HERE AND NOW
(AGAIN)
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What’s up this time – first, a return to the previous practice of including poets from my library, plus, all my own work here is from my early writing, in the 2002-2005 years. Only one, the first one, has been revised with a couple of lines to update. Me – an almanac of lived stories Gary Blankenship – Washington D.C. Me – home fires beacon first frost cresting perfection shadows Wislawa Szymborska – Children of Our Age Me – north wind on a southern beach Wanda Coleman – Dear Peter Pan High Time Lovers Me – before the estate sale sunset on South Alamo from the porch at Casa Chiapas on a rainy morning Vandana Khanna - Alignment Me – in defense of dirty old men everywhere Leslie Ullman – Night Trade Me – what God don’t like John Ashbery – April Galleons Me – meanwhile in the Hydra Constellation  an almanac of lived stories I have made 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 serious 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, success and achievement beyond expectation, a 45 year marriage and a son who brings great pride, a minor rebirth in art late in life still, that life turning At times, temporarily rough, and in the end, 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 great poets They might be!  This next piece is by my poet friend Gary Blankenship who passed away earlier this year. Although Gary and I never met in person, we did meet many times over the years in our poetry as we read and enjoyed the work of each of us, with and without commentary. This poem is from his book The Poetic States in which he commemorated each of the 50 states with a short poem, plus the following, sometime farcical, piece about the state who hasn't yet, but will someday, become a state, the Capital of the country, Washington D.C. The book was published in 2014 by Writers and Lovers Studio. Washington D.C. A Short History of the Not-Quite- Independent State of New Columbia January 1791 - George Washington selects a swamp close to the site of the proposed cross-Aleghany water route to be his new capital. New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia complain. York, Pennsylvania, does not. December 1800 - The City of Washington is occupied by Congressmen, lobbyist, saloon owners, pick-pockets and prostitutes. May 1802 - The first of many schemes for a municipal government is passed by Congress. Pick-pockets and prostitutes take no notice. find the red queen shell under the pea three card tom-foolery August 1814 - The British burn the White House. Dolly Madison saves a portrait of President Washington. Congress is also burned. We call it the War of 1812. July 1846 - Congress returns the city of Alexandria and Alexandia County to the state of Virginia. A petition to return Congress is circulated. January 1867 - Black males are given the right to vote in local elections. Strom Thurmond objects. February 1870 - Iowa ratifies the 15th amendment prohibiting race as a qualificaton to vote. Jim Crow takes no notice. I have a dream - when all the nation's citizens have rights held by all other citizens June 1878 - Another scheme November 1928 - District voters celebrate Humiliation Day. Failure to ratify the ERA is still decades away. March 1961 - Ohio ratitifies the 25th amendment giving District voters the right to vote in presidential elections. All Confederate States except Tennessee object until 2002 when Alabama ratifies the amendment. May 1974 - Another scheme gives the District home rule. Washington is elected the first mayor. As of June 1984, only sixteen states ratify an amendment to allow a full vote for District representative in Congress. Washington state is not one of them. namesakes forsake their heritage the river rolls to the sea May 2006 - The House of Representatives rejects giving the District congressional representation in the House, but not the Senate. The Senate never notices. March 2007 - A new version of the bill is approved by the House and is pending in the Senate. The President has vowed to veto it. July 2027 - British Columbia becomes the 53rd state. The District of Columbia still waits for voting rights in Congress. deserted, representation as distant as the end to desert war  I was going through several three-ring binders looking for some specific poems that I was thinking I could gather into a chapbook. Didn't find what I was looking but did find a number of very early poems that I hadn't looked at in many years. So that's what this post is about, early, nearly forgotten poems from a poet just beginning what would become a stretch of writing a poem a day for near to 15 years, thousands and thousands of poems. I begin with a few short pieces written in 2004 and 2005. home fires full moon bright on black winter sky wisp of cloud like chimney smoke crosses drawing me home beacon crescent moon hangs white against the midnight sky, its gently arc a beacon to the weary and day-worn first frost first frost and leaves fall soft and slow like red and yellow snowflakes drifting in the sun creating perfection a small mole at the base of her spine calls to me as she walks away this tiny imperfection on taut, tanned skin creating perfection like a god who laughs at the absurdity of his creation shadows a woman in red stands quiet and still before a red wall becomes like a shadow on the wall while I, standing,as it passes become a shadow on the parade of daily life  The next poem is by Wislawa Szymborska, taken from her book View with a Gain of Sand, published by Harcourt Brace om 1993. The original Polish text was translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clair Cavanagh. Children of Our Age We are children of our age, it's a political age. All day long, all through the night, all affairs - yours, ours, theirs - are political affairs. Whether you like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political cast, your eyes a political slant. Whatever you say reverberates, whatever you don't say speaks for itself, so either way you're talking politics. Even when you take to the woods, you're taking political steps on political grounds. Apolitical poems are also political, and above us shines a moon no longer purely lunar. To be or not to be, that is the question. And though it troubles the digestion it's a question, as always, of politics. To acquire a political meaning you don't even have to be human. Raw material will do, or protein feed, or crude oil, or a conference table whose shape was quarreled over for months; Should we arbitrate life and death at a round table or a square one. Meanwhile, people perished, animals died, houses burned, and the fields ran wild just as in times immorial and less political.  I grew up about 35 miles from South Padre Island and years later lived further up the coast in Corpus Christi, Texas, across Corpus Christi Bay from North Padre/Mustang Island. I left the coast to live in San Antono until the mid-90s when the state agency I worked for was eliminated. In the early 2000's I moved back to Corpus Christi for a year to work for United Way. This piece was written in 2002, drawing on many coastal and beach memories. north wind on a southern beach a north wind blows strong against the incoming tide and all across the bay white caps flash in the sun like handkerchiefs fluttering across a field of salty sea-green a beachcomber, dressed for the day in a silver windbreaker walks the beach barefoot, shoes tied by their strings to hang around his neck, throws bread to the gulls, greedy birds, swooping, fighting each other and the wind for every crumb  Next, two short poems by Wanda Coleman from her book, Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems and Stories 1968 -1986. The book was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1987. The poet was born in Watts, know for it's 1965 rebellion, an event which cemented in her a determination to become a writer. A struggling welfare mother, she held true to her ambition and eventually became the eighth minority member of the Writers' Guild of America. Dear Peter Pan your son really looks like you down to the freckles your daughter is more like you than he is we talk of you from time to time i'm done with you but they have questions High Time Lovers so they never had anything together except sessions in bed to a backdrop of jazz and pretzels silver satin wine pillows seasonal red devil mattresses and green brown marijuana blankets to get hot cause their bodies couldn't generate enough heat to copulate comfortably  The next short piece is from 2005, early in the time when I wrote a new poem every morning. It was a fun period of discovery and writing. Part of the reason I quit writing a year or so ago, after thousands of poems, is that it just wasn't fun anymore. before the estate sale quiet walk through a dead man's house soft steps echo in this husk of a life seashells whisper of a falling tide end of the end beginning This is another piece from 2005 when I was writing in the morning and evening from the front porch of a coffeehouse near downtown. This is one of a number of poems written on that porch. sunset on South Alamo the air is still at sunset, a pause before the night edges out days shortened by the passing of summer here on South Alamo traffic slows and lights brighten curtained windows across the way the sun dips to afterglow and the nigh air comes, whispering quiet through spreading shadows curtains blow leaves rustle not far away, the river flows green and sluggish between cobbledwalkways, music drifts across the water and through the gathering crowds here, in this neighborhood, night begins as quietly as day has ended This is another poem from the same porch, this one a morning poem from 2006. from the porch at Casa Chiapas on a rainy morning it is a cool morning, wet at long last, rainwater pooling atop the table on the patio on the street workers are building curb and gutter forms, first step in repaving this old street I sit high and dry on the porch, enjoying the cool morning, the rain, the workers, their yellow hardhats dripping from the rain, even the noise, the hammers, the concrete saw curtting through trough old sidewalk, the screechy peep of the front loader as it backs up to drop its load of broken asphalt and concrete in the idling dump truck the morning is all around me, the stink of diesel exhaust, the big engine of the motor grader, rumbling, (see how delicate and precise its cut) I watch it all, hear it all, smell it all even the worker on the side, taking a break, lighting up, letting loose