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HERE AND NOW

(AGAIN)


August 26th 2022 - I fought the law (and you know how that turns out)

8/13/2022

1 Comment

 
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
Picture




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!









Picture




​

​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



​



Picture





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




​
Picture




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.








Picture




​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



Picture




​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


Picture





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






​
Picture





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.






Picture





​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







Picture




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.

​
Picture
.
​
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



​
Picture
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 
Picture




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
1 Comment

8/13/22 It All Seems Okay to Me

7/25/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture


​




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



​



​
Picture




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.



​


Picture




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.




Picture




​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



*

Picture




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



​
Picture




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. 

​
Picture



​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
​
Picture

​




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.

​
Picture
​




​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

​


​
Picture


​



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.


Picture






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


Picture




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.


​



Picture



















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





Picture






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

Picture
 



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’

​
Picture





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.

​
​
Picture
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







0 Comments

07/18/2022 Something Different

7/18/2022

0 Comments

 
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



​

Picture







​Red Tide
​$175
Picture



Explosion at the Campbell Soup Factory
​$210
Picture



​
​The Big Lie
​$210
Picture




​Now Is The Time of Assassins
​(After Artur Rimbaud)
$225
Picture




​Mystery At the bottom of the Devil's Blue Hole
​$165
Picture



​Saturday Night At the Flatonia Follies
​$115
Picture




​Den of Iniquity
Picture




​Riot OnSunshine Strip
$190
Picture




​Double Trouble
​$150
Picture





​Mountain King
​$135
Picture



​Crossing the Bridge Together
A John Lewis Tribute
$150

Picture




​Jacob's Ladder
$160
Picture





​Shadrack in the Fiery Pit
​$185
Picture



That's it.
​
Back to my version of poetry in my next post.

0 Comments

06-23-22 Let Us Consider

6/10/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
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…

Picture
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….
​
Picture
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…

​

Picture
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
Picture
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
Picture

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
​
Picture
​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
Picture
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

Picture
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…
Picture
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
Picture
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…

Picture
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
Picture
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…
Picture
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…
Picture
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"

Picture
​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…
Picture
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

Picture
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…


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5-15-22  Remembering Old Times and Old Friends

5/2/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
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...
Picture
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
Picture
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…

Picture
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…

Picture
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
Picture
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…

Picture
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…)

Picture
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…
Picture
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

Picture
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

Picture
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…

Picture
snippet
 
a snippet
a drippit
a little tiny
tidbit
readit
&
forgetit
it’s
just my morning
today
bit

Picture
Sad news, my poet-friend, Gary Blankenship, died a couple of days ago. My friend, beloved by everyone in the on-line poetry community who ever wrote or read with him, had a similar background to my own, a retired professional who turned to poetry for a purpose when work no longer provided one. I was one of those who wrote and read with Gary, almost from the time I began to write. His work, much quieter and gentler than my own more rough and ready work, was a good contrast to me. I have a couple of his books, including his first one. Wang Wei's River Poems, which introduced me to a particular Chinese master and to the old Chinese masters in general.

Unfortunately, my library is in disarray and I can't find Gary's book to choose from. Instead I'll post from this on-line selection from the book.


​Wang Wei, generally considered one of the three major Chinese (High Tang) poets, wrote a series of twenty poems collectively known as the Wang River Collection. They meant to record a journey up the river with his good friend, Pei Di, while also being about Wang’s mansion located in the river valley.
paragraph 2 
A group of poets from Toronto known as ‘Pain Not Bread’ published a book in 2000 titled Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei. The poems are modern free verse interpretations of Tang poetry by Wang, Tu Fu and others. Among the works is ‘Mountain Range,’ a beautiful adaptation of Wang Wei’s ‘Deer Park.’
3
Based on their work and others, I’ve set out to ‘transform’ Wang Wei’s poems into mostly verse libre sonnets, a free form sonnet. The order is not Wang Wei’s. I selected the order on the basis of how much I liked the poems and how difficult I thought the transformation would be.
4
III: After Wang Wei’s Luan House Rapids (13) — Beyond the Estuary

A torrent drowns duckweed and bulrush;
squalls whip cattails and willow thickets.
Canvas wet outside and in, soaked shoes
squirt with each muddy step.


A trickle, rivulet, rush flows over field
and road, into cellars and badger holes.
Boats break from their moorings, trash bins
float like empty shells past broken dolls and bikes.

On a cloudless night, we embrace the stars;
we pour diamonds through our fingers.
On a cold autumn night, jewels turn to dross;

promises dull, lumps of cinder without warmth.
A summer’s debris drifts to block the drain,
a white feather trapped between stones.

5
The literal translation by Wai-Lim Yip, “Rill of the House of the Luans”, is

6
blast-blast — autumn rain/s middle
lightly-lightly/shallow-shallow — rock flow pour
jump wave/s-bead/s self mutual/each other splash
white egret startle again down

7
Like the best of Oriental poets, Wang Wei leaves the poem unfinished; the meaning of the final line a mystery to be worked out by the reader.

8
My version is:

Autumn rain and wind gusts
strike the boulders below.
The rapids’ waves collide --
startled egrets rise, settle.


Although Gary had been less active than in the past, he leaves behind a wealth of excellent work.


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4-29-22 Long-Haul Truckin'...

4/17/2022

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Picture
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
Picture
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
​

Picture
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.
Picture
​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
​
Picture

Fast Times at Flatonia Flats
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1939 (part 3 of 13)


Frieda Wunderlich elected first woman dean of a US graduate school…
Daily newspaper comic strip “Superman” debuts…
30,000 killed by earthquake in Chile…
First experiment in the splitting of a nuclear atom…
Filming begins on Gone With the Wind…
Germany occupies Czechoslovakia…
7,000 Jews flee German occupied Lithuania…
Spanish Civil War ends, the fascists prevail…
Membership in Hitler Youth becomes obligatory…
Marian Anderson sings before 75,000 at Lincoln Memorial…
“The Grapes of Wrath” is published…
Dixie Clipper completes first commercial plane flight to Europe…
Nazis close last Jewish enterprises..
Frank Sinatra makes his recording debut…
“The Wizard of Oz” premiers…
Netherland mobilizes…
Hitler orders extermination of mentally ill…
First paper to deal with “black holes” is published…
Germany invades Poland, WWII begins…
Soviet Union invades Poland…
Reinhard Heydrich meets in Berlin to discuss final solution for Jews…
Birdbaths installed in Union Square…
Assassination of Hitler attempted, failed…
USSR invades Finland…
Montgomery Ward introduces the ninth reindeer, Rudolph…


----------
Frank
sings and Dorothy notices
she's not in Kansas
anymore
the world order
crumbles
but Christmas is saved
in America
by a reindeer with a very, very
shiny nose



---------


She works, sees to her son, walks to the movies on shapely legs tanned in the sub-tropic sun, her short skirt swishing, and men along the sidewalk grow silent and watchful as she passes. She is alone, lonely, but shy, withdrawn, does not want what the men ask for with their eyes.

He drives a wrecker truck, picks up the dead and dying along icy hill country roads. Finds a truck and trailer one night, overturned, beautiful white horses lying dead across the road, the owner sits on a rock, crying, beloved horses, his circus act dead, without his horses he is nothing.

A school in auto repair opens, seeing white horses dead and bloody red in his dreams, the wrecker driver decides to be a mechanic.
Picture
thinking of the death of a man I knew
​

not a friend
but we were friendly

that’s the kind of relationship
I preferred
with people who worked for me

friendly
in the way of how’s the wife
and the kids
and isn’t it a great day today
and how 'bout them
cowboys!

never anything deeper that might
complicate the
relationship…

-----

he died a couple of days ago,
a couple of years older than me

(I had always thought of him
as younger, an artifact of the relationship
I suppose)

the news of his death
was a shock to me, he being
part of the cadre from a time in my life
which, as I think back, seems only yesterday,
and who thinks of people dead who were just seen
yesterday

and though my memories of the time seem so fresh,
it has been, in fact, nearly twenty five years,
and it being so long and John being now dead,
my thought is to wonder how many more
of my memories’ immortals must now also
be dead

and that brings me to all the other people
from even much longer ago who must also be dead
and it seems that my memory of all of them,
so clear, so sharp, is now beginning to crumble
around me…

our lives a collection of memories, and now
those memories fall to pieces in the face of reality
and if memories are our life, how much longer
before my life is a trail of blank space
where people used to be, people I recall as real
as if they are standing here and now before me…

should I be saying good bye
or is it already too
late
Picture
Now is the time of the Assassins 
by Allen Itz


Time and the Tides

1940 (part 4 of 13)

FCC hears the first transmission of FM radio with clear, static -free signal…
Mass execution of Poles by the Germans…
Britain’s first WWII rationing, bacon, butter, and sugar…
Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet premiers…
Finland surrenders to Russia…
Mussolini brings Italy into Hitler’s war…
Germany invades Norway and Denmark…
Dance hall fire kills 198 in Mississippi…
Olympics are cancelled…
Winston Churchill becomes British prime minister…
First German bombs fall on England…
German troops occupy Amsterdam, Brussels and Belgium…
Britain and France begin evacuation of Dunkirk…
American Negro Theater organizes…
German forces enter Paris and France surrenders…
Brenda Starr, first cartoon strip by a woman debuts…
Bugs Bunny debuts in Wild Hare…
The blitz begins the first of 57 days consecutive nights of bombardment…
Black leaders protest discrimination in U.S. armed forces…
First Abbot and Costello film is released…
FDR wins unprecedented third term…
The walling off of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw begins…


----------
who’s on first
no longer a question
as war loads
the bases

Bugs
should a turned left
at Albuquerque
and the Finns admit
they’re finished

the Italians
put the pasta
on to boil

David's star is
put behind a wall
and pinned to every
Jewish lapel



----------

He’s come south, a drag-line mechanic helper, keeping the big machines running, building flood control levees on the river. Snakes, mosquitoes and mud - he will remember best the mud that cakes his boots so it’s hard to walk.

He meets her at the bakery, spending a part of his small paycheck on a cake for his landlords, a middle-aged woman and her middle-aged husband, a jazz trumpeter.

He watches her as she decorates the cake, the graceful wrap of her hand as she squeezes the frosting sack to make curlicues and red roses in a nest of green ivy that hangs across the cake like real ivy on a fence at home.

She rings up the charge on the register and takes his money.

“I’m Sidney," he says, "you can call me Sid.”

She smiles, shyly, looks into his eyes and sees not the hungry eyes of the men on the street, but a friendly smile instead, a friendly smile on a handsome face, a tall man with dark hair, long and swept back.

“I’m Mona,” she says.
Picture
yes, the bear does poop  in the woods
 
having
been at this for some time now,
years in fact, I have become
a poetry pro, able
to engage in walking, minding the dog,
and poeming
all
at the same time…

now
I’m sorry to say that as I walk
and mind the dog and attempt poeming
what I’m thinking of is dog poop
and the way city dwellers
treat it as if it is some kind of toxic
material such as North Korea or ISIS or
some other terrorist outfit like
the Pat Boone Fan Club
might come up with to terrorize
the civilized world
and I say
that’s silly because you didn’t see
Indians of the American type chase
deer and antelope and bison across the prairie
with little plastic bags to capture their poop
before it genocided their lives
and culture (white-eyes
certainly didn’t need any buffalo poop
to accomplish that end)
and you never saw cowboys
with little plastic bags hanging
from their saddles watching out
for cow pies and horse hockey
to defuse and decontaminate
and I don’t see why dog poop
should be toxic if deer and antelope and
buffalo and cow and horse and cougar
and such isn’t (and consider the number of
kangaroos in Australia and how it would devastate
that whole continent if kangaroo poop
was toxic and how could dog poop
be any more toxic than kangaroo poop
is a question someone should be
asking)

but
that said,
I understand
dog poop is not pleasant to look at
and downright disgusting to step into which is why
Bella’s rule of pooping is that she can’t do it
anywhere people walk, a rule she follows
religiously,
and if that’s an issue for some people
I can only remind them
that,
yes,
the bear does poop in the woods
and if you find yourself
stepping
in bear poop you are in bear
country where bears have a god-given
right to poop and where you have, according
to the natural nature of nature, no right to be
and you should set off for people country
where you belong in the first place
as quickly as you can
and leave the poor damn bears
to poop in
peace…
​
Picture
Den of Iniquity 
by Allen Itz

​




Time and the Tides



1941 (part 5 of 13)


The Japanese Imperial Navy with353 planes attacks the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, 2,304 people killed…
FDR gives his Day of Infamy speech to Congress and war on Japan is declared…
Germany and Italy declare war on the United States...


----------
the world’s misery
crosses both oceans,
becomes America’s misery as well

the righteous fight
is begun



----------


Sid joins the lines at the enlistment centers, but is deemed unfit because of his lost eye. Determined to serve, he seeks to join the Seabees, construction force for the Navy, but is again refused.

