HERE AND NOW
(AGAIN)
 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)  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)  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)  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)  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)  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)  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  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)  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.  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)  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)
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 Poems and stories in this post will come from my book, Always to the Light, and later poems never collected or published in a book, as well as from other poets I haven't selected yet.  Listening to Mussorgsky Listening to Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” From the speaker overhead just as I start to write my poem, Wondering how my little hiccup of a poem can imagine a place for itself In the same world as the great gates of Kiev, Having second thoughts, in fact, about writing anything today, Deciding in the end, to be true to my philosophy that the value of art is in its doing, Not its product, that product being merely an artist’s footprint, Sign to the tracker that the artist was there, Valuable to collectors of fine footprints but as irrelevant to the artist’s nature As the remains of a grand banquet laid out on a cluttered table, Evidence of a feast, but not the feast itself… So, hear me, dear reader, I am afraid this poem will never mean as much to you As it did to me in its making It was a great pleasure for me And I’m sorry I can leave only the bones for you  Poesis interruptus I stopped off at my friendly Gas-grocery-beer-cigarettes convenience for money After my usual morning coffee and newspaper read At my usual table At my usual diner With the usual Sunday morning dueling church folk To the behind and either side of me, Including an extra place or two Filled by the twice-a-year Christians Who, it seems, get all the saving they need on Christmas and Easter, Securing all other Sunday mornings for sleeping late or golf… Discovering After my third cup that I had no cash but for four pennies, three dimes, two quarters And a Canadian coin I’ve trying to get rid of since our trip to Vancouver two years ago, Leaving me to pay my $1.94 tab with my debit card ```````````` It is at this point in the story that the poet is interrupted By life outside the poem – poesis interruptus – and the question is four hours later As to whether he can get it up again to finish what he had most ardently begun… At first you might think that returning to the earlier story half-finished Is a process of separating the wheat of earlier inspiration From the chaff of the humdrum interim… But that’s not the case because, with proper poetic recognition, All could be one and each could be the other with no separation necessary or possible Integration is needed instead, finding the wheat in the essence of all chaff And the chaff that infiltrates all wheat – Like the small shopping center by the gas-grocery-beer -cigarette store Where I stopped to use the ATM machine, Anchored by a large vacant $1 store Close up to the “X-treme Impact Church” Next to “Alive MMA – Brazilian Jiu Jitsu” Adjacent to the “Gathering of Grace Church” Neighbor to “Fantasy Nails and Tan” Snuggled up tightly to “Tattoos and Piercings” Sharing a common wall with “Gin’s Chinese Restaurant” It is all, in this world, like the shopping center, All the disparate bits and pieces, All the wheats and chaffs of everyday urban life Swirled together by the Mix Master of everyday living, Making the single and complete Here and now of this particular and unique Easter Sunday morning, Another party to which I am not invited because I will pay the price of admission – Separation of sinners from the saved, rather than embracing unity of all mankind, Some sinner in every saint And a bit of saint in every sinner Wheat from chaff, I am one and I am both And cannot separate my own self from the other Or either from You  Happy Confederate Heroes Day the biggest problem with being a non-believer is I miss all the best holidays... Christmas and everybody tra-la-la-laling all over town and I'm in a funk because every place I like to go is overcome with manic Christmas fanatics driving me crazy with their lousy Christmas spirit and I know after six months of this the day will finally come and everything I like to do will be impossible for twenty-four hours because everything will be closed so people can go tra-la-la-ling at home with their tra-la-la kids and if I see that damn scrooge or that yellow brick road or that stupid angel getting his wings one more time I might just get medieval with my TV and right before that there is Thanksgiving which requires me to eat turkey for three weeks and I don't even like turkey... and next, just as that dumbass angel finally gets his wings we jump into Easter and the whole cascarones breaking confetti-filled eggs on my head thing, leaving me with a headache for two days and a week and a half of pulling paper bits from my hair... those are the big ones, except for the 4th of July which would be great if it was the 4th of October or something like that instead of right in the middle of the hottest part of summer when I'm supposed to eat bar-b-que in the park, outside and watch fireworks and listen to the symphony, with help from the canons at Fort Sam Houston, play the 1812 overture outside outside outside outside everything outside and who the hell wants to be outside when it's 114 degrees in the shade and there's damn little of that that doesn't leave me with anything but Confederate Heroes Day which causes family issues with one great grandpappy on one side and the other great grandpappy on the other and the minute we start talking about it we have to fight the whole frigging war all over again who needs it! (NOTE: Confederate Heroes Day dropped in Texas as a state employee holiday about 20 years ago in favor of LBJ's birthday.)  The catch of the day Is not the fish we catch Or the one that got away The catch of the day is the time we stay and the walking home together  Eastern sky the eastern sky red like an angry rose by any other hue would it sweet so smell end of days of 2012 approaching a new year’s ending beginning in two days and I have no reflex for an old year a new year an in-between year a sky red as an angry rose the hue so sweet no reflex to measure the new number the old just a day you know like any other day no reflex for seeing new what I’ve seen before or new days or old days or roses angry red no matter how sweet hue the smell it’s just another damn day in another damn year just another damn moment just another damn angry hue and I have no reflex to understand or to teach it must another momentary rose angry then gone like me hasta la vista huesome rose On the South Texas Coast  This poem is by Carol Coffee Reposa. It is taken from her book Underground Musicians, published by Lamar University Press in 2013. This is Reposa's fourth book of poetry. A professor emeritus of English at San Antonio College, she has received three Fulbright-Hay Fellowships, along with three Pushcart Prize nominations. Los Amantes de Sumpa First she died And then he died Ten thousand years ago. She was twenty. He was twenty-five. Both were well off for their time. Mourners laid him next to her, Placed his arm around her waist, His leg across her thigh. This man and woman Could have watched The sun come up each day In bursts of red and gold Or listened for the early morning birdsong While they thatched their roof. Perhaps they married Had a feast She might have borne a child. I look at the tangled bones His skull crushed From centuries of earth Hollows of his eyes Filled long ago with bright desire What remains of him still turned tdo her It doesn't matter When they died Or why, or how All that counts this afternoon Or any other Is his arm around her waist, His leg across her thigh.  Written today, if written tomorrow perhaps entirely different. Too long, too personal, written in poetry form only because that is the form most natural to me, like breathing Taking stock A picture from 50 years past, Me, In the tiny trailer I lived in While returning to university After military service A pen in my shirt pocket, always, Even today a pen in my shirt pocket, A jacket, part of an Afghan soldier’s uniform, Received in a trade with one of the soldiers Who guarded our compound, that I wore that day Even though it was a little too small for me Years passed since then Long ago, those days when the end of life Was a dim dot, a spec, far away, Far enough to easily forget it was there Years passed since then And today the tiny dot Is a black pit I stand at the edge of There is no forgetting the dark At my feet Years passed And I feel a need to take stock… Born and raised In a small South Texas town near the border, High intelligence creating high expectations around me I lacked the will to meet, A disappointment, even to myself Leaving that town at eighteen, Finding opportunity to grow closer To the me others expected me to be, But, still floating on a dead sea, I lingered behind Until military service, I fought the call, but gave in to the inevitable, And, once in, achieving rank early Despite being mediocre at my job at best, The beneficiary of expectations, those who led me Seeing in me a future leader Then, military service complete, University degree in hand, The beginning of a career that fit me As if made for me, Ambition discovered, power and influence, And though temporary as such power always is, I liked it and took advantage of it To do things that, on the scale of my life, Seemed great things But the great things that gave me such pride Passed, like the power that created them, The accomplishments that seemed so large, Eroded to doodlebug dust like the power That created and sustained them A second life then as a poet, Twisting stories of my life into A form of poetry mostly known To be unknown, a blip, then forgotten And then a third life as an artist, A talent-free artist, creating art No more memorable than the poetry And now the pit lies deep and dark Before me and, leaving all that past Behind me, my stock, my portfolio, Is simply this, a wife who loves me And a son in whom I have as much pride As anything in my passing powerful past That’s all… And it turns out, It’s enough  Old homes left behind taking a little trip in a couple hours a two-hour drive to the coast, to Corpus Christi first, the city where I lived for fifteen years before ambition drew me to the hills twenty years ago I'll see if any old haunts remain - it seems every time I visit, a few more are gone, the old city slipping away, a whole new city grown up on the south side where grain and cotton were the only cash crops before… I’ll wander around downtown, called now in my hotel brochure “The downtown entertainment district” (Which it was some years ago, until the folks at the old folks' home complained about the noise - we’ll see, I guess, maybe all the old folks died or have become accustomed to noise with their oatmeal) breakfast tomorrow morning at the top of the Omni, the bay and bayfront laid out, the water rippling in early morning tide, shinning orange and red under the rising sun, the lights of the shipyards tiny pin holes through dim early morning on the other side of the bay… --- taking the long way home tomorrow, across the bay bridge to North Padre and Mustang Island, stopping for pictures of the beach and the fishing boats in Port Aransas, then the ferry across the ship channel, back to the mainland, first Aransas Pass, then down the coast to the little cities that lap the water's edge, Ingleside by the Bay, Rockport, Fulton, with lunch at Charlotte Plummer’s, pictures along the way if I can find anything I haven't snapped before after lunch, west to the flat highways of the coastal plains, plowed fields on either side, fields settled in for winter, awaiting early grain, and the wind farms, new, spread along the coast, facing southeast to catch the constant gulf winds, winds converted to electricity, the sustenance that feeds our civilization, then, pasture and old oaks spreading wide across low hills that grow over the miles to the curves and up and down highways of hill country highways, just past my home in my little divide between rolling ridges and the creek that runs alongside it… home at the end of day, old homes left behind again  Ride the tiger early clouds turned to wide-open sky as the sun rising burns away the night cramps of dead memories and lost dreams a new day, old swept away in the dark processing of midnight shadows and the sighs of slow-hobo winds the old day surrenders its night, back broken by the crack of an orange horizon, the bright new tiger stretches, gathers together the hours of its dominion, metes them out to us with the lick of her red tongue, sharp extension of bright claws… ~~~ welcome… ride the tiger as you must, until the next dark sends her slinking back to her shadow den  Here are three short poems from my library. The poems are by Eric Greinke, taken from his book Wild Strawberries, published in 2008 by Presa Press. Greinke is the author of several book, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has a Master's degree in Social Work and has twenty-five years experience working with disturbed and disabled children. He has also taught creative writing in an alternate high school and has worked in the Michigan Poets in The Schools program. Dust Obnoxious cosmetics Drip from the face Of the Statue of Liberty. Diamonds gleam From teh President's teeth. Old dogs argue Over the skulls Of rock stars and senators. A battalion of metal roaches Dances around the captured flag. In the middle Of a moonless night Old men remember the Third Reich. Alarms ring in gladiolas, Cueballing yet another Spring. Northern lights A roar of jeweled leaves Titillates the dark northern sky Celebration above the trees Aurora flares Sun spots dance the edge Owl turns to small sound Marten clings To a a red pine branch Outside my sleepy head Liquid Wild ducks Scoot a landing On blue eyes  Usual suspects the old guys are here and the tattooed fat lady is here and the always neat and clean homeless guy with his tightly wrapped foam bedroll, heavy-looking backpack and professorial look with little half-lens glasses as he spends the day reading in the air-conditioned cool, and the mama with her little blond girl trailing behind, baby-doll in one hand and pink little purse in the other, and little plastic dangly bracelets on both wrists that she shakes as she passes, and the young mother with two little girls, heading double-time for the bathroom, passing a new guy, a long, white-haired Sam Elliot looking guy in short pants reading "Guns and Ammo" magazine, and a couple of medical student regulars, and the short-haired cowboy guy with the bad arm, and the two gay guys that show up a couple times a week (and, OK, maybe they're not gay, but they sure are sharp dressers) and the middle-aged woman, a mid-life student who always looks like she's mad at me because I always get here first and take the table by the door next to an electric plug where she'd like to be, and the dorky-looking guy and his dorky-looking wife who come in and stare at each other and never say a word the whole time they're here, and the old guy with thick glasses and a magnifying glass who writes tiny numbers in columns in a spiral notebook, eyes inches from the page, and the table of law students, arguing with each other like it was a Supreme Court appearance, and the Asian guy reading Shopenheimer haiku and the girl with long auburn hair and acne scared cheeks, a cheeky girl with a constant air of amused observation, and I'm thinking if she was 50 years older she might share the joke with me, assuming it's not me that's the joke, of course, a possibility I do not discount... all the familiar faces in all the familiar places on a mostly typical Thursday...  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 Diorama morning north wind blows hard against me, cold hand on the nape of my neck, trickles under my coat down my back clear blue sky sharp as a diamond’s cutting edge bright sun like broken glass falling long night’s sleep, waking to a five-year old’s diorama world, construction paper city construction paper world bright colors sharp corners Finishing this post with a reading from my book, Always to the Light, available as always wherever eBooks are sold.  Setting out in a couple days for a two week trip to a couple of my favorite cities to visit, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Durango, Colorado. It's a function of age. When young, we chase new experience. As we get older (and maybe I'm just speaking for myself) we begin to value more the old experiences and the old places, memories like ghosts of the past, that were dear to us before. Always in the back of our minds that each return might be the last and thus are doubly valued. So I will do in each place what satisfies me best, sitting, smelling new air, seeing and sometimes meeting new people. I'm easy, that's all it takes for me. I'll try to document the trip with photos and stories, probably not not new ones, for it's the downside of frequently visiting favored places. Not so much changes.  