a cloud of tobacco smoke, I smell that, too, and remember the taste and for the first time in ten years, miss it I imagine a cigarette between my fingers and wait for a poem  This poem is by Vandana Khanna, taken from her book, Train to Agra, published by Southern University Press in 2001. Khanna was born in New Delhi and has lived most of her life in the United States. She attended the University of Virginia and received her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she was recipient of the Yellen Fellowship in poeetry. Alignment In Hindi, love is always the long version: "You are in my heart." In Hindi movies, you can tell always it's a love scene because the man and woman never kiss, just sing and gyrate their hips towards each other. Love is splashed like billboards all along the Delhi streets in a blur of reds and blues. * Every time my grandmother tried to learn how to drive, she got pregnant. She never learned how to shift gears, but she had three children. * I know the lines give me away. My palms hold all the stories: you will lose like your mother and great-grandmother, like all the women in your family, all of them widows. * My grandmother at thirteen: married a man she had never seen before the wedding day, before the fire and the pundit. Fifty years later my grandmother at sixty-three: "That was not the best way but the only way." * Before the wedding, before years of marriage, my parents consulted an astrologer to see if their stars were aligned. Thirty years of marriage based on stardust and heat. Love is all numbers. The math insists upon it.  This piece is from 2004. in defense of dirty old men everywhere it's not sex that makes us pause at the passing of every pretty girl it's not lust, but longing longing for times passed, nostalgia for the clear slate of youth, the vigor of a body unbroken, the clear and undiminished joy of life unburdened by experience, life free of debilitating knowledge, free of the sharp grinding edges of life that have worn us down and make us old no, it's not sex that makes us pause but envy and longing for a second chance  This poem is by Leslie Ullman and is taken fom her book, Slow Work through Sand, published by University of Iowa Press in 1998. For many years, Ullman lived in the Southwest in the company of horses with access to the desert. She directs the creative writing program at the University of Texas, El Paso and is also on the faculty of the MFA program at Vermont College. Night Trade This is the way coyote sleeps: leaving his skin behind him, all plumage and stilled breath. Taking his skinny self elsewhere, to dart after rabbits and dream at the moon. Pealing howls under the moon, shrill gold coins tossed to other coyotes and gotten back doubled. Then he lowers his nose and curls his tail about his paws, smug as a house cat, as teh coins roll gleaming into the night to scare chickens and toss ranchers in their bunks. All night he licks he lips over this meal of noise, this gab-fest with cousins posted like radar stations in the dark. By day, they disappear, all thousands of them, leaving the desert to sunlight and trucks. They go back to their sleeping hides: one tanned carefully by a boy with his first gun, one eaten by moths in a Dakota trading post, one tagged with a high price on Rodeo Drive, and this one stretched across the foot of my bed at the watered edge of desert, where I wake some nights shivering in gold light and ghost money.  . This piece is from 2004. It's the kind of satire that keeps getting me banned from Facebook in 30-day increments. It's frustrating posting on Facebook, especially satire or parody, since I have to decide if the humor of the piece will be understood by the stupid 13-year-olds who run their censorship program. what God don't like I was seeing this preacher fella on TV the other day that was saying God don't like men fucking men. I don't know how in the world he would know that, except maybe he was talking to God and just straight out ask him, like, hey, God, what do you think about this men fucking men thing? I'd be afraid to do that, but maybe it's OK for preachers, especially this particular preacher fella, since it looks like he's pretty close to God and like he must talk to him about alll sorts of things cause he's all the time on TV, talking about what God likes and don't like (mostly about what he don't like from what I've seen) not just about men fucking, but all sorts of other things God don't like, like treehuggers and feminazies and Democrats and evolutionists and poor people and those wussy-[ussy perverts who think we ought not to be killing those raghead foreigners without some kind of pretty good reason (I mean, hell, he says, it's not like they're white people). and all those Commies, whatever they call themselves now but mostly what i get from listening to the TV fella is that mainly what God most often don't like are people who aren't exactly like the TV fella so I'm thinking maybe I ought to study that fella and try real hard to be as much like him as I can then maybe God won't don't like me tool  This piece is by John Ashbery, taken from his book, April Galleons, published by Penguin Books in 1998. April Galleons Something was burning. And bersides, At the far end of the room discredited walz Was alive alnd reciting tales of the conquerors And their lilies - is all of life thus A tepid housewarming? And where do the scraps Of meaning come from? Obviously it was time to be off, in another Direction, toward marshlands and cold, scrolled Names of cities that sounded as though they existed, But never had. I could see th escow Like a nail file pointed at the pleasures Of the great open sea, that it would stop for me, That you and I should sample the disjointedness Of a far-from-level deck, and then return some day, Through the torn orange veils of an early evening That will know our names only in a different Pronunciation, and then, and only then, Might be the profit-taking of spring arrive In due course, as one says, with the gesture Of a bird taking off for some presumably Better location, though not major, perhaps, In the sense that a winged guitar would be major If we had one. And all trees seemed to exist. There there was a shorter day with dank Tapestries streaming initials of all the previous owners To warn us into silence and waiting. Would the mouse Know us now, and if so how far would propinquity Admit discussion of the difference: crumb or other Less perceptible boon? It was all going To be scattered anyway, as far from one's wish At the root of the tree from the center of the earth From which it nonetheless issued in time to In for us of happy blossoms and tomorrow's Festival of the vines. Just being under them Sometimes makes you wonder how much you know And then you wake up and you know, but not how much. In intervals in the twilight notes from an Untuned Mandolin seem to co-exist with their Question and the no less urgent reply. Come To look at us but not too near or its familiarity Will vanish in a thunderclap and the begger-girl, String-haired and incomprehensibly weeping, will Be all that is left of the golden age, our Golden age, and no longer will the swarms Issue forth at dawn to return in a rain of mild Unsatisfacrtory honesty with tales of colored cities, Of how the mist bult there, and what were the Directions the lepers were taking To avoid these eyes, the old eyes of love. In  I wrote this next poem in 2004. At the time there was early talk of the best earth bound telescope's sighting of a massive collusion of galaxies in the Hydra Constellation. Now, nearly 20 years later we have clear photos of what is happening and what continue to happen over eons. Millions of stars, untold numbers of planets, and on some of them life like ours, with their own histories, religions, literature, political system, sciences, people with their own alien brand of everything that makes up our lives. All estinguished or in the process of being extinguished. Some righ now, some a thousand, ten thousand, a million years in the future. Our fate too at some point. How puny our Gods seem when the all is seen on this scale. This moved me 20 plus years ago, and I wrote about it in this piece and others. Today, actually seeing it, leaves me unable to imagine the limits or ends of creation and the accompying de-creation going on all around us. meanwhile in the Hydra Constellation a storm of stars pass soundless through the void, crossing unimaginable distances and times to meet, to crash in a flash of exploding suns and primordial fire stretching across a billion year, a furnace unlike any since the first great eruption that came from less than nothing to blast a cosmos into being and around those speeding suns orbiters like our own earth, and on some of them, creatures like ourselves, products of an evolutionary trail from muck to self-discovered glory, inventions of their own histories, periods dark and light, times of cruelty, death, and genius flowerng, people like we are people, struggling though life, seeking grace, forgiveness, the salvation of love, seeking honorable life and an honorable end that end comes to them now, across the void in a storm of stars colliding, an end ablaze with the light of creation deconstructing
