain
and the three days
we spent together on it

(New Mexico, December, 1964)
Picture
Leaving in frustration a few minutes ago from a conversation about a serious subject, trying to talk sense to someone buried, like a frightened ostrich, up to their neck in some bumper sticker dogma fed to them by the collection of Facebook gurus that seem intent on erasing any chance of common sense and logic from entering the public consciousness. 

Silly me, to think I would find anything else on social media.



the complexity of true things

the haze
shrouding downtown last week
was dust blown from the sands of the Sahara Desert…

I read that in the newspaper last week, making
me think of wind in the Texas panhandle
blowing tumbleweeds the size of a Volkswagen bus
across the highway, and I think of a dust storm
in Utah, so thick as I drive through it that nothing
alongside the road can be seen,
not even the rocky monuments
made famous in the cowboy movies I saw
on Saturday afternoons when I was young, and when
I was older, the Northwest Frontier, and the dust
on the desert between me and the Hindu Kush - far away,
all these places, all these dusty storms, yet even so,
not so far as the seeming endless Sahara, and I think
of the far-travel the dust downtown made to get here,
and I think of all that must be carried in that dust,
remnants of oasis palms, DNA of Bedouin travelers
and their obstreperous camels, all in a mix drifting
down the streets of my city and I begin to appreciate
the complexities of true things, how more intricate
and complicated our world, each piece a part of the whole,
the whole a confederation of all the parts, and the relation
of each part to all the others, not always seen, like relatives
who live far away, never seen even though they
in their parts are also you in your parts…

such a world we live in;
such lives we lead…

hard to remember the complexity
of all that’s out there
when wisdom is found for so many
in bumper sticker simplicity
and the shallow cleverness of Facebook memes, so that,
while all of life and our world and the universe
around us seems to grow more and more into a tangle,
the forces of the tangle and our fear of it
seem to push us more and more
into simple-mindedness...

~~~

the truth may be out there,
as was said one time,
but, God,
what a maze there is between it
and me

​
Picture
Tokyo, call out your tiny armies

a couple of years ago
I had lunch with a woman, a former
classmate I hadn’t seen since
high school graduation 60 years ago,
a highly intelligent, greatly
accomplished woman - and I was such an ass,
everything I said, offensive or just plain
stupid, words pouring out
like I was 13 years old again, on a first date,
uncertain of how to act or what to say,
so I just flip the “on” switch
to my mouth and the “off” switch
to my brain…

and I guess the problem is
in some circumstances, the 13-year-old
takes over and I’m the same
uncertain,
overcompensating jerk I was back then

and the woman and I have not
had lunch again
since…

and this still bothers me
and I still sometimes think about it
even these several years
later…

why do I still think about it?

maybe because I know
a chance to renew a friendship
was lost over that lunch…

or maybe it’s just I hate the evidence
of that 13-year old jerk
still residing somewhere inside me,
after all the years I’ve spent
digging deep holes
where
I might bury him forever,
so I might never have to think again
of him that is lurking
in some subterranean part of me
still…

Godzilla,
sleeping deep in the ocean
until awakened
by a burst of radiation from the
past,
that 13-year-old arisen

```

Tokyo, call out your tiny
armies

​

Picture


​a gaggle of English teachers


every Monday morning
in the coffeehouse, early,
a gaggle
of retired English teachers,
my age or maybe a little older,
high school teachers,
probably,
though from the way they talk
it seems clear they regret
all the universities’ loss by their pedagogical absence

(the one, struggling with removing the trash can lid,
looks at me,
says,
“you’d think someone with a PhD wouldn’t
have such a problem with trash can
lids”)


another,
skinny, with malnourished hair,
toenails like a badger
digging,
and a thin, reedy, whiny
voice
that would drive me nuts after ten minutes
in a classroom, talks the most -
says Fuck this & Fuck that
a lot
in that English teacher voice,
like she's fallen into an old Norman Mailer novel
and can't get up,
and it’s all I can do
not
to laugh out loud,
thinking back nearly 60 years,
imagining old Mrs. Buck,
my 115-year-old high school
English teacher
saying Fuck this and Fuck that…

and thank God my English teacher days
are far behind me
Picture


big time again

after two days and nights
of rain
the sky this morning is clearing
and the world is greening
and the aquifer
is filling

and such a great and wonderful morning it is,
so much better than months
past

and I am energized like the bunny
who goes on thump thump
when all others quit the race
and I look forward to a good day’s work
in the rippling fields of poetry
and to tonight
when I will harvest a bit of the field,
show a few of my photos,
read a few of my
poems

pretend
I’m big time
again…
Picture
​t
the woman weeps

the coffin lowered slowly into the open grave

women all around weep as well, women
who have sat where the weeping woman sits
and women who someday will

the men watch, knowing
there is a box waiting for them
someday
and a hole being dug
a little deeper
each day
to contain it

​

Picture
The next poem is by Francisco X. Alarcon, from his book, De Amor Oscuro/ Of Dark Love. It is a bilingual book, in Spanish and English on facing pages, translated by the poet. It was published in 1991 by Moving Parts Press.



II

your arms disarmed my sorrow,
by stretching like boughs
of elm in the night, they made
stars shine on the ceiling

we are no longer on the hard floor
of a poor apartment's living room,
nor do two quilts form our bed,
nor do we hide beneath covers

we are embracing on the warm earth,
the night lulls us, uncovered,
very nearby a river sings

I follow your voice as one follows
a torch in the dark mountainside,
far off, all are asleep in their bedrooms

​

Picture


a great tree


this tree
grew
when Christ’s cross
was virgin timber

continues
to grow as millions
have come to life
and died

false gods
and their believers
stricken
from the lists of the living

while
the true God
if she exists
lives here
still

​

Picture
fixing the language

having
exhausted now
my monthly quota
of atrocititious
assault
on the English
language,
I surrender
to my aspirational urges
to facilitate
improvement
to the other native
language
of this region

“Hola, que tal?”
I say, “como estas tu.”

“Muy bien,
gracias,” I
respond to my-
self, thinking as I did…

how boring!

this Spanish
lingua
is as in need
of pepping up
as English,
I think…

what these Spanish
language arts
artists
need is some imagination,
some better sense
of how things
ought to be instead
of fixating
on what the Spanish
Book of How By God
Things Must Be Said

like
for example

if your head is your
cabeza
why shouldn’t your
butt be your
cabooza

and most of all,
why does
a gringo like me
have to think about
this stuff

where’s
Borges when this kind
of stuff needs
to be done,
where’s Neruda,
where’s Allende,
Garcia Marquez,
Fuentes,
Paz, where was
Cervantes,
(for this is after all
not a new issue
to be resolved)

----

come on guys,
time to get your cabeza out of
your cabooza

​

Picture
you must remember this
​

I remember
both things that are
and things that aren’t

I remember Holmes
in the “Hound of the Baskervilles”
deducing from scratches around a keyhole
that a character drinks too much
and too often , comes home
drunk and has trouble fitting his door key
into the keyhole

I remember that
every time I have difficulty
unlocking my door in the dark, feeling a need
to reassure the neighbors
that, no, I am not
drunk

I also remember
a middle section in the book,
a subplot that is the author's feint, suggesting
a motive for the nefarious affairs
afoot, a subplot that provides
a back story on Holmes’ client, Sir Charles Baskerville,
who, it turns out, was a detective in his earlier life,
infiltrating the Molly Maguires,
then being discovered and, eventually,
becoming convinced
of the rightness of their cause…

but it turns out, no matter how clearly
I remember it,
this is not found anywhere in the “Hound of the Baskervilles,”
being instead from another book, (the last Holmes book) “The Valley of Fear”
which I do not remember ever reading, or even ever
knowing of before…

such is the memory of an elder poet, content
to make up memories when the annals of real life
do not sufficiently amuse, an entertainment
for long days and nights, but a danger
when the made-up becomes the better part
of reality…

leaving a fear that persists, like that of falling, in knowing
that much of the most interesting parts of my life,
places I’ve been, people I’ve known
could well be only the remembered dreams
of a poet with too much invention
in his life