Except for necessary but boring introductory stuff like this, most of the text in this post will come from, Places and Spaces, my book of travel poems. Beginning, as it almost always does when traveling west, the 550 miles to El Paso. We will extend that Monday by an extra 50 miles to Los Cruces, New Mexico for our first over night stop. So many times I've written of that first long day, I'll just pick one from the book. This story begin as a short trip to Silver City in New Mexico, Silver City being promoted on the highway as an arts city. Not so true, though was, at least, a very good coffee shop. Disappointed otherwise in Silver City, the trip ended up being a large arc across the state and home again. A drive in the country 558 miles and one time zone - San Antonio to El Paso a long day's drive in the country, stone-wrapped hills to the long-stretched fingers of pink Chihuahua Desert blue sky, blue on blue on deep ocean blue sky, to jagged clouds dark and sharply racing And little towns along the way, Segovia, Sonora, Saragosa, Sierra Blanca, Allamoore, Belmora, and Van Horn, all pass the miles and hours and skies and hills and deserts and all the little towns pass quickly on the ridge, a line of dead trees, oak blight killing scrub oak all around remind me of a picture I once saw of a lone tree, bare and burned, among the ruins of Hiroshima these trees like that, bare limbs black reaching up, grasping at the sky in the pasture below, a mare and her foal eat grass generous and green The roadway, blasted through stony hills, in the rock walls on either side layers of geologic time... there, near the top, a woman and a man passed, nearly human, and down here, by my feet a fish struggled, crawled awkwardly from the sea A large buck lying half in the grass, half on the road, muscle and blood and bone and heart against metal and plastic, old times of open graze and new times of death on black tar He, the buck, loser in a clash of kinds... A diversion, a small back road to Fort Lancaster ruins, a narrow two-lane, high mesas on either side a bird, zippity-flash crosses the road skinny little legs pumping, thin neck and head high and proud, sharp, like an arrow passing, and fast, no coyote, no can catch little paisano A cloud billows up from the Chisos Basin like a white rose opening to the sun, cane fields afire in Mexico, black smoke billowing, trucks move in behind the fire with cutters to harvest the cane to sweeten your coffee... Approaching El Paso... a roots CD mix my son made for me - Bela Fleck, Loudon Wainwright III, and a woman I don't know that I could and did listen to for hours The city long since outgrown its little desert-slash of river green, built now on wastelands and its connecting ribbon of interstate 10 at 5 p.m. a raceway of drivers from two countries and three states hurrying be home first, before the wasteland shits and home falls between the cracks North 30 miles to Los Cruces, west 59 miles to Demings, 54 miles north again to Silver City, an easy day's drive, two to two and a half hours, not counting the 30 minutes to find my hotel after my GPS confidently and with great precision deposits me on top of a mountain five miles from the city green desert all the way, a rainy year disguising the stone-hard truth below the green smudge of mountains against the horizon, left and right, front and rear, New Mexico, a state of mountains and deserts and neither ever very far from wherever you might be In the city - an arts and old downtown district are well-preserved and surprisingly populated for a Tuesday afternoon, students from the university and other interesting people crowd the sidewalk and busy street, two good bookstores and the best coffeehouse since San Antonio, strong WIFI signal, coffee with a kick, all very nice, but the main attraction to me for coming was I had never been there before, a moot issue now since I am here, so, with the new day, a decision... The national forest and the Catwalk and the Gila Monument Indian ruins are north - should I go north then return here at the end of the day or should I take and extra day and continue further north to loop around Albuquerque, passing through along the way, not just one, but two mountain ranges and forests... As a creature subject to the allure of tasty food, it will probably depend on how good breakfast is here this morning three horses crossing a green pasture, grass high, up to their knees, crossing single file, one after the other, like carousel horses with somewhere to go Chasing down a dirt road, pulling a cloud of grey dust behind, looking for a red iron bridge I saw from the highway Never found it, instead of the bridge, a rabbit on the side of the road not one of your cute little bunnies, but a big, male hare, three feet tall, two feet, not counting his ears standing proud and pink and scissor sharp, starts to run when I drive up, but stops as I stop, watches as I ease the car forward, reaching for my camera, poses as I snap off a couple of pictures  Dissatisfied so far with my drive, not having found the mountains and forest experience I came for, I decide to take a loop that will lead me right through the middle of the Gila Mountains and National Forest Hwy 159 off 180 - a twisty-turnsy , upsy-downsy road, but well maintained, a two-lane black top But after three miles it turns to one-lane and becomes ever more twisty-turnsy, upsy-downsy Eight miles in I come to the lost little village of Mogollon - originally a mining town, now I think it must be, the boarded up entrance to the mine visible on the side of the road Federal Witness Protection's prime hide out it seems, for persons wanted by the "Mob" and other forces of evil 10 to 12 structures including an old rock museum and several well-maintained houses lining the road, nice rustic houses, beautiful gardens A very strange place, a nice place if you want to get away from it all  A one-lane bridge seperates Mogollon from the National Forest. The paved road and a Forest Service dirt and rock road begins, very rough. Unsure as to how far the dirt road goes before returning to asphalt, for none of this is on my map, I have to decide, should I go forward or should I turn back. Should I see what comes next, which might be worth the whole trip or should I avoid what might be not so good. Disinclined by nature to ever back up, I press forward. The road travels along the bottom of a deep canyon alongside a dry creek. And it is about that time that it begins to rain and I become aware of a large, very black cloud hovering overhead. I know from experience what happens when hillsides and dry creeks and heavy rain come together, I am relieved when the road starts to rise, leaving the canyon and the dry creek behind. The higher I climb, the heavier the rain falls, and the slushier and slipperier the road becomes. Finally after an hour of twisting and turning and climbing and sloshing and slipping, the rain stops and the sun comes out and I can see the great gush of muddy water rushing down the hillside, building new channels as it races from the top to the dry creek below that I am no longer driving alongside. Thoughts of mudslides intrude for a moment, until I decide that I'm high enough to slide down the mountain on top of the mud and not beneath it. Setting aside mudslides and all other hesitations - it is not further back than forward - I come to a break in the trees and look out and see that I am on a high ridge, above the clouds, churning white and billowy below. Going down now, still on the dirt-rocky-rough road, a herd of deer cross the road in front of me. a very large buck and 25 to 30 doe and fawns, fluty white and brown stub-tails flicking as they run, all together, as a group coming down the mountain in great bounds, then back up the other side of the road, like winged creatures who through fate or folly lost their wings but still try to fly, almost succeeding with each great leap passing trough a burned out portion of the forest, pine and aspen, tall and limbless, black as the coal they have become, while they reach for the sky I stop and listen to the wind, all around deep-forest quiet but for the wind through these poor, standing-dead ghost whispers.....  Writing today from Santa Fe, I update current journey to yesterday. Our original plan was to do over six hundred miles on the first day of travel. After five hours of driving, we decided our initial plan was too ambitious, so, instead of going on to Los Cruces as planned we spent the night in Van Horn, a couple hundred miles from our original plan. But it was an enjoyable stop, spending the night at a hotel where we have stayed often in the past, the El Capitan, one of a number of hotels an architect rescued from ruin and restored to their former glory in the 1930's. There are three in Texas. We have stayed at two, the El Capitan. an old cattle and oil baron hangout, and the Gage in Marathon, a traditional railroad hotel. The third is in Marfa, the largest, where we have not stayed. Up early yester day and did the four hundred and something miles to Santa Fe where it's 33 degrees and sunny with a fierce north wind. Today will be spend walking around the plaza and watching other tourists discover the city. Tomorrow we will be off to Durango, Colorado, where we will spend three days before heading home, with a night on the way in Albuquerque and another night in Van Horn. Folllowing a very busy day in Santa Fe...  I return to the past and a trip we made to Denver, Colorado. My wife and I have different travel preferences. I like to drive, she prefers to fly. So I usually head out a couple of days before her and we meet at our agreed destination. My dog, Reba, and I traveled 35 states together before she died, and she was with me on this one, riding along in the back, or, if she thought I needed help, alongside me in the front seat. She was a good travel companion Since the first day of any trip west involves the many miles need to get out of the state, I start, from the book, on the second day. A quiet Sunday morning, just like in the movies. Another 500 miles and I'm getting started a little later than I'd like. But there's plenty of time. after about 40 miles I look behind, a long straight road, gradually rising The wind is blowing hard again and, like most of yesterday, it's blowing hard against me. little twisters cross brown fields on both sides of the highway, throwing up clouds of dust that move with the wind, but one, a smaller one, forms a perfect funnel about 5 feet across, keeping its shape for a hunded feet or more above the ground a tumbleweed the size of a beach ball blows in front of me, seems to pace the car for several seconds, then crosses the road Green fields, perfect circles, planted to fit the path of the irrigation sprinklers that circle, circle, circle, spraying their water like a merry-go-round whose horses spit as they past The perfect circles of irrigated green are laid across the landscape of dry and dusty brown, the part that lives or dies dependinhg on the rain. Passing through the little derelict towns that break the tedium of grey highway behind and ahead, with brown fields on either side. The fate off small rural towns in America, death and decay as agriculture becomes too big for little family farmers and ranchers and the little towns that sustained them. One little wide spot in the road, I don't remember the name, had fifteen structures visible from the highway. All were abandoned, collapsing hulks. Nothing left of the town but the sign on the highway. As I pass through Las Vegas, New Mexico, I see the first snow-topped mountains making the bowl that holds Santa Fe to the west. further north, as we cross into Colorado, the winter grass is almost white, the almost white of sand on gulf beaches, the white broken here and there by red barns like red umbrellas on a vast beach that has no sea Just past Pueblo, I turn on the radio and hear my first news of the severe winter storm that's on the way as I approach Colorado Springs, I see black storm clouds pouring over the mountain crests I enter the front of the storm, rain, sleet, snow, and fog, all at once in alternating bursts traffic slows down and I fall in line, an inexperienced driver in snow, I am pleased with the slow-down Traffic conditions improve slightly and I begin the long, slow crawl through Denver, find my hotel, register, walk Reba in the rain.  I abandoned this post about half way through our most recent journey, after days of driving 500 to 600 miles a day, too exhausted to even take my laptop out of it's bag. Home now, I'm tying to get back in the flow, having learned a couple of lessons. First, travel is much easier for the young than for the old. Second, going back too often to those places once held dear, means that those places become as worn and uninteresting as those who held them dear. This is our last trip, we decided, is our last to Santa Fe and Durango. Next time, we go north and east. Third, COVID has been a disaster for for service industries, especially for hotels and restaurants. Hotels are bad, but worse for me was restaurants. I am a traveler who enjoys new eating places and new food. We discovered in the last week and a half that restaurants, when you can find one open is understaffed, with limited menus, the food haphazardly prepared. This disappointment applied to several place where we dined often in the past and were looking forward to dining again. The exception was a Mexican restaurant in Cuba, New Mexico. El Bruno's easy to miss and not promising from the highway, but offering friendly and eager servers and the best Mexican food I remember ever eating, including both New Mexican style and TexMex. We had stopped there before and made a point of taking the route through Cuba that would give us a chance to stop again. El Bruno's was the sole exception to disappointment elsewhere. Setting aside our most recent, mostly disappointing, journey, this next story from Places and Spaces is about a trip East, aiming for a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a long drive for me and my dog, Reba, with a side stop in Columbus, Ohio to pick up Dee at the airport there before continuing on together. The trip, going and coming back in late autumn, is mainly through the southern states, so I titled the story, On the Cusp of Confederate Winter. The first day is 545 miles through Dallas and East Texas to Little Rock, Arkansas, A lot of traffic on I-35, the first shovel of asphalt "Ike we Like" laid out in 1950-someting, but otherwise mostly boring. a pick-up puling a horse trailer, alone in the back, one horse, a palomino, golden mane and tail and eyelashes flaring in the wind a hawk slips slowly from the air to land on a fence post, watches, sees all with yellow eyes that view all that moves as potential prey Through Dallas where snotty right-wingers go to get even snottier, whiter and even more right wing. exurbs follow I-30 to the northeast, a paved-over world, the only grass that survives struggles in the cracks in the concrete After Waxahachie... I like Waxahachie because the name makes my mouth feel good and the only reason to say it is when you're passing through it.. orange sky like mist through a forest of orange leaves Then Texarkana, where a line down the the middle of the downtown street divides one state from the other. lakes and small ponds and waterfowl, a crane passes over the road, low, long neck outstretched, wings spread like a dark shadow against a nearly dark sky red sky in my rearview, the road like a tunnel through the dark, tall thick forest on either side Unlike a previous night in Little Rock years ago, in the only hotel I could find, a dark and dingy, a sleazy, rundown dump in a slummy-looking neighborhood where, if I was the kind to carry a handgun, I would have slept with it under my pillow. This night, a clear, bug-free night in a well-lit neighborhood. Reba quickly asleep on her little bed in the corner. Eleven hours on the road, I would join her but for the woman singing badly in the next room over. The second day, Nashville, bringing the trip's total so far to 940 miles. I wanted to write about the forest, the colors, yellow and gold, and the red-brown color the Crayola people used to call Indian Red or Indian Brown and in the middle of all that gold and yellow and red-brown Indian whatever, some low bush that's scattered among the trees like little fires burning in the woods and I wanted to write about the flock of ducks that flew over in perfect V formation, near enough to the ground that each duck could be seen and counted as an individual, close enough to the ground that I could hear the flapping of their wings and the mutter-quacks among the rank and I wanted to write about the hills, reminding me of the hill country at home, but soft hills, none of the hard face of caliche and cactus and mesquite, just soft, soft forested hills, trunks climbing close together and I wanted to write about the sun in the morning and how it lit the colors of the trees and covered the sky from mid-afternoon, bring shadow and mystery and darker colors of the night But for two days, through two states, I have been unable to find a national newspaper. Leaving Nashville behind... the colors now are mostly shades of red and brown on a hill surrounded on four sides by forest a horse enjoys a pasture all his own in a dell, green as spring, a small church, white clapboard with a white, wooden steeple rising twice the church's height on a hill behind the church, rows of tombstones in rank and file, climbing he hillside like steps to an afterlife that, if we are all lucky, will look exactly like this little green dell with its little white church Losing an hour and running an hour behind... I stop at a park just across the state line so Reba can walk and pee just across the highway three cows line a ridge, dark cutouts against the sky Climbing now... the road rises in front of me bordered, as always, by red and brown forests at the top. a silver-dollar moon on a pale blue sky Skipping ahead, we enter Virginia. a white house on a hill, surrounded by leaf-bare trees, and behind them, mountains showing bits and pieces through the fog on the road, short, thick-foliaged pines stand crowded side by side, like spectators standing shoulder to shoulder watching a passing parade or, I think of the hundred of clay soldiers lined in rank after rank buried with their Chinese emperor and on the road, fog drifts between the trees, and in the shifting fog, the soldiers seem to move, gray-coated soldiers coming alive while their rebel cause lies in bloody dust This post is already too long and would be even much longer if I continue with the last half of this story which took us down the Blue Ridge Parkway and several Southern states as we drove home.  And, in the end, well done