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 the night I got chased out of Mexico this is a story about the night I got chased out of Mexico by a posse of Mexican taxi cabs I was a young guy just old enough at 21 to get a taxi license and I was driving cab on the Texas side of the border I picked up a fare outside one of the hotels who wanted to go to Mexico and I said hell yes cause it was about 25 miles and at 35 cents for the first mile and 10 cents a mile thereafter it was a pretty good pay-off of which I’d get a third which never was a hell’uv a lot most nights but better for a trip like this so we headed out down 77 for Matamoros through Brownsville and across the bridge from where I knew how to go two places boys town about which we will speak no more and the Central Plaza which was close to the Mercado and lots of good nightclubs good food music and floorshows with sometimes naked women and that’s where the fella I was carrying wanted to go so we went there and I dropped him off at the plaza and while he paid me I noticed all the Mexican cabbies giving me the eye and I noticed when I left some of those Mexican cabs started following behind and then I noticed I had ten to fifteen Mexican cabs riding my back bumper and I said to myself oh shit I fucked up and the way they were following close and honking it looked pretty clear that they were pissed about whatever it was I did so I took off for the bridge as fast as I could trying to remember as I flew which of the many one way streets in Matamoros were going my way and which were going to either get me lost or back to the plaza where more trouble was sure to be waiting and when I reached the bridge I tossed my 8 cents to cross to the Mexican border guard without hardly stopping --- when I got back my dispatcher told me the rules - cabs don’t cross borders fares are dropped at the bridge where they can walk across and get a local cab so I really felt dumb and never did that again though one time I did pick up a guy at the bridge who had been in jail in Matamoros for three days and was beat all to shit and bleeding and barely conscious so I took him to a hospital but that’s another story  This poem is by Stephen Dunn, taken from his book Loosestrife, published W.W. Norton in 1996. This was Dunn's tenthcollection of poetry and a National Book Critics Circle nominee. Imagining Myself My Father I drove slowly, the windows open, letting the emptiness within meet the brotherly emptiness without. Deer grazed by the Parkway's edge, solemnly enjoying their placid, gentle lives. There were early signs of serious fog. Salesman with a product I had to pump myself up to sell, merchant of my own hope, friend to every toolbooth man, I named the trees I passed. I knew the dwarf pines, and why in such soil the could grow only so tall. A groundhog wobbled from the woodss. It, too, seemed ridiculous, and I conjured for it a wild heart, at least a wild heart. My dashboard was aglelam with numbers and time. It was the kind of morning the dark never left. The truly wild were curled up, asleep, or in some high nest looking down. There was no way they'd let us love them just right. I said "fine" to those who asked. I told them about my sons, athletes both. All day I moved among men who claimed they needed nothing, nothing, at least, that I had. Maybe another time, they said, or, Sorry, things are slow. On the drive back I drove fast and met the regulars at the inn for a drink. It seemed to me a man needed a heart for the road, and a heart for home, and one more for his friends. And so many different, agile tongues.  I lived in Austin in the early-mid 60s for a while. It's another world now, nine hundred thousand, near one million, population, as compared to a quartr million when I lived there. It was a sleepy little city back in the day, it's primary businesses, state government and the University of Texas. Not so much now. I visited often on state business in the 70s and 80s. Now it's just for ocassional visits to see our son. Haven't been down town in at least 5 years. It was a cool place in those day, unconsciously cool, unlike the uber-cool of today. A great place to live back then. I wouldn't live there know if you payed me. The People’s Republic of Austin I was going to write this poem about Austin, Texas, back in the day, back when the hippies and hillbillies decided if they could swim naked together at Hippy Hollow they could get together on some other stuff, too, like music and drugs and a damn good time, back when you could find on any given Friday night most of the most important left-wing Democrats in Texas down at Shultz’s Biergarten getting drunk on Lone Star and insurrection against those conservative Demopublicans who’d been winning elections around the state since reconstruction (thirty years later they finally got one of their own elected, but she didn’t drink anymore and got her ass busted four years later by another ex-drunk who went on after that to become president) but, mainly, I was writing about back when I was young, and then I realized this poem was not about Austin, Texas, it was about me getting old and missing the good times and how everything tastes better when your mouth is fresh and your teeth are your own and how it isn’t Austin that’s gotten old and conservative and creaky and cranky it’s me goddammit me.  Following are 2 verses by Lalla, with translations by Coleman Barks, from Naked Stone, a collection of her verses and songs published by Maypop Books in 1992 . Lalla, who lived from 1320 to 1392, was a 14th century North Indian mystic, who wandered medieval Kashmire singing her songs. * Awareness is the ocean of existence. Let loose and you words will rage and cause wounds like fishing spears. But if you tend it like a fire to discover the truth, you will find how much of that there is in what you say. None. * What is worship? Who are this man and this woman bringing flowers? What kind of flowers should be bought, and what streamwater poured over the images? Real worship is done by the mind (Let that be a man) and by the desire (Let that be awoman). And let the those two chooose what to sacrifice. There is a liquid that can be released from under the mask of the face, a nectar which when it rushes down gives discipline and strength. Let that be your sacred pouring. Let your worship song be silence *  this is for the dumb-asses who disturb my sleep that’s it! I’m through trying to educate you you tea-party poo-poo head you over-heated, under-ventilated birther you death-panel devotee you Marxist cannibal you Capitalist cannibal you non-economic determinist cannibal you knobby knoll two-shooter theory crackpot you homophobic dickhead you Nazi feminist man-eating penis-envying witch who thinks all me should be strung up by their balls until they admit to the primal sin of manhood you victimhood addict at home on your farm in Kansas on 9-11 but still wanting special consideration for your trauma you you…you… you know who you are - I’ve done with you go shout your dumb-ass obsessions at the wind see if it cares anymore than I do  This poem is by Walter McDonald, taken from his book Night Landings. McDonald is a former Air Force pilot and is currently the Horn Professor of English at Texas Tech University. His two most recent collections ae The Flying Dutchman which won the George Elliston Prize and After the Noise of Saigon, which won the Juniper Prize. This book was published by Harper and Row in 1989. The Digs in Escondido Suddenly, the skull, a girl's, the cause of death obvious and swift, a diamond-shaped incision through the brain. She fell face down, bowing under the same tornado sky we worship. Summers, we scrape layers of dry caliche down through pottery and arrowheads, hoping for people, out picks flicking bones of buffaloes and wolves. Carefully, we resurrect her. What did she see, thise last few days? Alone at this lake, those first plains people kneeled this deep in the canyon, nowhere to turn for water. They may have sacrificed lame sons to keep them safe, nothing to cover them but skins of whatever they could kill, bison and deer, antelope with pronged horns, and wolves. On land this flat, if they wondered about gods, when the stumbled on this canyon, they believed: a spring-fed stream, rabbits and quail,enough flint for fire and arrows. On some days the felt nothing threatening, not even wind riffling through the feathers of an arrow about to kill. She is a bowl, a little skull. We stroke and photograph, and probe the flint of an arrow trapped by the brain's hard dust.  some kind of pretty damn good spuds I have a new book coming out in a few days… an E-book and I’ve never done an E-book before and never done any kind of book with this publisher… I don’t know how it’s going to turn out but I hope it’s not bad and if it is bad, I hope I learn something since I have another book in process and want to be certain that if I do bad again, it’ll be a whole different kind of bad than I did this time at least… one of the old fellas at the coffee shop ask me if I made any money off my books - he’s about eighty-something, the kind of old-timer that’s probably been making money one way or another since he was about five years old - and I told him, well hell, if I expected to make money I’d be planting potatoes not writing poems, because if you consider it carefully it’s clear there’s lots of different things to be done with potatoes, from French fires, to baked, to potato pancakes, to scalloped, to a ‘gratin and that French dish of potatoes all baked up crispy with lots of stuff mixed in like green onions and who knows what, not being French, I don’t have clue… but compare all the great things you can do with a potato to what you can do with a poem - limited, as far as I can see, to a bit of insight into the true workings of the world and women and men and trees and flowers and hills and dales and so forth, and that’s only about once every 17,450 poems, which is pretty good if you get it but doesn’t compare at all to a loaded baked potato or some of the oven fries down at the German Deli - they’s some kind of pretty damn good spuds  This poem is by Mary Swander, taken from her book, Heaven-and-Earth House, published by Alfred A Knoph in 1994. Swander is a native Iowan and an associate professor at Iowa State University. She has a Master's Degree from the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop and has received numerous awards and grants for her work, including from the National Endowment for the Arts. Gulf In this town, 1941, they burned Chester Yoder's effigy in the square. Stuffed with straw, it went up faster then ditch grass on a drought day. After so many months without rain, all it takes is a spark, then the fields are aflame. After so many years without bombs, we remember Chester again, the first Amish here to face the draft, Old Order, German speaker, the man so many called traitor, the one who clung to his belief that no matter who or how, killing was wrong. Even after his job as a forest fighter, some turned and crossed the street, others called him "yellow" and spat. Now we wrap the trees with ribbons to welcome home who flew over the cradle, and when the tree rocked and the wind blew, flames spread for miles in all directionss. Let's give them a hand. Or an arm. Or the Moustache Chester still shaves off every morning in protest against the old commanders in the country his ancestors fled from freedom. Let's let them atone for all the shame we felt in the past, battles unwon, hay never put up in the barn. To bear, each year the hard ground needs blessing, so let's sprinkle our seeds with water, blood and oil. Let's sit down with Chester at the table and lower our heads for prayer, for now when the bread breaks, so does the bough and even Chester can never fight that fire.  