(a note for Netflicks subscribers - see “The Molly Maguires,” an old
and very good movie starring Sean Connery…)



​

Picture
I remember her in her Airplane flying

she’s 75 now, maybe
76, but I remember her voice
like a storm blowing inland over
her cold and lonely ancestral fjords,
keening, like an ice-crusted wind, but most of all
I remember her eyes, from an appearance with her band
on the Ed Sullivan show, so long ago, her eyes
burning with green fire, behind the shadowed lids,
emerald coals looking into the camera,
through the camera,
burning me
as she
sang…

​

Picture
life on the streets
​

pigeons
peck at the pavement
capturing bits of food so tiny
only their beady little eyes can see it,
bread crumbs, minuscule bugs, who knows,
whatever it is I can’t see it so it is only through faith
that I can assume the pigeons are not delusional
and actually eating something, faith,
and the small but seemingly conclusive evidence
that I’ve never sees a skinny pigeon, never seen a pigeon
dead of starvation, all I’ve ever seen are like
those plumpers out on the parking
lot, proud little prancers, dancing the pigeon
hustle, two steps forward, one step back, peck, peck,
pecking at the asphalt, sighing their quiet pigeon coo, coo, coo,
ain’t it grand, this life on the street…

doesn’t seem like such a bad life, minimal grocery bills
at the supermarket, important for us social security types, except maybe
for the laying egg part, which, I don’t know, even though
they’re little bitty eggs, sounds
painful

​

Picture
The second section of my most recent poetry book is dedicated to the trials and tribulations of writing a new poem every day, which I did for 12 or 15 years. (I actually don't know which it was; the older I get, the less the passage of time means to me.) It is the problem of sitting down in the morning and knowing that according to the challenge the poet has set for himself, a new poem must be produced, with at least some hope that it will not be a really bad one. 

It's not the writing, but the coming up with something to write about, which, in desperation, produces some often times strange poems. 

Surprising how, though written 10 years ago, at least, this early morning "hail Mary" pass seems

so contemporaneous.  




the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning or just
another damn day in the life of beginnings and endings



I was going to write a poem
about how miserable everything is



how the lunatics
have taken over the asylum


how good things
everywhere
are hightailing it for the
low hills and high gulches

how the bad guys
have stolen all the white hats
and posture and preen
and pretend 
they are the good guys
while the real good guys
are all off somewhere
eating crackerjacks
and drinking lattes and 
smoking rose-tipped cigarettes,
mute and blind
to the ravages of their absence,
content in their philosophy of okeydokey
pass the smokeys
while the world burns
with the riders of the apocalypse
going eeehaw through the great divide
of hip and hop and spit and spot 
and drip and drop and pip and pop
and duck and fuck
and clickety cluck
and
eeehaw
we
ride,
they say their grim teeth
gnashing
as you run,
your white ass flashing
in the light of a dying moon

you had your chance,
they say,
and now it's our time to ride

gnashing
eeehawing
in the light of a dying moon,
we are the riders, they say
of your inconsequential doom

youbetcha

and I've gone old,
my damn coffee's gone cold
and my left foot's gone sleepy,
twitching like jello in a junk-jar
from jimjam jarheads,
and don't-know-jack
spratt
garage 
sales
and that's just the 
beginning of it...

but nobody wants to hear all that
so I'll just start over
and junk this jerky poem
and write a new one
about blue birds 
and puffy-fluffy clouds
​and shit like that
sales


Picture

my patient blonde friend

I have had my breakfast
now
and looking out the wide windows
of my restaurant
I can see my little SUV
in the parking lot and I can see
the back window of my
SUV and I can see
looking through the back window
my dog watching me
back
and I can see that she,
being more of a squirrel-chasing
dog than a literary lion,
doesn't understand
what this what-ever-I'm-doing
has to do with squirrel
chasing
and though she is a most polite dog,
forgiving of my past
and present
inattention to the finer squirrel arts,
not to mention, of course,
her and the fine blond
fur
on the top of head that begs
to be scratched
and the long blond fur
on her bac that begs to be stroked
and the fine little hairs
on her belly
that begs
to be tickled...
also,
I think,
she wants to pee

​

Picture

​exactly as cold as it looks
 
today
it is exactly as cold
as it looks

this is an important
thing
to know
as I dress for my
early morning walk with my dog
who doesn’t much care
how cold it is or
isn’t

yesterday
it was much colder than it looked
so I under-dressed
and was cold for the entire trek

the day before
it was not nearly as cold
as it looked
so I overdressed, finishing the walk
almost in a sweat

this need for daily
calibration
is one of the things that keeps life
interesting
for old folks who don’t have much else
on their mind

---

Momma Cat,
so named because when she
joined us she brought along two fresh kittens,
usually follows us on our morning walk
only as far as the end of the block
where she sits and waits
until we complete our circuit,
then rejoins us

this morning
she followed us all the way around
the circuit…

to the end of the block,
then over the footbridge
that crosses Apache Creek,
then down West Rolling Ridge
until it dead ends at Evers, then
back across the creek on the Evers Road bridge,
then north on East Rolling Ridge
to the end of the block on our street, Clearview,
then home…

I don’t know why she does it, doesn’t participate
in the walk in any way but by following
along…
but what strange shadows we cast under streetlights,
dog shadow, man shadow, and several paces behind,
cat shadow…

I can’t help but feel
there are some hints here
to a solution to some kind of universal mystery

I’ll think about it again
tomorrow
morning
as we walk

---

I have a sense
when we walk in the morning
that some shadowy
presence
that is not the cat
is following
us

the dog senses it too,
constantly turning her head back
to scan the darkness
alongside the
road

---

I don’t have a lot of shoes

just some boots I don’t wear
anymore

the brown shoes
I wear every day and some black shoes
I keep shinned for dress-up
purposes - weddings, funerals,
and the like

and a pair of slogging-in the-cold-and-wet shoes
for walking the dog

it was cold and wet yesterday morning
so when we set out to walk
I put on my slogging-in-the-cold-and-wet shoes,
but then forgot to change into my
regular shoes
when we came back home

so I walked around all day in my cold and wet
shoes, feeling sometimes like a lumberjack
or a lobster fisherman
but most often
like just a guy with cold wet feet…

occasionally exciting and reaffirming
to my masculinity,
but mostly sloppily miserable

---

in a life of few certainties,
one thing is certainly known…

I will be up at 4:30 tomorrow morning,
making a determination as to the relative
relationship of cold and cold-looking
as I prepare to select the proper
clothing
and shoes
for my morning walk with my dog, Bella

the moral contract
I have with her and, lately, Momma Cat
require it, as does my poetry,
the dark of uncomplicated early day,
no matter the relative cold to cold-looking
relationship,
being the best time for thoughts,
both meaningful and futilely meaningless,
which will in their own good time
slip, elegantly or otherwise,
into a poem for the day

​

Picture
aliens discuss their plumbing
​

I was going
to write about the beautiful morning,
so bright,
so cool, third day in a row, after three days
of triple digit heat

but I can’t...

