THREADS (7/1/21)

Nova through Saturn's rings revealed

remembering a summer afternoon
​
remembering
a summer afternoon
sitting behind my parent’s house
on a patio I made from bricks
salvaged from a demolished building downtown,
enough bricks for a fifteen by fifteen foot patio
and a brick sidewalk from the back door
to the garage, purposefully made
rough, bricks not completely
even, to give the appearance of great age
like an ancient cobblestone street
in an old and venerable city of my imagination

the patio where my parents, unaccustomed
to air conditioning until later in their life,
would sit in the evening, catching the soft,
damp breeze that blew from the gulf
almost all the time, a generation from a time
when stuffy houses were left behind at end of day
for quiet talk in the cool of an outdoor evening, sitting,
my parents, until squadrons of mosquitoes swarmed in
with night's dark shadows,
sitting, my parents, in the shade of a very old mesquite,
lightning struck, a large hole in the middle
of its trunk where it burned,
a lightning strike many years ago
fierce product of a savage thunderstorm
from the northeast, a thunderstorm
like the one approaching again from the northeast,
black and swirling clouds on the horizon, approaching
quickly from across the fields, the reason I rushed
to finish mowing, to be done before the torrent came,
to be done in time to sit here on my rough patio
with a dew-dripping glass of iced tea, watching it come,
a ready-or-not storm coming fast and strong…

but I’m ready and will watch it all from there
on that patio I made from salvaged bricks…

---

many years later now, mother and father long passed,
the house long sold to others, others I imagine
sitting on that same old patio under that same wounded
but eternal mesquite tree, leaving me to wonder,
as I imagine, if they ever notice my initials outlined
in bright red bricks right where to kitchen door step
meets the patio bricks…

wondering if they ever wonder…






​

Eventually I'm going to run out of paintings, so I decided to include my photos as a part of each post.

​there is a thread

there is a connecting
thread
that binds the world
and all its parts,
the new and the old
the dirty and the clean
the saint and the thief
the chicken and the road
the peanut and the butter
the prince and the pauper
the acorn and the oak
the tree and the forest
the lake and the trout
the love of a man for a woman
of a man for a man
of a woman for a woman
the love of all that moves in the day
and whispers in the darkest night
the moon and the stars and the sun
and each of its orbiting
globes whether gatherings of gas
or rock and iron and death
and life and the hydrogen and the oxygen
and the orca and the ocean
that enfolds it
and the field and the mouse
and the mountain and the top
and the oceans and the deep
and me and you,
the me part
you
the you part
me
there is a thread that connects
us
to all
all
to us
and finally
us
to we
together

​

​

If I ever have a crush on a jock, it will be Becky Hammon. 

Becky became assistant coach for the Spurs seven years ago, the first female to hold such a position in the NBA. Previously she was an all-star in the WNBA for years and was judged one of the fifteen best female basketball players in the game's history.  Turned down a number of times by other teams for head coach positions, most recently not hired, though better qualitied because that team valued "gravitas" over experience. I take that to mean no 5'6" female should ever even bother to apply.

I wrote this piece years ago when Becky was first named assistant coach. In the meantime she has turned down several job offers to head women's programs at universities. Current Spurs head coach Popovich in his seventies is expected to retire if not this year, soon. If she can't get the job here, after 7 years here as Pop's lead assistant, she might should re-evaluate those university positions.



 a sports story

Becky Hammon,
5 feet 6 inches tall, 37 years old,
star for sixteen years in professional women’s basketball,
judged to be in the top 15 players of all time
in that league, hired
by the San Antonio Spurs
as an assistant coach, the first full-time, paid female
on the coaching staff of any National Basketball Association team
in the league’s history…

how like the Spurs
this is…

so, now,
courtesy of the Spurs,
stick it in your sexist pipe
and smoke it…

​

the fog downtown
 
from the heights
the city's skyline seems to
float on gray clouds

at street level, the fog
coils like a snake between the buildings,
drifts down the city’s twisting
colonial-era streets, curls around
river bridges, and below the bridges
the murk lies quiet and calm, only inches
above the green, slow-moving water, here
and there green-shelled turtles
surface, separate themselves from the green water
to raise their heads into the mist
for gulps of damp air...