I joined the U. S. Air Force in 1965, a couple of weeks after my draft notice arrived. I was assigned to the Air Force Security Service where I was a Russian linguist, trained in the language in 1966 at Indiana University. I learned enough Russian, mostly military terminology, to survive the remainder of my enlistment serving in West Germany and Pakistan. even including a promotion to Buck Sargeant before it was over. I was not very good at the language beyond the narrow confines of my job, spying on Russian air force plane to ground control and vice versa radio communications. Twenty five years later I have nothing left of the language. my Russian lessons I was taught by Russian refugees from the 1917 revolution, the most elite of the Czar’s guard, defeated, humiliated by the mob, fled, most to Algiers, where many applied their military talents to the French Foreign Legion until that enterprise, too, was lost, most of them, when I knew them, living in their past, their golden age that ended fifty years earlier, living out their last years teaching Russian to American Air Force recruits who did not understand, did not comprehend their military ethos or of the glory and honor of their imperial past… they lived in the past as their young students lived in the day, certain - as the young recruits were certain their good times would never end - that their good time would return, that the mob would turn, that even after so many years the tide would rise up, the communist despots overthrown, and they, the inheritance of their people, would no longer be relics at a Midwestern university, teaching the coarse and unworthy, but would be once again the princes of the realm, glittering and golden as of old… there’s nothing wrong with enjoying memories of the best times past, the danger is to live with those memories, thinking you can make them happen again, come again just as they used to be, unwilling to accept the grinding turn of the wheel that is time, the grist that turns all the best and worst of the past to dust blowing in history’s unremitting wind… another fifty years now from those days of my own youth, I know there is some of the czarist officer in me, too much in me, as in the hour at night when I slip these days and return to my own best times, relive those times and, more than that, extend them to a new day that could be if memory’s dust could be made a power beyond the force of gritty and hollow wind - it is a dead end, that hour, a repudiation of the real life I have made and the world I live it in… better for me to look to the lesson of Fyodor, round little white moustachioed Fyodor, only a cadet when the end came, fleeing to Algiers like the Colonels, but, unlike them, putting aside dreams of the glory that might have been his, finding his way in music instead of war, becoming a bandleader, playing for years, leader of an official ship’s band, a life, with his little moustache, on luxury liners crossing the Atlantic, east to west, west to east, then retiring, teaching, writing his memoirs, paper piled two feet high in his closet, recording a life that always looked forward, never looked back… Fyodor, a champion for us who bury ourselves in past glories, who see too little beyond the day before last, a life that sees too much of the sun’s setting, too little of its morning rebirth… grand old Fayda, teaching me my most important Russian lessons  The next piece is by Chitra Banerjee Dvakarumi, taken from her book, Black Candle, subtitled "Poems about women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh." The book was published by CALYX Books in 1998. The poet was born in Calcutta and has moved around the world, living in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two children at the time the book was published. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. from Wright State University in Ohio. The poem ends with an explanatory footnote: "The worship of the Living Goddess continues even today in Kathmandu, Nepal. The "goddesses" are discarded at puberty. Feared and avoided, they live out their lives as outcasts." The Living Goddess Speaks Katmandu, Nepal He had been there always, the old man hovering at the edges of my childhood. His shaven head, his white priest's robe. Between games of tag and doll weddings he darted. dry, lizard-leathery. Following my sister home from the bazaar I could feel his eyes on me. My fifth birthday, he came into the house, spoke to grandfather. I was brought in, examined: forehead, palms, the soles of my feet. Yes, I had the thirty-two auspicious signs. I must be taken to the temple, must become Kumari, the new Living Goddess. A great honor. I clung to mother. They pried my fingers loose. Gently, the Living Goddess must not be harmed. Like mist they haze past, the nights alone in the ivory bed, the noises. The days on the temple throne, the high, chill, silver seat, the gold-worked silks. The jewels pulling at my throat. Garlands, incense, mightmare toll of bells. Dying babies thrust at my feet. The lame, the blind, themad. I saw, touched them all. Knew names of all diseases, though often not the meaning. Early I learned the Living Goddess does not ask, or weep. One day they brought my sister. In her stiff bride-silks she touch her forehead to my feet for blessing. A burning shuddered through me. I could say nothing. The Living Goddess does not speak. Seven years. Any day now my blood's dark flow will bring release. They do not tell me, but I know, already they have found my successor. What life for me beyond these walls, these iron doors? Even my attendant women, bringing bath water or eveninglamps, shrink from my gaze. The final clang of the gates behind me, who will I find to part the lips that have leaned not to speak? Who can kiss shut the eyes that cannot weep? Or lower his weight between the open legs of a once Living Goddess? Evenings at my window, up on tiptoe, pressed against the bars, I hear bazaar women selling candy, shiny red and green, jewel bright. Below, the brown canal where temple offerings are thrown. Dying jasmines from my coronet, crushed hibiscus from my throat, my feeet. They swirl by slow, then fast, faster, into the vortex of a river dark, rushing, somewhere beyond my sight.  best damn chili in Texas Frontier Something or Other was the name of the place on the edge of downtown in San Angelo best damn chili in Texas, the devil’s own hangover preventative pork and beef and three kinds of pepper hot enough to defoliate your nose hairs and grease enough to coat your guts from inflow to the gotta go a bowl before you hit the bars and a bowl after and you’re be so damn stone cold sober at reveille your eyebrows stand and salute when old General Pushcart come by on the back of his jeep I used to know a lot about this sort of thing  The next piece is by Lester Paldy, Distinguished Service Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he taught beginning in 1967. During those years he also served on the the US arms control delegations in Geneva and at the UN. The book, Wildflowers at Babi Yar, was published by Night Heron Press in 1994. Kiev, June 6, 1993 The Schoolgirl The twelve year old girl with deep gray eyes and hair the amber of ripening wheat stands at the bus stop holding the bunch of iris at her waist. She is too young for sadness, unlike us, and cannot know that later there will be time for that and chance enough. Sunday Morning People crowd the benches for the late morning mass, at the monastery chapel, their voices filling the space and flowing around the ornate columns. Children buy ice cream from vendors on the tree-lined street near the war memorial. On the afghanistan wall, names in Cyrillic script loom over a nodding babushka who stares at one as if wishing she could make it vanish. The Old Woman At a Bessarbskaja market a babushka weighs strawberries in a rusty balance, wraps them in newspaper, with hands like burnished leather and gives them to me. The fruit stains the paper deep red in my grasp. Her old and wrinkled hands were more gentle than mine. The Conversation A man and a woman walk arm in arm along the crowded street. He holds flowers and speaks to her with quiet intensity, oblivious to the barefoot woman and two small children standing by the curb who seem to wait for a ride to a place where none of us will ever go. Late Sunday Afternoon Trees arch over Artema street where crowds walk among the pasteled buildings. Some ride crowded trolleys to Independence square and sit by the fountain among the booksellers, where they talk as if words might hold the transient day and delay the coolness of the coming night. Andreskaya Street At dusk the gold domes of Andreskaya church catch the last of the sunlight and lamps burn in barges on the Dneiper glistening far below. Houselights glow on hillsides and cirrus veil the first star in the westrern sky. If the weather holds the Pleiades will shine on Ukraine tonight.  Another Austin piece, this one from about 15 years ago. Austin, 6th Street, 1 a.m. still a good crowd out mostly twenty-somethings from the University enough business to keep the bars open and the bands playing I came down to listen to one particular band featuring my son on bass and trombone and enjoyed their first set but it’s awful damn late for an old guy so I’m heading back to my hotel to hit the sack can’t help as I walk back to my car thinking back 40 years when 6th street after dark was a good place to get VD or stabbed in the back and not much else it’s all changed now 6th street means neon lights and music and let’s face it some weird looking kids and cops on horses keeping it mostly quiet and clean for several blocks around the actual street itself and this late with the tourists gone to bed and the state people and the business people in town for meetings gone to their rooms to drink it’s a quiet scene, mellow, and young - the only people I see my age are begging quarters and cigarettes left-over vague-eyed burned-out hippies who took a trip in 1965 and never made it back it’s a trip for me too being here watching the scene remembering things change but they always stay the same that’s been my experience  The next piece is by Boris Pasternak from his book of selected poems. Pasternak is best known for his masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, for which, along with multiple volumns of poetry, he won the Nobel Prize. Born in Moscow in 1890, he died in 1960, spending much of his life, and especially after his Nobel Prize, in trouble with the Communisht State. Sparrow Hills Put your breast under kisses, as under a tap! For summer will not