12-03-21 Remembering the Caves

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)

​

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

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


A Conclave Sonnet
(For Grace Ann)

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

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

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

​

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

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

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

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

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

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

where have we heard
that before…

```

this
the state of knowledge
expanding
today

theory
always questing to be
challenged, questing
to be debunked

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

not much

only enough  to consider
one suggestion -
maybe we should all talk
to our petunias today
though we know they will not
talk back, science tells us
there is a good chance
they will hear
and warm themselves
in the genetic memory
of kind words
spoken
by those who
in the far past knew them
better than
we