the women in the booth across from me
are so remarkable,
one,
the older of the two,
short and dumpy, wrinkles on winkles,
thick ankles drooping over sensible shoes,
an indescribably deep
East Texas accent, so broad
it’s like pine trees stirring in the morning breeze
right outside our window, wafting
the essence of wet pine every time
the door opens…


the other woman related
to the first
from their conversation, though so starkly different
from her it's hard to imagine a common
blood line, tall, slim, broad shouldered, large breasted,
most likely older than she looks,
straight hair white and long to the center
of her back, face all angles and planes, cheek
bones like an ice shelf hanging
over the ocean, a stunning woman
at whatever age, a revelation of the possibilities
of human beauty in a natural state,
a Nordic face, with a pass through Indian country

strange -

I can’t recall her eyes,
but her voice as she spoke to the other woman,
deep, husky, flat, fly-over country
accent that isn’t an accent,
like they talk on the
TV news…
 
---

what a gorgeous day it is, but even
in all its beauty, it’s an every-day day like I’ve seen before,
like I’m certain to see again if I wait long enough

but these women, so strange and so close, making the day
more than every-day, a mystery to the poet...

but their conversation, so bland, so banal, so every day,
so out of character
with the characters I imagine from their appearance -

like hearing aliens
from a far galaxy talking about
their plumbing problems
back home

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1-20-22  Kicking the Can

1/6/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​kicking the can

the loud woman
is here,
wheeling and dealing
“know what I mean”
ending
every sentence

~~

thought
I’d write a short poem
about the brightness of the sun
but lost it in the glare

brilliance
non-transferable

~~

cars
on Broadway
speed
past

I wave poems at them
but no one notices

too busy
for stray street corner
poets
too proud to hoist
a cardboard
sign

~~

the light is red...

everyone stops

the light is green...

everyone goes

the sign-slinger
dances
in the intersection

as there is no time for poets
no time either for terpsichorean
enticements

~~

close enough
being
sufficient for these latter days
endeavors
and
being exceedingly
proud
of myself for coming close enough
in the spelling
of terpsichorean
for “spellcheck” to correct it,
I rest on my laurels
for the day

~~

like kicking a can
down the road, not important
where you kick it,
just the kicking of it
perfectly good
enough

​
Picture
This piece, written in January, 2013 is a poem of despair regarding the fate of our politics and subsequently, our country. January, 9 years later, it does not seem any better.

no end to it
​

so tired
of living in a world
so full of stupid people

fools every day, impossible
to live a full life without exposing
oneself to them, caves and hermits and mountain tops
not appealing to one
not yet ready
to do without the rest of his kind…

politics
in general, whatever the current debate…

this time, guns - on one side slime people
willing to facilitate murder
for profit,
on the other side hapless liberals
who flutter and fritter 
and wail and moan uselessly
about the injustice of rule
by the corrupt winners
of corrupt games
played in the name of poor dead and debased
democracy, justice, “the people” -

the people,
dim, compliant victims
of their own thirst for the comfort
of lies
and well-paid liars, sellers of soap
who soft-soap the murder
of children

---

there will be no change
to it,
no end
to it,
no matter how tired I am
of it
​


Picture
the promise of a winter  day in South Texas
​

the morning fog has lifted
and the sun is out,
brightly burning from the day
every trace of damp ambiguity, the clarity
of the morning exposing in sharp colors
the world as it has always been
behind the veil, like lifting the cover
of a veiled woman to expose
unexpected beauty

like hillsides exposed by leaf-stripped trees,
revealing in high branches bird’s nests
swaying with morning breezes
in the arms their leafless anchors

life signs exposed, always present but
unseen under the green cover
of spring and summer…

clarity, clarity, clarity!

how we crave it in the muddle of
life, how we welcome
suggestions of it in our customary states
of confusion…

clarity in a South Texas morning,
seeing the lot of it all the way down to where it ends
and to where we see the promise
of beginning
again

that promise,
seen in the clear and bright,
our daily comfort
in the bewilderments that surrounds
us




​

Picture

​seasons changing around us


late getting there,
the park closed for the season,
so we are alone,
mile after mile of rolling hills
covered with all the colors
of autumn, spread across
hill after hill,
like a box
of Crayolas spilled
in the summer by some child,
left to melt in the sun
when mother called,
hardened now
in the cold,
to multicolored streaks
running where
summer flow had taken
them…

an early winter storm
follows us,
closer behind
every time we stop
to take in the fragile beauty,
its seasonal end
approaching,
buried in snow on the hills
so bright before,
the surviving glory of the lost season
passing
all around and ahead…

we leave the parkway to stop
for the night
and in the morning
find our intended route
over the mountains blocked
by very heavy snow…

we take the low route
and leave the mountains
behind
for another day

(Blue Ridge Parkway, 2011)
Picture

the vault
​

there is no movement
in the opaque and enigmatic fog
but for the two of us walking,
and no sound
but the muffled hush
of my soft-soled shoes
and the clickity clickity
of dog’s nails on the
sidewalk…

the dark mystery
of the morning, adrift in dim haze -
a vault of old
memories stored
for years,
now
released

I open myself
to the past, not always
a good thing
for I am a realist
about all things
including my
past,
and there is no hiding
them
from me
for I know where the bodies
are buried, my own
and others

the vault opens
and in this enshrouded morning
shadows
linger behind every
tree

and it seems
I know
their every name

​

Picture
Maybe I should consider prose

I returned to writing poetry a week ago
at least that was the intent
but so far haven't written a word that wasn't
flop-sweat crap
written like a high school sophomore sweating out
a book report that might impress his English teacher
flow like a dam-blocked beaver pond
the passion of a backwoods preacher with an ugly wife
and herpes
no good reason for anything I've written
no good reason to read anything I've written
masturbation of the creative impulse, a flasher
at the playground; a twelve-year-old at a spin-the-bottle
strip party
you show me yours; I'll show you mine, then
a disappointing unveiling, like a
Pat Boone rock concert
blank verse - but not the good kind, blank like the eyes
of a shriveled up old man in an overstuffed chair, drool
on his whiskered chin as his lips tremble...
maybe I should try a cup of prose

​
Picture
It is hard

sick
slept all day
dreams of when
I made things happen

sweet
it was in my dreams

````

watching
the blind cat
bounce
like a pin ball
from wall to wall
until she finds her way;
soft bounces,
her pink nose against the wall,
then turn

sometimes
a turn into a bedroom
that goes nowhere, marooned
in the dark beyond
her personal
dark
until I find her 
sitting
waiting for the world to make sense again,
then
I take her
where I think she wants to go

~~~~

doctor appointment today,
five and a half minutes

she will give me 
new pills
and four and a half minutes
of advice -
I will take the first,
ignore
the second...

young and pretty,
what does she know
about being old?

~~~~

I
find comfort
in my regular place,
around my regular people

why
do I ever think
I need more

~~~~

I
find comfort 
in thinking of other places,
other people,
where I can be
the mysterious stranger
in the back of the 
room,
things 
I might not ever see
before
or since

people
who know even less about me
than I know about
them

~~~~

it is
hard
to be happy

young or
old, 
it is hard to know
the true nature of happiness
from temporatry
desire

~~~~

it is 
hard
to live in a world
where nothing happens
​unless you make it

​
Picture
I post this sample of my art now and then, just a reminder that scribbling is not the only facet of my amateur's self-delusions.
Picture
Catullus was the spearhead of a new poetic movement in the late Roman republic, emphasizing colloquial language and grandeur brightened by realism. He was master of short witty commentary on politics and society. Unfortunately, while we can admire the wit, the personalities and events are a blank to us so there is very little emotional heft to them.

Born of a high-class family in, it is thought, 84 B.C. The date of his death is unknown.

The poem I selected is from the collection by Penguin Classics titled The Poems of Catullus.