there is pleasure in travel but comfort in routine and the everyday so I'm back second table from the rear, by the window, back to the river, looking out on the corner of Martin and Soledad, San Antonio, Texas life in the slow lane, looking for a poem in all the old familiar places I've been sentenced to a 30-day term in Facebook jail, so, having nothing else to do, this could turn out to be a long post. My offense this time was calling a dumbass a dumbass. Of course I called the dumbass a dumbass a number of times, determined by the Facebook Bot who rules us all, to be "bullying." My defense - reiteration is necessary when trying to communicate with the stupid, as in this case. But the real dumbass is Facebook with their censorship by computerized keyword. All of my previous incidents of being blocked would have been recognized by any mentally competent human being as satire or parody. Facebook's little program doesn't allow any such humor or plain old human review. And perhaps that's the scariest part of it, censoship by computer, worse than "1984" which at least had human oppressors who could be overthrown, censorship beamed from the sky, untouched human hands, even the oppressors oppressed along with the rest of us. Computer systems enforcing self-fulling prophesies. Which is my second source of peevishness, there being no recourse to such misplaced censorship. The big Facebook in the sky says what it says and no questioning is allowed or acknowledged. Which leads me to this... Pimple-brained, nut-cake, nitwitted, thieving, sourball licking, witch-sucking, loony politic other guys hark! the blue open sky, the trees, the gentle -falling leaves the sparrows hip-hopping branch to branch the church-clothed-clot-herd folk walking bible in hand, childen skip skipping so Sunday School prayers now I sit me down to eat and if I choke before I swallow Heimlich me quick and don't you tarry cause I'd rather walk than be carried on a stretcher on this autumn-bright autumn Sunday morn in the southern provinces of you esse way but politics swallows my brain today, but trying to walk lightly slightly brightly around the subject because I hate political poison poems and I know if I get to talking about all those pimple-brained nut-caked nitwitted thieving sourball-licking witch-sucking lunatic political other guys I'll never stop but hark!! I say to myself it is a beautiful open-sky Sunday autumn day that shouldn't be spoiled by such thinking about writing about reading about downtown downers as politi-chips and unsalted pretzel brains look to the sky instead, to the birds, to the trees and the leaves drop-dropping to the ground of many colors it is Sunday after all let us pray-prey on happy happy day-thoughts and be joyful to the sun and the mountains and rivers and hills and streams - all legal now and tax deductible in London and surround environs from Sherwood flats to Sherwood meadows to Sherwood forest where the King's deer now roam safe & unhooded hark! hark! hark! goddamn it I said hark!  I wanted to write something outrageous today but it's still too close to the election and my outrage gauge is hung on empty so I thought I'd write something serious instead, a serious consideration of the nation's and the world's condition, but that only ignites panic attacks and howling hysterical laughter then I was thinking I'd write about sex, but I'm getting kind of old and my memory isn't as good as it used to be, not so stiffly resistant to the lassitude of time so maybe I could write about love, no one's ever too old for love they say, but that's the problem, poets young and old have been writing about love for ten thousand years, longer than that if you believe the drawings on the walls in the caves of Poontanghia, so how could I possibly compete, what new is there to be said about love, except that I caught it and, unlike a three-day cold, it has stayed with me, fevers morning and nights for 47 years, resistant through the liquid flow of time to all natural or super-natual events that might deny and discourage it or I could write about my lover's legs and the amazing way they join at the hip, but I don't want to get too graphic this morning because that would be outrageous in this august company and I'm completely out of outrage since the last election Selling my jams and jellies   Naked rolling, parts rubbing a slow Sunday afternoon and we were trying to decide what to do and I suggested we get naked and roll around on the grass in the backyard, rubbing body parts togedther fiercely but there's a chill in the air, probably too much chill to be rolling around outside naked no matter how fiercely we rubbed ourselves together so I was thinking, well, we could go down to the art museum and take a look at the impressionist exhibitin, settle down naked in front of the Monet and give him a real impression, rolling around on the carpet rubbing body parts together impressionistically - that might make the old guy forget all about water lilies... but they have these guards down there that follow us around from room to room and I don't know why, except maybe they can read minds and don't abide with people rubbing naked parts together in front of their Monet - maybe if we moved over in front of the Duchamp, he did a lot of his own naked rubbing-around, as I understand it, and what's that nude going to do after decending the staircase but some parts-rubbing cause why else go downstairs naked as a jaybird if there weren't some parts-rubbing intentions... but the guards are guardedly attentive so the museum is out and I was thinking we might take a drive in the hill country - the way the leaves are changing in our backyard, there must be piles of red and orange and yellow and gold lying on the ground under some of those big hill country oak trees, ripe for some good old rustic naked parts-rubbng and rolling around, but it is even colder in the hills than it is here so there's the chill factor to consider, plus all those rattlesnakes who love to hide in leaf piles on these chilly days, or maybe up in the oak trees to sleep through the winter - and I think they might now welcome people waking them up, rolling around naked in the leaves, rubbing parts together with sylvan abandon, despite the fact it was a snake in a tree that started all this naked rolling about and parts-rubbing in the first place... or we might just do what we always do on lazy Sunday afternoons, could just take a Sunday afternoon nap you, in the easy chair and me on the couch just like we always do Santa Fe Afternoon  Here are two poems by my poet friend Gary Blankenship, taken from his book The Poetic States, and a drop of sunshine. His book is a collection of short poems inspired by each of the fifty states and Washington D.C. The two poems I selected to use here are, first, Texas, my home state, and second, New Mexico, which, since my first visit in 1963, has held in my mind as the place I ought to be. Texas Larger than a Breadbox You are too huge to be captured in verse written by a minor poet who knows it takes two days to cross you no matter where the start. And you raised two modern presidents - one mostly good, the other a bit less, though they both seemed all to fond of guerilla wars that couldn't be won. Nothing more needs to be mentioned in a short poem, but Dick's Riverwalk, the perfect place for tequila shots and buckets of boiled crawdads as we forget which war explodes now and the humidity blowing in from the Gulf. New Mexico Trinity's Hour A new sun bloomed out of the desert defying Sol to roast white powder glazed like broken pottery in a kiln The light separated from the dark to illuminate playas taauarned to stream, clouds the sudden color of hell, gypsum dunes and salt flats It shone on chaparral forest, creatures that crawled, burrowed and fell from the sky, seeds and fish awaiting spring, beasts that hunted beasts and those that hid from the hunters It lit a sheepherder in his hogan, Alamogordo, Carlsbad, old Santa Fe, lovers eloping from Las Cruces, jingle dancer waking in her pueblo. truth and it's consequences, the blood of a Spanish Crist Its flash found a vendor on Honshu, pineapple farmer on Oahu, ballet dancer in Stalingrad, soldier dying in a Pacific jungle, rabbinical student at the Wailing Wall, man of independence as time shifts to five minures before the last midnight It l A good way to start, is all I'm saying  Rules suck - a libertarian manifesto rules suck, that's my conviction except for those that protect me from bank robbers and serial killers and international assassins and incompetent motor vehicle operators and rogue cops and Islamic terrorists and Communist terrorists and Lutheran terrorists and Mormon terrorists and Zen terrorists And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals terrorists and Pat Boone fan club terriorists and illegal Mexican aliens who want to behead people and smuggle drugs and steal my job picking grapes for 89 cents an hour and cemetery plot salesmen and term life insurance salesmen and poison spinach... wait, I don't eat spinach, poisoned or otherwise, so that rule sucks too, but the rule that protects me from poison peas and corn, and poison pork chops - that's another story and the rule that says my employer has to pay me when I work and that my landlord has to fix my plumbing when it leaks and that I can take my AK-47 to church to protect myself against international assassins and terrorists and devil worshipers and homosexual hippies from Harvard Square and California surfer boys and Lebanese switchboard operators and gangsta' rappers and Chinese tongs and those damn Mexican narco-terrorists and other nasty nabobs of nefarious negativity it's just the wa it is rules suck, that's my conviction mostly  Twit about town 30 degrees bright sun squirrels shivering in the trees and that's the weather report for this morning but I have more important things on my mind - the whole naming thing, my insistence on assigning naming rights to creators so, for example, I drive a RAV 4, so named by the Toyota automobile company, so named, I'm guessing, by the creator of the company, Charlie Toyota this principle is the source of my right to name these little thing I write "Poems" and I don't care what anyone else thinks or wants to call them, just like Charlie Toyota doesn't care many think he should have named his company Oldsmobile or Tinkerpot or Btristlebull; or Upyourass or anything else I drive a Toyota because Charlie says so and I write poems beause I say so and it raises the question of how a lion came to be called a lion and a snail a snail and a jackrabbit a jackrabbit and me a man and you a woman if you are one and if you're not, I'm not saying anythng about the depths of your masculinity, just saying that, for example, if you're a woman how did you come to be called that... assuming I'm correct that the creator gets to name his creations, then God the creator must have named me man and you woman, if you... ectetera etcetera but wait! Genesis says God delegated naming rights to Adam, who, presumably, named himself, and, face it, Adam doesn't seem to have been the smartest dude in the garden, even though, disregarding Eve's sometimes bossy tendencies. he's the only dude in the garden... he's basically dumb as the thing he sits on and later called "rock" which is probably a good thing, since if Adam had any brains he might have also have had a sense of humor, a frequent affliction of those witih brains, and the whole naming thing could have turned into a joke, like the Abbot and Costello who's on first bit and, who knows, I might now be known as the Twit of the Hour or the Twit about Town, or in some cases Da Twit, and who knows, my gosh, what you might be today if Adam had a sense of humor Shadrach In The Fiery Pit 
 Zulabulaland 9 a.m. and I heading for my new coffee house, den of ocassional creations of a poetic nature, one of those Presbotarianist places where you get a blessing with each cup of coffee and an invitation to donate to their mission in Zulabuland, with nice art on the walls and old furnitue and chairs upon which a person of my substantial substance can find adventure in intermittent creaks and groans and I was driving to this place of ocassional poetic creation when two yuppie-puppie vans raced right through a red light in front of me and if I hadn't slowed down two blocks earlier to get a better look at a house I'm going to buy after I win the lottery tonight, they would have creamed me as we used to say, havng nothing to do with cows or milking machines, or haystacks, or sylvan pastures of green, just plain run right over me, leaving me in a bloody twist of metal and flesh formerly known as me, pretty bad for the flesh formerly known as me but not so bad for the wife of the flesh formerly known as me, said flesh worth more in such mangled and dead condition than unmangled and alive, making it possible for her to move into that house I was looking at without counting on lottery winnings... such are the economics of life and death ````` another sign of the craziness all about, these yuppie-puppie moms in their yuppie-puppie vans driving like Bonnie and Clyde running from the poooooolice after a bank job - I'm telling you there is no safe place for us sane people when yuppie-puppie moms are driving their yuppie-puppie vans through yiuppie-puppie neighborhoods, like Steve McQueen chasing bad guys through the hills of San Franisco... too damn many people seeing too many movies they're not psychologically prepared for is what I think is going on  This piece is by Stephen Dunn from his book, Different Hours. Dunn is the author of ten previous collections of poetry, in addition to this book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. The Reverse Side The reverse side also has a reverse side. - A Japanese proverb It's why when we speak a truth some of us instantly feel foolish as if a deck inside us has been shuffled and there it is - the opposite of what we said. And perhaps why we as we fall in love we're already falling out of it. It's why the terrified and the simple latch onto one story, just one version of the great mystery. Image & afterimage, oh even the open-minded yearn for a fiction to rein tings in - the snapshot, the lie of a frame. How do we not go crazy, we who have found outselves compelled to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word not yet written. new board Double Trouble   As I mentioned before, I quit writing poetry several months ago. Most of the poems I've posted here and elsewhere for the past several weeks, came from this book, Goes Around Comes Around, my third book, second eBook. I've provided my own covers for all of my eBooks except this one. In this case, the cover is from a photo by Thomas Costales, an amatuer photographer I met at a book store. Thomas, suffering from insomnia, has created a wonderful collection of night photos such as this one. He also created a very good collection of portraits. I used both his night picures and his portraits in the old Here and Now. I haven't had any contact with Thomas in years. I hope he's still taking his pictures. As I've been reading the poems from Goes Around Comes Around that I haven't read in years, I'm impressed by my own work. The poems are loose and unpretentious and, often, humerous. It seems to me my work in later books tightened up and lost the free flow that I maintained in this book, as if I became to regard my self too seriously, losing the spontainity that made the poems here so pleasing to me. My recent problem, and the reason I no longer write poetry, is I've lost the words and the free spirit. As an old man, 77 going on 78, I'm facing the problem of losing the right word. Most of my readers are writers as well, and I'm sure they know what I'm talking about. There are the "right words" in a poem, usually a familiar word that just won't come to mind, requiring substitution of that word with a second or third choice that flattens the poem and drains the fun of writing it. So that's the reason you're seeing only old poems from me, old poems or new poems that end up as prose. For example, a friend of mine died died last year, a friend of 60 years who I met in 1965 in Air Force basic training. We completed basic traing then went together to almost a year of Russian language traing at Indiana University. After that, another three months of of equipment training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Anglo, Texas. After completing this year of training, we were both assigned to the same post in Gemany, traveling together throughout Germany for a year. After that we were assigned different post, he in Turkey and me to the Pakistanni frontier. Following military service, we continued to see each other for all the years, every year or two, meeting for a drink or coffee or a meal, despite living over 1,000 miles apart. As the years pass our own lives each went the normal way of lives, leaving us always something to talk about. Now, following his death, I remember the years of memories that we alone shared but that are now mine alone. And thus, this void is left, there being no one left who remembers it all as I do, no one left to talk about as we did. This is a poem I would liked to have written. But this prose rememberences is what I have instead. It's a fine day today it's a fine day todaiy, the sun shines on all of us, children of the bright... it's a fine day today, three pages of dead people in the paper- only five younger than me and one of those I think was lying a fine day today, three pages of dead people in the paper, and none of them was me...   