HERE AND NOW
(AGAIN)
 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
0 Comments
 kicking the can the loud woman is here, wheeling and dealing “know what I mean” ending every sentence ~~ thought I’d write a short poem about the brightness of the sun but lost it in the glare brilliance non-transferable ~~ cars on Broadway speed past I wave poems at them but no one notices too busy for stray street corner poets too proud to hoist a cardboard sign ~~ the light is red... everyone stops the light is green... everyone goes the sign-slinger dances in the intersection as there is no time for poets no time either for terpsichorean enticements ~~ close enough being sufficient for these latter days endeavors and being exceedingly proud of myself for coming close enough in the spelling of terpsichorean for “spellcheck” to correct it, I rest on my laurels for the day ~~ like kicking a can down the road, not important where you kick it, just the kicking of it perfectly good enough  This piece, written in January, 2013 is a poem of despair regarding the fate of our politics and subsequently, our country. January, 9 years later, it does not seem any better. no end to it so tired of living in a world so full of stupid people fools every day, impossible to live a full life without exposing oneself to them, caves and hermits and mountain tops not appealing to one not yet ready to do without the rest of his kind… politics in general, whatever the current debate… this time, guns - on one side slime people willing to facilitate murder for profit, on the other side hapless liberals who flutter and fritter and wail and moan uselessly about the injustice of rule by the corrupt winners of corrupt games played in the name of poor dead and debased democracy, justice, “the people” - the people, dim, compliant victims of their own thirst for the comfort of lies and well-paid liars, sellers of soap who soft-soap the murder of children --- there will be no change to it, no end to it, no matter how tired I am of it  the promise of a winter day in South Texas the morning fog has lifted and the sun is out, brightly burning from the day every trace of damp ambiguity, the clarity of the morning exposing in sharp colors the world as it has always been behind the veil, like lifting the cover of a veiled woman to expose unexpected beauty like hillsides exposed by leaf-stripped trees, revealing in high branches bird’s nests swaying with morning breezes in the arms their leafless anchors life signs exposed, always present but unseen under the green cover of spring and summer… clarity, clarity, clarity! how we crave it in the muddle of life, how we welcome suggestions of it in our customary states of confusion… clarity in a South Texas morning, seeing the lot of it all the way down to where it ends and to where we see the promise of beginning again that promise, seen in the clear and bright, our daily comfort in the bewilderments that surrounds us  seasons changing around us late getting there, the park closed for the season, so we are alone, mile after mile of rolling hills covered with all the colors of autumn, spread across hill after hill, like a box of Crayolas spilled in the summer by some child, left to melt in the sun when mother called, hardened now in the cold, to multicolored streaks running where summer flow had taken them… an early winter storm follows us, closer behind every time we stop to take in the fragile beauty, its seasonal end approaching, buried in snow on the hills so bright before, the surviving glory of the lost season passing all around and ahead… we leave the parkway to stop for the night and in the morning find our intended route over the mountains blocked by very heavy snow… we take the low route and leave the mountains behind for another day (Blue Ridge Parkway, 2011)  the vault there is no movement in the opaque and enigmatic fog but for the two of us walking, and no sound but the muffled hush of my soft-soled shoes and the clickity clickity of dog’s nails on the sidewalk… the dark mystery of the morning, adrift in dim haze - a vault of old memories stored for years, now released I open myself to the past, not always a good thing for I am a realist about all things including my past, and there is no hiding them from me for I know where the bodies are buried, my own and others the vault opens and in this enshrouded morning shadows linger behind every tree and it seems I know their every name  Maybe I should consider prose I returned to writing poetry a week ago at least that was the intent but so far haven't written a word that wasn't flop-sweat crap written like a high school sophomore sweating out a book report that might impress his English teacher flow like a dam-blocked beaver pond the passion of a backwoods preacher with an ugly wife and herpes no good reason for anything I've written no good reason to read anything I've written masturbation of the creative impulse, a flasher at the