Here and Now (Again)
  • Home
  • Home

HERE AND NOW

(AGAIN)


12-03-21 Remembering the Caves

11/27/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
I will be using a number of pieces in this post that I didn't include in my book, Places and Spaces, because they didn't fit with the plan I had for the book.

beginning with this one, from our first visit to Durango. We've been back many times, as recently as a month and a half ago.


Animas in the A.M.

5 a.m.
walking main street
downtown

dog impervious to the cold

not me

across the railroad tracks
past the hotel

slick sidewalk
alongside the Animas River

snow deep on both sides
river iced at the bank

solitary duck
climbs frost-glistened
rock
mid-stream

slips
scrambles
honks


no other sound
but the rustle of the river
as it eddies and curls and slides
over rocks

across the river
five deer gather
in a clearing

graze
silent as the morning

a car crosses
the bridge at the end of the block
lights reflecting on snow
all around
tires crunching froze-crisp ice shell on the road

and the deer
flipping their tails
flee
high-leaping

(Durango, Colorado, 1997)

​






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
A cemetery

a cemetery
on a low mound
between the highway
and the Rio Grande

the humble markers
of poor people
from the cluster
of casitas
I passed a quarter mile
back, small houses
of native stone, like
the more elaborate markers,
the ones not of rotting wood,
crosses, bowing toward the ground,
native flowers
gather at the base of some,
stone or wood, nothing,
stone or wood or flowers,
around the indentations
that mark the oldest graves,
the unmarked, the never marked,
those of transient markers
no match for the inevitable
decline of time that leaves these
shallow dimples
over a grave in which nothing
but a few scattered bones
remain, poor people,
cowboys and shepherds
who lived and died,
then faded to nothing beneath
dry badland
sand…

(Hwy. 170 between Terlingua and Presidio, May, 2003)

​



Picture

Come the resurrection

the path down and back
is steep and arduous, especially
for older people,
though benches along the way
provide a place to stop and rest,
a moment to breathe thin air
and listen to the wind
passing
between the canyon walls,
the stubby trees
restless in response

birds call along the way
but go silent
among the ruins,
homage to the ghosts
who patrol the bare adobe rooms,
guarding the ancient walls
until those who left
return again, pull from storehouses
the grain and seed they left
behind
for this very day of
resurrection

we are silent visitors,
with the birds, waiting for the
tread of soft
footsteps
so long absent from their
home

(Mesa Verde, 1979)

​
Picture
Continental divide

snow field
backed up by pine

7 years old,
the first time he’s seen
this much snow,
out of the car
pushing through hip-deep snow...

first snowball,
hits me on the chest,
I return fire,
snow battle ensues
until we collapse laughing
in the snow…

shadows pass
in forest silence,
behind the thick pines,
deer,
giving no apparent notice
to the strangers
and their loud, unfamiliar games
in the virgin snow…

fresh storm coming,
first flakes fall,
fat
wet flakes
hitting with a splat
on our coats,
the windshield...

time
to get off the mountain

(Colorado, late October, 1990)

​

Picture

Dust to dust to dust

wind howling
outside the car

sand popping
against our windows
like tiny fingers tapping,
blowing across the highway
thick as a mid-winter fog
on a Gulf coast morning

tumbleweeds
fly in front of us and behind
like prickly missiles
shot from a silo somewhere
in Iowa or Kansas

a big one,
the size of a small car,
rushing at us broadside,
tossed airborne,
right over the top of us,
one side to the other…

(Texas Panhandle, March 1981)

​
Picture

​From 2014, not a travel poem, though the picture is, from 1967 while studying Russian at Indiana University for the Air Force.


King of the serial heroes

breakfast
downtown again,
my favorite place for breakfast,
the best $40 breakfast
in town…

and
why am I telling you this?

because I have to tell you something
I suppose

and until I have something interesting
to tell you
my breakfast plans will have to do…

the restaurant
at the Pearl, about a block and a half
from my coffeehouse, so
I’d be going that way even if I wasn’t
going there for breakfast

7 o’clock now,
meeting Dee at the restaurant
at 8:30, which means
I’ll be leaving here
about 8 o’clock
- here being my regular breakfast haunt
where I just had coffee and toast
this morning, with a turkey sausage patty
for the dog