 Although entangled in prolonged grief
severed from the company of the Muses
and far from Pieria

                     my brain children still born
myself among Stygian eddies
the eddies plucking at the pallid foot
of a brother
                       who lies under Dardanian soil
stretched by the coastland
                       whom none may now hear
none touch
                       shuttered from the sight
whom I treasured more than life
and shall -
                        in elegies of loss
plaintive    as Procne     crying under the shadow of the
    cypress
for lost Itylus,
                        I send, Hortalus, mixed with misery
Berenice's Lock -
                        clipped from Callimachus
for my might think my promise
has slipped like vague wind through my head
or was like teh apple
                           unvowed
the girl takes from her lover
                            thrusts into her soft bodice
and forgets there...
                            till her mother takes her off guard -
she is startled,
                            the love-fruit trundles ponderously across the
                                  floor
and the girl, blushing, stoops gingerly
​                                                                  to pick it up 
         


Picture
 
it's a sign
 
this is not
a happy chirpy 
day
 
birds
moan from the trees
dogs
whine and cower
cats scowl
in aggravation
at the world's 
failure
yet again
to recognize
feline pre-eminence
in the order of things
 
trees
droop their limbs
stars, like cheap plastic
jewelry
on a dark-hearted
whore,
do not shine
the sun rises, its single
bright eye
sagging above the horizon's edge
like a lay-about drunk
preparing for its day's labors,
again
it seems to say
again, and again and again
I rise, it says,
seeking only the dark relief
of night falling
sister moon, it calls,
stay awhile
longer
 
let me sleep...
 
it's not a happy, chirpy day -
when birds
moan 
from their trees
you know it's not a
happy, chirpy
day
 
it's a 
sign

​

On the Coast

I've lived on or near the Texas coast most of my life. These are a few pictures from recent years
.

Picture


​season of zombies walking

two weeks
of cedar fever

the highest count
of cedar allergens
in fifteen years

sniffling drippling
nose,
itchy
watery eyes,
energy
and ambition
swirling
down the great
bottomless
sink of Blatzovia-Kaplatz

I do not wish
to get out of bed

I do not wish to do
anything
but sleep,
wrapped tight
in my blue blankie of snug,
my blue-raggedy, womb-memorized
nest of contented murmur

for
I live in a world
of snuffling
blindly shuffling
zombies...

or,
at least,
seems that way
through my own zombie
eyes

​

45th wedding anniversary coming very soon. A celebration will ensue. 

If that happens before I post the next blog, I will include additional pictures in it.



At this time, I'm putting this on hold. After fooling with this for an hour and a half, I'm prepared to say don't use J C Penny portrait service. Their product is good but damn near impossible to work with other than hanging the prints they give you on a wall.

I'll talk to customer service tomorrow to see if they can save themselves. Right now, I'm pissed at them.
​


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1-3-22 Fire's Red Embrace

12/23/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
red embrace

so many lights in the neighborhood…

porch lights
area lights
motion sensor lights

the battle of human
against night and the dark
continues with every downing of the sun

thus it was, always so -

fire,
freedom from the black travelers
of night, held at bay
at the flickering red edge
of the camp fire

always waiting
for the fire
to die…

still they wait today
those shadow things always
there on the black edges
of our imagination

and still we push them back,
from the falling to the rising sun
we make our circles
and build our
fires,
wrapping all we love
in the fire’s
red
embrace

​​
Picture
in a Mexican courtyard, 1959

a Mexican courtyard
under a rhinestone studded sky
on a black, border town night…

she dances,
slowly, like a cat,
around the courtyard,
pausing before every table
to stretch, again, like a cat,
perfect in its shadow body,
feet barely brushing
the dirt floor, compact,
sleek, full breasts,
dark Indian nipples
erect,
no burlesque,
no go-go dancer, nothing overtly
sexual, more like
a cat stretching, except she is
naked and it is a whorehouse
and it has to be about sex,
sex as a cat can be like sex,
slow and sensual in every step,
every smooth, silky step
a caress of the night….

15-year-old boys
clutch their tight crotch under the table
and wonder if the girls
they know
could ever be like this

​
Picture
The rest of the poems in this post are from my book, Always to the Light, available, as are all my eBooks, wherever eBooks are sold, including, most prominently,  Amazon.

There is a dark side to life and a light side. One can choose which life to lead, dark or light. This cover, illustrated by the photo, says to always look to the light, the light being a more rewarding and fun and safer approach than the dark side.
Picture


​From where I sit

from
where I sit
I cansee past
a small grove of 
winter-bare oak
to Interstate-10, east & west routes,
the one way to Houston and, through Houston,
Louisiana and points east and north beyond

the other route, followed westerly 600 miles
through hill country and high desert to El Paso
and four states beyond,
the orange setting sun reflected on Pacific waters...

most of the people I see passing are not going so far,
most know the futherthest you travel in any direction,
the closer you get to home, so why not just stay there,
untraveled, but satisfied, right where you and your life belong...

myself? 
I don't know that I've ever been at home
so I'm always pulled between leave and stay...

today,
under a cold, overcast sky,
I think I want to stay

tomorrow?

that's why we have night and day,
night a curtain that comes down between old and new,
a sign to us as it rises every morning
that new things are possible after all

what use a curtain if nothing changes
between acts
Picture
Smile for me

it's the lunch side of Sunday brunch
& the place is packed,
a mixed crowd of church folk in their Sunday best

& the just crawled-out-of-bed crowd  in shorts & flip-flops,
bed-hair flat on one one side, sticking out on the other
like a porcupine in heat, & the golfers from the quarry,
clip-clop clip-clop-clip in their golf shoes

& grandmas and pregnant moms with last year's babies
in high chairs, dads in khakis & hard-starched checkered shirts
thinking how simple life is
at work
& that baby again, looking at me from across the room

talking
talking
talking

hyper-alert,
smiling
a big toothless smile for me

this swirl of sound & color is like I'm alone,
unmoving in the center of a whirlpool of sensation,
all moving, sound & color streaming like paint flung in a circle
except the baby,
talking
talking

talking
smiling a big toothless smile
for 
me

​



Picture
Slow lane

it's 10:30, 
the movie we want to see this week
starts at noon, 
so we have some time to kill

meanwhile,
I've had my breakfasrt
and the multiple coffees needed to set the world
back to its proper rotation,
and the Sunday morning peasure of both my local paper and the Times,
slowly read

Dee just out the door for a walk and some window shopping
and me,
here,
with this

making me think,
as writing a poem always makes me think,
this time about how much pleasure there is
in these slow Sunday mornings
and how happy I am I'm not hung-over
as so often I used to be because of the way
Sunday mornings always followed the self-abuse
​of Saturday night
​



Picture
Scattered in the wide night sky

scattered
in the wide night sky
are pinpoints of light bringing star-heat
to worlds like our own
biological stews pining the universal spark on some
and on others, life at its most simple is cradled,
protected from the cosmic storms,
and on a relative few,
creatures who strive and dream like you and I

I
know this 
like some people
know God, such knowledge
a product of longing
in the lonely bright for a comanion
​worthy of our best nature
​
Picture
Here are two short poems by Nanao Sakaki, from the collection, Break the Mirror, published by North Point Press in 1987. Sakaki was a Japanese poet, author of Bellyfulls and leading personality of The Tribe, a loose-knit countercultural group in Japan in the 1960s and 70s. He was born to a large family in Kagoshima Prefecture, and raised by parents who ran an indigo dye-house.

After completing compulsory education at age twelve, he worked as an office boy in Kagoshima. He was a draftee radar specialist stationed in Kyushu in the military, and surreptitiously read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kropotkin, Marx, and Engels as time allowed. After the war, he went to Tokyo, living in an underpass near Ueno Station.


Vinegar

With vinegar
I clean up windows.
I clean up mind's windows.
I clean up green forest
             blue sky,
            white clouds.
I clean up the universe.

__________not true__________

Now transparent windows-----

Againist the glass
Chickadees, robins, jays
                hit their heads
               and lose their lives.