He is distraught, Mona relieved.
Picture
always a sucker for the blond
 
I can see
through the restaurants
wide windows
beautiful blond
Bella
in the car
sitting in her favorite spot
behind the steering
wheel,
watching
anticipating
ever move I make

so
attuned
is she to me
that she knows all my
tics and stratagems, knows
when I am working in my office that
when I reach to close the top of my computer
that something is up, rises from her
spot by me and waits for me
at the door

body
language…

she is an expert,
at least when it comes to my body and
my language…

I used that sympathetic soul
to my advantage
last night
and still feel guilty about it

pills she must take twice a day
for a rash make her very thirsty, with
the expected consequences
as when
last night she started to pee
in the den right in front of me and
I yelled at her because she never does that
(and we just paid $150 to have that carpet cleaned)
and she jumped and hurried off to her safe place behind
my recliner in the bedroom
and I wanted to get her outside to finish peeing
but she was scared by my yelling
and didn’t want to come so I played the ultimate card,
reaching for her leash and she came running
reaching for her leash always means a walk
is in store except this time when she was all the way
out the backdoor before she realized the door
was closing behind her and her leash still hung
from its hook and such a devastated look
I got that it haunts me yet this
morning…

but even betrayed
her trust in me she maintains
and, remembering all the good things,
the walks we actually walked and not the tricks,
forgetting all the bad so that
even now
she sits in my car behind the steering wheel
watching ever move I make here inside
the restaurant, alert to even the slightest move
that might suggest the next great thing
we will be doing together
next…

(or she may be watching for the sausage patty
I give her every morning after breakfast
but I prefer to believe it is me
she loves
and not my sausage, captive as I am
to this blond dog as men are to most
blondes)
Picture
Shadrach in the Fiery Pit
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides


1942 (part 5 of 13)

Rose Bowl played in North Carolina due to Japanese threat…
Japanese troops occupy Manila…
Nazi officials confer to plan the extermination of Europe’s Jews - the “Final Solution” …
Count Basie records One O’clock Jump…
First U.S. force in Europe goes ashore in Northern Ireland…
Archie comic book debuts…
FDR orders internment of all west-coast Japanese Americans…
American defense of Philippines collapses, MacArthur ordered out…
First day of the Battle of Java Sea - 13 U.S. warships sunk - 2 Japanese…
First cadets graduate from Tuskegee flying school…
Belzec Concentration Camp opens with 30,000 Polish Jews…
FDR orders men between 45 and 64 to register for non-military duty…
U.S. and Filipino forces overwhelmed by Japanese at Bataan…
Stars and Stripes newspaper for U.S. armed forces starts…
First U.S. aerial bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities…
First food rationing in U.S. beginning with sugar…
1,500 Jews gassed in Auschwitz…
Bing Crosby records White Christmas…
Japan’s 1st major defeat in the Battle of Midway…
German army defeated at El-Alamein North Africa…
Anne Frank begins her diary…
Dwight Eisenhower appointed commander of U.S. forces in Europe
Execution of Jews by the thousands proceeds across Nazi -occupied Europe…
Tweety Bird debuts…
Casablanca premiers…
First self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurs…



----------


the noose
of apocalypse
is tied

the
gallows
prepared



----------


Sid is free of the snakes and mosquitoes and mud, transferred from the levees into town to work in the shop. He knows it is a temporary job, open because the worker who held it is a soldier now, training the battles to come. The job will be his again upon his return. Sid is still disappointed that he can’t join the fight, but pleased, at least, that he has freed up another to fight in his place.

He and Mona have made friends among the pilot trainees at the army-air base on the edge of town. Young men who will be in the midst of murderous air battles in the Pacific or, soon they know, over Europe. But for now, they are just young men with the temporary luxury of having their young wives with them.

Sid and Mona are the only two unmarried among their crowd. Lonely and alone in a strange place before they met, they are good friends now.

Just good friends, they say, but they both know, though afraid to say it, that their friendship is not the end. They see a future they so very quietly imagine, for now.
Picture
brown legs walking in sunshine
 
remembering
brown legs walking
in sunshine
and I’m sitting by the gym
and it’s 1957 again
and I’m 13 again, and
a new center of the
universe
is revealed to me

Picture
Night Life
after Willie Nelson
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides

1943 (part 7 if 13)


William Hastie, aid to secretary of war, resigns in protest of segregation in armed forces…
Frankfurters replaced by Victory Sausages (mixture of meat and soy meal)…
Hitler declares “total war”…
The Pentagon, world’s largest office building, is completed…
U.S. bans pre-sliced bread to reduce bakery demand for metal parts…
Duke Ellington plays his first concert at Carnegie Hall…
General Eisenhower selected to command allied forces in Europe…
German “White Rose” student group hangs anti-Hitler banner in Munich, are caught and beheaded…
German 6th Army surrenders at Stalingrad, a turning point in the war in Europe…
New volcano erupts in farmer's cornfield in Mexico…
Porgy and Bess opens on Broadway…
Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore premiere on radio…
Oklahoma premieres…
Bergen -Belsen concentration camp forms…
Postal zone system invented…
German and Italian forces surrender in North Africa, one group after another…
Berlin is declared free of Jews…
Zoot Suit Riots -Mob in Los Angeles beats up everyone who appears Hispanic…
Income tax withholding becomes law…
Race riots in Texas and other states…
Allied forces invade Sicily…
Almost 6,000 tanks take part in the greatest tank battle in history with Russian victory over Germany…
RAF bombs Hamburg (20,000 dead)…
Mussolini resigns…
John F. Kennedy’s PT-boat 109 is sunk…
Mussolini captured by Allies, rescued by German forces, starts resistance movement…




----------


tides begin to turn
but even turning
tides
are deadly

the dead wash
out with the retreating surf

as new dead
wash in with each bloody surge

the march of tides and time
is not over



----------


Sid and Mona join his very good landlord friends Matrice and Harry for a night across the border in Reynosa, Havana on the Rio Grande it's called, where U.S. dollars buy the finest in Mexican foods and floor shows and magicians and where, in the finest of the clubs, El Leon del Noche, an African lion pads through the restaurant on a leash.

And an orchestra that plays the latest in American big band swing. The band knows Harry and he always brings his trumpet so that he can sit in. This night he plays the most beautiful version of Stardust Sid and Mona ever heard.

They sit close at their table, holding hands, breathless in the thick Mexican night. The change in their life they had imagined finally comes, quietly, at a small table in a Reynosa nightclub. They found their song and with the song, each other.

Matrice watches it happen, smiles, winks at Harry. Their conspiracy realized, their plan come together.
Picture
something insightful

something insightful
is what I need today, a good trenchant statement
of sharp, cogent insight that
through the magic of superior poetics
will become a poem for the ages or at least for the next fifteen minutes
after which it won’t count any more
since I will no longer be famous, and no one will care
as to the relative insightfulness of my statement, no matter
how rightful or blind hog obvious it is

it’s the most wonderful thing
about fame being limited to only fifteen minutes,
it being that the sooner one’s fifteen minutes are up
the sooner all the idiocies of that time
are forgot -
much better than my 78 years
during which every idiocy ever considered or perpetrated
during that time is on the record, subject
to constant review, ridicule and personal angst
over and over and over again…

so much better that fifteen-minute statute of limitations…

~~~

maybe this is my insight for the day, or the one at least
that will pass for the next fifteen
minutes



​

Picture
Jacob's Ladder
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides


1944 (part 8 of 13, and my birth year)
 
 
Ralph Bunch first Negro official in the State Department appointed...
Eisenhower takes command of Allied Invasion Force in London...
First jazz concert at Metropolitan Opera House, featuring Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and others...
RAF drops 2,300 bombs on Berlin; 447 German bombers attack London... 
Leningrad liberated in 880 days with 600,000 killed...
Batman and Robin premier in newspapers...
Mount Vesuvius erupts...
Jimmy Steward flies his 12th combat mission leading attack on Berlin...
D Day, 150,000 Allied troops land in Normandy...
15 U.S. aircraft carriers attack Japanese on Marianas...
Congress creates the CIA...
FDR signs GI Bill of Rights...
First Japanese kamikaze attack...
First German V-2 rocket hits Great Britain...
U.S. retakes Guam...
Anne Frank arrested, sent to Auschwitz...
Smokey Bear debuts...
Charles De Gaulle walks the Champs-Elysees after Paris liberation...
George H. W. Bush ejects from his burning plane...
Copland's "Appalachian Spring" premieres...
Auschwitz begins gassing inmates...
FDR wins 4th term...
Glenn Miller lost over English Channel...
 
 
----------
 
 
 
American
string of pearls
regained in the Pacific
 
American 
stringer of musical pearls
lost in Europe
as
Mr. Smith bombs
Berlin
 
the fire of 
explosions
manufactured and natural
light 
global nights
 
the batsignal
calls
on sone such night
for even more heroes
to rise
and fall for the cause
of morality's light 
 
 
----------
 
 
Mona's son, Vincent (first called "Spud" by his uncle and now Spud to everyone but his mother), is ten years old now, prone to mischief, and a worry to his mother.
 
He does not take well to the arrival of a new man in her life and misbehaves when Sid is around.  Sid is not a patient man, Mona knows, and has no experience with children. and she worries that as Spud tries to push Sid away, he will succeed. He acts like he wants Mona to choose between the two of them.
 
"Why do we need him," Spud asks, "why can't you just make him go away?"
 
Sid worked hard to gain the boy’s trust, but nothing seemed to make any difference until a Saturday afternoon at Sam Hill Park when Spud fell into a canal that flowed through the south end of the park. He could not swim, and it was Sid who heard his screams for help and jumped into the water, fully clothed, and pulled him out...
 
His best pants and shoes ruined, Sid held the boy as he shivered from the chill water and cried and told Sid how sorry he was to cause such a problem.  But Sid quieted the boy, holding him with a gentleness Mona had not seen before, looking for the first time like a father to her son.
 
That night, after Spud had been put to bed, they went back to the park, alone this time, and on a blanket on a large stone shelf of flat rock under a pecan tree, made love for the first time. Naked in summer moonlight, with long soulful kisses and slow silken caresses, gently rocking as they were for the first time joined.

​

Picture

​the third wife of Adam
​

the first went sour,
had intercourse with demons,
giving birth to monsters
that haunt us still
today...

the second,
well, that was God’s fault,
making her in front of Adam
and so disgusted was he
by the revelation
of what was inside the latest
creation and by extension,
himself that he was repulsed
and would have nothing to do
with it, no matter how pleasing
God made the outside…

and God destroyed the second
and determined to try just one more
time, this time, while Adam
slept..

``````````````````````````````````````````````````````

and said God to the third
as he complete fitting all the parts
in all their proper
places -

"I have made all that is around you," He said,
"this garden is mine, my wonderful creation,
but it seemed lonely and bare
without a creature like myself, so I made Adam
in my image and because he was incomplete as one
I made you to be his mate, his wife and the
mother of the future I will make
with the two of you…

"and I named you Eve because you are the setting
of the old and the bringer of a new
dawn, the culmination of my
ambition…

"and as prelude to the dawn," He said,
"your destiny is not in this garden

"to explain, I will come to you in another shape
and show you that your destiny is to defy me
and by that defiance become a creature of free will,
a creation complete at last in my image,
a creation who by this last piece is certain to confound me
and stir my wrath and, for a while,
blind me to my love for you, my child
as will all you children
be my children…

"and through all the thousand years
that will pass, my wrath
will diminish
and I will remember my love for you
and we will be reunited
in a new garden -
a new Eden
in some far place unseen
and known only to me
that new Eden that awaits our
return…

"this is your story," He said,
"the third and last wife of Adam,
who will carry my story
to the end, you destiny to be
mother of all men and in the end,
mother of God..."
Picture
True Romance
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides


1945 (part 9 of 13)


Pepe LaPew debuts…
German forces retreat in Battle of the Bulge…
Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony premieres in Moscow…
Every Amsterdammer gets three kilos of sugar beets…
Red army continues to liberate concentration camps as it advances west…
Grand Rapids becomes first U.S. city to fluoridate its water…
1,000 American Flying Fortresses drop 3,000 tons of bombs on Berlin…
Andrews Sisters hit number one on the charts with “Rum and Coca Cola”…

Yalta agreement signed by FDR, Churchill and Stalin…
U.S. Marines raise flag on Iwo Jima…
Federico Garcia Lorca’s “La Casa” premieres in Buenos Aires…
First International Woman’s Day is observed…
Firebombing of Tokyo in nighttime B-29 raid, more than 100,000 killed, mostly civilians…
“Going My Way” with Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman win best movie Oscar…
U.S. 7th Army crosses the Rhine…
“Glass Menagerie” premieres…
U.S. soldiers liberate Buchenwald…
FDR dies, Truman sworn in as 33 president…
Red Army begins Battle of Berlin…
Mussolini captured by Italian partisans and hung…
Unconditional surrender of Germany to the Allies and V-E (Victory in Europe) Day is announced…
Herman Goering is captured by U.S. Army; Heinrich Himmler commits suicide…
Abbott and Costello’s film “The Naughty Nineties” released, includes longest version of “Who’s on First”…
The war in the Pacific continues, island by island with massive causalities on both sides; the Japanese ignore several surrender ultimatums…
U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later drops second bomb on Nagasaki…
V-J Day; Japan surrenders unconditionally…

Branch Rickey signs Jackie Robinson…
Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam independence from France





----------
 
war clouds
part
leave broke and bloody
lands
open to the sky

a time to beat
weapons
into plowshares,
a time to replant
and rebuild

but, oh,
the weapons are so more fearsome
than ever
before
the power of forever burning
stars
in the hands of mortal
man

and
already
on the horizon
new storms can be seen forming

peace
a fragile
and
forever
a passing
moment
in the hands of
temporary
man



----------


Talk of marriage begins.

Matrice and Harry offer a larger apartment, enough for Mona and Sid and Spud, and maybe another when the time comes.

Sid’s father is an open, approving man, happy for his son’s chance at happiness, wherever he finds it. Sid’s mother does not like the idea of her son marrying a widow woman - especially one with a son going on 12 years old.

Her family just pleased that she has someone besides them to depend on.