(here being were I am every morning - here
for a symbolic cup of coffee
so the servers won't feel disrespected
by my absence and so
they won't call the sheriff to investigate
the possibility of foul play having
befallen me)

but still niceties aside, I must leave room
for the coddled eggs…
then, going
downtown on the interstate
on a misty-slick road, commuter clogged,
half the traffic intimidated by the wet road,
driving 50 miles an hour, and the other half
hitting 85, on the theory that slick roads
won’t be a problem if you drive
fast enough to fly
above them

see,
there, I finally got to the exciting part,
will I make it downtown
or will I die in a wet, dripping and twisted wreck
half-way there?

it’s a real drama
this poem

a cliff-hanger,
just like when Zorro
rides his horse off a cliff
into a deep, dark
ravine

you have to come back
next Saturday to see how he survived,
"how", not "if" because we know he did survive
just don’t know how, Saturday afternoon
movie serial heroes, like God himself,
moving in mysterious ways
to always beat the odds, survive
for a second, third, fourth, fifth, etc.
coming…

I am the hero of all my stories,
as you well might know,
so expect a dramatic, bloody car crash,
from which I will crawl, unhurt,
to continue my Wednesday morning quest
for my $40 breakfast

King of the Serial Heroes - that’s me

​
Picture
another travel poem not included in the travel book, "Places and Spaces"

Musical mystery tour

he and I,
father and son
quality time together
driving through the mountains
and deserts and vistas
of the American Southwest, me
celebrating my first
retirement, he
celebrating the end of another
year of high school

at fifteen,
a musician himself,
he had an advanced and eclectic taste
in music, so that by our fourth day
I was introduced to musicians new to me
that are still among my favorites
more than 20 years later,
listening to Bella Fleck and his Flecktones
as we pass through Santa Fe,
Dave Matthews while visiting Red Rocks,
near holy site to Chris,
where Dave and his band played
in their early days, about to get too big
for such small venues, imagining
the band’s improvisations echoing off the rocks,
Denver’s tall buildings on the horizon,
and over and over as we passed through state
after state, a Willie and Lobo CD,
two guys with about a half-dozen modern and exotic string instruments,
a mix of musical styles and themes from the Moors and the Spanish,
intricate compositions from all the different strains
of Spanish musical influences with a little modern jazz mixed in,
thinking how amazing and wonderful it would be
to watch them play…

somewhere in Arizona,
a small town
whose main and near only street
followed along railroad tracks
from city-start to city-end,
a rusty town, everything rusty red,
a mining town, the red dust of its mines
the only thing left of the towns
reason to be…

a night in a motel beside the highway,
brought awake several times though the long night
by trains passing, their lonely whistle moaning at every crossing,
up early for breakfast and coffee at a café beside the tracks,
sausage and eggs and a flyer on the cashier’s counter,
Willie and Lobo,
never knowing they would be there,
we missed them by just two days…

I didn’t tell Chris how close we had come,
but I still have the CD
and play it often

(Somewhere in Arizona, 1998)

​

Picture


The next poem is by Frank O'Hara, taken from his book, Meditations in an Emergency. The book was published by Grove Press in 1957.

O'Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England. From 1951, he worked in New York, first for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art as assistant curator. He was killed in an auto pedestrian accident in 1966 at the ate of 40. He wrote of postwar art and of his experiences as a gay man.


Radio

Why do you play such dreary music
on Saturday afternoon, when tired
mortally tired I long for a little
reminder of immortal energy?4

                                                           All
week long while I trudge fatiguingly
from desk to desk in the museum
you spill your miracles of Grieg
and Honegger on shut-ins.

                                                    Am I not
shut in too, and after a week
of work don't I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

(note: I nod in agreement with the thrust of this poem. My local classics station seems to define worthy to air as anything written over 300 years ago. I long to hear some music from the great scores in cinema, the popular opera of our time.