Day 24,387 and counting another day, another dollar, a million days, a million dollars... that's what the fella down at the Happy Valley Home told me... and, depending on your capacity for long-term planning, that view can be very encouraging, even cominf from the Happy Valley cohort, who, if you choose, can be seen as not out of touch with reality, living instead in a greater reality closed to the ore prosaic of us - or not as for me, I'm a believer in reality, but only in romantic affairs... when it comes to money, I settle for no less than the wildest fantasies which is why I am sure I'm on the road to riches every day and while I may not get all the days I need to get there all the way, being on to something good is better than being stuck in the weeds like a back-road vagabond with a flat tire and no spare in the trunk... I'm a human being of the American persuasion after all, and, like my kind, want to get everything there is to get and expect, by god, to get it... day 24,387 and counting  Thinking of the state of the world, as well as my country and even my state, I think of this poem. It's an old poem, one that I've probably posted here before, but it's a rarity for me, a "message" poem. But I think it's a good message worth repeating. Habits of mercy I was thinking this morning about what I want to do with the rest of my life, and decide it's the same thing I want to do with the rest of my day - kiss my wife at least once or twice eat some good food write some good poems sleep a nice nap communicate with my better nature & forgive myself for all recent sins, known, as well as those secret, even to me easier for some then for others, those with no true love to kiss no food to eat no bed to sleep in no poetry for their soul - those with no key to unlock the door to self, their true self as unknown to them as a stranger passing dark on the street - and most difficult of all for those who can't find withing themselves forgiveness of themselves... poor miserable, ego-obsessed creatures that we are, sinners almost from our first thoughts, if we cannot forgive ourselves, how will we ever learn to forgive others and if we cannot forgive others, how can we ever live in this world that needs cleansed hearts as much as we need clean air and water habits of mercy are what will save this world; human sins forgiven by human sinners  A minor poet explains it all I'm eating breakfast north-faced today, unusual, because normally I sit at the booth on the other end, the one next to the electric plug where I face south as I eat this morning, that booth was taken by another south-faced keyboard clicking diner, leave me at this end, in the only other booth next to an electric plug where I now eat breakfast facing north I'm not sure what effect this will have on the gastro-dynamics of my egg-over-easy and super-extra-crispy bacon but it does present a subtly different view, which could have far-reaching psychological effects on those like me, normally eat breakfast facing toward the south, facing the oncoming traffic on the interstate as well as those like me, today, who eat breakfast facing north, facing interstate traffic going away, this different orientation the reason, I believe, why south-facing diners are usually highly motivated people with the supreme confidence required to write meaningless, totally trivial, poetry, while north-facing diners often suffer from abandoment issues and are frequent victims of depresssion Lost Jigger of Gin  The Hawaiian shirt plan it's a kind of orange/yellow thing with palm trees and some kind of liquor bottle with sailing ships on the label, it's one of seven Hawaiian shirts I bought a couple of weeks ago - the one I have on today part of my new strategy for facing South Texas Summer - embrace it! no more hiding in my air conditioned house for four months, tasting unprocessed outside air only for the time it takes to get from my air conditioned house to my air conditioned car instead, I will sweat as one's supposed to when it's 100 degrees in 85% humidity I will wear my salt-stained Hawaiian shirts daily; I will work at least one hour each day in my backyard in the cinder-toasting sun as lightly dressed as allowed by law, my fish-white belly and butt will be brown like the pecans that fall from the tree, my feet will become summer rough again, my hands black and bruised from digging in the dark soil and sharp chaliche rocks I will be like the ancient peoples who made their hard lives here among the cactus and hills, and rocky meadows, in the summer heat and north winds of winter I will be seven years old again, when summer was my friend I will be summer again My town, from my neighborhood  My town, round and about downtown i heard a new song on the radio yesterday.
The line is, "I like Austin, but I love San Antone." That's true for me except, while I like Austin in the late 60s early 70s, my son lives there now and I never want to live there again. In fact, I've spent time in all the major cities in Texas and the only one I'd live in is where I live now, San Antonio, a city of a million and a half people, including a massive influx of people from all over the country, that still has managed to maintain it's own unique culture. Notes from slower regions of the universe the first time we made love I carried you to my bed, like a leaf on a high hot tide ```` Sunday afternoon in the apartment on Santa Fe, lying in bed, watching it rain through a damp window screen watching the rain advance in soft sheets across the gray waters of the bay ````` the house on G street open ceiling, rain on the roof pattering, banana plant by the window weaving green pataterns in the wind like sleeping dry in the rain ~~~~~ the first night home from the agency crib at the foot of our bed, we sleep lightly, listen in our sleep for his beathing ~~~~~ we slip into sleep flesh to flesh, spooned, soft skin on soft skin, my rough hands cupping your small breasts ````` I sleep, my leg between yours, your arm across my chest the fire banked, the embers still glow  SAME BULL, DIFFERENT CHUTE I was just finishing up my biscuits and sausage gravy when two Leon Valley police officers walked in, both kind of pear-shaped, as Leon Valley, being a small suburb of the ciy, has not nearly the pay scale or physical job requirements of the city within which it is subsumed they sat at the table to the right of me, all jingly with all the tools of their trade hung up on their utility belt... from a table to the left of me, a tall, granite-faced fella with a sweat-stained cowboy hat and a basso-profondo voice that seemed to come from some deep, dark cavern beneath his boots, said, "Howdy, boys" the officers said howdy back and asked, "What's up?" and the tall man said, in his voice from the center of the earth, "Same bull, different chute" and I was thinking, first, how goddamn cool is that, and then, by god, there must be no more than ten people in the whole damn state of Texas who can say that and not sound stupid, and here I sit, next to one of them I started listening then to the tall man and the two other fellas, wanting to hear more of that great voice saying cool things, but, mostly, he talked about the goddamn newspaper and the stupid reporters and how he called them and threatened to cancel his subscription if they didn't quit all their commie reporting, and talk such as that seems he only had one good line how disappointing! but then, later, I stopped at the supermarket on my way to our Sunday morning newspaper reading marathon and I notice a fat-assed man and a fat-assed woman walking in front of me, noticing the tender way the man put his hand on the woman's butt, stroking it and patting it as they walked and I was thinking, damn, ain't it great when people get what they want in life, and appreciate it  This poem is by Wanda Coleman, taken from her book, Heavy Daughter Blues. The book was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1991. Born and raised in the Watts section of Los Angles, Coleman, even as a welfare mother, continued her struggle to be a writer. She broke into the profession through writing screenplays, eventually earning an Emmy for a teleplay. Author of four books of poetry, Coleman works as a medical secretary/transcriptionist while continuing to write and publish. I.S. In the Purple Felt Hat (3) street of wine house of thrill walnut corridors & double dead-bolted doors/a dingy hoover avenue hideout eyes/having had me have to have me come across me at a local ink spot "I want it again" i can barely balance the tray of drinks under his scorchinig scrutiny danger in ebony skin and ebony moustache the purple felt fedora and daring ebony leather /criminal of the spirit stalks the cconer pocket (cunt musk) "I never expected to see you again" i collect the dollar tip, tuck it into my bra he hangs until closing. we leave together i will quit this waitress tomorrow - leave no trail tonight I'm out to get -even/repay a debt in flesh (a thigh for a thigh - a truth for a truth) "how man other women have you raped" "a few - but you are something special" a part-time pimp he withholds copulaton - use it the way corporate execs use perks/seduction into social slavery - he goes against his nature enough to change his modus operandi i'm fifty below zero having got my got he's mine - mine always. sobs my name begs. pleads Flight of the California Condor (3) over ham & eggs they jaw about how it was before the Dodgers hit town in '58 the old downtown hang-outs and the 10 cent mug of java the old white men of L.A. tip their hat say, "so long" and move further west I  Admiring the Dark dark is staying dark longer every night as July heads for the back door and August impatientely taps its fiery little feet out front... waiting I enjoy the dark morning, eating breakfast by the big window looking out to the dark of night waning watching the new day gathering in the east, just a hint, a bare little shadow of light remembered, almost lost in the ambient glow of clouds softly lit from below by the city's night illuminations, clouds always glowing from below in a city of a million of a half people fearful of the dark - porch lights lit all night, motion lights flashing bright with every rustly of leaves by the wind, every twitter of a bird, street lights, security lights, night lights that let us sleep in semi-darkness, certain that whatever evil lurks outside the luminance we wrap around our sleeping body will be as frightened by the light as we are by the dark and will stay away it is the way we have lived with the dark since fire-tenders maintained the flames that kept us safe at night from the earliest history of our kind... menwhile, sitting in my well-lit cafe, typing in the glow of computer electrons, I admire the beauty of the night, while looking past the dark to each pool of light around, calculating the distance between pools, clocking how quickly I could race the dark from one bright pool to the next if I had to eith  A little shout-out to the paranoids among us. SMALL DREAMS PASS BY UNNOTICED don't dream too large tonight they know who the dreamers are and they are watching TRUE ROMANCE   I'm thinking soft this morning I'm thinking soft this morning soft autumn breeze on sun-warmed skin, the soft middle of fresh-baked bread, the soft fur behind a kitten's ear and under its chin, the fresh smell of soft sheets on a wedding bed, the soft squeeze of a woman, the velvet slide down her back to the rounded slope of her rear, the rise of her breasts, breathing in out rising falling on the soft edge of sleep, the moist center of her calling, and the damp cheeks of my son at four, eyes wet from a bully's taunts as I held him close, "you are a good person," I tell him, my voice a soft whisper in his ear, "and a strong, brave boy whose mom and dad love him." ````` I'm thinking soft this morning, remembering... missing the touch of days brighter and softer than today DEN OF INIQUITY   What I'm supposed to be doing this is the time of day when I usually demonstrate my bonafides as a poet by pontificating on cue and the problem today is I can't remember if a cue is a nudge and a wink or the long striker stick used to reposition colored and numbered balls on a green felt table in a brisk game of pocket billards - pocket pool I would have said but that construction is often construed to denote another game entirely - or vice-versey, which complicates things since i'm not sure now if I should start writing or amble over to Fat Annie's for a pick-up game of eight-ball which reminds me of several good pool-playing stories I could write about if I knew that's what I'm suppsed to be doing at this exact moment but since I don't know for sure, I won't write anything, but that's okay since I didn't want to write a poem this morning anyway instead, if Fat Annie's is open this early I might resolve the question by connoting that's what I'm supposed to be doing... ````` meanwhile there is a moon hang pale like a sliver of shaved soap in the dark, night-tide sky that cares nothing about my poem or any lack thereof and Annie's cooler is full of ice-cold Orange Crush and Grapette that would suit me much more than than a hostage poem so that' where I'm gonna be Next I have three short poems by Guillaume Apollinair, taken from his book Alcools, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995. The poems were translated by Donald Revell. It is a bilingual book, with the original French and English translation on facing pages. Apollinair was an infuential poet, playwright and critic in the late 19th-early 20th century. Like his contemporary, Blaise Cendrars (the inspiration for my own book, Places and Spaces, of travel poems), Apollinair was a world traveler and wrote many travel poems. Annie On the coast of Texas Between Mobile and Galveston there is A big garden filled with roses There is also a mansion It is one big rose A woman walks there often Alone in the garden When I cross the lime-tree road We are face to race Because she is a Mennonite Here roses and her clothing have no buttons My jacket is missing two buttons The lady and I are almost one religion The Gypsy The gypsy foretold Our two lives thwarted by the nights We told her goodbye And Hopefulness sprang from holes in the ground Heavy as a circus bear Love danced when we commanded The blubird lost its featehrs Mendicant friars lost their prayers A person knows damn well he's damed But hope of loving along the way Compels us to consider hand in hand The words the gypsy meant to say Autumn In the fog the knock-kneed peasant and his ox Go slowly through the autumn fog That hides the villages and all their ugliness The peasant keeps on walking humming A song about love and deception A song about a ring and a heart of fire Oh autumn the autumn ambushed the summer In the fog I saw two shadows go  Career counseling the Saturday morning crowd at the coffeehouse, though large, is not conducive to poetic exploration so I fall back to yonder years when at sixteen I shot a 45-caliber pistol at a turtle in the Arroyo Colorado about six miles from my house the turtle was a tiny green-shelled reptile floating provocatively on the surface of the water which in those days before herbicide runoff was not a harbinger of death to creatures large and small except fish which would be a harbinger of death to you if you are ever ate one a place where in the old days I learned to swim in the murky green currents and never died even once in those days being a harbinger of death to numerous bottles and cans with my 22-caliber rifle and pistol I had never fired a heavy-duty piece like the 45 which I borrowed from a friend and wanted to which I did, firing a volley of hard hitting slugs which caused a mighty stirring in the water around the turtle while the turtle floated away, unimpressed, in its placid green-back way dreams of turtle soup fading away as I returned the 45 to the friend from whom I had borrowed it and turned back to the hunt for frogs at midnight, their pale little legs delicious when fried and tasting like small chickens, much better than turtle soup anyway content to understand that due to my incompetence there was no likelihood of a future for me in sniper alley, or as a serial killer or fearsome terrorist, my life as a fearsome bureaucrat set instead SWIMMING UPSTREAM IN A DOWNSTREAM WORLD   December night in my neighborhood winter night in the last moment before dusk falls, the sky is clear, light blue, like the "it's a boy" blankets you get at the hospital to warm a new-born son, thin, almost tansparent blue moon bright in the soft sky, not full, flattened a little on one side like a globe, flattened at the south pole so it won't roll off your desk, Antarctica folded in on itself a chill wind blowing from the top of the hill, raising a shower of golden leaves from trees long the creek light winter-home, taste of chimney smoke in the air ten degrees cooler than the numbers on the thermometer read very quiet  CIRCLES a new year approaches just a few dawns away one rotation ending as another begins, circles within circles within circles within larger circles still as our moon circles, bringing dark to light night skies, bringing day and night circling our sun, bringing singing birds of spring, summer's meadow flowers, tangy taste of autumn leaves, chill winds that blow in winter even as our sun and all its brother-sister stars turn on the universal axis of everything we can know, for now, but maybe not for always, as we may someday know of other cirles, turns, rotations, there now but that we cannot see and the All we know will grow again and we, in our knowing, will grow again, even as we shrink ever smaller in the everything there is circles within circles within even larger circles still... "it seems we're just running in circles," and how true and how grand that is Practice Board  It occurs to me, late as usual, that I have not properly credited my wife, Dora Ramirez Itz, for her help in editing and proofing my blogs. So, thank you, Dee.