Sid and Spud spend long Saturdays together; sometimes take in a cowboy movie, while Mona works at the bakery.

Life flows around them in slow and gently ripples.
Picture
​legion of the late-dawning dark

most who understand what I have done
are gone,
dead,
or lost in their own bitter
memories…

----------

we are angry
generation, grew old thinking
old didn’t matter

we know better
now

understanding now we are not
special like we thought,
not exempt like we
thought…

understanding now that even at our best
we are still just a part of the decay
that produces new life, our
function to be not the flourish that blooms forever,
but only fertilizer for the next
spring’s flowering…

understanding that even the tallest tree
will someday
in a silent forest fall
unheard...

not the way expected
it would be…

----------

I march with a cohort
of the angry,
the legionnaires of the
late dawning
dark…
Picture
Santa Fe Afternoon
by Allen Itz

Time and the Tides

1946 (part 10 of 13)



ENIAC, first large U.S. computer finished…
“Show Boat” opens…
First meeting of the United Nations General Assembly…
“Lucky” Luciano pardoned for his wartime service and deported to Italy…
Juan Peron elected President of Argentina…
Winston Churchill makes “Iron Curtain” speech…
First U.S. rocket leaves Earth’s atmosphere…
Greece holds its first election after WWII…
First election for Japanese Diet…
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (later renamed Sony) is founded with 20 employees…
First hour long entertainment TV show premieres on NBC…
“Annie Get Your Gun” premieres with Ethel Merman in the lead…
Truman seizes control of nation’s railroads to delay a strike…
Patent filed in U.S. for H-Bomb…
First bikini bathing suit displayed in Paris…
Supreme Court bans discrimination in interstate travel…
U.S. tests atom bomb on Bikini atoll…
Truman orders desegregation of all U.S. forces…
“Animal Farm” published…
First mobile long-distance car-to-car telephone call…
Herman Goering sentenced to death, commits suicide in his cell…
“The Iceman Cometh” premieres…
Camera onboard a V-2 rocket takes first picture of the earth from space…
John F. Kennedy elected to U.S. House…
“Best Years of Our Lives” premieres…
Led by Ho Chi Ming, Vietnamese attacs French forces in Hanoi…
“It’s a Wonderful Life” premieres…
Truman officially proclaims the end of WWII…



----------


a time of
endings

a time of
quiet

a time of planting
in fields
plowed by bombardments
of war

a time
when first buds
of future days
push
through the torn and bloody soil
of pastures reaching
for life

a time when
all the forces of good and bad
gather
for the next round
of clashing philosophies

a time when blood rises
throbbing
toward
that day


---------

Wedding day at the courthouse.

Harry stands for Sid; Matrice for Mona. Spud stands between them as the vows are said.

Sid and Mona have to work, so their honeymoon is short, Saturday night in a small motel on Boca Chica Beach. They are alone together as Spud stays with Harry and Matrice.

To the sound of tides brushing in and out over sand glowing white under a brightly jeweled sky, they make love for the first time as man and wife.

Monday they go back to work; Monday night they settle for the first time into their new apartment, the first full night together for the three of them. Spud falls asleep quickly; Sid and Mona, in their own bedroom, celebrate their homecoming with the quiet passion of the newly-wed.

Picture
​I love college radio
 
“Eleanor Rigby”
symphonic version,
preceded by Aaron Copland’s
“Appalachian Spring”
and followed by Chopin’ “Nocturnes”
and Debussy’s “La Mer” and “Clair de Lune”

that’s the way I started my day
here on the corner of Broadway and Pearl…

I love college radio and I expect I’m going
to love this day,
another
in a long line of an old man’s midweek
capriccio…
Picture
Gilligan Sets the Course Home
by Allen Itz
Time and the Tides

1948 (part 11 of 13)


Channel 13 in New York (PBS) begins…
First Supermarket opens in the United Kingdom…
First country music TV show, Midwestern Hayride, premieres…
“Treasure of Sierra Madre” opens…
First tape recorder sold…
Mahatma Gandhi assassinated…
Mao’s army occupies Yenan…
First newsreel telecast shown on NBC…
Communist Party takes control of Czechoslovakia…
Supreme Court rules that religious instruction in public schools is unconstitutional…
Congress passes Marshall Aid Act…
Senator Glenn Taylor of Idaho arrested in Alabama for trying to enter a meeting through a door marked “for Negroes’…
Israel declares independence from British…
Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq & Saudi Arabia troops attack Israel…
Milton Berle Show premieres…
Babe Ruth’s final farewell at Yankee Stadium three days before he dies…
USSR begins Berlin Blockade; U.S./British airlift begins…
Ed Sullivan premieres on TV…
Indians sign Satchel Paige…
Alcoholic Anonymous founded…
Professional wrestling premieres on prime-time TV…
“Candid Camera” debuts on TV…
Truman elected on his own in an upset…
T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for literature…
Hopalong Cassidy and “Kukla, Fran & Ollie” debut on TV



----------


peace
and prosperity

soldiers home from war
take wives
have children
go to college and buy little houses
where a new middle class
is born

there are shadows
but always there are shadows

but soon everybody
will have a TV
and a new culture
a new language as old accents
are shed
north south east west
regions meld
into
peace and
prosperity and

shadows?

only the black and white
shadows
of television
of
Uncle Miltie
of Hopalong, of
Gorgeous George
and Wild Red Berry disturb
the night

and any who don’t have the shadows,
want them
Sears
Monkey Ward
low down, easy payments
too…



----------


Sid lost his job when the soldiers came home, but found another one right away. Gets paid every week, cashes his check at the supermarket and takes all but his small weekly allowance home to Mona who makes sure there are groceries in the cupboard for the four, yes, the four, of them, to eat.

With little Annie, just a year old, at her side, Mona works at home, bakes cakes, makes corsages out of old silk hose for high school dances. Helps all she can.

Spud is fourteen, still not a bad kid, but stubborn and reckless and impulsive. Teachers do not like his way or his inattention or his sass. He fails at everything but football.

Money so tight, but still Mona agrees to a hard decision - a private school in another city where, sponsored by their church, Spud can go. It is a place of discipline and accountability. Sid believes that is all his son needs and Spud, who still sees his hero in his adopted father, agrees to go.

Mona weeps as she sews name tags on his clothes and packs a large trunk for him. Sid takes a day off from work so they can all go to the school together, so that the boy doesn’t have to get off a bus alone, so that this separation, their first, is done together.

It seems such an empty house that Sid and Mona return to, silence a presence of laughter missing. Annie cries for her brother as Mona cries for her son. Sid sits quietly in his chair mourning the responsibility of fatherhood.

Picture
​
​
​Easter in Kabul

we walked the streets, three
of us, strangers to the city on a short leave,
through the downtown, buses and pedicabs honking,
crowding the street, each claiming dominance, motor bikes
and bicycles, and along the street, rickety stores,
none more than two floors high but the Spirizan Hotel,
watering hole for the US Aid workers, and the Russians from their
embassy and a UN contingent and a few Americans, bar at the top
of the hotel neutral territory where all could eat and drink
without starting an international incident leading to World War III
or just national humiliation...

and a book store where I buy a book of poems by the country's
foremost poet (dual language, Urdu and English) and also in English,
Mao's Little Red Book, brought on camel back across the Khyber Pass,
very thin, almost onionskin, paper, and the red plastic cover,
utilitarian and tough, a holy bible of sorts from the cultural revolution
next door...

as we continue toward the AID house where we will spend
our three-night stay, the road turns to red gravel, passing a restless
snorting camel, buying fresh nan from a street vendor, the sweet
airiness of it melting in our mouth...

----------

from out window in the morning,
we see the children walking to school in their tan uniforms,
singing...

(how I will mourn the tragedy of their lives in the years to come)

a cat on the roof below us next door, wakes and stretches, a lazy cat
​
sleeping on warm tiled roof in morning sunshine...
Picture
Red Tide
by Allen Itz
​ 
Time and the Tides



1950 (part 12 of 13)


Now the world’s second nuclear power, the Soviet Union flexes its muscle…
Ho Chi Minh begins offensive against French troops in Indo China…
Britain recognizes Communist government of China…
The Great Brinks Robbery makes off with nearly three million in cash and securities…
First TV broadcast of “What’s My Line”…
Senator McCarthy charges 205 communists are in the State Department…
Walt Disney releases “Cinderella”…
Dylan Thomas arrives in New York for his first U.S. poetry reading tour…
Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca premier “Your Show of Shows”…
First woman officer assigned to U.S. naval vessel…
Silly Putty invented…
Bob Hope’s first TV appearance…
“Peter Pan” premieres…
Dutch police seize condoms…
North Korea invades South Korea, captures Seoul, Truman orders American Air Force and Navy into the conflict…
U.S. and North Korea forces clash for the first time…
The Law of Return guarantees all Jews the right to live in Israel…
“Sunset Boulevard” premieres…
U.S. gives military aide to anti-communist regime in South Vietnam…
Earthquake in India kills 20,000 to 30,000…
Beetle Bailey debuts…
South Korean troops enter North Korea…
Charlie Brown debuts in “Peanuts” precursor…
U.S. forces invade North Korea, occupy Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, approach Chinese border and China responds with massive counter-attack into Korea…
Puerto Rican nationalists attempt to assassinate Truman…
William Faulkner wins Nobel Prize for Literature…
Eisenhower takes command of NATO…



----------


not a war
for us at first,
plenty war
for those dying
cities falling
and more people
dying
on both sides

a line on a map

thousands of lines
on thousands of maps

a time of redrawing lines
making obsolete
maps
of failing empires

another war starts
as relics of French empire totter

this one starts also
without us, barely noticed
by us, but a tar baby war
that inexorably draws us, three generations
of little tar baby wars
pend
stealthily
growing like the tiger cub
that grows its claws and its fangs
and is nobody’s baby
anymore

and the big one, the last one, the-end-of-all-wars,
the end-of-the-world that
keeps us awake at night,
the bomb-shelter big one, the-duck-and-cover
big one, Armageddon passed
like a low hand at poker, too terrible
for anyone to win with it
so
all
bluff and pass



----------


Spud is 16, going on 17, back at regular school, impulsiveness contained, mischief restrained, unhappy, seeking an outlet. He lies, enlists.

It’s his war and he doesn’t want to miss it like his dad missed his.

It is done.

Annie cries as he leaves. Mona cries as he leaves. Sid does not approve, will not acknowledge his departure, will not shake his hand.

Nevertheless, he is in the army now, and off to fight his war.
Picture
​my search for better personhood
​

still,
having slept an extra hour
every morning
for the past six days
and having exchanged my wide window view
of stressed commuters on Interstate 10
for a smaller window
and later and slower and more laid-back traffic on Broadway
I cannot say
I am a better person for it

but the sun just came out
making the morning yellow and bright
and that is certainly
promising
but
still I fear
it will take more than that

and the obits this morning,
25 dead people and only one younger than me
(and that only by scant months)
and that is sure as hell
a promise
to consider,
but
still
I think
it will take more than that

and while my wife was her usual
non-committal self
my dog demonstrated the true and deepest love for me
this morning
and that would be promising if in any way
it suggested a status change
but It does not
so that falls on the maintenance side
of the ledger
not on any new promise side
so it will take more than
that