​
Picture
Gravity’s gold

Bella and I, her golden fur
blazing like the bright
of a second sun shining, and me,
devote disciple of the church
of intermittent napping,
sit together on a park bench
in the central plaza crawling
with people seeming all
tourists, the only likely
resident habitues, the aged hippies
sitting behind us strumming
guitars, talking about everything
from starships to moon shadows
on the plaza in dim early
morning….

the tourists who pass,
old couples, pretty girls
with accents, all stop
to talk to Bella, to stroke
her head, as if she were,
indeed, the sun with the sun’s
gravity, pulling them
to her orbit…

while she, usually so distant
and unwelcoming to anyone
who is not me, more
like a cold far star than
the warm draw
of an afternoon sun, basks
in the attention…

doesn’t want to leave
when I get tired of
sitting

(Santa Fe, 2013)

​
Picture
A flight to Kabul from Peshawar, Easter week, 1969


Moonscape

mountains
high and bare
our small DC-3
struggles
as highest peaks
pass below within
arm’s reach, it seems,
from my window seat
life below
if there is such
must be harsh
and hard
with hard people
harsh and unforgiving
to those who intrude
without invitation...
not to be
messed with
as centuries
of armies and great generals
have learned - from Alexander
to even now ourselves
ruing the lesson -
if you decide you must fight here
make sure first you have
the merciless moonscape mountains
on your side
(Flying over the Hindu Kush, April, 1969)

​


Picture
This poem is by Andrew W. Greeley, taken from his book, The Sense of Love, published by the Ashland Poetry Press of Ashland College in 1992.

Greeley, a priest ordained in the diocese of Chicago nearly four decades ago, has been a noted scholar for many years (a professor of social science at the University of Chicago and the author of scores of books in sociology) and has been a constant best-selling fiction writer.


A Conclave Sonnet
(For Grace Ann)

Our great glacier-melted lake turns most fair
When, troubled, it gropes for uncertain calm
A Like a girl combing wet and tangle hair,
Rain swept and twisted by a manic storm.

Hair-line traced, fragile vase more lively made,
Lightly marked by steel-pointed sorrow's knife,
Ready still for flowers too long delayed
To grace subtle lines in the bloom of life. 

Children do not mourn for the lost half day
When the noon sky lifts after summer rain
But praise the blue with an afternoon of mirth...
Hope broken, shattered, stomped on, then reborn:
First life lost, it was said, then found again...
Seeing death as the vespers of rebirth.

​

Picture
Remembering the caves
 
so it’s like this,
we preserve memories in our brain
and when our brain
dies
so die the memories

but there are also
memories that
reside in our genes
that do not die with us
but are passed on to our
offspring, memories
encoded in genes
that are part of the
inheritance
just as are the rest
of the genetic
mix that makes us

generational memories,
passed on and passed on
so that some part of us
remembers the cave,
remembers the man-things,
the almost-us Neanderthals
who we remember
as we remember so many
other fantastical things
beyond our experience,
things we explain through
tall tales and myths and
fairy stories…

and beyond that,
it is said, all living things
animal and plant
have these genetic memories
just as all living things
have a consciousness, the
whooping cranes
in their winter marsh home,
finding this refuge every year
not though some trick
of navigation, but because
they remember it,
generations of genetic memory
remembering its comforts
and where it is and how
to get there

and also the forests
and the prairie grasses
and the sunflower
who turns its face
to the sun before
the sun rises, knowing
from generations that it will
rise and that it will rise
in the east and generations
of warm sun memory tell it
when it is time to turn…

science learning from
myth, myth suggesting
new science, and with each
new thing we learn,
new mysteries, all knowledge
an accumulation of ignorance
addressed,, universal
consciousness, memories
from all becoming
part of all…

where have we heard
that before…

```

this
the state of knowledge
expanding
today

theory
always questing to be
challenged, questing
to be debunked

what does a poet
know of this
and what advice
can such a dabbler
provide

not much

only enough  to consider
one suggestion -
maybe we should all talk
to our petunias today
though we know they will not
talk back, science tells us
there is a good chance
they will hear
and warm themselves
in the genetic memory
of kind words
spoken
by those who
in the far past knew them
better than
we
0 Comments

11-23-21 Taking Stock

11/10/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture
Poems and stories in this post will come from my book, Always to the Light, and later poems never collected or published in a book, as well as from other poets I haven't selected yet.

​
Picture
Listening to Mussorgsky
 
Listening to Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”
From the speaker overhead just as I start to write my poem,
Wondering how my little hiccup of a poem can imagine a place for itself
In the same world as the great gates of Kiev,
Having second thoughts, in fact, about writing anything today,
Deciding in the end, to be true to my philosophy that the value of art is in its doing,
Not its product, that product being merely an artist’s footprint,
Sign to the tracker that the artist was there,
Valuable to collectors of fine footprints but as irrelevant to the artist’s nature
As the remains of a grand banquet laid out on a cluttered table,
Evidence of a feast, but not the feast itself…
 
So, hear me, dear reader,
I am afraid this poem will never mean as much to you
As it did to me in its making
 
It was a great pleasure for me
And I’m sorry I can leave only the bones for you

​
Picture
Poesis interruptus
 
I stopped off at my friendly
Gas-grocery-beer-cigarettes convenience for money
After my usual morning coffee and newspaper read
At my usual table
At my usual diner
With the usual Sunday morning dueling church folk
To the behind and either side of me,
Including an extra place or two
Filled by the twice-a-year Christians
Who, it seems, get all the saving they need on Christmas and Easter,
Securing all other Sunday mornings for sleeping late or golf…
 
Discovering
After my third cup that I had no cash but for four pennies, three dimes, two quarters
And a Canadian coin I’ve trying to get rid of since our trip to Vancouver two years ago,
Leaving me to pay my $1.94 tab with my debit card
 