 EVEN THE DISBELIEVER SEARCHES FOR BELIEF the scientist says there is no God the philosopher says there is no God, but do we not, in our search for all knowledge and final truth create an approximation of God, for what is God but the alpha and omega, the perfect final of all, including truth. you search, the philosopher adds, because you believe that there is an end to all knowing - your belief and your search for the truth that is all truth no different than that of the Hindu holy man sitting cross-legged on a mountain peak contemplating his way to the One at the center of the All, or, the monk in his cell flagellating his bloody back because he thinks pain will clear the pathway to the presence of God, or, the Methodist minister who does good works because he thinks God notices those who do good and seeks desperately that notice, like yours, all of them a search for the God of final things, like the Greeks searched for God through the creation of ideals, gods like men, men like gods, the ideal of creation --- this one says there is no God except the one who exists as the most basic craving of our humanity, the one who urges our rational self to disbelieve so as to protect the truth of our soul, that essence which spirits away to other realms when our rational self expires Big Bend National Park, Chisos Mountains, Chisos Basin The Texas Big Bend, as I recall it in this painting.   I WANT A DONUT I said, I want a donut damnit not a carrot stick or a celery stalk not a bowl of moose munch in rehydrogenated goat's milk no cold little cauliflower bud not even a sugar-free donut don't want it fat free either I want a good ol' suicide-in-the-round glazed Dixie Cream capital D donut with sprinkles you gotta fight back or the older you get the less you get in living now, get me my damn donut Lost Jigger of gin Many readers love him. About the same number hate him. I enjoy reading his dark, bleak, wrong side of life poems because in them, you always know his hero will, like the Dude., abide. What I most admire about him as a creative artist is that he created a persona he maintained consistently in both his poetry and his fiction, breaking his cover, but only a little, near the end when he know his end was coming. Who was Bukowski, really, beneath the persona he created? Maybe his ex-wives knew. Here are two of his poems, the first as philosopical as I've ever read him, and the second back to his familiar turf. Both of these are from his collection Open All Night, published by Harper Collins, in 2003. Like so many of his collections, it was published after his death. THIS IS A FACT in the company of fools we relax upon ordinary embankments, enjoy bad food, cheap drinks, mingle with the men and ladies from hell. in the company of fools we throw days away like paper napkins. in this company our music is loud and our laughter untrue. we have nothing to lose but our selves. join us. we are now almost the entire world. God bless us. THERE'S ONE IN EVERY BAR the pathetic squirrel drinks Johnny Walker Red at Stinky's Bar & Grill, in love with the cocktail waitaares he watches her body her eyes he dreams of her on his sofa crossing her legs and giggling he dreams of her drunk in his bedroom he dreams of victory of conquest he leaves her very large tips he says very little to her. the pathetic squirrel dislikes how crude and obvious the other bar-squirrels are to her and he's delighted when she laughes at them and says things like "back off, Marty!" the pathetic squirrel loves the large bow on the back of her short dresss. he leaves each night intoxicated knowing he will be sick on the job the next day. the pathetic squirrel is in love with the cocktail waitress but ask her about him and she'll confide: "he makes me sick! he's a complete asshole!" an she'll be right. but he still has his dream and that might be enough in itself because he doesn't realize that she'a a complete asshole too. I did not intend to do a third Bukowsky here, but when putting the book back in the shelf, it opened to this piece, Self-appraisal, such a rarity for this poet. But, of course, not as himself, even as he recognizes the end of his life is approaching, but as the persona the created, his alter ego through out all his poems, Chinaski, who will live far beyond his time, in books published long after his death. Chinaski, not him, but in his mind, I think, more than him. CHINASKI parodies himself, romanticizes himself. he's in a small room again, always in a small room, closing the door, closing out the world. in his 70s he's still trying to over- come his brutal childhood and he's never had a real understanding of women. his writing is uneven if powerful and even at its best there is a feeling of redundancy, of nothing new. he has been imitated by hordes of writers who find his simple style appealing. he now has a home, a swimming pool, a spa, a fine car and a wife who feeds him vitamins. he is a recluse and if you apparoach him at the racetrack there is a chance you will be ignored or insulted. his only visitors appear to be movie stars, film directors and interviewers. upon his death perhaps a small place will be made for him in world literature where he will sulk in the shadow of Celine, Hemingway, Jeffers and Henry Miller. God rest his alcoholic agnostic soul and now let us go on to more worthwhile things. Now, A couple of images from the central Texas hills. One, a picture from the road of the legendary longhorn, and the other, from the campus of Texas State University.    (a found poem: NewYork Times, Front Page, Januayr 14, 2009) PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW a man on a motorbike pulled alongside 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 Another Practice Board  Another favorite poet, Polish winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literatrure, Weslawa Szymborska. The piece is from her book View With a Grain of Sand, publishedby Harcourt Brace in 1993. Translation was by Stanislaw Barqanczak and Clare Cavanagh. UNDER ONE SMALL STAR My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. Please don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past lovers for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing my flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths. I apologize to those who wait in railroad stations for being asleep today at five a.m. Pardon me, hounded hope, for lauging from time to time. Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water. And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage, your gaze always fixed on the same point in space, forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed. My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers. Truth, please don't pay me much attentioin. Dignity, please be magnanimours. Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from you train. Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then. My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once. My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man. I know I won't be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that athey might seem light. WHO KNEW I know what this poem means and so do you but it would be so great if we could get together some rainy afternoon in a coffeehouse on a tree-lined boulevardin in a quiet neighborhood and talk and talk until you understood what I wrote and I knew what you read Clown for hire   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 relatively few creatures who strive and dream like you and me I know this like some people know god, such knowledge a product of longing in the lonely night for a companion worthy of our best nature Crackpots of the world unite STRINGBEAN string bean looking fella in a cowboy hat and shit kicker boots sitting across from me drinking from a quart carton of 2% milk reading some kind of techincal looking book with graphs and shit and one hand looking paralyzed fingers tight against his palm like Bob Dole 'cept this fella isn't holding a pen in his clenched fingers like Bob Dole aways did good 'ol guy that Bob Dole might'a been a fine president if he hadn't been Republican and 143 years old - probably wouldn't a'been fucking around with no chubby interns any way what is it with politicians and their dicks anyway like just another one this week scewing around love me love me love me they're all saying all the time waving their dicks around starting wars or screwing women either too young or too married for any man with good sense to mess with I mean put your dicks back in your pants and grow up for christ's sake you're supposed to be running the country fool not running around on your dearly beloved who ought to be whopping you across the head three of four times a day till you get it on straight fool  A funny story before the poem. During the last years of my professional career, I had offices in about 15 cities in South Texas, including Del Rio. I visited each office at least once a quarter so that local staff could know me and know I was interested in what they were doing. eating breakfast every morning at a cafe next to my hotel, I noticed I was getting extaordinary service with every meal. Kenny Rogers was filming a movie near the city at the time of one of my quartely visits. At the time, my hair and beard were considerably longer and grayer. I learned later that one of the staffr at the cafe had become certain and had convinced the rest of the staff that I was Kenny Rogers. not the only time I was mistaken for rogers, none of the other times led to such excellent breakfasts. Now the poem. ON THE RIVER two eggs, one pancake, and four sausage links - five dollars, ninety-eight cents 4:30 in the very early morning early breakfast in Del Rio, Texas, County Seat, Val Verde County, on the river, 150 miles west of San Antonio 400 southeast of E Paso, with a population of about 45,000, largest collection of Texas bodies and souls between the two, not counting Cuidad Acuna on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, where the lights in Boy's Town make cigarettes glow a sparkly, shimmering gold and a slender, young whore dances naked in a dim-lit courtyard among scattered tables with 16-year-old boys, college carousers, oil-tattooed roughnecks, leather-faced cowboys and fat businessmen belching beer and three-dollar cigar smoke, watching ever slow, sweat-oiled move, every one of them, man and boy, looking for something at a place where they're sure to never find it look, but don't touch for touching costs more than the price of a bottle of Mexican beer... but not a lot more Finishing with another practicve board.   PATH TO ENLIGHTMENT I intend to put my brain on a leash this morning because I'm thinking I want to be taken seriously as a poet and adult human being of the masculine persuasion and nobody takes nobody serious who's always running off at the brain like I'm prone to do, chasing every little bushy-tailed squirrel that happens to cross my path to enlightment meaning making it hard to get to the end of that path, difficult to find the enlightment that one naturally assumes of a human being of the masculine persuasion, and a poet to boot... never even close chasing squirrels instead... but, second-guessinig myself, something us chasing-every-squirrel types rarely do, and never without good cause, I'm reconsidering my decision to adopt the leash-constrained mode, thinking to abandon the chase for the mantle of seriosity expected of poets and adult human beings of the masculine persuasion because there are advantages to the chase-every-squirrel state of mind, like flushing out a bird bath, getting rid of all the leaves and algae and bird poop that collects in the presence of birds and shallow water, giving it a good flush, a good scraping out, leaving behind clear water, water free of entrenched distraction, water renown for its clear thinking, water that knows its own mind - and I'm thinking that is a clear advantage for the chasing-every-squirrel state of mind because how is one to find enlightment when the path is strewn with leaves and algae and philosophical bird poop? just won't work... if you want to find enlightment, you have to clear the path, flush the pump like you flush a bird bath and that's what a chasing-every-squirrel state of mind, freed from the leash and on the chase, is good for, stirring up such a frenzy, a regular misdirection that blows all the extraneous crap out of the way, leaving a clear path, enlightment just over the next rise... seriously... Another practice board A REAL LOSS T0 POETRY it was a golden night, no moon, stars buried behind thick, low clouds reflecting back to the ground and streets and houses, the golden light of the city, never sleeping golden light filtering through the trees like spun gold gold, orange shadows in the golden night, and down at the creek water flowed in golden bubbles of light while the crickets cricked and the frogs farted and, oh crap, haven't I done this before and who cares, anyway poetry is serious business and ought to be about serious things like, how about that helium? if I ate a ham and helium sandwich, would I rise to the ceiling like those balloons they give to kids at the supermarket who let go of the balloon and the balloon rises to the ceiling which is lined with balloons given to kids who let the balloons go,, red, blue, green, what a bunch of colors lining the supermarket ceiling and what if I ate two ham and helium sandwiches, or maybe even three, would I float away into the sky if outside where there is no supermarked ceiling to keep me safe, would this be a new mode of transportation, great airplanes guided through the sky by teams of pilots gorging on ham and helium sandwiches and what about the porpoise, Einstein of the sea, Aristotle with fins, Plato with a snout and a jolly smile and what do you call more than one porpoise - is it porpiees, maybe, and what about a gathering of porpiees, not a school, because that's fish and porpiees are not fish, and not a herd because that's cows and horses and sheep, and porpiees are none of those and not a swarm, cause that's bees, and not a flock cause that's geese and chickens and not a pod cause that's whales (which I think is a silly name for somethng as vastly gargantuan as a congregation of whales - it would be much better if we called such a gathering a "tundra" or something else equally as vastly gargantuan, but that's just me) and at least whales are mammals like porpiees and not fish, even though, like whales, porpiees like the water and frolic all about in it, at least the porpiees I saw at Seaworld like to frolic all about in the water, so maybe a group of porpiees who travel together might be called a "frolic". but that's just a suggestion... and anyway, I could go on and on because there's lots and lots of important things poetry should deal with instead of getting stuck in frou-frou poems about golden nights and cloudy skies and absent stars and vanished moons and crickets and frogs... and what about those frogs and the way they mate like a honkytonk in Amarillo, has anyone ever written a poem about that - well, in fact, I did, but no one else and that's a real loss to poetry... I'm telling you, a real loss Showing off several of my boards and my new haircut (even though, actually and on purpose, it looks exactly like my old haircut)   I wrote this at the request of a very good friend who had just experienced a terrible and unexpected loss. FOR KATIE'S NANA Remembering Katherine 4/3/1998 - 6/22/2010 a child like a star is born and brightly burns through the darkest nights, then, flickers in the universal winds and fades, its alloted time compete and all the constellations that burned with it dim in a fellowship of lose... until grief fades, consumed by memories forever closely kept... for what more can we ask of a child than to be a star  LIFE IS life is like a duck hunt every time you really begin to fly some asshole in the weeds shoots your fuzzy butt right out of the sky art by Vincent Martinez These poems are fom One Hundred Poems From the Chinese, collected by Kenneth Rextoth. The book was published by New Directions in 1971. No translator is credited for any of the poems. The first two poems are by Tu Fu, one of the greatest of the Chinese poets. Loneliness A hawk hovers in air. Two white gulls float on the stream. Soaring with the winds, it is easy To drop and seize Birds who foolishly drift with the current. Where the dew sparkles in the grass, The spider's web waits for its prey. The processes of nature resemble the business of men. I stand alone with ten thousand sorrows. New Moon The bright, thin, new moon appears, Tipped askew in the heavens. It no sooner shines over The ruined fortress than the Evening clouds overwhelm it. The Milky Way shines unchanging Over the freezng mountains Of the border. White frost covers The garden. The chrysanatahemums Clot and freeze in the night  Written a couple of years back, before routine became my