playground; a twelve-year-old at a spin-the-bottle strip party you show me yours; I'll show you mine, then a disappointing unveiling, like a Pat Boone rock concert blank verse - but not the good kind, blank like the eyes of a shriveled up old man in an overstuffed chair, drool on his whiskered chin as his lips tremble... maybe I should try a cup of prose  It is hard sick slept all day dreams of when I made things happen sweet it was in my dreams ```` watching the blind cat bounce like a pin ball from wall to wall until she finds her way; soft bounces, her pink nose against the wall, then turn sometimes a turn into a bedroom that goes nowhere, marooned in the dark beyond her personal dark until I find her sitting waiting for the world to make sense again, then I take her where I think she wants to go ~~~~ doctor appointment today, five and a half minutes she will give me new pills and four and a half minutes of advice - I will take the first, ignore the second... young and pretty, what does she know about being old? ~~~~ I find comfort in my regular place, around my regular people why do I ever think I need more ~~~~ I find comfort in thinking of other places, other people, where I can be the mysterious stranger in the back of the room, things I might not ever see before or since people who know even less about me than I know about them ~~~~ it is hard to be happy young or old, it is hard to know the true nature of happiness from temporatry desire ~~~~ it is hard to live in a world where nothing happens unless you make it  I post this sample of my art now and then, just a reminder that scribbling is not the only facet of my amateur's self-delusions.  Catullus was the spearhead of a new poetic movement in the late Roman republic, emphasizing colloquial language and grandeur brightened by realism. He was master of short witty commentary on politics and society. Unfortunately, while we can admire the wit, the personalities and events are a blank to us so there is very little emotional heft to them. Born of a high-class family in, it is thought, 84 B.C. The date of his death is unknown. The poem I selected is from the collection by Penguin Classics titled The Poems of Catullus. Although entangled in prolonged grief severed from the company of the Muses and far from Pieria my brain children still born myself among Stygian eddies the eddies plucking at the pallid foot of a brother who lies under Dardanian soil stretched by the coastland whom none may now hear none touch shuttered from the sight whom I treasured more than life and shall - in elegies of loss plaintive as Procne crying under the shadow of the cypress for lost Itylus, I send, Hortalus, mixed with misery Berenice's Lock - clipped from Callimachus for my might think my promise has slipped like vague wind through my head or was like teh apple unvowed the girl takes from her lover thrusts into her soft bodice and forgets there... till her mother takes her off guard - she is startled, the love-fruit trundles ponderously across the floor and the girl, blushing, stoops gingerly to pick it up  it's a sign this is not a happy chirpy day birds moan from the trees dogs whine and cower cats scowl in aggravation at the world's failure yet again to recognize feline pre-eminence in the order of things trees droop their limbs stars, like cheap plastic jewelry on a dark-hearted whore, do not shine the sun rises, its single bright eye sagging above the horizon's edge like a lay-about drunk preparing for its day's labors, again it seems to say again, and again and again I rise, it says, seeking only the dark relief of night falling sister moon, it calls, stay awhile longer let me sleep... it's not a happy, chirpy day - when birds moan from their trees you know it's not a happy, chirpy day it's a sign On the Coast I've lived on or near the Texas coast most of my life. These are a few pictures from recent years.  season of zombies walking two weeks of cedar fever the highest count of cedar allergens in fifteen years sniffling drippling nose, itchy watery eyes, energy and ambition swirling down the great bottomless sink of Blatzovia-Kaplatz I do not wish to get out of bed I do not wish to do anything but sleep, wrapped tight in my blue blankie of snug, my blue-raggedy, womb-memorized nest of contented murmur for I live in a world of snuffling blindly shuffling zombies... or, at least, seems that way through my own zombie eyes 45th wedding anniversary coming very soon. A celebration will ensue.
If that happens before I post the next blog, I will include additional pictures in it. At this time, I'm putting this on hold. After fooling with this for an hour and a half, I'm prepared to say don't use J C Penny portrait service. Their product is good but damn near impossible to work with other than hanging the prints they give you on a wall. I'll talk to customer service tomorrow to see if they can save themselves. Right now, I'm pissed at them. |
|
RSS Feed