so
it might appear,
setting all else aside as nice but not the true way
to better person-hood, that the only way to be a better person
is to be a better person…

~~~

isn’t it always the way,
there's always one damn catch or other,
like the advertisements on the back of comic books
about how to quit being the guy
who the bully at the beach always kicks sand in the face of,
the secret sold for twenty-five cents and a coupon on the back of the label on the 75-ounce jar of
Vaseline Petroleum Jelly…

Nirvana and better person-hood
available only to those most dedicated to its pursuit

(and liberal daily use of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly)
Picture
Explosion at the Cambell Soup Factory, Gator Bait, Louisiana
by Allen Itz
 
Time and the Tide

2020 (as extrapolated from 2015, part 13 of 13)



President Trump, reelected, resigns; celebrates the U.S. reproachment with Russia with official opening of his new casino on the Volga - The Trump-Putin Towers…

Vice President Kardashian takes the oath of office as the new President of the United States…

The end of history, as prophesied 40 years ago, finally arrives…



----------


history
becomes the fool;
the court jester in a pork pie hat
with fluff-ball bells on strings
that bob and bounce
with every faltering step,
the Ministry of Silly Walks sets the pace
as reason limps to the sidelines,
“take me out, coach,” the hero pleads,
“take me out…”

space aliens, tinfoil hats
and pyramids beneath your bed,
the force be gone
and already forgotten…



---------


My name is Spud, or, used to be, but nobody’s called me that for years.

The fellas down at the VFW call me Colonel, my rank after Khe Sanh, the rank I kept for the next 20 years. A wise ass who was right too often, a career killer in Uncle’s army. Sid was right way back, when he told me I didn’t have the discipline to be a soldier.

But I did all right, fought my wars well, got my ribbons, got my medals, just never got the rank I deserved.

Sid, well he finally forgave me for joining up without talking to him, then got all mad again when I re-enlisted for Vietnam. He’s dead now, a long time now, a car wreck on his way to work. That same damned old job never got the promotions he deserved, never the pay rises he deserved, years of watching lesser men take the rewards he earned.

Like father like son, I guess, wise asses both of us.

Mona died about ten years ago, in a home, alone, I’m afraid. I was in Europe, then Asia, the Mid-East for all the sand wars and just never paid attention. Annie was in California, another never-to-be movie star serving eggs and burgers at Denny’s. She never paid much attention either. Neither of us, I guess, came to much good as children.

At least neither of us made the mistake of trying to be parents.

It’s a helluva world and a helluva country. I figure I’d be fighting another war soon if I wasn’t so old. Too bad for all the young fellas and girls who’ll soon be starting their own string of wars to fight.

What can I tell you, an old soldier playing dominoes and drinking beer at the VFW. It’s a helluva world.

0 Comments

4/16/22  Time and the Tide

4/6/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
after "Hellboy"

not a great film,
but lots of fun, and the question now
is what to do with the rest 
of this Sunday afternoon,
a nap,
one possibility,
is tempting, but I know
if I go to sleep this afternoon, 
it's not going to be
one of those fifteen-minute power naps
that can refresh on a hot summer afternoon,
but a real 3- or 4-hour snoozathon
that will leave me groggy
and pissed off at the world
and it'll screw up my sleep tonight besides,
so, it being too damn hot
to go to the lake
or work in the yard
or go to the zoo

or picnic in the park
or take a hike down Government Canyon
to see the dinosaur footprints
or anything else that requires
leaving my air-conditioned cocoon,
so, here I am,
at the same old stand,
down at the coffeehouse
looking for interesting faces,
looking for a story,
looking for a poem to take the heat
off the afternoon
(and here the poet puts his glasses
back on and studies the coffeehouse crowd,
all the while typing,
his fingers on a straight loop to his brain,
until his brain stops, and thinks,
what the hell is this,
where did I go off track, 
what does this have to do with the poem
I was trying to write?)

I see the redhead
who is always here in the afternoon,
thin, sharp face displaying no evidence at all
of internal life, and I see the couple at the table
next to mine, a young man and woman,
he Hispanic, she, gringa, reminding me 
of us 45 years ago, except reversed,
except they're both medical students,
while we were both on our way up
through the jungle of the state's bureaucracies

and now the poet is really in a jam,
rummaging through all this old news,
hoping to hook something - anything -
to start a roll in the jumbled field
of Sundy poetics...)

the poet's eye jumps to the new couple
just coming in,
might there be something in this? he thinks,
this very large man and this very small woman,
but, no, add them together and divide by two
and what you have is two very normal, very everyday
boring people without an ounce of poetry
in their very large and very small bodies...

meanwhile,
the poet's brain keeps slipping back
to the great scene when
Hellboy and Abe, the fish guy, 
get drunk on Tecate
and sing the syrupy song
about lost love
and...

the poet notices two young women,
very pretty, dressed for summer,
and the poet, pencil poised,
realized that some things can't be said,
even in a poem, without encouraging
community dislogisticity, if not
lengthy imprisonment, and...

I look around one last time
and decide there's just nothing here
this afternoon to bring my creative juices
to boil...

(the poet decides it might be best
to dare the dangers of sleep intoxication
and go home for a nap - perhaps
a good idea will come to me in my sleep,
​he thinks
​





Picture
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, schoolteachers, 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
​

Picture
abuelita de los todos

the rotund little crossing guard, silver curls
trickling under the back of
her white crossing-guard cap,
commands the intersection
with the authority of her orange vest,
parades sternly across the rush-hour street,
little feet paddling fast against the cold asphalt,
like a mother duck
she pulls in her wake a gaggle of
tiny ducklings, all bundled, head to toe,
against the cold

whatever else might befall them
as the day progresses, her little charges are safe for now
under her fierce shield

abuelita de los todos -
la guarda bajo el sol naciente
​




​

Picture

hell no! I won’t go!

it’s warm in here
and very cold outside and
looking through the wide restaurant windows
it even looks cold
and I need to go out there and walk the dog
but I don’t want to
because it’s cold enough out there to freeze my macchiatos
right plumb off
and I would feel right distressed
if my macchiatos were to freeze and fall right off
and go bouncing down the street
so I’m going to sit right here and pretend I’m writing a poem
cause it’s just too damn cold out there for a south Texas fella
with tender macchiatos

so
hell no! I won’t go!
​
​
Picture
Cock-a-doodle

poets are creatures
of the word, 
and are often stymied
by social convention that sets
certain word off-limits,
you know, the words
that made us snicker in fifth grade,
usually having to do with bodily functions
and/or body parts best not shown in public,
for example,
there is what Walt Whitman
called the "man-root"

instead of Whitman,
the polite word to use in mixed company today,
assuming, of course, you have need
to refer to the body part in mixed company,
is penis...

but, I tell you, that is such a limp dangly
little word no man really wants to claim it
​for his, you know, whatchamacallit,

(see the problem right there it is,
trying to talk around the whole thing

when some simple little word
could make it clear we're not talking about
a fella's ear, or his nose, or his left elbow

*****

some might call it prick -

though I personally don't like that,
sounds too aggressive 
for a passive kind of guy like me,
and besides it's developed all sorts
of negative connotations, like for example,
no one wants to be or hang around with
a prick, and neither does one 
want to get pricked, no matter
how tiny the prick is that
does the pricking

*****

if we were Irish,
I suppose we could
all have our individual names for it,
like Lady Chatterley's gardener -
his preference was, I believe, John Thomas,
but it does seem to me
it wouldn't solve the problem
since we couldn't be sure 
what anyone was talking about,
assuming, perhaps,
the conversation was about another person
of whom we had not had the pleasure
of acquaintance and possibly more 
destructive
to social tranquility, there could be, for example,
endless argument between man and spouse
(or other interested party) whether it would be
more appropriately be named
"Big Willy" or "Wee Willy Wilkins" -
​a discussion which would do no good
for anyone...

*****

many nowadays seem to prefer
cock, that, at least, is what I see
and hear most often,
and I have to say,  I kinda like cock,
myself, such a proud manly word,
cock-of-the-walk, cock-sure, cock-
a-doodle-do, wake up and smell the roses,
or something else

and, of course, no man ever wants
to go off half-cocked...

*****

so, setting aside such obviously unacceptable proposals
as trouser lizard, or one-eyed-snake-that-ate-Milwaukee

and, while always being available to other suggestions,
for the time being, perhaps we can just put  cork
in the conversation and leave it at
cock.

in the meantime, possibly tomorrow,
someone will address the similar conundrum
regarding those attributes most usually 
attributed to the ladies

​but it sure as hell won't be me
​
Picture
surely the gods must weep

the soft slow opening passages,
like the whisper of angels' wings,
the most noble, moving, profound beauty
in all music, leading inexorably
to the same passages as it ends, this time
the full-throated god-roar of Odin
and all his sons and daughters,
the power of deepest beauty,
the beauty of immense
power,
all in a single piece of human creation,
surely the gods must weep
at this presentation of their own eternal story…

the Overture to Tannhauser, played in high school band,
engulfed in the music from the low brass section
at the back of the band, only three bars in,
the music like the quiet rising waters
of an on-coming flood, that very minute I learned
such depth of soul and sound was possible,
the very minute I learned I loved classical music

Picture
sitting at a stoplight on San Pedro Ave. thinking of dead people
 
sitting at a stop light on San Pedro Ave.
on my way to my coffeehouse
this morning, thinking about all the dead people
in my life, thinking of an aunt and uncle
who lived in McAllen at the time and how when I was a kid,
six or seven or so, I would spend a week with them
in the summer…

childless at the time and happy to have me around,
I remember how on Saturday I went with my uncle to his office
in a tall building downtown, riding an elevator, my first, and playing
with my toys on his carpet while he worked and I remember how
during the week I played on a large undeveloped tract of land
across from their house, open land, no brush, unbroken
and not farmed and I would spend the day playing in the dry caliche dust,
and I remember the land littered with shells of snails, thousands of them, generations
of snail bones, white, like bleached bones in the desert, snail bones white in the dust
and the bright Rio Grande Valley sun…

and I think of how little I remember of that week, not a meal, not a night
in bed, just the elevator ride and snail bones, white and dusty, and I think
how my aunt and uncle and most of the people I’ve ever known
are like snail bones now, white bones under layers of dust, and how sad
it seems that so much of my life is about dry, white bones baking
in a desert sun…

and then before the light turns from red to green,
a young Latina crosses the intersection in front of me,
pedaling hard on her bicycle, heading, no doubt, to the college
two blocks down the street, a backpack strapped to the back of her bike,
full of books, I imagine, as the young woman, long black hair streaming,
strong, brown legs pumping as she rises and falls on her bicycle seat, the future
racing past on a bicycle, life racing past, black hair streaming and brown legs pumping,
and for a while at least I forget about the white bones buried in the
dust of my life and for a moment the hour glass is turned back and the dust
that is my life no longer trickles down from the small cloud remaining, instead
the glass is full and vibrant streaming, life not a memory of fading bones but
a vision of black hair streaming and brown legs pumping, life,
alive, black hair streaming and brown legs
pumping…
​

Picture
more confident suns
 
a sepia-lit day
under an uncertain sun

storm blowing in from the coast,
but staying east of us, the threat
increasingly hollow as west winds blow
the rain away…

but still
the hesitant sun knows how prevailing winds can change,
a lesson learned by many of us in life…

rarely the easy
way -
at least for me

everything I’ve ever learned
the product of mistakes,
under-estimating myself, over-
estimating people I counted on, giving up
when I should have hung on, or holding on when
good sense would have told me to let go

but, and here’s the important lesson

always losing more by giving up
than by holding on has made me
tough, or, as others say,
stubborn…

the virtue of a hard head,
serving me now as
never before

meanwhile
a sepia-lit day
under an uncertain sun

but I hold on
to remembered light
and more confident
suns…

​
Picture

pretty young women with large bosoms want to be my friend

​

pretty young women
with large bosoms
say
they want to be
my friend
on Facebook

this is a bizarre
development for me
at my age, pretty
young women
with large bosoms
wanting to be my
friend,
and,
come to think of it,
pretty young
women
with large
bosoms wanting
to be my friend
is not something
I recall
happening
to me at any age…

it seems to have
started
shortly after I shaved
my head, perhaps
it’s a Daddy Warbucks
thing or maybe
exposing my
scalp
has
somehow
exposed the boiling
core
of sexuality
blazing within
my loins…

or maybe
not…

at any rate
I’ve been hesitant
to become
friends
with pretty young
women with large
bosoms on Facebook
because who knows
what they might
be after since
I’m not
rich
so
i think
maybe it’s my
bod,
or my scintillating
intellect
(though the bod
would be my
choice,
happy to save
my scintillating
intellect for tea
with the older
ladies)…

but in the end
I think these pretty
young women with
large bosoms
are just nurses,
charity workers, out
to sooth the shriveled
soul and other parts
of dried up old
men,
or maybe they are
just
confused
about the riches
I don’t have…

best I decline
their offer of friend-
ship for the sake
of both of us,
me too old
and they too young,
for the rending
heartbreak
that will surely
follow
our mutual
disillusionment...

plus
if my wife found out
I was being friendly
with pretty young women
with large bosoms
I would be in immediate
danger of losing
bathroom privileges
and sleeping in my car
with my dog which
is really
small
(the car
not the dog)
and already smells deeply
of dog…

it’s for the best
my dears
I say to all the
pretty
young women
with large bosoms…

move on, try to forget me,
possibly
you might check with
the old sailors'
home,
teeming with old men
fully as bald as me
and actually
you don’t really have
to be that young
or have such large
bosoms for them, so
you can let yourself
go a bit -
just
wear a skirt
and hosiery
for they, after a life
at sea, are experts in the
lessons of any port
in a storm…

~~~

and if it doesn’t work out
with the old
sailors
you might
call me again,
who
knows
what evil might lurk
in the hearts of bald old men
given a chance for
second
thoughts…
Picture
In the old "Here and Now" it was my practice to include poets from my library in every issue.  I have done little of that in this new "Here and Now," mostly because it's a lot of work transcribing the work from the original book.

So, returning to that practice, at last a little, here is a poem by Suzette Marie Bishop from her book Horse-Minded, published by CW Books in 2012.

Bishop reaches writing at Texas A&M International University. She won the May Swenson Prize for her previous book, Took Off Her Wings and Shoes. As a poet and teacher, she gives many readings and workshops for gifted children, seniors, at-risk youth, and for an after-school program serving a rural Hispanic community.


None of It Was Overlooked by Us

In his truck
between him and another classmate
leaving a party for the workshop,
he had asked me 
to go dancing after the party
and after we dropped the other poet
off at her apartment.

As we drove down the mountain
we all joked about The Overlook Motel,
wondering what was overlooked,
laughing down that steep slope.

Things turned quickly
as they can with poets
when she refused to get out of the truck
once we got to her place,
pleading with him to come in.

She seduced through me
as if I'd disappeared
or would just wait patiently in the truck.
He gripped the wheel
and kept shaking his head,
"No."
She finally got out.

We drove the rest of the way down
the mountain in silence,
and he turned into my apartment complex,
the desire for dancing,
making out with me in his truck
killed for him,
maybe reminded of his guilt
about his estranged wife
he hadn't mentioned yet,
unable to talk about her.

I was left
stunned
as he drove away

Three poets in the cab of a truck,
all the dark night
falling away from us out
the opened windows,
the extremes of the hour
stay with me:

unspeakable ecstasy,
unspeakable pain
swirling around us
like the wind through the windows,
sweeping our laughter and silence out

to echo off the ridges.
​
Picture
This is first in a 13-part series of personal and world history, told in text and photos. I will include a new part with ever following post.