preferred way to spend my day. the source of my problem routine, that's my problem, too much of it... I haven't seen an Albanian gypsy in years, or heard the plaintive cry of a river flattapotumus or smelled the acrid stench of burning filagabbit feathers... looking around me in this restaurant I see not a single Grenadian pirate or Singhalese soul-snatacher, just plain old moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and little kids with chocolate milk mustaches, and the old guy in the corner, typing on his computer, dripping grits in his beard, muttering to himself about things conspicuously unhinged... just another Sunday morning... how is one to find a poem in a life so unadventurously confined  A personal reckoning of the day We went to my brother’s funeral today. In Victoria, in the Golden Crescent, center of the state’s Rice Belt, 178 miles either way. A short jaunt for Texas travel, but a difficult one going, late, racing time on small country roads. We arrived near the end of the service, plenty of time for the essentials of funeral, time to comfort the living and learn the lessons offered by the dead. In my case, as we filed past the coffin to see my little brother, for the last time, in his box, to learn the tricks of time and its tides, the tricks that put him, the younger, in the box where I should be. He, who should have been last, leaving before me, making me the last. And what of the last? What is to be made of my last? I thought of the two of us and our lives as brothers. The four-year difference in ages meant that when we were young, it was rare for the two of us, outside home, to be at the same place at the same time. Meaning we grew up on different life tracks. His life led to a life of personal comfort. Comfort that, on my life track, I have never found. I still, in the time left, I seek it, never expecting to find it. Seems I have always been a step behind satisfaction and comfort with where I am and what I’ve done. In my old age, I am a man of strict routine, routine that cushions me against the desperation and depression I expect to find around every corner. And my routine has been broken now for two weeks, leaving me exhausted and on the edge of a quiet despair. My life, interrupted, focused almost exclusive around the inadequacy themes of my poetry, which I no longer write, and my art which I doubt will ever be as appreciated as the pleasure I take in it Too big, too unrestrained to ever fit on anyone wall, needing a large, pale wall in need of the color I can add to it, a mansion, perhaps Bill Gates has such a place, or something institutional, a university or a bank or an office building needing to bring life to their walls. But I don’t know Bill Gates or any institution interested in the work of a past-due amateur. But I paint them anyway because of the pleasure each new piece brings me. And the poetry – that is over, I think. Perhaps this prose is as close as I come. Never again for me, I’m afraid, the thrill of a mind running free and frantic to find new joy in old words and old ideas to jolt back to life. And so this is it, not the poem I hoped to find in the day, but a report and a reflection of myself; gone to morn and comfort, finding also, as is almost always the case, variations on the stories of oneself. Addendum: The poem is self-explanatory as to the purpose of writing, my effort to find some truth in myself as final survivor of a family of five. I hoped to be honest, but in one aspect, I was not, maybe, honest but incomplete. I mention the despair and depression that always seems right around the corner,but I was not as specific as I could have been. I didn't name it. It is a thing perhaps stronger for men of my age and history, growing up in an age of male domination, when it was thought and we males were expected to be in charge. Finding in our late years the shadows of a time coming when we will be in charge of nothing, not even our own bodies and minds. The names of people know for many years, forgotten, the words, simple and well-known, that disappear (and for a writer, what worse than the lack of words), the fumbling fingers trying to turn the page of the daily newspaper, the car key that are gone from the counter (gone from where I know I last put them), the uncertain gait on a flat sidewalk, the dread of stairs, the ocassional explosive rage that comes and goes over trivial inconveniences. These simple things, the first signs, we fear, of a time that might be coming. Assuming another five, maybe ever ten, years of life. For how many of those years will I be present and accounted for. It is the word men of my age don't like to think about. Dementia, the disappearing self.  the very proper lady in the black Sunday dress the very proper lady in the black Sunday dress and jeweled necklace and dangly earrings blows her nose into a tiny lace hindkerchief and her eyes bulge like a bug's or maybe like a big spotted frog caught wide awake on her lily pad at midnight thinking silverfish thoughts, and her ears, I swear, are flapping and I'm tiinking, "holy shit" her head's gonna explode like the bad guy's head at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie and I don't know if I should watch or shield my eyes from the sight, so I compromise and peek through my fingers and watch as the pressure slowly eases and her head shrinks back to regular size and her ears lie supine at rest against her head and her eyes slink back into mean little slits like when she came, only I didn't notice then like I do now... that is one evil woman, in her proper black dress and jewelry and hanging earrings and, by gosh, I'm glad she didn't blow up or I'd probably have evil debris gunk dripping all over me... a pretty scary experience for this early in the morning, but it is one of the reasons I like to have breakfast here - you meet the most interesting people, and other creatures one can't be entirely sure of Art by Vincent Martinez This is another piece from One Hundred Poems from the Chiniese, this one by Ou Yang Hsiu. Old Age In the Sprintime I am always Sorry, the nights are so short. My lamp is burning out, the flame Is low. Flying insects circle About it. I am sick. My eyes Are dry and dull. If I sit Too long in one position, All my bones ache. Chance thoughts from I don't know where crowd upon me. When I get to the end of a Train of thought, I have forgotten The beginning. For one thing I retain I forget ten. When I was young I liked to read. Now I am too old to make The effort. Then, too, if I come Across something interesting I have no one to talk to About it. Sad and alone, I sigh with self pity. Another practice board   Over the course of a 30-year professional career I attended, often convened, many such meetings as this one. business breakfast there is a large crowd, ten diners, on several tables pushed together a business breakfast meeting it seems, for a congregation of insurance agents (my guess, they look like insurance people) mostly men in dress shirts and ties and a couple of women frantically over-compensating for lack of male genitalia... at the head of the table, a large red-faced man who appears to be the boss, pontificating, with the assurance of a person genetically in the dark, telling sleep-deprived staff all about the Shinola he don't know shit from, and beside him, a mid-thirties blond, well-put-together, who has a 17-year-old daughter at home who's driving her nuts with skimpy dresses and good-for-nothing boyfriends, all this exposed to the world before the meeting began, and now that it has, reveals herself to be the boss's carry-on brain, taking over his Shinola punditry to bring the meeting to order, providing such business as there was scheduled to be at this early morning business meeting apparently other eight at the table know who knows what needs to be known because their droopy-eyed attention to the boss's Shinola is immediately replaced by edge-of-their-chair attention when she starts talking, chewing reduced from a roat to petite and silent chomp-chomps as eggs and bacon slide quietly and respectfully down alerllt and thoughtful gullets I have been to, often convenec such meetings, sat at the head of many such tables spouting my own Shinola, killing time until my right-hand brain finishes her poached egg and fat-free milk and sets herself to take care of business, while I relax, my job done for the day This is an old board, but I don't remember ever posting it here. Cortez Discovers Mexico  Poor little Pumpkin little Pumpkin, Texas, hiding out among the trees KoKo's Gas-n-Grub Faith Evergreen Baptist Church poor little Pumpkin population 43  like soft hands like soft hands stroking sweet-breath summer breezes midnight lover Transitions Shadrach in the Fiery Pit This poem is by Cynthia Zarin, from her first book, The Swordfish Tooth, published by Knopf in 1989. Snail In the breeze of the propped-open green door I lay my head against your leg and tasted salt. And in the last light I felt myself close kin to the snail you found. Amber, primordial, lossed from the lettuce tongues it crawled across your palm, its searching head a sure iambic bob, then quivering - shining breast wheel turned pull-toy, dragooned by a lucid, creeping milky finger. All week, my mind interior, I watched the snail lit by its whorl traveling along your sun-tanned hand; cartographer of the myserious male life, its loping, upward arching line. Autumn light  MOONWALK walking under a full November moon, a bright, shadow-casting moon, the stone steps down to the creek shining liquid white as I step from stone to stone carefully, barefoot, conscious of the caution to diabetics, "watch you feet, always guard your feet " but the moon is too full, the night too bright to watch anywhere but up, neck-stretching , to the bright disc, gleaming in the sky like a silver dime in the sky, passing as I walk beneath the bottom side of tree branches gasping black against the glare of the moon bright moon eclipsing the stars as I open the creaking gate to walk beside the creek... it's 4 a.m. - the frogs and birds still sleeping, the water stumbles over limestone rocks, tremnbles as it flows through the grassy creek... I stand, showered in moon-shine, turn, climb back up the hill on the gleaming white stones, back to bed, having drunk my fill of November night and moonglow  Best friend's best friend adrift in cold storage I'm looking for a poem this morning but can't find it because of all the other crap cluttering my head that I don't want to write about it's like trying to listen to a Chopin etude in a thin-walled apartment while your neighbor is pushing Metallica to the max but perhaps it's possible to push tiny balloons between the prickly bushes without getting pricked ````` cold morning, a fur-bundle of huddled cats at my doorstep, winter-fat cats demand food every time they see me ````` dark all day, winter vistas gray and dreary ````` trees skeletal against roiling sky - bony limbs over-reaching ````` birds outside my window - their winter song, "turn up the heat"{ "turn up the heat" ````` ice on the birdbath - no skating allowed ````` search the drawer for winter socks... big toe arctic explorer poking out ````` dog scratches at the back door, wants out, but not for long ````` man walking dog, bundled-wrapped with hat and gloves dog lover in winter- best friend's best friend ````` with snow, beauty in the mornng - without, just cold and bare ````` chill winds blow shivers and sneezes - better still than August or July  THE BEGINNING OF THE END OR THE END OF THE BEGINNING OR JUST ANOTHER DAMN DAY IN THE LIFE OF BEGINNINGS-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 who are 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 okey dokey pass the smokeys while the world burns with the riders of the apocalypse going eehaw 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 chickety cluck and eeehaw we ride, they say our grim teeth gnashing and you run your white ass flashing in the light of the dying moon you had your chances, they say, now it's our time to ride, gnashing eeehawing in the light of the dying moon, we are the riders of you inconsequential doom you betcha and I've gone old and my damn coffee's gone cold and my left foot's gone sleepy, twitching like jello in a junk-jar from jiom-jam jarheads, and I 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, junk this jerky poem and write a new one about blue birds and puffy-fluffy clouds and shit like that  From 2017/18 , in the midst of the Trumpian attack on everything decent and wise. I was thinking the photo above of the greedy winged beach rats was appropriate illustration. JUST BECAUSE THIS POEM IS ABOUT IDIOTS DOESN'T NECESSARILY MEAN IT'S A POLITICAL POEM THOUGH I ADMIT IT DOES MAKE IT MORE LIKELY trying to write a poem this morning, maybe something about how the wind is blowing, shaking up the trees, snapping the flag over at USAA (I bet if I was outside I could hear it pop in the wind) and the possibility of thunderstorms, welcome rain, and if it does come, a good strong rain, I'll be out in my backyard, naked, stomping and sliding in the mud when the first raindrop falls, flapping and rolling in the grass like a bird chasing worms, and the biscuit and gravy I had for breakfast was especially good this morning... but politics continue to invade, steady against the wind, not the national stuff about which I have given up in despair, resigned to waiting for the next election, retaining some hope that all those insane fucks from the last election will be sent packing back to whatever hole they crawled out of... no, not talking about those national intellectual and moral abominations, but the more local type, the Texas Legislature winding up its bi-annual 180 day session, dominated by Republicans, the same kind of slime-sucking snakes brought to us nationally by the last election, ending one of the most dishonorable sessions since secession like yesterday, heading into the las frantic days of the session, three pieces of last minute skullduggery - the "let's go-shoot-our-professors" guns in classroom bill, and the "too-damn-many-poor-democrats" voter ID bill, and the "let's-send-all-them-damn-meskins-back-to-Arizona" sanctuary cities bill and the months to the next elections seem to stretch further and further away every day, especially when I hear a couple of Democrats at the table next to me yesterday about how we shot bin Laden when we should have given him a party hat and a party horn and brougt him back here for questioning, like in "Law and Order," but only after having his rights read to him in seven languages, including Sign and I'm thinking, holy shit! are these the idiots who I have to look to to get rid of the other idiots and, see, that's why I'm tired of thinking about politics cause it seems all you ever have is a choice of which idiots you're going to let give you heartburn next... but then it might rain and I might go sloshing in it and I've heard some folks are trying to talk Tommy Lee Jones into running for Senate in Texas and that'd be almost as much fun  THE BEAUTY OF ORIGINAL SIN "Abyss of Eros, beauty of original sin." wrote the Korean poet think how exciting it must have been, how delectable, delightful, outright beautiful that first sin, the original sin, the concept , “sin” unknown until the thing, the sin, was done… doesn’t make any difference what it was… maybe it was the eating of forbidden fruit like the book says or maybe it was sex, or less complicated than that, maybe it was when he first noticed the curve of her breast, the round perfection of her ass, and liked it, or maybe it was her sin, seeing the arrogance of his massive cock, erect, so different, she thought, from the little nubbin that hung so humbly between his legs before, and she imagined so many uses for it… or maybe it was something more abstract, maybe just a random thought, the one or the other or the both thinking something that hadn’t been inserted for them to think, something that they thought up all on their own, maybe it was just that creativity, impinging on the realm of he who created all and reserved creation as a thing only for him… or maybe it wasn’t that complicated… it could have been something as simple and small as putting a slug in a parking meter - but no difference, a thing large or small, it was wonderful, it was new, it was the first and it was original, the first original thing for them, and, thus, by the rules it was, in its originality, a sin, the original sin, and it was beautiful… they may have wondered later if that sin was worth its consequence, but to no avail, for in their wonder they sinned again, there was no turning back.. My backyard several year back. It was a really good year, no freeze, no drought, and things just grew and grew. FAST TIMES AT THE FLATONIA FOLLIES   BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN? sky hanging low and heavy this morning, clouds dark and deep - something's up ````` that's the way this poem