always bubble up, An we cannot pump out the accordion's roar Night after night round the dusty floor. I've heard tell of old age. Terrible prophecies! No breaker will throw up its hands to the stars. They say things you can't believe. No face in the grass, No heart in the ponds, no God in the trees. Stir up your sould then! Make it all foam today. Where are your eyes? This is the world's high noon. Up there, thoughts cluster in a fleecy spray Of cloud, heat, and woodpeckers, pine-needle and cone. At this point the tramlines of town break off. Beyond, it is Sunday. Breaking off branches, The glade runs for cover, slipping on grass. Scattering noons and trinity and country walks - The world is always like this, the wood believes. So the thicket devised it. so the clearing was told, So it pours from the clouds - on us in our shirt-sleeves 1917  what if I’m my evil twin there’s a kind of Jeckle/Hyde theory that suggests we are all twined in the world, the good in us and the bad of our potential separated into two beings who live in contradiction to each other if this is true, it is in our nature to assume we must be the good twin, but I’m thinking maybe that’s wrong, what if I’m the evil twin who for years has been fucking up all the good done through some other guy’s good deeds, undermining his life by being the him he doesn’t want anyone to see Holy Moley! as Jimmy Durante might say, the possibilities is flabbergastin’  This piece is by Cynthia Zarin, from her book The Swordfish Tooth, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1989. This was Zarin's debut book. The poet was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, she was working as a staff writer at The New Yorker when the book was published. Although it was a first book, she had appeard often in magazines and periodicals. Wildlife Heads smaller than my fist, pin teeeth, the frightened chipmunk clutchng the porch screen frightens me - quick movements not my own jarring a rainy, eerie afternoon, in a week of enforced solitude, as though my heart leapt out. Time incoate, meaningless. Two birds, trapped all night inside the porch, arch and din against the grid. A day equals a black year - motor of the blood a drill gone mad. At dawn we found them, wooed them out. And then, last night, a mole: visitant friar a the garbage can. Alone, I stamp my foot, but bold in company, one guest terrified, become a benign protector of dim habits, arthly or unearthly scrounging in or out.  Next, I have two poems from 2005, fairly early in my poem-a-day routine. The poems were written on successive days. I think of them as the step-sisters.
Both poems were included in my first book, Seven Beats a Second, from 2007. eyes of Sister Jude sharp eyes, like tempered blades that cut clean through when angry guarded eyes tat weigh and judge and stand alert for betrayal at every turn dark eyes, deep, softeed once by love and melted by passion, then moistened by a long night's weeping but only once, and it was long ago the dreams of Mary Quemada her long hair flowing like a dark tide gathering across her satin pillow, she dreams of times past and places she loved long ago while I, watching, year to dream with her There will be no poetry in this post. Instead I will push my art, specifically, the 15 pieces I recently hung at Kapej Cafe and Gallery on the north edge of downtown San Antonio, 5 pieces in the cafe and 10 pieces in the gallery. Also, I am posting a very abbreviated version of my professional biography, the part of my life that I consider "my life," acknowledging that my art, and before that, my poetry, was begun after my professional life ended basically as a way to stay busy until I died. That is not to say that I am not committed to my poetry and art. It is just a part of my nature to never be uncommitted to whatever it is I'm doing. And like everything I do, I do it my own way. Here's the professional part of my life, 30 years worth, very reduced. I worked for the state Employment Security Agency for 30 year, ending my career as the agency's San Antonio Regional Director with 400 staff spread in about 20 offices over 28 counties. Before my professional career, I was educated at the University of New Mexico in a Peace Corp training program in 1964. In 1966 I studied Russian at the US Air Force Intensive Language Training Institute at Indiana University. Following the training I spent two yearsin Germany and Pakistan performing classified intelligence functions in the US and abroad. Upon discharge in 1966, I returned to Texas State University where I had studied before and graduated in 1971 with a major in Sociology. Several years later I attended a Masters course in Philosophy at University of Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas. I was working at the time as Community Services Director for the local United Way and found the night classes more intrusive than I wanted and didn't complete the Masters program. While back at Texas State University, I published a couple of poems in an Austin based poetry mag, then continued to write until graduation when professional and family demands took up all my time and attention. I returned to writing after i retired in 1995, publishing seven books (one print and six eBooks.) I published in a number of print and on-line until about 10 years ago when I greated a blog where I printed my work and the work of others. A couple of months ago, my poetry inspiration stopped and I looked for an alternative creative outlet, which led to the paintings I'm posting here today. Okay, that done, here is my new fascination, spray paint on wood, 8 to 10 inches across and 4 to 5 feet vertically. I've done about 50 pieces in addition the the 15 I recently hung. I draw inspiration from a number of sources, frequently literary, occasionally biblical, sometimes historical, and political. Most often, it’s a memory of something I’ve seen or heard. I applied metaphor to my poetry and do the same with my art I invite my San Antonio area friends to visit Kapej Cafe and Gallery 415 Camden on the north edge of downtown to view my art, and, on the third Saturday of every month, 2pm to 4pm, to my regular poetry reading. Even as I am posting this now, I haven't figured out how to regularize the size of the images. I made the images with the same camera with the same settings, yet half the images when posted turn out very large. Disappointing, since the images are much better when seen all at once. But enough complaining. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- True Romance $210  Red Tide $175  Explosion at the Campbell Soup Factory $210  The Big Lie $210  Now Is The Time of Assassins (After Artur Rimbaud) $225  Mystery At the bottom of the Devil's Blue Hole $165  Saturday Night At the Flatonia Follies $115  Den of Iniquity  Riot OnSunshine Strip $190  Double Trouble $150  Mountain King $135  Crossing the Bridge Together A John Lewis Tribute $150  Jacob's Ladder $160  Shadrack in the Fiery Pit $185  That's it. Back to my version of poetry in my next post. let us consider blood and water water is the blood that lets our blood flow, the blood of all life the blood of the forest and of the meadow and of pastures and bluebonnets, and daisies and the blood-red rose, the blood that eases drought, that allows farmers to plant and sow, that allows the cow and pig and lamb to grow to fill our stomach, the blood that we rise at midnight to lubricate our dry mouth, the blood that washes away desert dust at a noon oasis, panacea for both our hunger and our thirst… water is the blood that flows between rivals in dry times, blood is the disputed creek or river, the range war, neighbor on neighbor, water is the blood that flows as aquifers are drained for some at the expense of others… water is the blood of wars coming, the blood for which we will fight, the blood to be shed in the fighting, yours for mine, mine for yours… water is the blood of all our future desires…  a Memorial Day poem of a sort, more a memoir expressed in short lines as if disguised as a poem. Whatever it is, it is a long one. Marching behind the heroes (a Memorial Day rememberance) the circumstances that led to my military experience began At the University of New Mexico In the Fall of 1964… Completing five months Of Peace Corps training, then, Not select for overseas assignment, I returned to South Texas To drive a taxicab for several Months (from which several great Stories came) then a move To Southeast Texas to work For a small-town newspaper, Managing circulation, plus occasional Stints as a news writer and photographer and, Very rarely, help in the press room… losing my draft deferment after leaving Peace Corps training, I enrolled In a junior college in a town A few miles from the city where I worked, then neglected to attend Any classes, which, becoming known To my draft board in South Texas, Led to my receiving a draft notice Two weeks before Christmas, 1965… Not wishing to spend two years Of my life pounding ground in the army, I quickly enlisted in the Air Force, Choosing four years over two In the hope, at the relatively late age of 21, of doing something more interesting for the time spent… Spending the requisite time in basic training, where a tall, thin South Carolina drill sergeant, named me, as the oldest by several years of the other grunts, as "Big'un" Then selected to serve In the Air Force Security Service As a Linguist, spending most Of my next year of service at Indiana University studying Russian, Followed by several months At Goodfellow Air Force Base In San Angelo where we were introduced To the radio equipment we would use To eavesdrop on the Russian Air Force I next was sent to Darmstadt, West Germany (there being at that time, still, both an East and A West Germany) where I spent a year in a Unit that included Russian, German, Czech, Polish and Hungarian linguists assigned To monitor the air forces of all the Warsaw Pac Countries… It was a mostly routine job, there being Little non-routine activity to monitor, Until the day before I left to return To the States for leave pending Reassignment to West Pakistan… That day began with a great rushing Of activity throughout the Pac area, Troops and aircraft units rushing from Place to place, converging, late in the Night as my flight home passed over The Atlantic, in Czechoslovakia, the Czech government overthrown, its Leaders in exile and Warsaw Pac troops Occupying the cities’ streets and countryside The beginning of the invasion Discounted the day before as annual routine Exercises, the fact of the invasion not