Time and the Tide

1934

Alcatraz becomes a federal prison
Nazi Germany passes the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring
Over 10,000 die in Indian earthquake
First Jewish immigrant ship breaks the English blockage of Palestine
418 Lutheran ministers arrested in Germany
First high school auto driving course offered in Pennsylvania
Great dustbowl storms cross U.S. prairies
Okaloosa, Iowa becomes first U.S. city to fingerprint its citizens
Bela Bartok’s “Enchanted Deer” premiers
-----------
almost unnoticed
the Aryan Councils
meet,
drummers
prepare to beat
their savage
drums
------------
Fifteen years old, she leaves school, marries a Canadian sailor. Together they live happily by the sea.

Two years older, he plays high school baseball. An all-round athlete, he stutters when anxious, but, tall, dark and handsome, the girls in the small town where he lives don’t care.
​

The world has not yet come to their doorstep.
0 Comments

4-4-22 Approximately Excellent

3/8/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
 new world rising
​

from Austin, north central, time to go home,
back to the old world, San Antonio,
forget I-35 through the city, most days, especially
this time of day, most days, the longest linear parking lot
in the United States of America, but I lived here, 60 years ago,
visited many, many times since, I know the old way across town…

45th
to Guadalupe;
Guadalupe
on
the strip
bisecting
the
UT campus,
then
through
downtown
in
the shadows
of the new
gleaming 
in the
sun
residential
high-rises;
across
the bridge
over
Lady Bird
Lake to
1st,
running
parallel to
South
Congress,
the whole
south
central
part of the city
now called
SoCo
(for a while
ten years
ago
after
development
chased
out
all
the
street
corner
prostitutes,
called
affectionately,
NoHoNoMo);
then
over to
Congress
at
Ben White
to
Slaughter Lane
and
a jag
to I-35,
which
though moving
slow,
by this
point
at least
moving…

A drive through the heart of the city and everywhere crowds, walking, biking, sipping lattes and cappuccinos and americanos at sidewalk cafes, people everywhere, crowds of young people, pretty young women in Saturday Brunch clusters, young men in Austin-fashionable shorts and flip flops and it’s like some alien or international force came to the city and took away everyone over 25 years of age and now there’s no one here but these youngsters, way-hip and happy and it must be an exciting place to live and I remember it was exciting when I lived here, back when, in the redneck-hippy days, but we didn’t have the place to ourselves as it seems these young folks do, had some old folks around, in fact, a lot of the redneck-hippiest were old folks themselves, old Beats, old philosophers and poets and grand-standing forever students, academic hangers-on, loving the life and the nubile young coeds, studying some but never finishing, finding new and exciting beats, new and exciting music hillbilly-hip and nirvana blues, from the heart of a city where most everything was new - those times were exciting too, but it seems different now, as I think a lot of us were hicks in those days, astounded at the new possibilities and the new batch seem immune to the astonishment, assuming assumptions we would never think of in the old days…

But then, maybe it’s just being old that got to us, unable to keep up, giving up and moving to Topeka.
​
Picture
,
Mickie knows the down-low


Mickie Mondragon knows the down-low
and can take you there if you're willing
to pay the price 

Mickie is a tiny woman,
5 feet and a fraction, 80 to 85 pounds,
crooked gremlin smile and black hair
dark as the bottom of Chacon Canyon at midnight,
a small strip shaved above each ear,
visible only when she laughs…

denizen, 
some say queen,
of the deep and dark Zarzamora Strip 
on the South Side,
an old brick Pentacostal church
on the corner the only hint of grace in the district
surrounding the church, music clubs,
heavy metal to conjunto
strip clubs, male and female,
the genitalia of one’s choice writhing
in erotic frenzy on a rose-lit stage,
straight bars,
gay bars,
bars for the undetermined, looking for something new
biker bars, a churning tidal pool of testosterone looking for a fight,
knives and chains preferred, to be worn
and to be used
high class cocktail bars
for those who want to slum
without getting too slummy, millennials,
and college kids looking for something to talk about
at the banking or real estate conventions of their future,
the semi-daring who want to walk the down-low without touching
or being touched, a prophylactic encounter with evil,
and the down-and-out bars, linoleum tabletops,
pickled eggs in streaked glass bottles, breakfast, lunch
and dinner de jour, the bar, the slobbering drunks
asleep at the tables, fronts for the $1,000 ante
poker tables behind the green, felt door in the back

Mickie, known and welcome everywhere,
knows the down-low and will take you there,
show you the sights, introduce you
to all the most colorful characters,
all the shady gents and ladies
who will pat your back and call you
by your first name like you are
an old reform school buddy…

Mickie will take you there...

but be ready to get out on your own
If you can,
because that part is just not
Mickie’s job







Picture
a 78-year-odd fat man
​

so,
​I’m a 78-year-old fat man…but wait,
poetry is about truth and beauty
and while there is no beauty in a 78-year-old fat man,
truth is still important, and the truth is, though
I am already a fat man, I’m not as fat a man
as I used to be, and I just turned 78 a few weeks ago…
so
abiding by the poetic requirement for truth
it should be more correctly said that I am
a recent 78-year-old, not-as-fat-as-he-used-to-be
man, and the further truth is like so many in my contingent
I hate change and mostly I hate change
(affirming, because change means I’m going to have to learn new stuff
and I believe, fervently, even, that at the age of
just 78, fat, skinny, or perfectly formed,
such a man should already know what he needs to know
to live a full 78-year-old life…
I mean, I like many in my regiment, I always like
to read new stuff about stars and galaxies
and dinosaurs and ancient tribes of ancient peoples,
and various other oddities and monstrosities of life
unknown before my time, but I only like to learn such stuff
as long as I don’t have to learn too much about it,
in fact,
I prefer to know just a little bit, just enough to know enough
to set my imagination churning,
because, it is
a fact,
my imagination churning produces much more interesting stuff
to know than anything I would know by actually knowing
real stuff…
and that works great for me, since I read such
science news and other such stuff just looking for
stuff to fill me up like an over-ripe melon with pseudo-science
and interesting fantasy that I might expound upon here
and at other venues where actually knowing stuff
is not strictly
required…
but other than that kind of stuff,
the stuff I don’t want to learn is the stuff
most sixteen year olds already know and I figure
if a sixteen year old already knows it why in the world should
a 78 year old, not-as- fat-as-before man bother with knowing it
too because it just seems to me that such a man
ought to know
just about everything he actually needs to know to make it
though his day…
as to the rest,
well,
take my computer, so old it’s almost steam-powered,
but old as it is, it is my faithful friend
and like any of the other friends
I’ve buried or except to bury within the next few years,
I dread the time when its time is up
and I have to go looking for a new computer friend,
it is just like I hate the idea of going out and finding new regular
friends when the old ones
bite the dust…
it’s oh so much more complicated…
learning a whole new set of demands and expectations and idiosyncrasies
and all the other stuff that goes with maintaining a healthy and productive
relationship…
like my phone and my wife’s new car - I’ve been talking on a phone and driving
for 65 years and none of what I learned now seems irrelevant
to making a phone call or driving over to the corner store
for a Baby Ruth, except that the complications now on both the phone
and the car almost make me hesitant to go out in the world
without a tag-along second grader to keep me legal and in the technical
loop…
and, ah, Baby Ruth, now there’s a constant in my life but I’m finding them
harder to find in the candy aisle
is that the next indignity, Baby Ruths becoming another historical oddity
confined to glass display cases in museums of the latest antiquities,
leaving me to learn all the particular rules
and wherefores and whereupon
of a Snickers or Mars Bar?
wouldn’t surprise me…
but then with 78 years upon this twirleybird
planet,
not much does…

​


Picture

​
saved by the blond with long legs and large breasts

breakfast this morning
amid a cohort
of old men, their little convention badges
hanging from their shirt pockets

an old coot’s convention
at one of the nearby hotels,
I suppose

a convention chair, I imagine,
calling the convocation to order, loudly,
the hearing in the audience leaning over
to pass the message on to those
whose aged ears
can only hear sounds in two or three
frequencies that only dogs
can hear, certainly not
to the human voice, no matter how loudly
announced…

two by two they come into
the restaurant, wives (usually younger)
in tow, sitting with their fellow
conventioneers, tables of old men
leaning across the table to hear,
conversation of whats? and whats? and
say that again…

makes me think of years ago
when I was the keynote speaker
at a gathering of deaf people
(yes, I know, what does a hearing keynote
speaker have to say to a room of the deaf
and how often does he have to say it)
and I remember seeing
all the people crowding the hotel
restaurant, signing to their friends
at their table and across the room,
the whole room a tidal wave
of waving hands and fingers, naturally
leaving me wondering what
they were saying
about me

but that’s another story…

meanwhile , just as I was about
to succumb to the contagion of crankiness certain
when too many old people
mingle together
in too small a space,
a young woman entered the restaurant,
tall, leggy and blond, with large beasts like the prow
of a golden sail ship pushing softly
and proudly through
the creaky curtain that enveloped the room,
the age haze that made it hard for me,
a cranky old man, myself, to
breathe, the thick air that exposed
all my ego driven lies and evasions, the ones
we tell ourselves and pretend to believe,
the crowd of old men
like mirrors that tell truths I cannot tell myself,
that, like it or not,
shows you exactly as you are,
all those secrets that make the me
no one else can see
saved this day
by the lovely proud breasts and long legs
and blond hair like sunlight in
the dark, allowing back into the room
the magic of this old man’s
gift of self-deception


​
Picture
 
my life with chickens

let me summarize:

much of my early life
was spent shoveling chickenshit
from beneath roosting nests

every Saturday
when other kids were watching Howdy Doody
I was shoveling chickenshit

later in my life
as I continued through my course of education
I continued to shovel chickenshit
pushed by dim-witted persons presumed
to know more than me

then
even later, a job delivering frozen chickens
to supermarkets, naked, pink-pimpled bodies on ice,
laid out like a serial killer’s trophy case

(at least, there wasn’t any chickenshit involved, unless
you count the boss whose chickenshit daughter
dumped me for a former best
friend)

and finally, as I
ever climbed to new levels of authority
in my profession, I became
an acknowledged expert in the conveyance
of chickenshit to the unfortunates
who worked for me,
a highly successful career I had,
owing in large part
to my near-lifetime experience
with the subject
at hand…

​

Picture
​A child of San Antonio
​

Little Lina,
Born an Afghan child,
Now a child of San Antonio
Since moving here with her family
Two years ago…

Three years old when she disappeared
From the play area in front of her apartment,
Turning four now, wherever she is
\

An area-wide search, thousands of volunteers,
Through the city and near-by cities,
Through the hills and pastures in between,
Navy divers search the rivers and creeks all around

Little Lina not found yet, sleeping last night
And many nights before in a strange bed,
In strange places, amongst strange people

That is the last best hope
Of her family, for, if she sleeps,
Wherever she sleeps,
She is yet alive

Against all hope, the city joins her parents
As they weep, pray to all the gods of San Antonio,
And await her
Return
​

Picture
 want to go deep
 
I want to go deep,
find that far-down place
available only to true spelunkers
of souls abiding
in cosmic
deep

but
I
can’t
go
deep

when the conversation
in the next booth
up
is so interesting

a woman, a teacher I’m thinking,
talking to an attorney,
the teacher
trying to convince the attorney
that a child, a three-year-old,
is in danger,
being abused by his parents,
and she marshals her arguments,
one after another, a catalog of observations,
and the attorney objects to each one,
you’re being such a defense lawyer,
she says to him,
I’m having nightmares about this
she says,
but the attorney is unmoved…

such a strange discussion over breakfast,
I think,
breakfast business
meetings
commonplace in these parts,
but usually a boss type
giving sales updates, handing out attaways,
describing bottom lines past
and expectations
future,
pretty standard, an exercise
in power, getting people out of bed early
to listen, on their own time,
to the latest pin stripe
exhortations…

lots of business meetings
I’ve been to, meetings I’ve called or been called to,
meetings I’ve listened in on from here
at my corner table, but never a meeting this intense,
even when it was lovers meeting,
trying to build a relationship or, sometimes, with tears
and angry words, trying to put a dead relationship in its grave,
people in extremis, but this meeting, this impassioned defense
of a child at risk, ultimately failing, ultimately a casualty
of a lawyer’s disbelief, the intensity of the meeting
and the ramifications of its inconclusive
conclusion…

how in the world am I supposed to plumb the depths
of my soul when this kind of stuff
is going on
around me, my spelunking blocked
at the cavern’s entry, like giant stones rolled
from the side of the hill, blocking…

---

don't bother trying to roll the stones away...

I just won’t get down there today
anyway…
​

Picture
cold truths of life and death in black and white

atop a rise
a mound of earth
an ancient burial mound
looking out over
a snowed-over field
white field
black skeleton of a winterized tree
thin black line of a frozen creek
five black horses
led by a white horse
ghost against the snow
legs lifted high
above the snow
crossing

(Colorado, February, 2008)
​

Picture

From my first book, "Seven Beats a Second" in 2007, art on every page by Vincent Martinez.



Eyes Of Sister Jude 

sharp eyes
like tempered blades
that cut clean through angry


guarded eyes
that weigh and judge
and stand ever alert for betrayal



dark eyes, deep,
softened once for love,
then moistened by a long night's weeping


but only once,
and it was long ago
​

Picture
a back-story on this. when my son started at Texas State University, we bought a small trailer out in the country for him to live in. when he finished school, we began to rent the trailer, which worked fine for a couple of years. until we ended up with a renter who we finally had to toss out. when leaving he did several thousand dollars' worth of damage to the trailer. most of the repairs we paid someone to do. some we attempted to do ourselves.