````````````
 
It is at this point in the story that the poet is interrupted
By life outside the poem – poesis interruptus – and the question is four hours later
As to whether he can get it up again to finish what he had most ardently begun…
 
At first you might think that returning to the earlier story half-finished
Is a process of separating the wheat of earlier inspiration
From the chaff of the humdrum interim…
 
But that’s not the case because, with proper poetic recognition,
All could be one and each could be the other with no separation necessary or possible
 
Integration is needed instead, finding the wheat in the essence of all chaff
And the chaff that infiltrates all wheat –
 
Like the small shopping center by the gas-grocery-beer -cigarette store
Where I stopped to use the ATM machine,
Anchored by a large vacant $1 store
Close up to the “X-treme Impact Church”
Next to “Alive MMA – Brazilian Jiu Jitsu”
Adjacent to the “Gathering of Grace Church”
Neighbor to “Fantasy Nails and Tan”
Snuggled up tightly to “Tattoos and Piercings”
Sharing a common wall with “Gin’s Chinese Restaurant”
 
It is all, in this world, like the shopping center,
All the disparate bits and pieces,
All the wheats and chaffs of everyday urban life
Swirled together by the Mix Master of everyday living,
Making the single and complete
Here and now of this particular and unique Easter Sunday morning,
Another party to which I am not invited because I will pay the price of admission –
Separation of sinners from the saved, rather than embracing unity of all mankind,
Some sinner in every saint
And a bit of saint in every sinner
 
Wheat from chaff,
I am one and I am both
And cannot separate my own self from the other
Or either from
You

​
Picture
Happy Confederate Heroes Day

the biggest problem
with being a non-believer
is I miss all the best holidays...

Christmas
and everybody tra-la-la-laling all over town
and I'm in a funk because every place I like to go
is overcome with manic Christmas fanatics
driving me crazy with their lousy Christmas spirit
and I know after six months of this the day will finally come
and everything I like to do will be impossible for twenty-four hours
because everything will be closed
so people can go tra-la-la-ling at home with their tra-la-la kids
and if I see that damn scrooge or that yellow brick road
or that stupid angel getting his wings one more time
I might just get medieval with my TV

and right before that there is Thanksgiving which requires me to eat turkey
for three weeks and I don't even like turkey...

and next, 
just as that dumbass angel finally gets his wings
we jump into Easter and the whole cascarones breaking confetti-filled eggs
on my head thing, leaving me with a headache for two days
and a week and a half of pulling paper bits from my hair...

those are the big ones, except for the 4th of July which would be great
if it was the 4th of October or something like that
instead of right in the middle of the hottest part of summer
when I'm supposed to eat bar-b-que in the park, outside
and watch fireworks and listen to the symphony, with help 
from the canons at Fort Sam Houston, play the 1812 overture

outside
outside
outside
outside
everything outside and who the hell wants to be outside
when it's 114 degrees in the shade and there's damn little of that

that doesn't leave me with anything but Confederate Heroes Day
which causes family issues
with one great grandpappy on one side
and the other great grandpappy on the other
and the minute we start talking about it 
we have to fight the whole frigging war all over again

who needs it!

(NOTE: Confederate Heroes Day dropped in Texas as a state employee holiday about 20 years ago in favor of LBJ's birthday.)


