HERE AND NOW
(AGAIN)
 days and nights on the frontier (I) we flew no flag because we were a secret, known only to readers of the front page of the New York Times which knew, even 45 years ago, all the secrets fit to print… but also, of course, the radicals and revolutionaries downtown knew, and the tribes who sent men to clean our rooms and shine our shoes and, no doubt, watch us carefully, preparing for the day, but best, there were the caravans who knew, lines of camels loaded with goods on their back, going clankity clankity with every lumbering, soft-footed step... the caravans that stopped every couple of months on the narrow road that separated our secret living quarters and our super-secret operations center where we sat and listened to the also not-so-secret secrets of the other guys... the camels put to pasture beside our walls where the merchants in their robes laid out their wares for us to consider as we passed for shift change, from the gates of our home to the gates of our work and back, all kinds of goods, oil paintings , brass shining bright under the desert sun, camel saddles of polished wood and soft leather and always at least one tailor who it was said could, for next to nothing, look at a picture of a man’s suit from Esquire and make an exact copy with the finest silk from China, a silk suit, finely tailored, in finest Savile Row fashion for $20… many bought such suits and some bought many suits before going home, getting word back to us who remained that, while the silk was fine, the cotton thread that sewed them was not, that the way to keep your $20 suit when you got home was to take it to someone who could take the suit apart and put it back together again with good thread… there was a lot about the place that was like the suits, both less and more than it often seemed - secrets that weren’t secret, finely tailored suits made with rotten thread, soldiers who would rather see us gone protecting us from people who would rather see us dead, fake wars and, ultimately, fake peace... days and nights on the frontier...  pressed like rain the moon a blood edged scimitar pushing a cloudburst west rolling dark and dense the Gulf’s gift to the desert, blooming in all the shades of cactus transcendent it would be a time to be there I’m not but would like to be running with the clouds across the desert and into the mountains pressed like the rain by the blood-edged moon  days and nights on the frontier (II) working a midnight shift on Moscow time meant that 4 a.m. breakfast at the 24/7 NCO club was a pitcher of beer and a cheeseburger with fries and the jukebox blasting… multiple listenings to the Doors with “Baby Light My Fire” … feeling worn and raunchy having seen nothing female for more than six months but the Commander’s 16-year-old daughter sunning at the pool, her leaving at the end of the Commander’s tour in whatever virginal state she arrived, a sterling testament to good military order and discipline…  as Mother’s Day approaches I think about a poem for my mother, passed on now for more than twenty years and it’s always hard, so much easier writing about my father, so large and dominant, he, the sun, she the moon and thus, it might seem a lesser light… but consider the moon, always circling, always there but sometimes seen and sometimes not, shifting phases and faces through the course of a month but never changing… a constant sometimes invisible in its constancy, a reflector, not a creator of light, easy sometimes misjudge its place and its power… but, consider the tides…  how I became a pacifist not much of a fighter when I was young, most of the fights I had I lost, like the first, when I beat my larger opponent’s fist with my face mercilessly… luckily for the fractious barroom drunks I occasionally crossed in my drinking days, I grew older and I grew smarter and, most important, I grew considerably larger, developing along the way a menacing visage, discovering, along the way that large and mean-looking allowed me a hardcase bluff that discouraged even the most hopelessly drunk from testing their unsteady valor against me, avoiding thereby further damage to innocent fists throughout the terminal of my Saturday night adventures learning, as was true in most of the rest of my life, that faking it usually works about as well being it  days and nights on the frontier (III) the operations center ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with staff working rotating shifts, swing, mid, and days, three days each shift with a day off between each and because of that twenty-four operation, everything else operated twenty-four hours as well, the NCO/Enlisted and Officer Clubs, the two tennis courts, the two lane bowling alley and the base theater, the base theater with a steady stream of Disney and other family entertainment (even though there were no families, except for a short time, the Commander and his daughter) and most everyone on the base who wasn’t working or sleeping was drunk or on the way to getting drunk… and the curious thing is (at least I think it’s curious now even though it didn’t strike me at the time) there was no obvious law enforcement - outside the walls were semi-permanent camps of host country soldiers who provided the external security but were never, ever allowed inside the gates and inside the gates I do not recall over eleven months ever seeing any military police except for those couple who guarded the gate to the