In charity
I pick them up
         eat them up
        with friends.


Winter Flower Trails

            After two days snowing
            A rosy evening glow.

You remembrr suddenly
The star shining in daytime
And flowers blooming her in summer.

               Star light
               Snow light
               And icy thistle field.

Staggering with heavy boots
You break dry flowers
Into small pieces of the sun.

                 Stare here
                 Your footprints
                 Animal tracks
                 Flower trails

Shine over the zodiacal light
                 Along the Milky Way. 



Picture

A found poem, from a story in the New York Times, Front Page, January 14, 2009

Praise God from whom all blessings flow

a man
on a motorbike
pulled along side her

asked
what seemed an ordinary question

"are you going to school?"

then he pulled her burqa 
from her head
and sprayed her face
with burning acid

17 years old
and bravely back in school,
she says,
"They want us to be 
stupid things."

praise God
in all his cruel and 
hideous
forms

amen
​
Picture
My younger brother, my older brother, (both deceased) and me
Beat down but never backed down

I always admired
those whip-thin guys
who run their lives on instinct

who,
when disrespected, lay the offender out on the floor,
light a cigarette, walk to the bar and order another beer
while I'm still lost
in internal dialogue...

"what did that guy say?

"did that guy just call me a punk-ass motherfucker?

"he did, he did by God. he did just call me 
a punk-ass motherfucker.

"why would he do that?" I would query myself.
"Im a nice guy, plus, I never did anything to him.

"well, I don't care. I can't let anyone call me
a punk-ass motherfucker!  I'm gonna have to take him down!"

"where'd he go?"

of course, by the time complete my internal dialog and react,
he's probably moved on to his next stop,
laughing with his friends

probably forgot he called anyone a punk-ass motherfucker,
and everone else in the bar, disappointed that there wasn't
no fighting after all, has turned back to their beer
and moved on...

and,
I'm standing in the middle of the room by myself..
one of those whip-thin instince guys
would have swung first
and thought about it later
and you can see from the scars
they swung first when they should have thought about it
maybe just a litle bit longer...

my older brother was one of those whip-thin guys,
gone now for more than fifteen years,
beat down, sometimes,
but never backed 
​down
​


​
Picture
This poem is by Mexican novelist, poet, essayiist and translator Jose Emilio Pacheco from his first book City of Memories. The book, published by City Lights in the United States and Ediciones Era in Mexico was winner of the James Asuncion Silva Award for best book of poetry to appear in Spanish from 1990 to 1995. The American edition is a bilingual book, with Spanish and English translation by Cynthia Steele and David Lauer on facing pages.

It is a true poet's poem, cast our for whoever might want it.





For You

Not a bottle at sea nor vampire's flight,
more like a torn scrap of paper blowing toward you
     in the street, the poem.

It's one or the other: you trap it or let it go by;
read it or throw it in the trasn.

The wind blows where it will:
putting it in your hand or steering it toward
     nothingness.

It's a miracle that your eyes linerger
on a scrap of paper in the street.

Do with it what you will.

​
Picture
This pictureis from about ten years ago, taken on a day like this day, the second of the new year, in San Antonio, were the sun is bright and the temperature is in the mid-thirties, reminding me of the pleasure sitting outside on a cold moring, by a fire drinking the morning's first cup of coffee.


Pumpkins a little frosty today

​
pumpkins a little frosty
this morning
and the footbridge
across Apache Creek
a little slippery
with a light rime
sheet, dog pulls
I slide along
behind…

it’ll be 60 degrees
within two hours
of the sun’s rising…

colder tonight,
warmer again tomorrow
morning

no wonder
we are confused

---

cat scurries,
no more a friend of the cold
than me…

dog thinks it’s all
just mighty
fine

I take her
off the leash
down by the creek
and she runs
and runs and runs,
wide circles
in the low cut grass,
then stops to jump
up to my chest
for a scratch behind
her ears

then runs again
and again and again
in wide circles
in the grass…

wet paw prints
on my coat
where she jumps

---

a bird on a bush
right outside my window

not sure what kind

maybe a mocking bird,
but feathers so fluffed against the cold
it’s hard to say

a ball of gray fluff,
like the soft lint
you pull off the filter
in your clothes
dryer

sharp little beak,
tiny, coal-dust eyes,
looking in
at the warm people
on the other side of the glass,
especially at me since I am nearest,
a black stare before it flexes
its fluffed chest
and flies

---

Sunday
morning it is, a time to prepare
for a slow day
to wind
and
travel​

​
Picture
Photo taken near sunrise, January 1, 2010


​Medicated meditation
 
drifting

a small boat
on calm seas, ripple
suggests, but forgotten,
lulled by soft tides
that rise and fall such a very
little bit, day to night, night
to day, drifting

small boat calm
seas
day to night
night to
day

drifting

a tiny whirlpool
of nowhere
soon
0 Comments

12-19-21 On This Bright December Day

12/8/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture


​On this Bright December Day

I could be racing my
Stutz Bearcat
through the high mountain passes
of Abrakazam, if I wanted to
or trading tequila shots
with the Duchess de Whirl
I could do that...

or I could be riding hell for leather
across the rocky steppes
of Kerikombati,
eating roast pig
on the pristine white sands
of Jazmaka de Mir
or attending a Hollywood premier
with the bountifully bodacious Hungarian star of the evening,
Alotta Shegotta, or
I could go hang gliding over the deep red canyons
of Tashtaganskastan if I wanted,
or I might pilot my jumbo Lear to a birthday bash
for the Prince of Cisco-Ferlingetti...

lots of stuff like that I could be doing today...
but I have a poem to write first,
then the new Harry Potter movie that opened just last night,
I could take my niece to that,
and there's my geraniums that need some watering,
and a drawer full of socks needing emergency organizational attention

important stuff..
real life...
​
real life stuff that proves I am living
and not just part of someone's
Stutz Bearcat dream

​


Picture



​
In the time of emergence

an old Navajo chant
speaks of the "time of emergence"
and I think of the all-there-is 
emerging,
not a product created by the hand of a god,
but a creation that emerges from the mind
of the all-mother/all-father,
creation, not as a single event, a job of work,
complete over the course of a week of seven god-days,
but a continuing process of never-ending creation,
a creation-flow, an emergency of ever-deepening truth,
like the night emerges and from the night a day emerges
and from the day, a night, like the sea emerges from the deep,
breaks on shores far from where its water essence begins,
then returns to the deep that sent it, and back again to the same
or different shores, far-traveled, enriched by its journey;
like rain on cut hay left in the field overnight,
the fire of creation processing within, its must odor rising again
with the fallen rain to become a cloud, drifting over continents,
over prairies and mountains and cities and great forests,
across the oceans, bringing the musty smell of wet hay
with new-falling rain around the world and back again
to mowed fields where it began,
in a moment of passion emerged from one of us to another,
then the continued emergence through a life of ins and outs,
comes and goes, contributing as we come and go,
our own passions to the universe we are part of again,
flowing through our time until our end
and in a moment of death-ecstasy, souls singing
as we join the all-there-is from whence we came

our part of the great emergence complete, until we, like the sea
return again to new and different shores,
enriched by our time drifting in the creator's emerging conscious
​
Picture

​Chaos management

"I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life. What I don't like is mis-management of chaos."