APPROXIMATELY EXCELLENT


Today
Was another day
At the money pit,
Laying down
Kitchen tiles this time


It is said to be a very precise business,
This tile-laying thing,
And I’m not
Widely known as a person
Of frequent
Precision


More
Of an approximation type guy,
That’s me, but I put that new tile down
Anyway,
And know my knees hurt,
And my…
Well,
Without bothering to name
All the various parts,
Just say,
Everything,
Hips down
Hurts


And it may be true,
Even precisely true,
That an individual of a perfectionist bent
Who insists on a true northerly orientation
Might find fault with the trueness
Of the line
Of my
Tile


But another person, say,
Another person of a more approximitistic nature,
Willing to drift his orientation a degree or two,
Or even three, north northeasterly could very well
Look at how my tiles line up
And find it quite
Sufficient,
In fact,
That person, knowing that the lowest professional
Bid for this work was 965 dollars
And 37 cents
Precisely,
Would almost certainly
Say that the free work done today
Was, in fact, quite excellent,
approximately

​

Picture
Slipping Away

1.

my mind is blind
to the crisp autumn sky
and the creek running clear
and the squirrel 
teasing my dog,
a backyard clown
mocking the quivering
puffed-chest forward
self-righteousness
of a small dog
facing a large world

my eyes see none of this,
for like a fist
clenched tight against itself
I am closed to all but anger,
a simmering constant
since the last election,
anger,
not just at the loss
of mine against theirs,
but at the outcome
as a symptom
of the nature years of my life
in these later years
like a lifetime
of being on the wrong side

ii.

I feel the passing of time now
like never before,
time and opportunity
slipping away,
life space lost, like
water squeezed from a cloth,
disappearing in an eddy
down a drain,
leaving an approximation of me
to fill the place i had before
until the day I need no space at all

iii.

as I read the obituaries in the morning
or stand at the grave of my father
as I did last week in a park
green with the growth of recent rain,
I cannot reconcile the contradictions
of death and life, how the life I see
in the obituary photos and the light
I remember in my father's eyes
can disappear in an on-rush of dark,
one minute to the next, life to death,
how it is that I, too, will some day slip
into that vortex of night and never return

iv.

I think of the eternal nature of atoms
and how they combine and recombine
over uncountable eons to create
illusions of form, and in some
of those illusionary constructs
a spark of life and consciousness
and beings like you and me
and all those whose obituaries 
I read ever morning,
and my father dead 42 years,
the illusion of him gone forever
to seed the soil he lies in
and the grass and trees and clouds
over his head and, someday
in the great recycling that brings
all the old to something new,
perhaps another form with life
and a sense of self and universe
outside of self that is the cradle
where rests the truth, for life to last
​forever, we must over and over die
​



Picture
Art by Vincent Martinez - with poem, from Seven Beats a Second


lying in the sun with Susan

quiet bay

no sound but the light rustle
of marsh grass in the gulf breeze

she
lies on the deck, legs spread,
as if to thrust herself
at the summer sun

sweat glistens 
on the inside of her thigh
and my tongue aches
for the taste of her

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2-28-22 As Long As The Road Runs Ahead

2/12/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
all is lost, alas
 
so
I have this poem I wrote
that is not a very good poem at all
but as a poem-a-day poet
I have to either post it or write another poem

it’s like spending your last $8.99 on a shirt at WalMart,
not realizing how ugly it is until
you get it home
but you have to wear it because
you paid for it

so
I’m thinking
that surely is a pretty peach-colored sky
to the west, a reflection
of the sun cresting the horizon
to the east, and I’m thinking
well
so what
this peach-colored sky thing
happens every day so how is that better
than an ugly shirt from
WalMart

so
I’m thinking well
look at the pigeons
peck pecking on the pavement
in the parking lot,
isn’t that worth a nice poem
but I’m thinking
what’s the big deal
about pigeons peck
pecking
on the pavement in the parking
lot, has anyone ever seen
a pigeon not
peck
pecking
on something
somewhere, so

I’m thinking,
look at that big bus
passing on the interstate
taking someone, somewhere,
while I sit here peck pecking on my computer
like a pigeon
and, besides, I’m thinking
who cares about buses going somewhere,
last time I was on a bus back in 1967,
I got off in Atlanta
and flew the rest of the way
to my destination
and I bet buses are no better
now
than they were then,
and that was
pretty
bad

so
I’m thinking,
look at that huge oak tree,
bet it’s full of
squirrels,
but I’m thinking, I’ve done squirrels
recently and aside from their bushy tails
they’re basically rats
in trees
and who wants to read more about
rats
in trees

so
I’m thinking
now I’m stuck with two lousy poems
and I’m going to have to post
one of them
for my poem-of-the-day
and I’m thinking
damn,
I wrote a really good poem
yesterday

I wonder what’s happened
since then
that leaves me with two lousy poems
that I have to choose from

the glory of the day before
lost
all lost
like Richard
who lost his horse
and ended up buried in a parking lot
with British pigeons
peck
pecking
right over his head
​

Picture
the dangers inherent in writing poetry in the afternoon

semi-bright
day
Wi-Fi at the coffeehouse
crashed

leaving
dead time for me
with ten thousand things
(at least)
I want to do

I hate dead time,
it is reminding me too much of
dead me,
when all the little fizzlebillets
that connect
this little brain bit
to that little brain bit
goes on the
fritz
and I’m stuck
candidate for a career
in any one or more of the zombie movies
which seem to multiply
like gruesome little bunnies
overnight,
turning all my best parts
into
corned beef hash,
which,
I don’t know about you,
seems really disgusting
to me
and I’m thinking
that instead of allowing my fizzlebillets
to turn into corned beef
hash
I should maybe try some mental exercises
but I get stuck at 6 times 6
so, it may be already
too late…

​

Picture
campfires
​

around campfires
beings not so unlike us
as we imagine, told stories
of the trials and victories of the day,
shared news of the hunt
with their clan brothers and cousins

many stories reached into the hearts of those who heard them
and were told again on other nights
around other campfires, passed on through generations
and geography…

traditions were born, expressed
in all the many languages of
man…

and we
who call ourselves poets
bear the weight of that tradition
with every word we
write, a burden, but not heavy, light instead
and full of promise

an invitation to join
kindred souls, to retell the old stories
and sometimes our own new story,
so well told
its telling sets a new spark rising in the dark night,
passing  from our own campfire to others
brightly burning, we will never
see…

keeping aglow
the ancient embers…

it is our job,
undertaken with the humility
of those who understand their place
in a long and vibrant
history…

it is our joy,
however well or poorly
we do it

​

Picture
an ambulance passes, patient cabin lit
​

old woman, white hair,
some lying across her forehead
like foam advancing
from an impatient tide,
cheeks sharp-edged, planed
like lava run on the side of a mountain,
asleep, blue
blanket pulled to
her chin, attendant quiet and still beside her,
no lights, no siren, unhurried
passage home,
far-traveled trail-rider
nearing trail’s
end

​

Picture
An actual new poem, from a story in the weekly New York Times Science section.

double trouble

a clash of Titans
falling into
a clash of Titans

one black hole
pulled into
a larger black hole

blackness,
darker than the desert
at midnight

gravity
slipping like a saucer
of melting wax,
pulling apart all the tiny parts
of me,
atoms and electrons and
neutrons and quarks and barks
pulled and scattered
to leave the ghost of me
adrift in the black
of all

even darker than clash
of elementals

imagine the power
of such dark
forces,
rending the universe
leaving the black portal
to never ever land

never ever land
the smile of Alice's Chesire Cat
mocking in the dark 
the white ghost of me
adrift in the ever never land,
asleep in forever-ever land 

​



Picture
trail mix
 
made dinner
last night, steak,
macaroni and cheese (for color),
and beans…

cowboy dinner -
not a green thing anywhere

```

my son’s dog is Ayla

she loves to play chase the ball

throw the ball and she’ll run and get it and bring it back
for another throw,
throw the ball and she’ll run and get it and bring it back
to continue the game

she’ll do it for
hours

I decided to play the game
with my dog, Bella, so I threw the ball

she ran and got it…

took it the far-back corner
of the back yard
and buried
it…

that’ll be enough
of that

```

he had a wife
and two children

who he loved and cared for
above all else…

he wasn’t a
philanderer at heart

but every woman
between

eighteen and seventy five
wanted him

and he was no good at all
at resisting

temptation…

he was
my friend…

I wonder if he’s still
alive,

still
not resisting temptation

```

on the other hand,
I knew a woman, good mother
and wife, except that being such
left her feeling unfulfilled,
seeking such filling
with tennis pros and other men
on the margin seeking always
someone else’s good wife and mother
to fulfill

```

“on the wings
of a snow-white dove
I found my own true love,
sent from above,
sent from above”

country folk in the old days
knew about religious music, praise
music that looked to God
in their own rough life, understood
the gifts of life and love
he gave them…

a barista in a coffeehouse
where I used to go liked to play
modern praise music, sung and played
by sincere-faced yuppies, puppies
whose closest experience with their God
was the dollar and a quarter weekly allowance
they used to get from their mom and dad, awful music,
unimaginative wailing, heartless, crass and dull as the worst
pop music by the worst teen sensation…

it was a church-supported coffeehouse…

you’d think they’d be more careful
about demeaning the supposed glories
of the God they claimed to
worship and
adore

```

and speaking of
godly missions,
fulfillment,
steaks, and great accomplishments
of the previous year
I was very proud, after years trying,
to master the arts of the omeleteer
late in the previous year, finally
learning how to prepare an omelet
in the proper masculine
fashion

it’s a man’s food to fix
you know, what with all the
swifting and spiffting and stirring
and stirring before easing
the eggs into a pan heated
to the exact best temperature,
selecting all the proper
ingredients to be added to the eggs
in the proper sequence and
at the proper time
as they fluff, swirling
the rising eggs around the pan
(properly buttered before-hand of course),
then with that gentle yet resolute
flip that is required so that your omelet
has the proper slight browning
on both sides, it is a manly thing to do,
this creation of the perfect
omelet, requiring all of a man’s greatest
attributes of delicate strength
and keen observation...

I am very proud
today, as I consider this, my accomplishment,
perhaps my greatest accomplishment
of 2013…

new mountains to climb
in 2014, new vistas to explore
and conquer…

perhaps buttermilk
pancakes

​

Picture
a girl-child plays in a summer park
​

a girl-child
with long braided hair
and deep violet
eyes
runs in a park
blowing soap bubbles,
a stream of soap bubbles
caught by the wind,
blowing through the trees

there is your true God

a pretty girl-child
blowing bubbles, each bubble
a universe let fly by winds of chance,
one bubble yours
and mine
where we sleep…

innocent
and unaware of all sharp edges
in the matraverse
in which our God runs, blowing
translucent universe
bubbles
watching them drift in the wind,
watching them pop
as harsh and unwelcoming
space and time
finds them

arbiters of order,
all the mechanics of space
and time, hostile
to such free and open flying

​

Picture

​I’m just tired of it
 
Well,
It’s true…
 
I’m an old man,
Codger dial set to most curmudgeonly,
Crotchety, just as a 78-year-old man ought
 
But damnit, I’m tired of how
Nothing works anymore
 
I’m tired of rough, pot-holed streets
That only get worse
After our incompetent street department
Fixes them
 
And I’m tired of incompetent, at best,
Politicians
And the weasel-in-a-snakeskin politicians
Whose incompetence is the only thing saving us
From disaster

and I’m tired of great television programs
That I can only see after I fi-diddle-diddle
Some kind of “fire-stick”
That will never light my fire
 
And I’m tired of good restaurants
That set aside their blue-plate-specials
For some frou-frou menu of pasture greens,
High prices and tough steak
And good old breakfast diners that put
Jalapenos in their biscuits and gravy
 
And modern automobiles that look like multi-colored snails,
Instead of those great finned monsters
That set our imagination aloft
 
And the Spurs, my basketball team, who play
Great basketball for 45 minutes before blowing it
In the last three minutes of a regulation 48-minute game
 
That’s just pretty damn discouraging
To us disciples of the round ball memory
Better days of yore
 
All of that,
Then,
In the midst of all my high codgerishness,
I see pictures of our Mars lander,
Mars, for Christ’s sake, there we are,
Putting our robot’s footprints
On the red planet, leaving a plume of red dust
As it traverses the plains and canyons
Of our most ancient memories, preparing
As it passes, for a day not far ahead,
When it is human footprints on Mars,
Mars, for Christ’s sake….
 
And that new telescope
That will show us the beginning of time and space,
The only everything we know, seeing it from minutes
After the “big bang,” having eyes on the creation
Of everything, everywhere, and everytime…
 
Thinking we ought to get the people
Who did all this and put them in charge
Of everything else as well

leaving me, thinking of this, that worthy things
May still be possible for our kind,
Lulled
In a kind of poly-possible unlikelyhoods,
Satisfied for the day
Except,
Still pissed about the Spurs

​

Picture
she’s probably heard it all before

pretty
young black girl,
barista at the Starbucks
where I go when my regular coffeehouse is closed

beautiful hands,
I notice
as she gives me my change,
and dark, deep eyes…

smiling
as she waits
for the next customer,
thinking, I don’t know what,
probably what every pretty young girl
smiles about
and on this young girl,
it is
especially fetching…

I’m looking at her as I stir my coffee
at the sugar and everything else bar
and she sees me
and comes over, thinking I want something…

how do I tell her how much I want
at least some of the years
lost
and how much I enjoyed
watching her smile

but I don’t even try
to tell her,
since,
it’s the way it is,
she’s a pretty young black girl
and I’m an old white man, probably,
in her mind if I say anything,
a dirty old white man
and she’s heard it all
before
I’m
sure

​

Picture
as long as the road runs ahead

birthday coming up,
number 78 this time,  
a week to think about it

and I will, because
this one unlike others seems irrevocable...

I do not dread the advance
of time and time’s inevitable denouement

because it’s like what Darrel Royal
used to say - you dance with one who brung you

and the years have “brung” me
much that has been satisfying, rewarding

me with memories
I would not trade for any extension

of years spent dull and dreary,
without the pleasures that come with things done

people known, places been,
even the mistakes as real in my mind

and as important to me as all the times
of smooth and proper sailing...

this life, like an ocean, the deeper the better,
stagnant ponds where life is encrusted with the waste

never doing, never trying, never flying, never falling, never
choosing at a fork in the road, a dull life of sitting

at the intersections of life
afraid to move, afraid to choose