I have walked these streets
in years past,
like the turtles,
keeping my head down
as I walked along the river
at the midnight hour,
when it was not a safe place to be,
mysteries sheltered in each dark
doorway, under each bridge
at the water’s edge, knife-fighters,
whores, thugs and the generally
insane wandering
through ghosts known only
to them…

the dense morning fog
reminds me of those nights,
misty shadow-things
lurking
but benign,
pale remembrance of the dangers
of the dark and lonely...

the greatest danger this morning,
collision with a park policeman cruising
the Riverwalk on his bicycle

a better place to be now, but lacking
the drama of those low-living
nights before






​

Red tide

​

---

night beach

night on the beach
in a tiny camper trailer, waves
whispering as they pull and push sand from beach to the sea
and back again while tiny beach creatures scuttle, little crabs
pushing from dens under wet sand,
like babies being born, pushing aside the grit that holds them in the damp dark,
the holes they come from closing up again as
salty foam washes over them,
the grind of new sand, washing over them...

bare as the salted air washes over me, waking
as the sun rises over warm gulf water,
breakers shining orange under dawn’s fiery  glow -
the red end of night, the time of night when  the sharks finish
their feeding in the surf under the bright tropic moon...

even as I am awakened by the golden
light…

even as the animals are fed, I am hungry, rising from
my hard bed, walk the beach through ankle-deep surf,
feeling the flowing sand and tide, advance and retreat over my feet...

shaking the night blown salt from my hair, I dress, drive
for breakfast  Sandy’s Pier, oatmeal and crab cakes
and coffee, then back out to the warming beach, back to the trailer,
where I hitch up and go home...

~~~

a playground in the light of day, the beach
a church in the night, a place of solitude,
a place of worship for those who believe in no greater
power than the push and pull of the tides,
a place to feel at one with the power of the moon,
a cathedral at midnight under a sky of stars ,
 when the sharks feed under the full, tropic moon,
and the orange glow of dawn on foaming waves, the
the bright morning light reflecting on the wet beach,
just as the moon shone back from the sand at night…

night is the time for the beach, sleeping in the
quiet of whispering surf and scuttling
crabs…






​

Two from Colorado

​secret places
​
acres of brush,
paved over these days,
parking lots, WalMarts, Dairy Queens,
nail salons and half-priced
barbers, broken-down shopping centers,
empty storefronts, dirty display windows,
graffiti, trash blowing over cracked asphalt,
almost deserted.
everything there before, gone,
replaced with fly-by-night evangelical churches,
flea markets, bingo halls,
and other shepherds of the cyclical bust
out to fleece the flock
one way or
another…

but before,
the brush uncut, thick,
paths winding through like
a dirty gray maze, lined by scrub mesquite, brilliant green
in spring, yellow huisache, wild chilitipin,
tiny berries advertising their heat
in intense red, and wide red-ant beds,
the big ones, trails
of them, like a Russian red-army parade, like little red trucks
carrying bullhead thorns to scatter around their beds,
their first line of defense, and horned toads who went to sleep
if you rubbed between their horns and who, some said,
spit blood at you if riled, and long, low, sleek
green-stripped lizards, racing, so fast across the trails,
and snakes, in the brush, rarely seen but the rustle of their slither
heard along with the cries of mockingbirds and redwing black birds
and raucous jays and the most fearsome creature of all,
tarantulas, big black and hairy, not poisonous we were told,
but those big pincher jaws sure to produce a painful bite…

and throughout the brush, pockets of cleared
space, under a mesquite tree, a safe circle
where fifteen year old boys could talk, smoke Parliament
cigarettes and look at the Playboy and Cavalier
and Sunshine and Health magazines they inherited
from older boys, some so old, so wrinkled and crinkled
and fragile, third or fourth-hand girlie magazines, the closest
a fifteen-year-old was likely to get to first-hand

fortresses in the brush, secret places
where secrets were told and
kept, dirty jokes, big brags, scary stories
of ghosts and ghouls and tarantula bites…

important places for us back then,
relief for a fifteen-year-old
from the oppression of the world
outside

seeking, like the tarantulas, hairy
and ugly and slow and unloved,
a place to live a quiet
hidden
life
where only the select
know the secret places
and the secret paths to get
there…

A new board

Squiggly, jiggly, giggly, and swoop​
​

THAT COMPLETES THIS POST
I'LL START A NEW ONE TOMORROW