1-3-22 Fire's Red Embrace

red embrace

so many lights in the neighborhood…

porch lights
area lights
motion sensor lights

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

thus it was, always so -

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

always waiting
for the fire
to die…

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

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

​​

in a Mexican courtyard, 1959

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

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

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

​

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

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

​From where I sit

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

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

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

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

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

tomorrow?

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

what use a curtain if nothing changes
between acts

Smile for me

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

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

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

talking
talking
talking

hyper-alert,
smiling
a big toothless smile for me

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

talking
smiling a big toothless smile
for 
me

​

Slow lane

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

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

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

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

Scattered in the wide night sky

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

I
know this 
like some people
know God, such knowledge
a product of longing
in the lonely bright for a comanion
​worthy of our best nature
​

Here are two short poems by Nanao Sakaki, from the collection, Break the Mirror, published by North Point Press in 1987. Sakaki was a Japanese poet, author of Bellyfulls and leading personality of The Tribe, a loose-knit countercultural group in Japan in the 1960s and 70s. He was born to a large family in Kagoshima Prefecture, and raised by parents who ran an indigo dye-house.

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


Vinegar

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

__________not true__________

Now transparent windows-----

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

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


Winter Flower Trails

            After two days snowing
            A rosy evening glow.

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

               Star light
               Snow light
               And icy thistle field.

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

                 Stare here
                 Your footprints
                 Animal tracks
                 Flower trails

Shine over the zodiacal light
                 Along the Milky Way. 

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

Praise God from whom all blessings flow

a man
on a motorbike
pulled along side her

asked
what seemed an ordinary question

"are you going to school?"

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

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

praise God
in all his cruel and 
hideous
forms

amen
​

My younger brother, my older brother, (both deceased) and me

Beat down but never backed down

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

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

"what did that guy say?

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

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

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

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

"where'd he go?"

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

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

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

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


​

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

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




For You

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

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

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

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

Do with it what you will.

​

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


Pumpkins a little frosty today

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

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

colder tonight,
warmer again tomorrow
morning

no wonder
we are confused

---

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

dog thinks it’s all
just mighty
fine

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

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

wet paw prints
on my coat
where she jumps

---

a bird on a bush
right outside my window

not sure what kind

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

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

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

---

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

​

Photo taken near sunrise, January 1, 2010


​Medicated meditation
 
drifting

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

small boat calm
seas
day to night
night to
day

drifting

a tiny whirlpool
of nowhere
soon