operations center, reviewing badges to confirm we were who we were supposed to be at the place where we were supposed to be… nowhere inside the walled living area of the small base do I recall seeing a military policeman and nowhere, even the officers guarding the operations gate, did I see anyone armed… this, in a community of about 1,500, half to two-thirds awake at any one time with nowhere to go and nothing to but sit by the pool or at the appropriate club or by the walls or atop the barracks where stars shone bright in a display of light every desert night, nothing to do among this small collection of places but drink... drink and remember other, more welcoming, places and count the days remaining at this place, hoping the beer will last until then and then be left behind…  an old, out-out-of-season piece tamaleria it is Christmas Eve and in accordance with tradition we will spend it making tamales with a crew of related corn husk spreaders my son will be in charge, because in a large family of Mexican women, inheritors of generations of mamas and tias and abuelitas, all expert in the art, my half-Mexican son is the only one who knows how to do the job of mixing the masa and cooking the savory carne (and a few frijoles refritas, “las especiales” ) he has agreed to do handle the technical end of preparing ingredients and the actual cooking, but only if there are significant volunteers to do the grunt labor of actually spreading the masa and carne and wrapping the filled corn husks… I expect it will be great Christmas Eve fun for about the first hour… (I don’t even like tamales so much, but the time of gringo domination in South Texas is past, especially in the vicinity of mi casa…)  mistaking a thing’s name for its thingness the Zen master speaks of names and the naming of things and how the naming of things is a function of the world and not the thing how by naming we seek to catalog differences between things that are all the same, coming from the same place when their existence begins, going to the same place when it ends… a tree might be a tree, he says, but it is also a cat and a rock and a droplet of water and even a lion named Cecil, a name beyond a name, but still a tree and a rock and a cat and a droplet of water, and the sun is the moon and the moon is the star and the star is you and you are me and we are with all the rest all things that be, that have been, that will be, and all our naming does not change the essence of all things which is the same as all things of all things… be proud... for your are not that tiny, disposable thing your parents named you, you are more, bigger, part of all as you are part of your parents and their parents and the ox that pulled their wagon through the rock-strewn steppes of Patagonia… be proud... for you are much more than the blinded world has named you…  days and nights on the frontier (IV) from out barracks roof we can see over the walls and past the Pakistani soldiers who from their small camp guard us, and past them the fields and the shepherds and their sheep, and sometimes the shepherds take their sheep elsewhere as a man with a long-barreled, antique rifle shoots at another man with a long rifle in an adjacent field who shoots back, both missing, tribal disputes requiring not death or serious injury, but just the effort and the show, like dogs barking on opposite sides of a fence, a noisy piece, but effective at the time... (but not so much anymore it seems, the dogs of war having jumped the fence and men who are not shepherds with new and more accurate guns and women and children with bombs strapped to their chest) but this is then, then it was just the guards, singing quietly in the morning, and the fields and shepherds and sheep and make-believe wars for honor satisfied, and beyond them, the desert, shimmering on hot afternoons, and beyond them, the mountains, the Hindu Kush, hard mountains, dry, brown and treeless, just deep canyons and sharp crags cresting on a deep sky, a Martian landscape, hard mountains for hard people... we could see it all from our roof, watching with a six pack of beer as the soldiers who watched over us lay out their carpets to pray... they do not pray for us, except, perhaps for us to be gone  settling for semi-naked ladies I approach the new day’s poem as I approach the new day, hesitant and a little unsure as to how it’s going to go… a busy day ahead, things to do, a trip to Austin, nothing interesting enough to force into a poem… and while I sit here dumbfounded by my “failure to communicate” (what a great movie) creative self to sitting-in-my-chair-drinking-coffee self (and yes I know “dumbfounded” is a peculiar word for use in this context, but I like it and it is my weakness to use words I particularly like even if they don’t quite or at all fit and I’m used to it and I expect you to be too by this time) affirmation! (yes, self-affirmation, even when inappropriate essential to maintaining the hubris of putting words on paper and expecting them to be read by other than close friends and relatives who will tell you they read it even it they didn’t) (let’s face it - hubris, I mainline that stuff like a junkie on horse or a fat man eating pecan pie - I have no other excuse) meantime, communication between the ego and its alter still mostly static and buzz (is it not obvious), I am bombarded by images and moments and distractions, traffic on Broadway, a fire truck, Chopin bumping keys