Picture
The catch of the day
Is not the fish we catch
Or the one that got away

The catch of the day
is the time we stay
and the walking home together

​
Picture
Eastern sky
​

the eastern sky
    red
like an angry rose
by any other hue
would it sweet
    so smell

end of days
    of 2012
approaching
a new year’s ending
    beginning
        in two
            days

and I have no reflex
for an old year
a new year
an in-between year
    a sky
        red
as an angry
    rose
        the hue so sweet

no reflex
to measure
the new
    number
    the old
just a day
you know
like any other
    day
no reflex
for seeing new
what I’ve seen
before
    or new days
        or old days
        or roses
            angry red
no matter how sweet
    hue
    the smell
it’s just another damn
    day
in another damn
    year
just another damn
    moment
just another damn
angry
            hue

and I have no reflex
to understand
or to teach it

must another
momentary
    rose
        angry
            then
                gone
                     like
me

hasta la vista
    huesome
    rose
On the South Texas Coast
Picture
This poem is by Carol Coffee Reposa. It is taken from her book Underground Musicians, published by Lamar University Press in 2013.

This is Reposa's fourth book of poetry. A professor emeritus of English at San Antonio College, she has received three Fulbright-Hay Fellowships, along with three Pushcart Prize nominations.


Los Amantes de Sumpa


First she died
And then he died
Ten thousand years ago.

She was twenty.
He was twenty-five. 
Both were well off for their time.

Mourners laid him next to her,
Placed his arm around her waist,
His leg across her thigh.

This man and woman
Could have watched 
The sun come up each day

In bursts of red and gold
Or listened for the early morning birdsong
While they thatched their roof.

Perhaps they married
Had a feast
She might have borne a child.

I look at the tangled bones
His skull crushed 
From centuries of earth

Hollows of his eyes
Filled long ago with bright desire
What remains of him still turned tdo her

It doesn't matter
When they died
Or why, or how

All that counts this afternoon
Or any other
Is his arm around her waist,
His leg across her thigh.

​

​
Picture
Written today, if written tomorrow perhaps entirely different.
​

Too long, too personal, written in poetry form only because that is the form most natural to me, like breathing

Taking stock

A picture from 50 years past,
Me,
In the tiny trailer I lived in
While returning to university
After military service
 
A pen in my shirt pocket, always,
Even today a pen in my shirt pocket,
A jacket, part of an Afghan soldier’s uniform,
Received in a trade with one of the soldiers
Who guarded our compound, that I wore that day
Even though it was a little too small for me
 
Years passed since then
Long ago, those days when the end of life
Was a dim dot, a spec, far away,
Far enough to easily forget it was there
 
Years passed since then
And today the tiny dot
Is a black pit I stand at the edge of
 
There is no forgetting the dark
At my feet
 
Years passed
And I feel a need to take stock…
 
Born and raised
In a small South Texas town near the border,
High intelligence creating high expectations around me
I lacked the will to meet,
A disappointment, even to myself

Leaving that town at eighteen,
Finding opportunity to grow closer 
To the me others expected me to be,
But, still floating on a dead sea,
I lingered behind
 
Until military service,
I fought the call, but gave in to the inevitable,
And, once in, achieving rank early
Despite being mediocre at my job at best,
The beneficiary of expectations, those who led me
Seeing in me a future leader
 
Then, military service complete,
University degree in hand,
The beginning of a career that fit me
As if made for me,
Ambition discovered, power and influence,
And though temporary as such power always is,
I liked it and took advantage of it
To do things that, on the scale of my life,
Seemed great things
 
But the great things that gave me such pride
Passed, like the power that created them,
The accomplishments that seemed so large,
Eroded to doodlebug dust like the power
That created and sustained them
 
A second life then as a poet,
Twisting stories of my life into
A form of poetry mostly known
To be unknown, a blip, then forgotten
 
And then a third life as an artist,
A talent-free artist, creating art
No more memorable than the poetry
 
And now the pit lies deep and dark
Before me and, leaving all that past
Behind me, my stock, my portfolio,
Is simply this, a wife who loves me
And a son in whom I have as much pride
As anything in my passing powerful past
 
That’s all…
 
And it turns out,
It’s enough
Picture


Old  homes left behind

taking
a little trip
in a couple hours

a two-hour drive
to the coast,
to Corpus Christi first,
the city where I lived for fifteen years
before ambition drew me to the hills
twenty years ago

