8/9/21 What was, and won't be again

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…