- Franketienne, Haitian author, poet, playwright, painter

there are patterns to the univese,
from the orbits of galaxies
to the circling of the tiniest electron
around its mother neutron anchor
to the greening and falling of leaves
to the daily commute of bankers and painters and donut makers
to the soft sleep of babies and the long, dry nights of old and time-worn men,
all circling

all circling, each circle a world within itself,
inter-acting with its fellows in shadows of confusion,
like looking at the color patterns of gumballs encased in glass,
patterns seen only through a one-eyed squint from some great distance,
the further away clear becomes the organization,
red upon green next to blue under yellow,
each placed in a structured chaos,
like the universe in all its chaotic glory,
structured truth we can never get distanced enough to see,
an incubator spewing chaos,
indestructible unalterable manageable only through
the indirection of unseen hands that must never fumble
or chaos will solidify and all the circles will stop their spinning
and fall to the lethargy of inertia stilled
and all that is will, like Lot's wife, turn to salt crumbling on a silent palin
in the steady wind of never-again...

​
Picture
The poems in this post come from New Days & New Ways, my most recent, and probably last, book of poems, specifically from the 6th and last chapter in the book,"Out There," an attempt to close the book in a more philosophical vein.

I don't expect to ever again do the work involved in putting a book together and putting it out there for people to read.

​
Picture
Bang

I believe
we are all children of the big bang
and that nothing truly new has been added to the mix
since...

and while I don't know what came before the bang,
I'm guessing we'll figure it out
before the end...

multible bangs,
maybe;
bangs within bangs,
bangs bouncing off bangs like a six bank corner pocket hustle;
perpetual bang,
one bang banging another like steel balls hung from strings
banging one after the other in a row in a forever and ever progression;
bangs banging out there, banging in somewhere else -

that's one to imagine,
creation in reverse, the Garden of Eden returning to uplowed field...

or it could be a single, once-and-only bang -

that would make us really something,
us and all the universe we know, or don't,
our stars, the only stars anywhere

you and me, the only us anywhere...

somehow, I just don't feel that special

​

Starburst
Picture
Born again, and again and again and again

I know many people who proudly proclaim
to have been born again,
under-achievers I call them
since, not satisfied with being only twice-born,
I have been born again;
and again and again again

for I am a being of universal elements
and thus, certain to be born again
as I have been born before uncountable times,
uncountable times,
for the parts that make me as old at the universe itself
and so must be all the things I have been,
things near to home and faraway -
lost in the vast unknown regions where stardust still drifts -

vastly traveled are my parts,
so vastly traveled I must be as well ,
so varied and old and well-traveled

look around you at the vast everything-ness
that we are,
have been,
and will be a part of ...

consider how marvelous I am,
and you as well

sometimes I think of the me that was a daffodil,
and how beautiful I was,
much more beautiful than I am now,
though rooted and consequently less curious than the proto-cat I was,
roaming with early felines, newly crearted to hunt that was the me,
that was the deer, or the beaver, or the small mouse hidden in high grasses,
or the grass I might have been, 
or the wiggling worm that fertilized the grass-of-me with my worm droppings...

so many places I have been

so many beings I have been, so more than the twice
the pentacoltals brag of ,
and so much more than twice-born I will be in the millennia ahead,

so much more to be, so much longer to be them

I can imagine how jealous must be those who consider themselves
​to be only twice-being
​
​
Explosion at the Campbell Soup Factory

Picture
Picture
Discovery

the serenity
of the moment before

the particle of a second
when the universe stops to inhale
before breathing again
with a gasp of stars shaken and stirred
in their orbits

the idea,
the thought complete,
all pieces floating in confusion slide through the chaos
to find their place together...
and you know, you finally know how your life
fits in the greater, pulsating, ocean of creatures 
both like and unlike yourself

the greater theme is finally yours to know...

now it is only to not forget
again

​



Picture
This poem is by Marilyn Hacker, from her book, Winter Poems, published by W W Nortorn in 1994.


letter on June 15

I didn't want a crowd. I didn't want
writers backbiting in a restaurant.
Last night's leftover duck, some chilled Sancerre
(you've called fresh-tasting) beckoned to me more.
I crossed the Pont Sully, into an eight-
forty sunset, toward home, and whom I'd meet.
In the letter that I didn't write,
I tell you, I was meeting you tonight.
You in an envelope; you in the braille
of postmarks footnoting the morning mail.
You, bracked from life with someone else
though part of every page is what she tells
you; not my morning clarity of bells
to matins, phoned links to life with someone else.
I met you here as if geography
wee all that separated you from me
though hand to hand and lovely mouth to mouth
magnetic norh and doubly polar south
are on lost maps, the trails are overgrown.
It's warm, it's almost dark, it's half past ten.
"I can't imagne Paris without you"
was the tearjerker on the radio
when I begana to cry in Julie's car
under the Nashville skyline where you were
the bottom line. By the time we got
to Phoenix (with bald tires and gluey hot
seatcovers) I was already half way back
to Paris without you. In time, with luck,
anyone can imagine needing less
than all this food, these books, these clothes: excel
uholstry, distraction dead wood, bloat.
You're what I had to learn to do without.
I did. But there you are, no farther than
the whirring of the small electric fan
we bought that summer when you had night sweats,
then a sore back, then just a cold, then doubts
that you'd blot out with morning lust against
my chest, my cunt my mouth, as evdence
that you were present. Later, you'd deny
what you'll admit to now: the late Julythree-quarter moon on shuttered bars, the meat
and vegetables, the dim glow when you lit
a candle in the chapel after Mass.
An ancient park attendant clears the grass
of kids who where imagined jouissance
when we conceived and miscarried out chance.
We each have whispered, written, other names.s
There are more dead for whom to light small flames.
Down on the street, waiters crank up the awniing
of the cafe
en face. Tomorrow morning
I'll be no farther and no closer than
your walk down to the post office with Jan
along a storm -pocked tertiary road.
Word-children, we will send eac other words
that measure disances we have to keep
defining. When I lay me down to sleep
you stack up your day's work sheets on the porch
table, light up, lean back. Two silver  birch
trees for a twilit arch above your head.
I't hours before you're going to bed.
​
True Romance
Picture
Picture
Inside/outside

it's all a circle,
these lives we lead,
everything goes,
and in its time,  comes again

like this bright and beautiful morning,
sky clear, the light blue of bright
yellow sunshine and yellow-laced shadows...

i've been here before and, with luck,
be here again - and again and again, knowing
even as I luxuriate in this cold bright,
that dark will come again, 
welcoming that dark, for bright is not bright without it,
as day is not day without the brackets of night,
as people who live in the dry desert, how they welcome
the rain, people who live under a forever cloudless sky,
how they marvel at a cloud's slow passing...

and as I think of my circular life,
I think of my dog, lovely, sweet Reba, for whom
every minute is the only minute, like all dogs,
living in the moment, every minute a lifetime,
sixty life times in an hour, how disconcerting,
how wonderful to be so inflicted by nature,
so blessed to live like that,
to live outside the circle of time,
to live in the constant changing
forever strange and forever new

and I wonder if I could ever be dog enough
​to live a life of so many lives
​
Picture
A cold, fishhook moon

a cold, fishhook moon
floating in a black, star-specked sky...

the universal pool of all overhead
as I walk the path down hill in the goose-bump cold
of this post-midnight, pre-dawn morning...