I'll see if any old haunts
remain - it seems
every time I visit, a few more are gone,
the old city slipping away, a whole new city
grown up on the south side where
grain and cotton
were the only cash crops before…

I’ll wander around downtown, called now
in my hotel brochure
“The downtown entertainment district”

(Which it was some years ago, until the folks
at the old folks' home complained about the noise -

we’ll see, I guess,
maybe all the old folks died
or have become accustomed to noise with their oatmeal)

breakfast
tomorrow morning
at the top of the Omni,
the bay and bayfront laid out,
the water rippling
in early morning tide,
shinning orange and red
under the rising sun,
the lights of the shipyards
tiny pin holes through dim early morning
on the other side
of the bay…

---

taking the long way home tomorrow,
across the bay bridge
to North Padre and Mustang Island,
stopping for pictures of the beach
and the fishing boats
in Port Aransas,
then the ferry across the ship channel,
back to the mainland, first Aransas Pass,
then down the coast to the little cities
that lap the water's edge,
Ingleside by the Bay,
Rockport,
Fulton, with lunch
at Charlotte Plummer’s,
pictures along the way if I can find anything
I haven't snapped before

after lunch,
west to the flat highways of the coastal plains,
plowed fields on either side, fields
settled in for winter, awaiting
early grain, and the wind farms, new,
spread along the coast,
facing southeast to catch the constant gulf winds,
winds converted to electricity,
the sustenance that feeds our civilization,
then, pasture and old oaks
spreading wide across low hills
that grow over the miles to the curves
and up and down highways
of hill country
highways,
just past my home in my little divide
between rolling ridges and
the creek
that runs alongside it…

home
at the end of day,
old homes left behind
again

​
Picture
Ride the tiger

early clouds
turned to wide-open sky
as the sun rising
burns
away the night cramps
of dead memories and lost dreams

a new day,
old swept away
in the dark processing
of midnight shadows and the sighs of slow-hobo winds