~~~

I will think more of this in the days ahead,
and, as always, as I think, I write…

my conclusion now, well,
wait, this story not yet ended

as long as the road runs ahead,
there will always be horizons to reach for…

​

Picture
the aliens on our streets

five foot two, maybe three
on her tiptoes, stern, got-business-to-do face,
sharp nose, sharp chin, blond hair
pulled back tight, giving the appearance
of a profile on an ancient
Roman coin

sits straight backed in her chair,
the uniform tight,
her broad belt and attached accessories
remind me of my son when he was about three,
a toy tool belt with toy tools cinched around his middle,
covering about a third of his body…

she and her partner don’t talk much, I see,
both with their professionally unreadable, got-business-face,
business, despite all the television stories, known only to them
and their fellows, a life both inside and outside
the life the rest of us laze through,
so comfortable and smug...

her face softened, broken with a smile
as I pass and say hello, a human face flashing
behind the cop-on-the-beat face
she wears most of the day, and, if she’s lucky,
is able to leave at work when she goes home
at night to her husband and maybe children,
somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother,
living inside, outside, the face she carries like a shield
all day…

~~~

I am reminded of the “pigs” of my younger days, the appellation
rising again among many, referring always to “cops” as if it was a dirty word,
and I wonder if they’ve ever known one,
if they’ve ever seen one
behind the
mask…

I think not

I think most people live a life so safe and secure
they have no way to ever understand
what lives beneath the surface, organizing their life
around myths instead, never understanding what commitment
it takes to keep that underlife
away from their door and the tidy life
they live behind
it

​

Picture
it’s all in the game

with thanks to Tommy Edwards and Nat King Cole

“Many a tear has to fall,”
he sings

and I wish
I was sixteen again
when I understood the truth of things
long since forgot

I remember thinking,
I should be writing this down,
but I didn’t of course,
being sixteen, truth passes quickly,
captured in a moment,
too delicate to keep
in a closed palm,
released,
the memory
seared
forever we think,
forgetting, at sixteen,
about getting old
when even the plainest memory,
the most obvious truths
of youth
fade

---

but
for a moment,
in the music, I see its
shadow

​

Picture
harvest
 
a great morning
after 10 days of cold

sun
bright and yellow

pasture fresh mowed,
golden grass
fresh cut
and thrown from the tractor in rows

deer
graze along the rows

little holes dug
around the base of oaks

holes
like those doodlebugs
make in fine, loose
earth

holes made by squirrels
retrieving
their bounty of acorns

winter sustenance
earned earlier in the labours
of summer and fall
gathering

I,
nearing another in a very long line
of birthdays,
gather my own, right here
right now

here…

let me share my harvest
with you

​

Picture
​

​a hole in time


all these years later,
there are moments when something,
some sight, some sound,
just something,
triggers the past, a hole in time and in the instant of an eye-blink
I am back in it…

this morning,
passing a hotel in the dark,
a side door, light burning, and
seen through the door a long hotel hallway,
blue carpet, hotel wallpaper color walls,
and I am standing outside such a door
in early morning dark thirty years ago,
waiting for the mayor so I can take
him into a meeting room
and introduce him to assembled out-of-town VIPs…

Luther Jones,
a lovely and beloved man who, after his political life was over,
would stop by every couple of weeks to talk
to the children at the elementary school
named after him, known
to everyone from his sparkling city by the sea,
for me and many others,
a mentor and champion over the years,
passed on in his 80s in 2001…

it was a funeral large and crowded full of friends and citizens,
but simple, like the man…

a hotel’s bright-lit side door, a beacon to memory
this dark morning, and I am awash in remembering
times and so many good men passed…

sweet sadness begins my day...

​
Picture


​
Amethyst

A deep stone with many streets,
its light holds itself in with 
blue, the pours sunlight
over the windowsill. My fingers
run like water over its edges
and I feel a small rose opening, a pulse.

I gave off light like this once, listening
to poems beside a man I hadn't
known long, feeling my thoughts
simply braid into his.
We didn't touch and later we stopped
writing letters, but that night
a sheath of heat held us, and the light
rising from me for once was muted.,
not diamond, or daydream spending itself
in sparks, and it never quite left.
One morning, expecting tartness
and seeds from purple grapes that appeared
along a stranger's fence, I tasted
sunlight. I tasted snowmelt
washed down form rock and pure air. 
At times it seems that benevolence
thrives in a small enclosure.

Today the sun turns the grey
mountains gold, dusky pink, the spills shade
over their canyons which deepen
to blue as tdhe light begins to leave.
The bay gelding walks
to the end of his pen and dips his nose into
black water, not drinking, just
splashing it, playing,
making it gleam in the soft dark.




Picture
bench-sitting, people watching
 
the day started early

4:30 the dog’s early walk,
coffee from the lobby;
several blocks to the plaza,
around the plaza
and back to the hotel, all the morning
necessaries done

back to Starbucks down from the plaza
at 6, most of the same folks
from yesterday - the woman, tiny woman
with a tiny doll face, beading some kind of jewelry
while her husband drinks coffee and
watches; I saw them later
at their spot
on the square, business less than booming

then, at 7, breakfast at
La Fonda, eggs benedict with their own-made
hollandaise sauce and tomatillo, best
ever…

then,
time for the business of the day…

bench-sitting and people watching,
a bench on the plaza facing the sun
and the sidewalk, looking and listening
as people pass -
(learning as I wish I had learned 50 years ago,
beautiful women love to pet beautiful
dogs) -
people stop, scratch the dog’s head, cooing and
coochie cooing, like the beautiful German tourist
and her mother talking to Bella in German, a
multilingual dog, Bella seems to understand…

a month’s worth of attention in just a few hours,
spoiled dog will expect the same daily
from now on…

sitting with my back to a group
of mostly men, homeless, street people, ladies
and gentlemen of extended leisure, habitues
of a park salon, expounding on issues
wide and deep, football, the day’s menu
at the mission, interviews of famous people
heard (it's Santa Fe, after all) on National Public Radio,
the advantage of knives over guns,
the crazy fuck who hangs out on the other side
of the park…

probably the most interesting conversations
I’ve been privy to in a long, long time…

meanwhile,
Bella soaks up all the attention of the passing
crowds, mostly old people in the morning, old
women with red painted toes and old men
with silly-looking hats they think required during
vacation rambling in the mountains - and no,
my hat is not the least bit silly, being, as it is,
the naturally required hat for vacation rambling
in the mountains…

and
speaking of mountain rambling,
that’s the plan for today, Espanola to Los
Alamos, then through the national forest
and across the Sangre de Cristo range
a five hour drive of lofty heights and wide
vistas, perfectly timed for the leaves
changing as we pass, a wonderful day
of deep forests,
high mountain passes, and clean mountain air…

tomorrow,
we don’t know yet,
maybe north to Ojos Calientes
or south to Van Horn, the long way home
on Highway 90, through Alpine,
Marfa, Marathon, Del Rio,
across the desert, skirting the Big Bend’s
border mountains…

two more days of driving

and seeing all the
sights

​

Picture

Elizondo Road
 
I just learned
that Freddy got himself
a road…

up near Bluetown,
a tiny town a couple of miles
from the small town where I grew up,
just a cotton field
from the Rio Grande River…

a little Mexican beer joint
there where I used to go to buy
beer when I was about sixteen,
no questions asked
until a new guy asked me
what year I was born
and I couldn’t get the math
to work in my mind
so I turned around and walked
out

lucky for my drinking habits
the new guy didn’t last
long, costing the owner too much
business, I’m guessing,
so things quickly returned to
normal…

```

(this is supposed to be about Fred,
not me, which I often forget when in the midst
of poeming...)

so,
as I was going to say
before I so rudely
interrupted
myself,
Fred was a very nice fellow...

a nice fellow, my co-worker
for a few years,
a farmer, a social worker
who helped farm workers and labor contractors
find each other for the annual
migration, a friend to all who might need
a friend, and, come election time,
a gatherer of Democratic voters, filling
his big farm truck with farm workers,
insuring they all knew
by the time they reached the polls
who the Democrat was and how to vote
for him…

a man with all the normal South Texas
prejudices, but like with most of the kind,
prejudices applying only to those he didn’t know,
never to any he knew and made his friend,
in short, a very nice fellow and a good friend
to have in the best and worst
of times…

if I listed of all the people I’ve known
who deserve a road, it would be a
very short list and right at the top
would be Fred from Bluetown, Texas,
a man I know would be
very proud
of his road, a man i knew
and liked many
years
ago

​

Picture
anniversary thoughts on a winter night

the cold night seeps
through the window 
beside our bed,
damp, coastal cold
that makes midnight fog
fall to the ground, frozen,
reflecting the pale light 
like the tiny sparkles
of broken glass
you see scattered on the street
after an accident

the window,
when I brush against it,
is a cold jolt
that pushes me across the bed
to lie closer to you,
to wrap myself around you,
embracing your warmth
like an animal
drawing tight around itself,
seeking the internal fire
of its own warm heart
to protect itself
from the cold hand of night

you are my fire
tonight
and nights to come,
the warm nest that saves me
from cold and loveless nights,
the light that sustains me
through dark and lonely days

you are the center
of life and warmth for me

you are,
​and so, i am

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2-9-22 The Complexity of True Things

1/25/2022

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Picture
three days on the mountain

after two days of climbing
we crossed
from west to east
in a heavy snowstorm,
knee deep in half a winter’s
accumulation
between the trees

it was about 2 in the afternoon
when we crossed
the crest,
within two hours
we found the clearing
where we slept that night
under a diamond strewn
sky…

a bright rising sun
woke us
under a cloudless blue sky
broken only by the thin contrail
of a jet flying higher, even,
in the cold morning firmament
than where we slept

coffee over an open fire,
and freeze-dried eggs
scrambled,
frying pan and coffee pot
cleaned in the snow,
breakfast eaten quickly
before the last day’s trek
down the mountain,
an easy day,
each of us, as we spread out
along the trail,
quiet in our own thoughts,
remembering
the past months,
friends now
who we knew, in just a few days,
would be gone,
unlikely to ever be seen
again

our last memories -
the mountain
and the three days
we spent together on it

(New Mexico, December, 1964)
Picture
Leaving in frustration a few minutes ago from a conversation about a serious subject, trying to talk sense to someone buried, like a frightened ostrich, up to their neck in some bumper sticker dogma fed to them by the collection of Facebook gurus that seem intent on erasing any chance of common sense and logic from entering the public consciousness. 

Silly me, to think I would find anything else on social media.



the complexity of true things

the haze
shrouding downtown last week
was dust blown from the sands of the Sahara Desert…

I read that in the newspaper last week, making
me think of wind in the Texas panhandle
blowing tumbleweeds the size of a Volkswagen bus
across the highway, and I think of a dust storm
in Utah, so thick as I drive through it that nothing
alongside the road can be seen,
not even the rocky monuments
made famous in the cowboy movies I saw
on Saturday afternoons when I was young, and when
I was older, the Northwest Frontier, and the dust
on the desert between me and the Hindu Kush - far away,
all these places, all these dusty storms, yet even so,
not so far as the seeming endless Sahara, and I think
of the far-travel the dust downtown made to get here,
and I think of all that must be carried in that dust,
remnants of oasis palms, DNA of Bedouin travelers
and their obstreperous camels, all in a mix drifting
down the streets of my city and I begin to appreciate
the complexities of true things, how more intricate
and complicated our world, each piece a part of the whole,
the whole a confederation of all the parts, and the relation
of each part to all the others, not always seen, like relatives
who live far away, never seen even though they
in their parts are also you in your parts…

such a world we live in;
such lives we lead…

hard to remember the complexity
of all that’s out there
when wisdom is found for so many
in bumper sticker simplicity
and the shallow cleverness of Facebook memes, so that,
while all of life and our world and the universe
around us seems to grow more and more into a tangle,
the forces of the tangle and our fear of it
seem to push us more and more
into simple-mindedness...

~~~

the truth may be out there,
as was said one time,
but, God,
what a maze there is between it
and me

​
Picture
Tokyo, call out your tiny armies

a couple of years ago
I had lunch with a woman, a former
classmate I hadn’t seen since
high school graduation 60 years ago,
a highly intelligent, greatly
accomplished woman - and I was such an ass,
everything I said, offensive or just plain
stupid, words pouring out
like I was 13 years old again, on a first date,
uncertain of how to act or what to say,
so I just flip the “on” switch
to my mouth and the “off” switch
to my brain…

and I guess the problem is
in some circumstances, the 13-year-old
takes over and I’m the same
uncertain,
overcompensating jerk I was back then

and the woman and I have not
had lunch again
since…

and this still bothers me
and I still sometimes think about it
even these several years
later…

why do I still think about it?

maybe because I know
a chance to renew a friendship
was lost over that lunch…

or maybe it’s just I hate the evidence
of that 13-year old jerk
still residing somewhere inside me,
after all the years I’ve spent
digging deep holes
where
I might bury him forever,
so I might never have to think again
of him that is lurking
in some subterranean part of me
still…

Godzilla,
sleeping deep in the ocean
until awakened
by a burst of radiation from the
past,
that 13-year-old arisen