overhead, two skinny blond women having a meeting, too much time at the gym taking them past desirable to hungry and ferocious and sharp-toothed predatory (middle-age, trying, always, to keep that debutant look without the wide-eyed innocence I never believed anyway, but still probably nice people so I hate to criticize…) and, I swear to God, sea gulls that turn out to be ring tones on one of the women’s cell phone but it’s already too late, I’m back at the beach dodging jelly fish and nearly naked ladies… and I’m tired of this hail Mary fake and dodge anyway so what the hell, I quit ```````````````` content to hang out instead with the semi-naked ladies sand in my shorts be damned  days and nights on the frontier (V) a Filipino rock and roll band on the USO circuit around Europe, all dressed up in cowboy hats and fringed shirts with shiny snaps, playing rockabilly hits from the 50s, covers of the best from Sun Studios, Johnny Cash, Elvis, Jerry Lee and all the rest playing Christmas Eve at the NCO Club in Darmstadt down the road about 70 or so klicks from Frankfurt, and I had a date with the cousin of a friend, a pretty girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a bright, sunny smile, and we danced and danced bopping around the dance floor, her skirt swirling and swirling and it was a great Christmas Eve a long way from home… the guys in Vietnam had Hope and Ann-Margaret and the current Playboy Playmate of the Year... in Germany we had a Filipino rockabilly cover band, but nobody complained… ---------- a year and a half later I saw them again, the same Filipino cowboys, same hats, same fringe shirts with shiny snaps, playing the same rockabilly hits in the bar atop the Spirizan Hotel in Kabul… everyone liked them, even the Russians, big guys with stony stares who didn't express appreciation for much of anything but their vodka, and I liked them too, the cowboys, not the Russians, drinking my own Russian vodka, tapping my feet to the music, no dance floor and no pretty girl to swing around it like I remembered from Christmas Eve in Germany and I couldn’t but feel a little sorry for the guys, trying to play rock and roll guitar licks to an international crowd of far from home drunks in Afghanistan, having, it must have been, the worst agent in all of the Philippines…  snippet a snippet a drippit a little tiny tidbit readit & forgetit it’s just my morning today bit  Sad news, my poet-friend, Gary Blankenship, died a couple of days ago. My friend, beloved by everyone in the on-line poetry community who ever wrote or read with him, had a similar background to my own, a retired professional who turned to poetry for a purpose when work no longer provided one. I was one of those who wrote and read with Gary, almost from the time I began to write. His work, much quieter and gentler than my own more rough and ready work, was a good contrast to me. I have a couple of his books, including his first one. Wang Wei's River Poems, which introduced me to a particular Chinese master and to the old Chinese masters in general.
Unfortunately, my library is in disarray and I can't find Gary's book to choose from. Instead I'll post from this on-line selection from the book. Wang Wei, generally considered one of the three major Chinese (High Tang) poets, wrote a series of twenty poems collectively known as the Wang River Collection. They meant to record a journey up the river with his good friend, Pei Di, while also being about Wang’s mansion located in the river valley. paragraph 2 A group of poets from Toronto known as ‘Pain Not Bread’ published a book in 2000 titled Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei. The poems are modern free verse interpretations of Tang poetry by Wang, Tu Fu and others. Among the works is ‘Mountain Range,’ a beautiful adaptation of Wang Wei’s ‘Deer Park.’ 3 Based on their work and others, I’ve set out to ‘transform’ Wang Wei’s poems into mostly verse libre sonnets, a free form sonnet. The order is not Wang Wei’s. I selected the order on the basis of how much I liked the poems and how difficult I thought the transformation would be. 4 III: After Wang Wei’s Luan House Rapids (13) — Beyond the Estuary A torrent drowns duckweed and bulrush; squalls whip cattails and willow thickets. Canvas wet outside and in, soaked shoes squirt with each muddy step. A trickle, rivulet, rush flows over field and road, into cellars and badger holes. Boats break from their moorings, trash bins float like empty shells past broken dolls and bikes. On a cloudless night, we embrace the stars; we pour diamonds through our fingers. On a cold autumn night, jewels turn to dross; promises dull, lumps of cinder without warmth. A summer’s debris drifts to block the drain, a white feather trapped between stones. 5 The literal translation by Wai-Lim Yip, “Rill of the House of the Luans”, is 6 blast-blast — autumn rain/s middle lightly-lightly/shallow-shallow — rock flow pour jump wave/s-bead/s self mutual/each other splash white egret startle again down 7 Like the best of Oriental poets, Wang Wei leaves the poem unfinished; the meaning of the final line a mystery to be worked out by the reader. 8 My version is: Autumn rain and wind gusts strike the boulders below. The rapids’ waves collide -- startled egrets rise, settle. Although Gary had been less active than in the past, he leaves behind a wealth of excellent work.
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