known To me until I deplaned at Charleston Air Force Base The next day… My next assignment was In Peshawar, West Pakistan... The original purpose of the post was to monitor Russian response to the U-2 flights over their country, This job ended when the Russians, almost by accident, Shot down one of the high-flying U-2s, taking the pilot Gary Powers, prisoner… After that debacle, our mission was directed At Russian missile and space rocket launches, Including monitoring Cosmonaut communications From space, though no such thing happened On my watch, there were many stories Of Russian loses kept secret, rockets exploding on launch And upon returning from space With cosmonauts inside, at least one Cosmonaut marooned in space, left To die in orbit… But mostly I monitored crop dusters Over the vast region that has become, Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Several independent republics Time passes and nothing is ever the same, For better and for worse and sometimes There is even a little fun, as when I monitored the Soviet Defense Minister Flying through the Kabul air gate On his way to Paris with his mistress… During that assignment I was able To fly to Kabul for a week of leave… What I saw in that week was a country On the cusp of leaving the 12th century Behind for the creation of a more modern State, particularly children I saw passing Our quarters, walking together, singing, On their way to school, a vision that Haunts me as I consider what has happened There since, the war lords, the bloody Russian Invasion, The equally bloody Taliban, the deep Sadness of possibilities lost… I left Pakistan, in 1969, the end of my military Career, as the government changed and we Were ejected from the country... Although I have suspicions… Our presence there was top secret to begin with, So, how do you tell when a secret is no more, How does one get thrown out from a place That supposedly was never there… ``````` And that was the end of my military service, Never a hero, never in the company of heroes, I did the job I was assigned to do and learned To enjoy it, gaining from it memories, images I Will never forget, and the GI Bill that funded The last two years of my college education And later a job in the early 70s helping Young veterans returned from the jungle, Needing assistance to reassert their civilian life, Near children, leaving their service 3 or 4 years Younger then I was when I went in, leaving me unwilling on occasions like today to consider myself as anything but a subsidiary to the Band of Brothers….  let us consider dreams sometimes I dream I am the hero flying on a white horse across a purple waving prairie; sometimes I dream I am the prairie ancient, clean, vibrant and fertile, forever waving beneath the sun and clouds slowly drifting; sometimes I am the clouds soft and billowy, traveling continents and oceans beneath the warming sun, beneath the cool, yellow moon; sometimes I am the sun and moon, sisters in a sky on the edge of stars gleaming, stars afire in the black eternal space of a god deeply sleeping; sometimes I am that sleeping god, dreaming that I am a white horse flying across the purple waving pastures of my forever spreading home…. sometimes I wake, sorry to be still lonely among my kind, sorry to be awake again in the world of undreaming… As I've told my story a couple of times before, I published my first couple of poems in the late 60s, while completing college after military service. Then I quit writing for nearly 30 years as family and profession took all my attention. When I returned to writing I was mostly interested in stories I had collected over the years. That, and the fact that I am basically a primitive in my writing and in my art, causes some to question my claim as a poet and an artist. Bullshit I say! I consider nomenclature irrelevant. I label my stuff "poetry" and "art" because in our culture, nothing is acknowledged until it is labelled. I labelled this piece "poetry" when I wrote it and when it was published in The Green Tricycle. It is the story of a portion of the experiences I had as a Peace Corp trainee in 1964. The piece tells the story of a three-day trek over the Monzana Mountains in the second week of December, 1964. December Passage Through the forested foothills we hiked, through the evergree cust of mountain chill and sun-warmed December desert, following an uphill, twisting trail cut by deer and bear and mountain cougar, until the horizon stretched red relow us and stars flickered bright overhead. On a rough and rocky slope we slept, amid the whisperine feral rustlle of wild nocturned life.. In the silent dawn we woke, under dim, gloomy skies. Lightly falling snow was soon a flurry, then a pale storm, then a curtain of white, finally a cloak wrapped tightly around us, muffling the sights and sounds of our passage. Through swirling white we trekked, bucking our packs up a zigzag path, finaly, over the crest, to a clearing covered in a mantle of snow, protected from the frigid wind by encircling trees. We rested for the night in this high refuge, kindling a fire to warm our circled camp. We turned our backs to the encroaching dark, drawing close around the blaze and, under a canopy of stars flickering in the black crystal night, singing songs many of us learned on Civil Rights marches, sharing the warm and radiant light of the jittering flames, Later, secure in the glow of crackling embers, we pulled dthe cold, clear night around us and slept. We woke to blood-bracing cold in the pink-tinged dark that signals the approach of sunrise. Dawn broke, silent and still, and the air was clean and clear, the storm over. High, high overhead, the track of an invisible jet sliced twine lines of white across the deep, dark blue of the cold morning sky, neatly thin lines at first, well-defined and stark, then swelling into broad bands of gauzy white that spread across the empyreal vault above us, the dissapated and disapparaed. Like the contrails of the jet above us, we began to stretch out along the trail on the downhill passage, drifting apart again, the mountains kinship fading, dissipating under the centrifugal force of journey's end let us consider life and death white knight at one end of the jousting field, resplendent in white armor, horse draped in white armor as well, brilliant in the noon sun, Lancelot I think it was, the King’s champion, the Queen’s lover... and onto the field rides the mystery of the black knight, a huge man on a huge horse, unknown, as black as Lancelot was white, a spoiler in the game… and we all know, sitting in our theater seats, that this is going to be a battle between good and bad, dark and light, life and death and there it is… the essence of the battle we fight between birth and the end, the life-light that is born with us, and that we carry with us, the sunshine of all the days allotted to us and the inevitable everlasting dark the black at the end of tunnel, the final mysterious fall into the nothing and nowhere of night so deep we lose our place forever, lost to the dark forever the white, the shining light of life, the brilliance of all possible good wrapped around us, our cocoon of potential protecting us from the black that always surrounds us, the dark that daily tries to seduce us into its cold embrace… a fight we all know we will lose in the end for black is the natural state all around us, the natural state of us and all our works as well, broken for a short spell by the sun passing over us, rising, then falling, true to its end as must we be to our own  Lord, could you at least do this one thing for me it’s a bright, beautiful day outside and the dog waits in the car for a walk but three weeks into three weeks of head cold and cedar fever allergy miseries I am so weak and disoriented (in the sixties and seventies, people would have paid good money for a hit of this other-worldly inter-dimensionality, this stepping over clouds beneath my feet, this head-butting the late-setting moon, this twisted lattice of space and time and fear of flying and just plain old reality-slippage, like sand draining through my ears) but then is then and now is now, at least I think so, and the fun is gone and I would really like a hit of bed, instead pillow-plumping-covers-covering sleep, days or at least long enough for this damn minds-eye muddle to subside… someone call in the developers, strip the north hills of all cedar trees right down to the limestone, free me o lord of snifflers of thy heavy hand of allergens or, if that’s too much to ask, o lord you could at least take fifteen minutes from your celestial obligation to keep the stars burning and bright and walk my poor dog for me  let us consider magic let us imagine magic is real that a young man with a trumpet can blow down the walls of a mighty city; that the dead can rise; that a man can walk on water and a boy can fly; let us imagine that all we know not can be learned through the dim arts of magic, that the truth of all lies buried in Merlin’s secret cave; that once there was a Camelot that love and truth and beauty flowered there under the rule of a sorcerer's magic; let us imagine a world where the witches of west and north and south and east rule all but the realm of a counterfeit wizard; let us imagine yellow brick roads and loaves and fishes and water to wine and the power of goodness forever triumphant over the bane of evil; let us imagine love everlasting; let us imagine life unfettered by anger and fear; let us live as we imagine; imagine as we live all the better lives that might live within us  discovery’s rapture Sunday morning at Barnes & Noble, where we are just about every Sunday morning, coffee, newspapers, new books to see which ones I’ll steal on my Kindle as soon as we’re back outside… a family, middle aged parents, three children, ranging from 10 or so to 6 or so, all well-dressed, maybe for church, not for one of the more elaborate, dress-up churches like the Methodist or Presbyterian, you know the ones where men wear suits and women wear hats, more like the Catholics who’ll take anyone no matter how bad they smell, and one of the Pentecostals where cleaning the tractor grease out from under your fingernails constitutes dressing for church… but, wait, I got off track… what I meant to say is that this was just a very normal-looking twenty-first century family, visiting a bookstore, the only thing unusual, the wonder in which they seem to take in their surroundings, all of which I think would seem very normal to most… being mostly an observational poet, I watch people and pick