I wander in the star-lit dark, searching,
as I sometimes do in the night while others sleep,
searching for the answers 
that even in these late years elude me,
searching through the mysteries of night
whether full-moon light or dim, no-moon dark
for the the whys and ways and whats
of a day in the life of the one among millions
that is me - 

carbon-cluster me, assuming,
with the arrogance of my kind,
that there are answers that are mine
​to know

​
Picture
Anthropocene

that's what they are now calling
"The Age of Man"
meaning, I'm not sure, either
the time humans began to occupy the earth
as masters, or the period
beginning earlier, when man existed primarily
as small, sampering jungle and prairie prey...

but I'm pretty sure "the age of man," hower defined,
came after the "age of dinosaurs," about which I'm not sure
were they reptiles or mamalian cousins of man
that just happened to lay eggs, or, as I've begun to hear,
somehow related to chickens and I'm not sure
if chickens are reptiles or mammals with wings,
or something else, along with turkeys and hawks
and eagles and red,red rohins, and even 
carrion eating vulture...

but I am delighted that there is a chance
that the "age of man" followed the "age of chickens"
and, considering how stupid chickens are,
whether the "age of man" would have ever come about
if we had been competing for an age of our own
with something smarter, a dog, or maybe a pig,
leaving us, had it been thus, scrathing fleas
and sleeping a slop pen in the "age of dog and pig"

and putting all that ancient history aside, I can't help but wonder
whose age the next will he...

considering our record so far during my particular part
in the "age of man", tkhe "age of ash and cinder" might seem
a fair  prospect for the next age. or, maybe a better scenario,
like the "age of cockroach" (think of that the next time
you squash a cockroach with your pointy-toed cowboy boot, 
it might be your heirs you are suashing,
and heaven forbid they have a long genetic memory -
plan for the future, that's what you have to do
when you're responsible for a whole age)

-----

meanwhile, across the way,
a herd of deer graze across a broad pasture,
except not bunched like a herd,
but scattered individually across the field,
as if each deer, walking his on way,,
decided on its own to stop for a bite of pasture grass,
solitary deer each at its own meal,
not Texas deer, too much alone, New York deer, maybe,
commuters at a quick-stop pasture, adapting
to the "age of man"

and my cockroach mean mood is lifted...

maybe there's a chance for an "age of deer", 
a return to golden fields and forests, 
a return to the "age of first nature" -
befor the jealous god split timel
and brought the misery of ages to humans
and all the other creatures alike

or maybe,
if I believe that hard enough
it will make, at least,
​a better day

​
Picture
Who will be the poet then?

say that a poem is not the word spoken
or the word printed in some proscribed form
designated as poetic by tradition or fashion of the time;
go instead to the image the words,
however presented, are meant to provoke
and find the poetry directly in the vision,
images in the air of real space and time,
transmitted through your senses to that part of your mind
that dwells among the visual cues and clues of the world,
the de-randomized pieces that combine to for a picture
that means an emotion, visions that fire chemial reactions
that push eletronic jabs to our frontal cortex
to createl a contex within which emotions form,
think of poetry as transcending words,
internal visions of the poet going directly
to an external vision to be seen and shared...

(the most beatiful poem I've ever experienced,
a French short film of horses,
a herd of horses running through fields of high grass,
the beauty of their flesh and their muscled bodies,
and the sweat blown from their nostrils,
and the steam, too, from their mouths and nostrils,
the internal heatof their great bodies under great exertion
blown into cold air, and the colors of their coats
and the grace of their great running leaps 
over high grass and shallow waterways -
the most beautiful poetry I've ever experienced
and not a word was spoken - no words written or spoken
could match the image direct)

think of poetry as visions transmitted through 
some visual media, like the screen of your local cinema,
or think of future poetry, transmitted directly
into your dreams...

think of the day when dreams are the ultimate poetry
and poets the ultimate dream-makers...

​who will be the poets then
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12-03-21 Remembering the Caves

11/27/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
I will be using a number of pieces in this post that I didn't include in my book, Places and Spaces, because they didn't fit with the plan I had for the book.

beginning with this one, from our first visit to Durango. We've been back many times, as recently as a month and a half ago.


Animas in the A.M.

5 a.m.
walking main street
downtown

dog impervious to the cold

not me

across the railroad tracks
past the hotel

slick sidewalk
alongside the Animas River

snow deep on both sides
river iced at the bank

solitary duck
climbs frost-glistened
rock
mid-stream

slips
scrambles
honks


no other sound
but the rustle of the river
as it eddies and curls and slides
over rocks

across the river
five deer gather
in a clearing

graze
silent as the morning

a car crosses
the bridge at the end of the block
lights reflecting on snow
all around
tires crunching froze-crisp ice shell on the road

and the deer
flipping their tails
flee
high-leaping

(Durango, Colorado, 1997)

​






Picture


Cold truths of life and death in black and white


atop a rise
a mound of earth
an ancient burial mound
looking out over
a snowed-over field
white field
black skeleton of a winterized tree
thin black line of a frozen creek
five black horses
led by a white horse
ghost against the snow
legs lifted high
above the snow
crossing

(Colorado, February, 2008)

​

​
Picture
A cemetery

a cemetery
on a low mound
between the highway
and the Rio Grande

the humble markers
of poor people
from the cluster
of casitas
I passed a quarter mile
back, small houses
of native stone, like
the more elaborate markers,
the ones not of rotting wood,
crosses, bowing toward the ground,
native flowers
gather at the base of some,
stone or wood, nothing,
stone or wood or flowers,
around the indentations
that mark the oldest graves,
the unmarked, the never marked,
those of transient markers
no match for the inevitable
decline of time that leaves these
shallow dimples
over a grave in which nothing
but a few scattered bones
remain, poor people,
cowboys and shepherds
who lived and died,
then faded to nothing beneath
dry badland
sand…

(Hwy. 170 between Terlingua and Presidio, May, 2003)

​



Picture

Come the resurrection

the path down and back
is steep and arduous, especially
for older people,
though benches along the way
provide a place to stop and rest,
a moment to breathe thin air
and listen to the wind
passing
between the canyon walls,
the stubby trees
restless in response

birds call along the way
but go silent
among the ruins,
homage to the ghosts
who patrol the bare adobe rooms,
guarding the ancient walls
until those who left
return again, pull from storehouses
the grain and seed they left
behind
for this very day of
resurrection

we are silent visitors,
with the birds, waiting for the
tread of soft
footsteps
so long absent from their
home

(Mesa Verde, 1979)

​
Picture
Continental divide

snow field
backed up by pine

7 years old,
the first time he’s seen
this much snow,
out of the car
pushing through hip-deep snow...

first snowball,
hits me on the chest,
I return fire,
snow battle ensues
until we collapse laughing
in the snow…

shadows pass
in forest silence,
behind the thick pines,
deer,
giving no apparent notice
to the strangers
and their loud, unfamiliar games
in the virgin snow…

fresh storm coming,
first flakes fall,
fat
wet flakes
hitting with a splat
on our coats,
the windshield...

time
to get off the mountain

(Colorado, late October, 1990)

​

Picture

Dust to dust to dust

wind howling
outside the car

sand popping
against our windows
like tiny fingers tapping,
blowing across the highway
thick as a mid-winter fog
on a Gulf coast morning

tumbleweeds
fly in front of us and behind
like prickly missiles
shot from a silo somewhere
in Iowa or Kansas

a big one,
the size of a small car,
rushing at us broadside,
tossed airborne,
right over the top of us,
one side to the other…

(Texas Panhandle, March 1981)

​
Picture

​From 2014, not a travel poem, though the picture is, from 1967 while studying Russian at Indiana University for the Air Force.


