2-9-22 The Complexity of True Things

three days on the mountain

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

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

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

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

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

(New Mexico, December, 1964)

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

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


the complexity of true things

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

​

Tokyo, call out your tiny armies

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

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

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

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

why do I still think about it?

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

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

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

```

Tokyo, call out your tiny
armies

​

​a gaggle of English teachers

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

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

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

and thank God my English teacher days
are far behind me

big time again

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

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

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

pretend
I’m big time
again…

​t
the woman weeps

the coffin lowered slowly into the open grave

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

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

​

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



II

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

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

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

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

​

a great tree

this tree
grew
when Christ’s cross
was virgin timber

continues
to grow as millions
have come to life
and died

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

while
the true God
if she exists
lives here
still

​

fixing the language

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

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

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

how boring!

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

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

like
for example

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

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

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

----

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

​

you must remember this
​
I remember
both things that are
and things that aren’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



​

I remember her in her Airplane flying

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

​

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

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

​

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

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

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

so contemporaneous.  



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


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


how the lunatics
have taken over the asylum


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

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

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

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

youbetcha

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

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

my patient blonde friend

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

​

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

---

I don’t have a lot of shoes

just some boots I don’t wear
anymore

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

​

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

but I can’t...

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


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

strange -

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

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

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

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

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