up on small things, sometimes imagining I have learned secrets about people, sometimes just making stuff up based on three seconds of watching this family first caught my attention when they walked past our table and the oldest boy made a comment about what a huge bookstore it was, seeming odd to me since it isn't so huge, and I don’t think most ten-year-old boys would notice even if it was huge, and if they did notice wouldn’t comment on it, but he was very excited, even more excited when he saw the escalators, and then, later, when he saw the elevator, so struck that he blurted out in a near squeal how it was such a big bookstore it even has its own elevator and finally, as I happened to be following the father into the men’s room, I almost ran into him when he went to a dead stop, staring in palpable confusion, if not outright disbelief, at the mens' room sign which included the helpful notice that there was a baby changing station inside I swear for a minute it seemed he was near deciding not to go in, apparently seeing something very alien about a mens' room with a baby changing station inside, like, whatever was going on in there it obviously could not be a real mens' room and he wasn’t sure about taking a chance on what might happen to him and his manliness if he went inside… ~~~ now it might be that I’m more attuned to tiny irregularities in the normal flow of life in the universe and it might seem that I’m over-reacting to such tiny blips, but life, for me, is but a never-ending series of tiny blips that an acutely aware person such as myself observe and sort, wheat blips here, chaff blips there, life as it normally passes on this planet, so long home to me, here and life that can only be leakage from an alien universe there... that is a bigger question and not relevant to right here right now… what is relevant to right here, right now, is how the whole confluence of observations reminds me of when I was six or seven years old and I opened my Red Ryder lunchbox at school and discovered that my mother had sliced my sandwich diagonally instead of across the middle, making my sandwich square into two sandwich triangles instead of the normal two rectangular sandwiches… it was the first time I had ever seen such a thing, the first time my mother had ever done that, or at least, the first she had done it in my presence - she may have done it many times before, but she was quite a bit older than me, and maybe I just never knew about it… I thought it was wonderful, this crazy explosion of sandwich possibilities, so avant garde, this diagonal sandwich slicing, and probably only something rich people did, being, with all their riches, well past the point of humdrum rectangular sandwiches, and on that first day of sandwich revelation, looking into my lunchbox, looking at the little pointy-end sandwiches, just looking at their pointy little corners, sent me soaring into a fancy-pants world I could have barely imagined before… ~~~ and I so hope the visit of that oh-so-regular-looking family brought to them the same rapture of discovery as triangular sandwiches brought to me  The Spot let us consider skin there is much to consider in the matter of skin… at its most basic a natural packaging, keeping all the gooey parts in; for many years and for some less enlightened still, a shortcut for identifying social, moral and philosophical status in shades of lightest white to darkest black; also for many years, protection against the coldest winter day and snuggly comfort of a chilly night, and even now for some, a status symbol, social status determined by the kinds and number of skins one can carry upon one’s most stylish back; all that I understand, but for me the best of skin is the pink skin of a kitten’s belly and the soft skin and scent of a freshly powdered baby and, oh, that long slow glide of skin upon skin in my lovers bed at midnight - that’s the very best use of skin I can think of…  a cowboy should be tough enough did it again, dressed for yesterday’s weather, Hawaiian shirt, black with big red flowers of probably Hawaiian origin, looking, it seemed to me as I studied it in the mirror this morning, very much like a cowboy shirt (except for the missing fringe) close enough to a cowboy shirt to remind me that rodeo is just around the corner, the first signs of it, the cowboy breakfast this morning (for the 45th year) soft tacos and coffee for about 75,000 people, very few of whom are actually cowboys, except this once a year when they get up at 4 a.m. and put on their cowboy hat and cowboy boots and fight heavy cowboy traffic to the big parking lot over by Freeman Coliseum, while, at the same time, approaching now from all over South Texas and other cowboy lands to the west and north and even east a few Cajun bayou cowboys, trail riders, bank clerks, school teachers, and insurance salesmen and the grizzled fella from down the street and occasional actual cowboys and cowgirls, all bundled up against the cold, moseying in on their horses from days and nights on the trail, pots and kettles clattering on the sides of their chuckwagons, and sometime soon, the cattle drive down Commerce Street through the middle of downtown, which seems to have some kind of secret launching date because I always want to take pictures of it but somehow never know about it until it’s over and I’m thinking maybe this year I can find out where to go and get there ahead of time and I’m thinking I ought to be doing that right now, right after I cross the last “t” and dot the last “I” on this little ramble, all, like this ramble, another dodge my dog would say, to avoid going for a walk in 50 degree weather in my Hawaiian, and I’m thinking, cause cowboys are supposed to be tough and not deterred when I comes time to herd their herd, that maybe I should reorient my thinking and based on the similarity of appearance, I should come to understand that a cowboy shirt is just an Hawaiian shirt with fringe benefits and conversely maybe I should think of this Hawaiian shirt as just a cowboy shirt de-fringed and that should make me a cowboy tough enough, as befits my kind, to go walk the dog  let us consider the best of times the little blond haired girl riding her tricycle in front of your house when you were three; the ’49 Plymouth you overhauled with your dad, never went more than 45 miles-per-hour, but, oh, that first drive so sweet; the first great afternoon of sex on the beach, never mind the sunburned ass or the sand lodged in delicate places for her name was Julie and we loved each other for at least three weeks; and later the girl in the back seat, not Julie, for that love gone, but never forgotten, she, with great billowy breasts, lying back against soft cloth seats, astride her like riding hot waves in a great sailing ship with white billowing sails; the wedding, vows complete, the stately recessional past guest standing, applauding, your father in an pew by the aisle, your father who disapproved of the venue and said he would not come, in a pew by the aisle, thumbs up as you and your bride pass; the baby, one month old, in your arms for the first time, tiny, tiny crying thing who will not stop for you or for his new mother, silently sleeping within a minute of being held by your mother, his new grandmother; the look in the eyes of your child when they ask you a question, knowing, that of all the moms and dads in the world you are the one who will know the answer; the band, your son’s first band, first hearing, the blast of horns and guitars and drums, realizing how good they are… the best times of a life… =========== some hold the notion that the good times lie still ahead; while the realist with an accumulation of years comes to accept best times of our lives lie not in the future but in the past, in the memories we hold dear…  my iron cross I have a cross made of two rough iron nails, each about 4 inches long, hanging over the door to my office, given to me by a friend, a believer who has affection for me and who wished to share with me the peace she finds in her faith though I am not a believer I do have similar affection for my friend and respect her unassuming and deeply held beliefs and was honored by her gift and the peace she hoped to bring to me and pleased, also, because the cross is a beautiful piece of rough-hewn art, the long iron spikes, elemental truth in the integrity of their coarse construction, as if the hands of their maker, the purpose and life of the iron worker artist is imprinted on every ridge and groove of their irregular surface and because it is an illustration of how art can embody the essence of meanings, the iron nails, old and heavy and sharp and crude as the nails belief says pierced the hands and feet of Jesus Christ, relics, almost, placed on my wall, a great story hanging over my head every time I pass through the door - a reminder to the poet that, true or not, believed or not, great stories have great power… and that it is the poet’s job to find the stories that bring that power to all who read them one does not have to believe the stories in order to respect and honor them because they are a reflection of our human desires for a better place and a better time, our search for a better self, a glimpse of the divine… some stories are bloody and cruel, but the need to believe, whatever the story, reflects the human thrust to find a place beyond the restrictions of our evolutionary heritage, to find a more human way to be human.. it is the way, through one story or another, all of us find our way  let us consider the random occurrence of good and bad poems some poets are determined to write wonderful poems but since they don’t feel capable of writing the wonderful poems they imagine they write no poems at all; some poets are determined to write wonderful poems and since the poems they write do not seem to them as wonderful as they would like they throw them away; some poets are determined to write wonderful poems and since the first poem the write is less than wonderful, they rewrite it over and over and over again, never writing another poem, concentrating all their poetry strength and creativity on making that unwonderful poem wonderful; and some poets (like me), born with no poetic shame, just say what the hell with it and write poems and poems and poems, confident in the random distribution in the universe of good and bad and certain as the bad poems accumulate, there will be a good one coming any time, maybe even a wonderful one… ========================================== and what about this poem, one might ask,,, though