King of the serial heroes

breakfast
downtown again,
my favorite place for breakfast,
the best $40 breakfast
in town…

and
why am I telling you this?

because I have to tell you something
I suppose

and until I have something interesting
to tell you
my breakfast plans will have to do…

the restaurant
at the Pearl, about a block and a half
from my coffeehouse, so
I’d be going that way even if I wasn’t
going there for breakfast

7 o’clock now,
meeting Dee at the restaurant
at 8:30, which means
I’ll be leaving here
about 8 o’clock
- here being my regular breakfast haunt
where I just had coffee and toast
this morning, with a turkey sausage patty
for the dog

(here being were I am every morning - here
for a symbolic cup of coffee
so the servers won't feel disrespected
by my absence and so
they won't call the sheriff to investigate
the possibility of foul play having
befallen me)

but still niceties aside, I must leave room
for the coddled eggs…
then, going
downtown on the interstate
on a misty-slick road, commuter clogged,
half the traffic intimidated by the wet road,
driving 50 miles an hour, and the other half
hitting 85, on the theory that slick roads
won’t be a problem if you drive
fast enough to fly
above them

see,
there, I finally got to the exciting part,
will I make it downtown
or will I die in a wet, dripping and twisted wreck
half-way there?

it’s a real drama
this poem

a cliff-hanger,
just like when Zorro
rides his horse off a cliff
into a deep, dark
ravine

you have to come back
next Saturday to see how he survived,
"how", not "if" because we know he did survive
just don’t know how, Saturday afternoon
movie serial heroes, like God himself,
moving in mysterious ways
to always beat the odds, survive
for a second, third, fourth, fifth, etc.
coming…

I am the hero of all my stories,
as you well might know,
so expect a dramatic, bloody car crash,
from which I will crawl, unhurt,
to continue my Wednesday morning quest
for my $40 breakfast

King of the Serial Heroes - that’s me

​
Picture
another travel poem not included in the travel book, "Places and Spaces"

Musical mystery tour

he and I,
father and son
quality time together
driving through the mountains
and deserts and vistas
of the American Southwest, me
celebrating my first
retirement, he
celebrating the end of another
year of high school

at fifteen,
a musician himself,
he had an advanced and eclectic taste
in music, so that by our fourth day
I was introduced to musicians new to me
that are still among my favorites
more than 20 years later,
listening to Bella Fleck and his Flecktones
as we pass through Santa Fe,
Dave Matthews while visiting Red Rocks,
near holy site to Chris,
where Dave and his band played
in their early days, about to get too big
for such small venues, imagining
the band’s improvisations echoing off the rocks,
Denver’s tall buildings on the horizon,
and over and over as we passed through state
after state, a Willie and Lobo CD,
two guys with about a half-dozen modern and exotic string instruments,
a mix of musical styles and themes from the Moors and the Spanish,
intricate compositions from all the different strains
of Spanish musical influences with a little modern jazz mixed in,
thinking how amazing and wonderful it would be
to watch them play…

somewhere in Arizona,
a small town
whose main and near only street
followed along railroad tracks
from city-start to city-end,
a rusty town, everything rusty red,
a mining town, the red dust of its mines
the only thing left of the towns
reason to be…

a night in a motel beside the highway,
brought awake several times though the long night
by trains passing, their lonely whistle moaning at every crossing,
up early for breakfast and coffee at a café beside the tracks,
sausage and eggs and a flyer on the cashier’s counter,
Willie and Lobo,
never knowing they would be there,
we missed them by just two days…

I didn’t tell Chris how close we had come,
but I still have the CD
and play it often

(Somewhere in Arizona, 1998)

​

Picture


The next poem is by Frank O'Hara, taken from his book, Meditations in an Emergency. The book was published by Grove Press in 1957.

O'Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England. From 1951, he worked in New York, first for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art as assistant curator. He was killed in an auto pedestrian accident in 1966 at the ate of 40. He wrote of postwar art and of his experiences as a gay man.


Radio

Why do you play such dreary music
on Saturday afternoon, when tired
mortally tired I long for a little
reminder of immortal energy?4

                                                           All
week long while I trudge fatiguingly
from desk to desk in the museum
you spill your miracles of Grieg
and Honegger on shut-ins.

                                                    Am I not
shut in too, and after a week
of work don't I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

(note: I nod in agreement with the thrust of this poem. My local classics station seems to define worthy to air as anything written over 300 years ago. I long to hear some music from the great scores in cinema, the popular opera of our time.

​
Picture
Gravity’s gold

Bella and I, her golden fur
blazing like the bright
of a second sun shining, and me,
devote disciple of the church
of intermittent napping,
sit together on a park bench
in the central plaza crawling
with people seeming all
tourists, the only likely
resident habitues, the aged hippies
sitting behind us strumming
guitars, talking about everything
from starships to moon shadows
on the plaza in dim early
morning….

the tourists who pass,
old couples, pretty girls
with accents, all stop
to talk to Bella, to stroke
her head, as if she were,
indeed, the sun with the sun’s
gravity, pulling them
to her orbit…

while she, usually so distant
and unwelcoming to anyone
who is not me, more
like a cold far star than
the warm draw
of an afternoon sun, basks
in the attention…

doesn’t want to leave
when I get tired of
sitting

(Santa Fe, 2013)

​
Picture
A flight to Kabul from Peshawar, Easter week, 1969


Moonscape

mountains
high and bare
our small DC-3
struggles
as highest peaks
pass below within
arm’s reach, it seems,
from my window seat
life below
if there is such
must be harsh
and hard
with hard people
harsh and unforgiving
to those who intrude
without invitation...
not to be
messed with
as centuries
of armies and great generals
have learned - from Alexander
to even now ourselves
ruing the lesson -
if you decide you must fight here
make sure first you have
the merciless moonscape mountains
on your side
(Flying over the Hindu Kush, April, 1969)

​


Picture
This poem is by Andrew W. Greeley, taken from his book, The Sense of Love, published by the Ashland Poetry Press of Ashland College in 1992.

Greeley, a priest ordained in the diocese of Chicago nearly four decades ago, has been a noted scholar for many years (a professor of social science at the University of Chicago and the author of scores of books in sociology) and has been a constant best-selling fiction writer.


A Conclave Sonnet
(For Grace Ann)

Our great glacier-melted lake turns most fair
When, troubled, it gropes for uncertain calm
A Like a girl combing wet and tangle hair,
Rain swept and twisted by a manic storm.

Hair-line traced, fragile vase more lively made,
Lightly marked by steel-pointed sorrow's knife,
Ready still for flowers too long delayed
To grace subtle lines in the bloom of life. 

Children do not mourn for the lost half day
When the noon sky lifts after summer rain
But praise the blue with an afternoon of mirth...
Hope broken, shattered, stomped on, then reborn:
First life lost, it was said, then found again...
Seeing death as the vespers of rebirth.

​

Picture
Remembering the caves
 
so it’s like this,
we preserve memories in our brain
and when our brain
dies
so die the memories

but there are also
memories that
reside in our genes
that do not die with us
but are passed on to our
offspring, memories
encoded in genes
that are part of the
inheritance
just as are the rest
of the genetic
mix that makes us

generational memories,
passed on and passed on
so that some part of us
remembers the cave,
remembers the man-things,
the almost-us Neanderthals
who we remember
as we remember so many
other fantastical things
beyond our experience,
things we explain through
tall tales and myths and
fairy stories…

and beyond that,
it is said, all living things
animal and plant
have these genetic memories
just as all living things
have a consciousness, the
whooping cranes
in their winter marsh home,
finding this refuge every year
not though some trick
of navigation, but because
they remember it,
generations of genetic memory
remembering its comforts
and where it is and how
to get there

and also the forests
and the prairie grasses
and the sunflower
who turns its face
to the sun before
the sun rises, knowing
from generations that it will
rise and that it will rise
in the east and generations
of warm sun memory tell it
when it is time to turn…

science learning from
myth, myth suggesting
new science, and with each
new thing we learn,
new mysteries, all knowledge
an accumulation of ignorance
addressed,, universal
consciousness, memories
from all becoming
part of all…

where have we heard
that before…

```

this
the state of knowledge
expanding
today

theory
always questing to be
challenged, questing
to be debunked

what does a poet
know of this
and what advice
can such a dabbler
provide

not much

only enough  to consider
one suggestion -
maybe we should all talk
to our petunias today
though we know they will not
talk back, science tells us
there is a good chance
they will hear
and warm themselves
in the genetic memory
of kind words
spoken
by those who
in the far past knew them
better than
we
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    ​78 years old, three times retired, 2nd life poet, 3rd life artist

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