```

Tokyo, call out your tiny
armies

​

Picture


​a gaggle of English teachers


every Monday morning
in the coffeehouse, early,
a gaggle
of retired English teachers,
my age or maybe a little older,
high school teachers,
probably,
though from the way they talk
it seems clear they regret
all the universities’ loss by their pedagogical absence

(the one, struggling with removing the trash can lid,
looks at me,
says,
“you’d think someone with a PhD wouldn’t
have such a problem with trash can
lids”)


another,
skinny, with malnourished hair,
toenails like a badger
digging,
and a thin, reedy, whiny
voice
that would drive me nuts after ten minutes
in a classroom, talks the most -
says Fuck this & Fuck that
a lot
in that English teacher voice,
like she's fallen into an old Norman Mailer novel
and can't get up,
and it’s all I can do
not
to laugh out loud,
thinking back nearly 60 years,
imagining old Mrs. Buck,
my 115-year-old high school
English teacher
saying Fuck this and Fuck that…

and thank God my English teacher days
are far behind me
Picture


big time again

after two days and nights
of rain
the sky this morning is clearing
and the world is greening
and the aquifer
is filling

and such a great and wonderful morning it is,
so much better than months
past

and I am energized like the bunny
who goes on thump thump
when all others quit the race
and I look forward to a good day’s work
in the rippling fields of poetry
and to tonight
when I will harvest a bit of the field,
show a few of my photos,
read a few of my
poems

pretend
I’m big time
again…
Picture
​t
the woman weeps

the coffin lowered slowly into the open grave

women all around weep as well, women
who have sat where the weeping woman sits
and women who someday will

the men watch, knowing
there is a box waiting for them
someday
and a hole being dug
a little deeper
each day
to contain it

​

Picture
The next poem is by Francisco X. Alarcon, from his book, De Amor Oscuro/ Of Dark Love. It is a bilingual book, in Spanish and English on facing pages, translated by the poet. It was published in 1991 by Moving Parts Press.



II

your arms disarmed my sorrow,
by stretching like boughs
of elm in the night, they made
stars shine on the ceiling

we are no longer on the hard floor
of a poor apartment's living room,
nor do two quilts form our bed,
nor do we hide beneath covers

we are embracing on the warm earth,
the night lulls us, uncovered,
very nearby a river sings

I follow your voice as one follows
a torch in the dark mountainside,
far off, all are asleep in their bedrooms

​

Picture


a great tree


this tree
grew
when Christ’s cross
was virgin timber

continues
to grow as millions
have come to life
and died

false gods
and their believers
stricken
from the lists of the living

while
the true God
if she exists
lives here
still

​

Picture
fixing the language

having
exhausted now
my monthly quota
of atrocititious
assault
on the English
language,
I surrender
to my aspirational urges
to facilitate
improvement
to the other native
language
of this region

“Hola, que tal?”
I say, “como estas tu.”

“Muy bien,
gracias,” I
respond to my-
self, thinking as I did…

how boring!

this Spanish
lingua
is as in need
of pepping up
as English,
I think…

what these Spanish
language arts
artists
need is some imagination,
some better sense
of how things
ought to be instead
of fixating
on what the Spanish
Book of How By God
Things Must Be Said

like
for example

if your head is your
cabeza
why shouldn’t your
butt be your
cabooza

and most of all,
why does
a gringo like me
have to think about
this stuff

where’s
Borges when this kind
of stuff needs
to be done,
where’s Neruda,
where’s Allende,
Garcia Marquez,
Fuentes,
Paz, where was
Cervantes,
(for this is after all
not a new issue
to be resolved)

----

come on guys,
time to get your cabeza out of
your cabooza

​

Picture
you must remember this
​

I remember
both things that are
and things that aren’t

I remember Holmes
in the “Hound of the Baskervilles”
deducing from scratches around a keyhole
that a character drinks too much
and too often , comes home
drunk and has trouble fitting his door key
into the keyhole

I remember that
every time I have difficulty
unlocking my door in the dark, feeling a need
to reassure the neighbors
that, no, I am not
drunk

I also remember
a middle section in the book,
a subplot that is the author's feint, suggesting
a motive for the nefarious affairs
afoot, a subplot that provides
a back story on Holmes’ client, Sir Charles Baskerville,
who, it turns out, was a detective in his earlier life,
infiltrating the Molly Maguires,
then being discovered and, eventually,
becoming convinced
of the rightness of their cause…

but it turns out, no matter how clearly
I remember it,
this is not found anywhere in the “Hound of the Baskervilles,”
being instead from another book, (the last Holmes book) “The Valley of Fear”
which I do not remember ever reading, or even ever
knowing of before…

such is the memory of an elder poet, content
to make up memories when the annals of real life
do not sufficiently amuse, an entertainment
for long days and nights, but a danger
when the made-up becomes the better part
of reality…

leaving a fear that persists, like that of falling, in knowing
that much of the most interesting parts of my life,
places I’ve been, people I’ve known
could well be only the remembered dreams
of a poet with too much invention
in his life

(a note for Netflicks subscribers - see “The Molly Maguires,” an old
and very good movie starring Sean Connery…)



​

Picture
I remember her in her Airplane flying

she’s 75 now, maybe
76, but I remember her voice
like a storm blowing inland over
her cold and lonely ancestral fjords,
keening, like an ice-crusted wind, but most of all
I remember her eyes, from an appearance with her band
on the Ed Sullivan show, so long ago, her eyes
burning with green fire, behind the shadowed lids,
emerald coals looking into the camera,
through the camera,
burning me
as she
sang…

​

Picture
life on the streets
​

pigeons
peck at the pavement
capturing bits of food so tiny
only their beady little eyes can see it,
bread crumbs, minuscule bugs, who knows,
whatever it is I can’t see it so it is only through faith
that I can assume the pigeons are not delusional
and actually eating something, faith,
and the small but seemingly conclusive evidence
that I’ve never sees a skinny pigeon, never seen a pigeon
dead of starvation, all I’ve ever seen are like
those plumpers out on the parking
lot, proud little prancers, dancing the pigeon
hustle, two steps forward, one step back, peck, peck,
pecking at the asphalt, sighing their quiet pigeon coo, coo, coo,
ain’t it grand, this life on the street…

doesn’t seem like such a bad life, minimal grocery bills
at the supermarket, important for us social security types, except maybe
for the laying egg part, which, I don’t know, even though
they’re little bitty eggs, sounds
painful

​

Picture
The second section of my most recent poetry book is dedicated to the trials and tribulations of writing a new poem every day, which I did for 12 or 15 years. (I actually don't know which it was; the older I get, the less the passage of time means to me.) It is the problem of sitting down in the morning and knowing that according to the challenge the poet has set for himself, a new poem must be produced, with at least some hope that it will not be a really bad one. 

It's not the writing, but the coming up with something to write about, which, in desperation, produces some often times strange poems. 

Surprising how, though written 10 years ago, at least, this early morning "hail Mary" pass seems

so contemporaneous.  




the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning or just
another damn day in the life of beginnings and endings



I was going to write a poem
about how miserable everything is



how the lunatics
have taken over the asylum


how good things
everywhere
are hightailing it for the
low hills and high gulches

how the bad guys
have stolen all the white hats
and posture and preen
and pretend 
they are the good guys
while the real good guys
are all off somewhere
eating crackerjacks
and drinking lattes and 
smoking rose-tipped cigarettes,
mute and blind
to the ravages of their absence,
content in their philosophy of okeydokey
pass the smokeys
while the world burns
with the riders of the apocalypse
going eeehaw through the great divide
of hip and hop and spit and spot 
and drip and drop and pip and pop
and duck and fuck
and clickety cluck
and
eeehaw
we
ride,
they say their grim teeth
gnashing
as you run,
your white ass flashing
in the light of a dying moon

you had your chance,
they say,
and now it's our time to ride

gnashing
eeehawing
in the light of a dying moon,
we are the riders, they say
of your inconsequential doom

youbetcha

and I've gone old,
my damn coffee's gone cold
and my left foot's gone sleepy,
twitching like jello in a junk-jar
from jimjam jarheads,
and don't-know-jack
spratt
garage 
sales
and that's just the 
beginning of it...

but nobody wants to hear all that
so I'll just start over
and junk this jerky poem
and write a new one
about blue birds 
and puffy-fluffy clouds
​and shit like that
sales


Picture

my patient blonde friend

I have had my breakfast
now
and looking out the wide windows
of my restaurant
I can see my little SUV
in the parking lot and I can see
the back window of my
SUV and I can see
looking through the back window
my dog watching me
back
and I can see that she,
being more of a squirrel-chasing
dog than a literary lion,
doesn't understand
what this what-ever-I'm-doing
has to do with squirrel
chasing
and though she is a most polite dog,
forgiving of my past
and present
inattention to the finer squirrel arts,
not to mention, of course,
her and the fine blond
fur
on the top of head that begs
to be scratched
and the long blond fur
on her bac that begs to be stroked
and the fine little hairs
on her belly
that begs
to be tickled...
also,
I think,
she wants to pee

​

Picture

​exactly as cold as it looks
 
today
it is exactly as cold
as it looks

this is an important
thing
to know
as I dress for my
early morning walk with my dog
who doesn’t much care
how cold it is or
isn’t

yesterday
it was much colder than it looked
so I under-dressed
and was cold for the entire trek

the day before
it was not nearly as cold
as it looked
so I overdressed, finishing the walk
almost in a sweat

this need for daily
calibration
is one of the things that keeps life
interesting
for old folks who don’t have much else
on their mind

---

Momma Cat,
so named because when she
joined us she brought along two fresh kittens,
usually follows us on our morning walk
only as far as the end of the block
where she sits and waits
until we complete our circuit,
then rejoins us

this morning
she followed us all the way around
the circuit…

to the end of the block,
then over the footbridge
that crosses Apache Creek,
then down West Rolling Ridge
until it dead ends at Evers, then
back across the creek on the Evers Road bridge,
then north on East Rolling Ridge
to the end of the block on our street, Clearview,
then home…

I don’t know why she does it, doesn’t participate
in the walk in any way but by following
along…
but what strange shadows we cast under streetlights,
dog shadow, man shadow, and several paces behind,
cat shadow…

I can’t help but feel
there are some hints here
to a solution to some kind of universal mystery

I’ll think about it again
tomorrow
morning
as we walk

---

I have a sense
when we walk in the morning
that some shadowy
presence
that is not the cat
is following
us

the dog senses it too,
constantly turning her head back
to scan the darkness
alongside the
road

---

I don’t have a lot of shoes

just some boots I don’t wear
anymore

the brown shoes
I wear every day and some black shoes
I keep shinned for dress-up
purposes - weddings, funerals,
and the like

and a pair of slogging-in the-cold-and-wet shoes
for walking the dog

it was cold and wet yesterday morning
so when we set out to walk
I put on my slogging-in-the-cold-and-wet shoes,
but then forgot to change into my
regular shoes
when we came back home

so I walked around all day in my cold and wet
shoes, feeling sometimes like a lumberjack
or a lobster fisherman
but most often
like just a guy with cold wet feet…

occasionally exciting and reaffirming
to my masculinity,
but mostly sloppily miserable

---

in a life of few certainties,
one thing is certainly known…

I will be up at 4:30 tomorrow morning,
making a determination as to the relative
relationship of cold and cold-looking
as I prepare to select the proper
clothing
and shoes
for my morning walk with my dog, Bella

the moral contract
I have with her and, lately, Momma Cat
require it, as does my poetry,
the dark of uncomplicated early day,
no matter the relative cold to cold-looking
relationship,
being the best time for thoughts,
both meaningful and futilely meaningless,
which will in their own good time
slip, elegantly or otherwise,
into a poem for the day

​

Picture
aliens discuss their plumbing
​

I was going
to write about the beautiful morning,
so bright,
so cool, third day in a row, after three days
of triple digit heat

but I can’t...

the women in the booth across from me
are so remarkable,
one,
the older of the two,
short and dumpy, wrinkles on winkles,
thick ankles drooping over sensible shoes,
an indescribably deep
East Texas accent, so broad
it’s like pine trees stirring in the morning breeze
right outside our window, wafting
the essence of wet pine every time
the door opens…


the other woman related
to the first
from their conversation, though so starkly different
from her it's hard to imagine a common
blood line, tall, slim, broad shouldered, large breasted,
most likely older than she looks,
straight hair white and long to the center
of her back, face all angles and planes, cheek
bones like an ice shelf hanging
over the ocean, a stunning woman
at whatever age, a revelation of the possibilities
of human beauty in a natural state,
a Nordic face, with a pass through Indian country

strange -

I can’t recall her eyes,
but her voice as she spoke to the other woman,
deep, husky, flat, fly-over country
accent that isn’t an accent,
like they talk on the
TV news…
 
---

what a gorgeous day it is, but even
in all its beauty, it’s an every-day day like I’ve seen before,
like I’m certain to see again if I wait long enough

but these women, so strange and so close, making the day
more than every-day, a mystery to the poet...

but their conversation, so bland, so banal, so every day,
so out of character
with the characters I imagine from their appearance -

like hearing aliens
from a far galaxy talking about
their plumbing problems
back home

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    ​78 years old, three times retired, 2nd life poet, 3rd life artist

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