I doubt it is wonderful, might it be good or is it bad? don’t answer that, My Critic, because whether it’s good or bad I’m going to write another one tomorrow anyway…  let us consider the rot of progress tomorrow I will watch the sun rise over gently stirring waters of the Gulf of Mexico as I have done many time in years passed loading up a pick-up truck or beat-up station wagon with friends and driving to the island, where we gather driftwood and start a fire that would burn all night as we watched the bright stars that shine in the inky black gulf night, with the whisper of the tides ever constant, doing their dosey doe, In and out, with the turning world until the sun rises from the sea, turns the water orange and then the morning, an orange, then yellow ball that brings the sky to cloudless blue… but that was then… tomorrow I will watch the sun rise over the gulf from the ninth floor balcony of my brother-in-law’s condominium, buildings like this one either side, the days when we would come in our pick-ups and station wagons long passed, the stubby low sand dunes that were the island, covered now by a city of towers and restaurants and grocery stores and a fire station and a chamber of commerce, all that makes a city a city, planted, to grow forever… but I know as many do not seem to know, that the storm will come because the storm will always come, always on it’s own schedule, blowing across the Gulf bringing tornado winds and rain and a flood surge that will clean bare the island, some will die, mostly new ones who do not understand the storm and it’s power and do not listen to those who know and much pain will afflict the others who built the glistening towers and supermarkets and chamber of commerce will feel sad for those who died by their own ignorance and I will feel the pain on those who bet fortunes against the certainties of chance... and when it is all done, when the pearl colored sand glistens bare again on moonlit nights, and the stars shine in the inky black sky and the tides whisper in and out all night… I will return and gather firewood and build a fire to burn all night celebrating earlier times and never forgotten nights…  better than the 3,438th rerun (unless Ginger gets naked) I did a reading last night to a small (I prefer the word, select) group and I wore my reading boots because while they add an inch to my height, more important, they add 6 to 8 inches to my ego and ego’s pretty darn important if you’re going to write something and call it poetry and expect people with more pressing things on their mind to sit quietly and maybe even listen and be appropriately amazed or at least decide it’s what the heck better than the 3,438th rerun of Gilligan’s Island and boy does that old Skipper ever get mad at Gilligan even though I don’t think the Skipper is much of a skipper and it’s probably his fault the Minnow got lost even though he always blames it on Gilligan and I think everyone on the island including that sweet Mary Jane understands exactly how she got stuck on this island with that horny professor who mainly has the hots for Ginger and couldn’t care less about that sweet Mary Ann but you know you have to have some kind of drama even on a previously deserted island or you’ll never get to 3,438 reruns unless Ginger takes off her clothes and swims naked in Gilligan’s lagoon but this is family TV from a time when families didn’t have sex and I’m glad of that because if Ginger had gone swimming naked in Gilligan’s lagoon any chance I might have of even a small audience (I prefer “select”) willing to sit and listen to me reading my poetry even in my reading boots could be described in just three words "fat chance, Skipper"  let us consider those who dare no man wishes to be called a coward yet there is a political movement in our country day building on waves of cowardice how to explain when in reality it costs little to be brave, one person in a city of millions stands up to the fear, displaying not bravery but trust in the mathematical certainty that there is safety in numbers… it being so easy to take such a “brave” position why are so many choosing to hide under their beds… disdaining such spineless behavior I declare now that I am one with the resistance, ready to stand firm against the barbarian hordes… standing stalwart at the shoulders of the valiant defenders but expect you will have to find me in my one in a million cave first…  Let us consider our span of time I was born Before the bomb fell on Hiroshima But lived under its cloud For most of my youth I weas young When black men were beaten For ordering coffee And an all-white lunch counter I was young When a manmade object Was sent high above To circle our planet I was young When a human foot First broke crusty surface Of the moon I was young When a president Was murdered In Dallas I was young When a black man (not the first) Was murdered On a motel balcony I was young When South Texas heat Was inevitable And unavoidable Anywhere But in the homes Of the well-to-do I was young When years of foreign wars Threatened my generation And more who followed I was young When a president Voided his oath And his honor and was Sent away in exile Now I am old And it seems no lessons Of my life Were learned by anyone Who matters Now I am old And it seems The only peace Is Still The peace of the dead  where do boys go to?
where do boys go to these days to see horned toads and tarantulas, where are the red-ant beds to piss on, and the dirt roads and arroyos to chase down on tough, stripped-down bicycles (the bicycles they ride today would fold their delicate little frames into a submissive heap if ever introduced to a dirt road) where are the muddy fields to play slip and slide and the thick brush where boys can hide from the world and girls and grown-ups and smoke Parliament cigarettes, where are the places where boys can be boys, where mischief can be innocent and nothing is forever or and never means until tomorrow, ~~~ “I’m looking under a dress of wonder that I overlooked before” we sang with not a clue of what was “under” and free to make it up as we went along, imagination we assumed made us experts where do boys go today to capture such gift of innocent ignorance… is there a place safe for such innocence, such ignorance as eased us into the harsher truth of it all…  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.  eudaimonia (eudaimonia - translated from its Greek roots as “human flourishing”) she comes like a stranger to your door, knocks and demands entry and, if you are ready to allow her passage, becomes your friend becomes the spark that creates creation the carrier of human flourishing that blows away walls that restrict your vision, cuts the knots that bind your soul opening the all-embracing sky that carries in its winds the contagion of your spirit’s deepest reach, the fullness of your humanity the bottomless well of your completion  before I went insane dreams all night of a time 70 years past… * I was ten, the last year before the insanity of adolescence set upon me… * and I did it so well, crazy as hell, doing crazy things just to show I could do it… so many people their trust abused, it’s hard to believe I made it out alive, and how often luck saved me from finding my place in jail, behind the bars it seemed I so ardently sought, * all for pride, for place, for the benediction of any Judas priest … * so domesticated am I now… who could ever imagine the tangled path that brought me here --- dreaming all night about the years before I went insane  Moats in the Eye of a Disinterested God by Allen Itz Time and the Tides 1937 (part 2 of 13) Howard Hughes sets transcontinental air record Second Stalin purge trial, 17 sentenced to death DuPont patents nylon U.S. Steel raises worker pay to $5 per day First state contraceptive clinic opens in North Carolina Gas explosion in school in New London, Texas kills 294 Fritz Zwicky coins the term “supernova” Spinach growers in Crystal City, Texas erect statue of Popeye Debut of Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd First commercial flight across the Pacific “Gone With the Wind” wins Pulitzer Prize Hindenburg explodes on landing killing 36 Police kill 10 strikers at Republic Steel Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific Buchenwald concentration camp opens China declares war on Japan In a secret meeting Hitler informs his military leaders of his intention to go to war Nazi exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” opens in Munich Walt Disney premiers the first full-length animated movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” ---------- Heigh-ho Heigh-ho the urge to purge surges America’s most beautiful pilot disappears barbed wire around a new summer camp merit badges for killing Jews ---------- A widow, with a son who grows rambunctious and wild, living with relatives as a part-time housekeeper, decorating cakes at a bakery, her life promises little more. A high school graduate, his father’s business taken by the bank, his sister home from college to stay - the Great Depression sucks life from opportunity and ambition. He applies for work with the Work Progress Administration, but does not get called. He plays semi-pro baseball, loses an eye during pre-game warm up. The shadows of war clouds darken, but noticed still only in passing.  radio silence for the first year and a half of my military service I was in training at Indiana University for the two years after I spent my shifts sitting at a large radio console listening, trying to ferret out the secrets of the Soviet air force mostly this meant trying to dig out meaning from tiny Russian voices buried in rumpled beds of static as part of my training I learned that some of the voices on the radio get trapped in the higher ionosphere and bounce within that band for years, old voices from years past still circling the globe but most of the voices pass on through the atmosphere and sail off into the void, traveling to the stars, the human voice another bit of static for alien ears such a lesser static we are than what we hear, the sound of the big bang continuing its expansion, waves of such distant origin traveling past and through us all the days of our lives, such a joyous and holy sound, but how I I cursed it as I sought human meaning through its crunch and crackle, not understanding at the time that I was listening to the universe singing its birth song ~~~ so silent and dead would be the universe without Fast Times at Flatonia Flats |
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