begins what's next? what are these heavy low dark and deep clouds predicting this morning? ~~~~~ are the heavy low etc. clouds a representation of smoke, the fires of the apocalypse burning again today, the first sparks here in the Texas hill country of the conflagration that will sweep the world in the final throes of judgement day, brimstones next on the agenda I know some hardshell ecclesiasticals who would buy into that in a minute, unquestioning believers in every chapter, verse, word, period, comma and colon of the Word which says and they agree, we're due our heavenly smiteance andy day now and all these low heavy etc. clouds prove the time is here hallelujah, praise be to He who smites ~~~~~ on the other hand all these etc. clouds could be sign of the first wave of alien invasion, like in that movie, huge alien spaceships pushing their broad gray noses out of the clouds any minute now aliens with teeth and tentacles and tiny feet with twisted talons come to eat our brains, rape our women, and abduct our children for slave labor in the potato mines of the barren planet Bitselboogerish - aliens come to cut down our trees, build massive pulp factories to turn our trees into cardboard for cheap tinnis shoes to sell in China before they eat their brains, rape their children, abduct their women for slave labor in pasta mines on the other side of Bitselboogerish where buffalo no long roam and skies are cloudy all day, where seldom is heard a discouraging word since everyone is under ground digging for potatoes and pasta and you can't hear them moaning discouragingly topside... I have a brother-in-law who would buy into that, a watcher-for-aliens in the night, discouraged because he's never seen one except in the movies where they always get it wrong, waiting every night for his inevitable abduction for weird alien science sexual experiments on the average alien-believing male when awarded conjugal visits with their Lady Gaga simulation, plastikiey, but pliable and open to new ideas as to more unusual practices of conjugality, they just want to see how it all works and he's willing to show them if they're willing to take him back with them to their fantastical home planet of noodle and noze ~~~~~ or it could just be that the clouds, all low and heavy and dark and deep are just the precursor to rain... but that's just one crazy idea too many... if I was you, I'd go with the apocalyps or aliens if you're wanting to bet with the odds This poem is by Robert Bonazzi and is taken from his book, Maestro of Solitude, published by Wings Press in 2007. The poem startled me as I read it because it seemed it could be me, about me. from Unframed Portraits III Forgive if I seem to be talking to myself - I do not write for an ideal reader or contemplate a classic muse Today a fellow poet declared that I'm not really a poet Characterizing my efforts as fragments more or less in the manner of Pascal I burst into several meanings of laughter secretly honored and humbled Forgive if I seem to be trapped in a monologue - I belong to a species most endangered: I do no know my name.  Waiting for promised lightning pumping gas pumping iron pumping my fist upon receiving a $5 coupon at Bar-B-Que is us pumping Mary Sue in the back seat of a '48 Hudson - oh, how soft those seats and Mary Sue (you don't have to read the above, it's what I call "priming the pump" - dropping a few irrelevnat words down the well with the hope that the addition to the well of irrelevant words will, through force of the Heimlich Manuever - or some such sciency word-thing having to do with one force activating a counter-vailing force - will cause good words to rise to the surface, being irresistibly pushed there by the irrelevant words) meaning, according to the Heimlich equation, that an actual poem will start somewhere below - .....patience may be required being it's a process thing and process things must process else they would be called "miracles" like Jesus' face of a tortilla, or Jimmy not cracking corn when the master's gone away, or my 1906 computer suddenly humming and buzzing and computing again, or the phone company guy arriving at 11:59 for a service visit promised between 8 a.m. and noon, or me getting a hot date when I was fifteen years old or next week, whichever comes first ````` miracles, you know, where would we be without them, the miracle of conception and birth, the miracle of divining wisdom, the miracle of Slinkies and Hula Hoops and Rice Crispies snapping and cracking and popping every time, the miracle of meteors not crashing into the earth like last time, except this time making us the new dinosaurs, converting in the tar pits into some future form of fuel for the finally and again ascendant cockroach, no longer getting squashed in kitchen corners - that's why cowboy boots have pointy toes, you know - cockroaches in cowboy boot doing the squashing this time instead `````and the little circley thing is circling on a blue screen which means the aforementined pending poem is still processing, but not so quickly so if you have something else to do you should go ahead and take care of it and I'll give you a call when the processing poem is processed, arisen, so to speak, from the depths by the force of the Heimlich processing primal push to relevancy in this portion of the universe but, maybe, since the phone guy hasn't come yet, I'll just email you, or maybe send a tweet which I almost never do, fearing being pigeon-holed as just another tweeting twit waiting for promised lightning Adios I'm Ascaird of Dinosaurs  Between my second and third retirements, I worked for a company that scored state assesment tests, 4th to 11th grade. During my time with the company, I scored tests from easily 15 to 20 states. My speciality was reading and writing and, ocassionally, social studies. Some states did a good job with their tests; some states did awful. There are some Southern states that, if I had kids in school, I wouldn't live in. I liked the state tests as counseling tools, a way to identify areas where students were not learning the things they needed to become a useful, functioning citizen and, identifying those needs, developing an individually-based curriculum to identify, then address the deficiencies. It was, and still is, a misuse of the tests to use scores to grade schools and individual teachers, and especially not as an excuse to hold students back from advancing to their next grade. Our school systems continue to operate as if all their students are out working on the farm during the summer. Instead, summers should be used for good old fashioned summer school, three months to address the deficiences in individual students identified by the tests. There were problems in all states, but a common one I saw in most states was that the people designing and writing the tests had been out of the classroom too long to understand the students they were writing the tests for. Too often I saw questions that I knew many if not most students would reference the world view of the students the test writers knew from 20 or 30 years before, questions that those long ago students would have know easily but that modern students taking the test would misread, misunderstand, and fail, providing a perfectly correct answer in modern context that would be not at all the answer required.;' A particular question comes to mind, a reading question. Under instructions of the question, students were to write an essay based on material from the text. What the test designer didn't understand was how much current children know about dinosaurs. I have a three year old neice that can name 15 or 20 dinosaurs, using their correct and proper names and even describing some characteristice of each one. The fourth graders taking this test probably know more about dinosaurs that the person writing the test and are proud to share their knowledge in their essay, forgetting all about referencing the text that was the basis of the text. Doing so, despite all their knowledge, they will fail the question. A Texas issue, though I never scored Texas test, I did proof them, and, as I did that I saw very clear instance of trick question, questions clearly designed to trick students into a wrong answer. I never saw anything like that in any other state. Scoring a hundred tests a day (especially when they are writing tests and every state teaches the same writing formula of three paragraphs, etc. etc.) can be very boring, like reading the same essay on the same one or two subjects a hundred times a day can be mind numbing. That's why running across a brilliant 8th grade writer, ignoring the rules and writing a piece worth publication anywhere can be invigorating. Also the essay with intentional or unintentional humor can send giggles and sometime loud outbursts of laughter across the room of a hundred readers all reading the same paper. Such as this, a response to the dinosaur question by a 4th grade boy, not laugh-out-loud funny, but good for a tender smile and a chuckle. The little boy answers the question, ending his answer with, "I'm glad I didn't live when the dinosaurs were around cause...I'm ascaird of dinosaurs." Another Practice Board CONTINUING MY LIFE AS A NON-ECTOPLASMATIC my quarterly brush with mortality today as I see my doctor for the regular review of my quarterly labs the schedule is pretty well set so I rarely have to wait long before she comes in with her quarterly declaration “IT LIVES” and turns the rest of the session over to her assistant, Igor, who finds some reason or other to give me a shot in the butt and an appointment for the next quarterly visit the fact is, I have pills for everything so I remain relatively healthy for a person in my condition and the primary purpose of the regular visit being to confirm that the meds aren’t killing me by destroying my liver and good humor and whatnot the fact is (again, another unfortunate fact) I have a lot of dead friends and a lot of friends presumed dead through long absence, so, a quarterly stopover at the doc’s office and a quarterly blood draw is a welcome confirmation of my continuing non-ectoplasmatic place in the world of the not-so-quick but living I feel better just thinking about it River Views, Downtown ANOTHER SUNDAY MORNING moon, falling toward the west horizon, slips behind a lacy morning cloud, hiding the shadows of its ancient scars ````` grackles on cue, fly from their nightime nests, cover the sky, dark cape of the Phantom of the Morning ````` strong winds, warm and wet, blow smells of the southern sea across the stark remains of northern winter ````` light seeps from a pinched eastern horizon, the sky not yet ready to open to a new day ````` moon shadows fade as sun shadows grow toward the retreating night ````` cat does her mornng stretch - doubles her length front to back, legs reaching in both directions, belly on the ground, tail straight in the air, little red anus like lantern light at the end of a train ````` dog stirs in her bed, too old for morning calisthenics - eyelids lift up, then down, enough for now Catching pieces of news this morning, moved me to write this.  Today's Sorrow Beautiful green valley Between stark, treeless mountains, Mud homes that will wash away In the first heavy rain Climb the side of the mountain, Row after row A small, busy downtown, Buildings mostly built of wood Close to the ground, occasionally Two or three floors, with wooden Balconies looking out on the Busy center of the city, traffic Bustling with bicycles, donkeys, Camels, One or two-passenger pedicabs, Converted golf cart taxies, widely Decorated, a hundred colors clashing One tall building, The Spirazan Hotel, A place where foreigners Could drink, a western style Bar, with a band, a rock and roll Band from the Philippines, Elvis, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, The same band I had heard At the NCO club on my base On the Pakistan frontier, And even earlier, at the NCO club At the NCO club at the base Where I was stationed in Germany in attendance, Russians, Americans, Europeans, young Arabs, a place outside their own country, A place where they could drink And party western style Outside view of anyone else The road from downtown, paved, unlike most That connect to it, Merchants along the road, Resting their camels, one Selling hot nan, so tasty When hot, like ceiling tile When cold Passing the zoo, animals Mostly ragged, but A beautiful young girl Who dropped her veil for just A second before her parents Could see Passing the Russian Embassy, Entering the Embassy To buy some maps, dangerous, As low level American intelligence agents, A violation of our secrecy rules, And subject to arrest by the Russians If they cared… But, apparently they didn’t care enough For an international incident To the USAID house Where we stayed, a crowd Of young children passing, Beautiful brown eyes and eyes emerald green, In their school uniform, Laughing all, Singing as they marched past From my room overlooking A lower floor, A grey cat slept, stretched On the roof, As cats stretch, Sleeping in the warm Afternoon… Kabul, Afghanistan, Easter, 1968/69, Before the horrors began  Starting a new board this afternoon. Should have it finished in a day or two. In the meantime, here's another practice board. These pieces are by Lalla (born 1320 - died 1392), fourteenth century North Indian mystic who wandered through medieval Kashmir singing her songs. The verses are from the collection, Naked Song, published by Maypop Books in 1992, with translation by ColemanBarks. When you eat too much, you forget your truth, and fasting makes you conceited, so eat with some discipline, and consciously. Be an ordinary human being. Then the door will open, and you'll recognize the way. Lalla, be moderate! ```` Everything is new now for me. My mind is new, the moon, the sun. The wholeworld looks rinsed with water, washed in the rain of I am That. Lalla leaps and dances iniside the energy that creates and sustains the universe. And speaking of Indian poets and mystics, I happened to read by chance today one of my friend and favorite Facebook poets. I used his work a lot on the old Here and Now and now here he is again in the new. He is a free lance writer in New Delhi and his name is Bharat Shekar. He is also an artist and usually includes a drawing with his poetry. This time, he did not. The poem was written in 2019. REMEMBERED RADIANCE (Yearning to wander) Not to dispel darkness, but to be its companion and guide, silver spreads silhouettes in moonbeams. . A darting owl scatters silence inside night with its feathery flight. . Then, every sound only deepens the quiet- a creak, a hoot, the thud of a stone tumbling over grass, startled 'twit-twit' of a lapwing, in some forgotten distance the gurgling mouth of a river making liquid love to rocks in passing. . Heaving with sleeping breath of flowers, the air turns moist to drip dew drops on leaves and blades of grass. . In ruins of abandoned houses, almirahs buckle open to free themselves of shadow substances. . Across valleys, over hills, Himalayas loom, immense, icy, intimate, holding each others' shoulders among the twinkle of stars. I wrote a poem, Up at 4:30, harking back to a time fifty years past when, while at the university after military service, living in a small trailer on the Blanco River, I would stay up all night writing and talking to my dog before getting up to meet a 10 a.m. chemistry, biology, or physics class (three classes I managed to graduate without ever passing.) I admit now, that fifty years later, my pleasure in watching the sun come up has lessened a lot. This might be a sunset campanion to that piece, though written more recently. Night lays in night lays in with a sigh like an old woman pulling bed coverrs up to her chin breeze rustless trees like feather dusters brushing the stars, frogs come alive in the creek, nighthawks hunt... on my patio, I strip down, lay back in my chair and join the frog-symphony, imagine the fresh, cool mud between a catalogue of reeds on the rain freshened creek-side, imagine the blood-tasty mosquito caught on my long green tongue, settle, squish, into the singing night Muffin-making and other activities of the long night  As the end of night begins the moon at midnight is full and bright, slipping through the trees like a slow and lonely dancer drifting as the end of night begins toward the west and away from the other side of the sky, the edge of the world over which its bigger, brighter sister will soon rise to claim a new day high in the cold, cold sky, near where the domain of all earth creatures end, icy scudding clouds provide a chill backdrop to the pale sister's passage the siblings, never together, can only nod in passing  A lot of Texas poets, both pros and amateurs, get lost in the diversity of the state. It's not hard to do. If you spend any time driving around through the varied cultures and vistas of the state, as I have done, it's hard not to want to put it all down on paper. The many stories and myths of the state are also a draw on any writer's imagination. Elane Carlisle Murry is one such writer, as in this piece from her book, The Law of Tough Mesquite, growing from the myths of the traveling cowboy, the loner who sees it all. Winnerof the W.E. Bard Book Award, the book was published by Eakin Press in 1993. The Fence Line At the top of the rise the rider drew rein and saw stretched before him a brush-studded plain. The soft desert wind blew the cedar's fresh smell as his horse stepped with care, down the steep rocky trail. At the foot of the hill, she shifted his weight and the hoofs of his horse built a fast steady gait Behind him the dust rose. He pounded a track till his eyes saw a fence line, narrow and black. At the sight of the dark strand he changed his straight course and veered toward the open and challenged his horse. Away into nowhere, away in a streak, sweat staining his shoulders dust streaking his cheek. PARTY TIME her lip trembles
her lip trembles and I love her for her courage ````` her day begins in yellow light, like lantern light, before the sun, like an old woman rising from her dark bed, crests the eastern mountain ridges... the basin will be dark before the sun falls through the western notch, the desert floor, a blaze of reds and yellow and orange... she stands before the colors far below, arms stretched wide, embracing the failing light... this is the way she wants it to end, in a glory afire with completion not soft and unsure, the way it began Once is good enough for me I know a volcanic crater left from ancient days of thunder and fire that is a meadow now, broad across, covered in high yellow grasses that blow in golden waves under midday mountain sun I know a beach covered in stones rubbed smooth and round by the rough caress of rolling tides, ten thousand years polished, the glow off moonlight, beacons of passing years --- I know these places and many more because I've seen them, but I know I'll never see them again because, like most travelers who prefer the small and uncharted roads, I find many beautiful places I'll never find again you who travel the main roads never suffer this loss of beauty for you always know where you're going and where you've been, it's the in-between you lose, a wind-streaked blur passing but I've seen these things, found these other places once, places you'll never see, and once for me, to remember and cherish is good enough for me anticlimax so Einstein is proven right again! gravity comes in waves like on the beach, just like he said… and so it is now a proven and, I’m told, mind-blowing event in the galactic news feed but I’m haven’t figured out yet what this means in the imagination of a poet who builds sand castle fantasies out of superficial understanding of such grand and glorious revelations a poet’s mind that gravitates (in waves, I suppose) to the more dramatic news as in two black holes stumbling in their ordered galactic waltz, the two colliding like two heavyweights on a swept-black dance floor, creating a “chirp” heard round the universe the chirp the proof sought for generations, announced like the cry of a tiny fledgling sparrow upon its maiden flight… such sturm and drang, the crashing together of two gods all-powerful in their own spaces contesting now for a single space - now that’s the stuff of a poem but gravitational waves, all that bring to this poet’s mind are visions of sand castles surrendering to a voracious gravitational tide eating the beach and all the castles on it the cataclysmic smashing of gods in the end leveling only delicate imagined structures on sandy playgrounds anticlimactic at best, seen better on TV  WHO COUNTS AND HOW DO WE KNOW IT In the Whitman poem I used in my last post, Walt wrote: Many sweating, ploughing,thrashing, and then the chaff for payment received, A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. So that's one way to know who counts, who gets the shaft (I mean "chaff") and who gets the wheat. Here's another way, a poem I wrote in 2016. newspaper headline this morning “SUV OVERTURNS, PASTOR’S DAUGHTER KILLED” the grief of a pastor over the death of his daughter, real and to be honored but why is it always a pastor’s daughter in such headlines, or a banker’s daughter, or financial analyst’s daughter, or a CEO’s daughter, the death of such luminaries headlined in the morning paper but why do we never read headlines noting the death of the carpenter’s daughter, or the route salesman’s daughter, or the janitor’s daughter, or the laborer’s daughter, or the daughter of the homeless man who lives under the I-35 overpass downtown? ah, just another way our values are weighed, to really count in this world it’s clear your daughter has to get a headline when she dies… I wonder who else’s daughters died last night, unknown and unmentioned, apparently no one important Another practice board  This poem is by Kevin Pruffer. It is taken from his book National Anthem published by Four Way Books in 2008. GOTHIC LEAVES The leaves fell out of the trees and feathered the grass. The birds dropped too, all morning their way-too-human eyes rolled back, then black and gone - So, stripped and, for once, visible, the naked twigs - hob-fingered, tack-fingured. My mother was a rocking chair: Best clean that up. *** Don'tdrive through piles of leaves, she said, children play there. She rocked in her chair. Crick, crick. Heaps of leaves on the roadside - boys buried in them, leaves in their brittle hair, stopping their mouths so they couldn't speak *** Leaf rot and bristle - The mounds of leaves and the bodies inside, the wind grown chill and mean. Soon, she said, it'll be winter. Best bring that dead wood in. The naked branches the window panes, but never broke them. BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK H how did the doornail die and how old was it at the time Harper Lee is dead and Umberto Eco and Justice Scalia and many more, I’m sure, that I don’t know about, all dead as the proverbial door nail whatever the hell that is and whatever it is how did it die and how old was it when the end came and Ursula Andress is 79 years old and that can’t be because the last time I saw her she was on a beach coming out of the surf in a bikini with a knife in a sheath and long blond hair and a lean, tan body and there is no way she can be 79 years old and more important what does that mean for me and how did the doornail die and how old was it and questions like that especially about how Ursula Andress got to be 79 years old and when is her doornail due, and what about mine and just thinking about all that stuff gives me a pounding headache (maybe that’s how the doornail passed on) guess they really liked the drummer read last night at the coffeehouse not poems, but from my recent book of flash fiction an experiment with drum accompaniment worked well sold four books I guess they really liked the drummer APO NEW YORK THE THING MOST WORTH THINKING ABOUT so to begin, the scientists who study the science of way-old things have named the “Iceman” -the mummy discovered in a melting glacier in the Alps, as possessing the earliest known tattoos… dead for over 5,000 years and preserved in the ice, it seems he was a hunter-warrior suffering from many of the same physical ailments as me, except that he died in his thirties while I’m still hanging on in my seventies… also he has some obvious war- wounds that I have avoided and he also has tattoos which I have also avoided - the tattoos, five on his lower legs and ankle and one on his wrist, all at bone joints and possibly a very early attempt at relieving pain - something like the practice of acupuncture invented by the Chinese three thousand years after the Iceman and two thousand years before our own time - this notice, leading, in the article I read, to an intense discussion about the effectiveness of acupuncture as a medical procedure, some declaring reports of its effectiveness to be poppycock (this being a scholarly article - such technical language is not unusual) and others responding by declaring that anything people do for two thousand years must be effective, which doesn’t strike as a particularly effective argument to me since the Iceman had war wounds and five thousand years later we still have warriors with war wounds and I don’t see how that proves the effectiveness of war as a prescription for health and wealth… but that’s a whole other argument that I don’t find so interesting, nor do I find the whole business of tattoos pleasing what is interesting is the wonder of finding a five thousand year-old corpse sufficiently preserved to allow for medical investigation and the other thing, the big kahuna, the fact that the glacier that for five thousand years preserved the body is melting… it seems to me that’s the thing about the story most worth thinking about… GILLIGAN PLOTS OUR COURSE HOME  It's not the actual experiences that matter, but what you learn from them. AN ALMANAC OF LIVED STORIES I got years Worth of stories Out of less than a year Driving a taxicab In a small city in bordertown Texas Same for a year On a foreign desert And months of construction work On the hot Tex/Mex border And drinking too much, Lots of good stuff there When the midnight drunk Bled into a sullen, overcast morning Never got any poems Out of cashier work at a grocery store Except establishing my asshole detector, First activated by customers Who came in to do their weekly shopping Five minutes before closing time While I have my day’s pay Burning a hole In my pocket, Saturday night plans put on hold Never got much Out of my first girlfriend, Tall and lean, a dead ringer For Paula Prentiss, Except how love is like Pork chops left out in the sun, Even the best love and pork chops Turn bad with just a few weeks inattention, Especially when a best friend Is there to provide what I In my absence could not… Mostly a good life, but turning At times, temporarily rough, Making poems out of good times And misery And I think of the new University-bred poets Whose work reflects Neither good times Nor misery I read them and think, Jeez, if they had just A couple of months Driving a cab through 12-hour nights, Or woke up drunk, mouth Agape, head in a stupor Resting on a foul-smelling bar, The last near-survivor Of a night of wrong moves, Dawn breaking through an Encrusted window, neon Still flickering, near dead But not yet… what a great poets They might be ON THE COAST  Story of my Life I owned a 1952 Cadillac once, bought it for $100 and had it for 3 months in 1968 while attending some advanced military training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas... beautiful car, cherry shape, inside and out, two-tone factory paint, cloth seats as soft as any bed I ever slept in, but wouldn't go over 45 miles per hour without overheating gave it away when I left, to cover a bar tab… car of my dreams… story of my life... Another practice board  the Wednesday meet-up and talk group the Wednesday Meet Up and Talk group is arriving here at the coffeehouse in a straggle, so far, mostly antique women, sitting behind me, discussing the various ailments of their age, the one just moved here from Montana, talks about the whatever fire out there and how she can’t breathe anymore up there because of the altitude and the others too, every part of the body, blood, skin, bones, ears, not to forget eyes, bowels, (even hair, according to the lady who brags on her wigs) at least one medical failure per customer, several, it seems, going for quantity over quality, trying a little bit of everything… no men have shown up so far this week, so, I have to stop here, there being no slow, dropping thinking old man to slow the ladies down, they are talking way faster than I can transcribe (maybe I’m quitting too soon, the ladies are into allergies, a subject upon which I can commiserate, pontificate, even, so maybe, since there are no other old men in attendance I ought to turn around and pass on some of my own allergy wisdom…) This piece is by Walter McDonald, taken from his book Night Landings, published by Harper and Row in 1989. Coming Home At her age, my mother should know I'd break her heart,tumble downhill and break my neck. She never learns. Soapsuds in her eyes, hands winding themselves dry in her apron, she hurries to the car and hugs us, my wife first, at last her arms choking the grandkids. They disappear inside her spongy belly, giggling, clutching and clinging. For days she chases them like a nanny, pots steaming on the store, dinner for king. My father would have slipped them peppermint sticks the way he spoiled his own. Gone, like the last passenger train from the roundhouse. Nights, while my kids play games in the garden, I squint to make the stars move like Pullman windows that winked on the way to Houston when I was nine, the year my father died, when I knew it was never my father's run but waved anyway at the lights. This, from me in 2016, a product of reading the New York Times Science Section every Thursday.
the whole of it could be the biggest bang since the big bang, just discovered, blowing away an unthinkably vast section of the universe, but so far from us it is barely a smudge on our most powerful telescopes so far away but still we will feel its effects in millions of years, just as nothing happens anywhere that doesn’t or won’t affect us sometime somewhere - just wait for it, the tide of all things moved by all the tides of everything, as no man is an island, no island is alone on even the most vast sea, like we, up to our armpits in ourselves, bump through the slip stream of everyone else… this makes some people very sad, this oneness, making them feel inconsequential in their smallness, others, like me, celebrate the magnificence of being such an important part of everything… (as all parts of a whole are important lest it be not whole) And here's another of the "deep think" variety, also from 2016. what we leave behind will define us all we know about the ancient times that came before us are fossilized remains, hints of long before we study and examine and hope to learn how the was became the is... like the imprint of a jungle leaf on a dry canyon wall, or, in San Antonio, at the bottom of another canyon where once flowed a clear, cool stream and on the old stream’s sandy bottom, turned by time to limestone, and in the stone, frozen in time, footprints of the great and cumbersome dinosaurs who once in eras past drank here, ate from the flora and fauna that lived around it, procreated and died here… and in the great deserts of the southwest, fossils of tiny fish and shrimp and other creatures unknown in our time, their lives hinted at only by their flesh turned to rock… the truth that all that has ever been, remains in some form, as rock, as chemicals leached into the rock, as air, the composition of which altered by the breathing in and out of it during eons beyond eons… and now, says those who study, has begun the new “Anthropocene” era, the time of human dominance, a time when old fossils undisturbed for millions of years are pushed aside by new fossils made by the hand and mind of our human kind so that many epochs ahead, whoever, or whatever, follows us, curious and studious as we, wanting, as we want, to understand the past of the earth upon which they trod, will seek out in the re- configured planets hints of us in the fossils… and what will they find? a fossilized pickle jar, the mysterious symbols “Vlasic” etched in rock; the complete fossil of a ’49 Studebaker, lost in 1952 to the bottom of the deepest lake in Wisconsin, unearthed during some unimaginable construction project, open to the light of day again a million years after its disappearance; a small action figure, Batman, maybe, or GI Joe or Princes Leia, or some hero or villain we haven’t created yet; a baby rattle, a dog collar, a wedding band, a tuba and a clarinet, a statue of an idealized woman holding one arm high, stone turned to stone, at the bottom of a deep and murky sea; signs of the times, “Dancing Girls 24 Hours, Lap Dances, $20” and the new who follow us will wonder, what dance did they dance and how did the dance on what is a lap and what is symbol, number 20 and how much is that; carbon from our burning and breathing, radiation from our wars, lead and other heavy metals from television tubes and compute detritus, perhaps the fossilized porcelain of my store- bought teeth some many numbered levels above the dinosaur footprints at the bottom of Government Canyon; treasures from attics, junk from second-hand stores, refrigerators, coffee makers, microwave ovens and margarita makers, things important and coveted, things lost and never found, things found and forgotten… so much we will leave behind, more than even we know, but all will be there, in some altered form for the new ones to find, just as we now find and marvel at that which was and won’t be again… |
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