the old day
surrenders its night, back broken
by the crack of an orange
horizon, the bright new tiger
stretches, gathers together the hours
of its dominion, metes them out to us
with the lick of her red tongue,
sharp extension of bright
claws…

~~~

welcome…

ride the tiger as you must,
until the next dark sends her slinking
back to her shadow den

​

Picture
Here are three short poems from my library. The poems are by Eric Greinke, taken from his book Wild Strawberries, published in 2008 by Presa Press.

Greinke is the author of several book, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has a Master's degree in Social Work and has twenty-five  years experience working with disturbed and disabled children. He has also taught creative writing in an alternate high school and has worked in the Michigan Poets in The Schools program.


Dust

Obnoxious cosmetics
Drip from the face
Of the Statue of Liberty.

Diamonds gleam
From teh President's teeth.

Old dogs argue
Over the skulls
Of rock stars and senators.

A battalion of metal roaches
Dances around the captured flag.

In the middle
Of a moonless night
Old men remember the Third Reich.

Alarms ring in gladiolas,
​Cueballing yet another Spring.


Northern lights

A roar of jeweled leaves
Titillates the dark northern sky
Celebration above the trees
Aurora flares
Sun spots dance the edge
Owl turns to small sound
Marten clings
To a a red pine branch
Outside my sleepy head


Liquid 

Wild ducks
Scoot a landing
On blue eyes

​
Picture
Usual suspects

the old guys are here
and the tattooed fat lady is here
and the always neat and clean homeless guy
with his tightly wrapped foam bedroll,
heavy-looking backpack and professorial look
with little half-lens glasses
as he spends the day reading in the air-conditioned cool,
and the mama
with her little blond girl trailing behind,
baby-doll in one hand and pink little purse in the other,
and little plastic dangly bracelets on both wrists
that she shakes as she passes, and the young mother
with two little girls, heading double-time for the bathroom,
passing a new guy, a long, white-haired Sam Elliot looking guy
in short pants reading "Guns and Ammo" magazine,
and a couple of medical student regulars,
and the short-haired cowboy guy with the bad arm,
and the two gay guys that show up a couple times a week

(and, OK, maybe they're not gay, but they sure are
sharp dressers)

and the middle-aged woman, a mid-life student who always looks like
she's mad at me because I always get here first and take the table by the door
next to an electric plug where she'd like to be,
and the dorky-looking guy and his dorky-looking wife
who come in and stare at each other and never say a word
the whole time they're here, and the old guy with thick glasses
and a magnifying glass who writes tiny numbers in columns
in a spiral notebook, eyes inches from the page, and the table of law students,
arguing with each other like it was a Supreme Court appearance,
and the Asian guy reading Shopenheimer haiku and the girl
with long auburn hair and acne scared cheeks, a cheeky girl
with a constant air of amused observation, and I'm thinking
if she was 50 years older she might share the joke with me, assuming
it's not me that's the joke, of course,
a possibility I do not discount...

all the familiar faces in all the familiar places
​on a mostly typical Thursday...

​
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
Diorama
​

morning
north wind
blows hard against me,
cold hand
on the nape of my neck,
trickles under my coat
down my back
clear blue sky
sharp as a diamond’s cutting edge
bright sun
like broken glass falling
long night’s sleep,
waking
to a five-year old’s
diorama
world,
construction paper
city
construction paper
world
bright colors
sharp corners

​


Finishing this post with a reading from my book,
Always to the Light, available as always wherever eBooks are sold.

​

1 Comment

11-6-21 Places and Spaces

10/22/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture
Setting out in a couple days for a two week trip to a couple of my favorite cities to visit, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Durango, Colorado. 

It's a function of age. When young, we chase new experience. As we get older (and maybe I'm just speaking for myself) we begin to value more the old experiences and the old places, memories like ghosts of the past, that were dear to us before.  Always in the back of our minds that each return might be the last and thus are doubly valued.

​So I will do in each place what satisfies me best, sitting, smelling new air, seeing and sometimes meeting new people. I'm easy, that's all it takes for me.

I'll try to document the trip with photos and stories, probably not not new ones, for it's the downside of frequently visiting favored places. Not so much changes.

​
​
Picture
Except for necessary but boring introductory stuff like this, most of the text in this post will come from, Places and Spaces, my book of travel poems.

Beginning, as it almost always does when traveling west, the 550 miles to El Paso. We will extend that Monday by an extra 50 miles to Los Cruces, New Mexico for our first over night stop.

So many times I've written of that first long day, I'll just pick one from the book. 



​This story begin as a short trip to Silver City in New Mexico, Silver City being promoted on the highway as an arts city. Not so true, though was, at least, a very good coffee shop. Disappointed otherwise in Silver City, the trip ended up being a large arc across the state and home again.


A drive in the country

558 miles and one time zone -
San Antonio to El Paso

a long day's drive in the country,


     stone-wrapped hills
     to the long-stretched fingers
     of pink Chihuahua Desert

     blue sky, blue on blue
     on deep ocean blue sky,
     to jagged clouds
     dark and sharply racing


And little towns along the way,
Segovia, Sonora, Saragosa,
Sierra Blanca,
Allamoore,
Belmora,
and Van Horn,
all pass

the miles and hours
and skies and hills
and deserts
and all the little towns
pass quickly

     on the ridge,
     a line of dead trees,
     oak blight killing scrub oak
     all around

     remind me of a picture
     I once saw
     of a lone tree,
     bare and burned,
     among the ruins of Hiroshima

     these trees like that,
     bare limbs
     black
     reaching up, grasping at the sky

     in the pasture below,
     a mare and her foal eat grass
     generous and green


The roadway, blasted through stony hills, in the rock walls on either side layers of geologic time...

     there,
     near the top,
     a woman and a man passed,
     nearly human,
     and down here, by my feet
     a fish struggled,
     crawled awkwardly
     from the sea


A large buck lying half in the grass, half on the road, muscle and blood and bone and heart against metal and plastic,
old times of open graze and new times of death on black tar

He, the buck, loser in a clash of kinds...

A diversion, a small back road to Fort Lancaster ruins, a narrow two-lane, high mesas on either side

     a bird,
     zippity-flash crosses the road

     skinny little legs pumping,
     thin neck and head 
     high and proud,
     sharp,
     like an arrow passing,
     and fast,

     no coyote, no can catch
     little pai
sano

A cloud billows up from the Chisos Basin like a white rose opening to the sun, cane fields afire in Mexico, black smoke billowing, trucks move in behind the fire with cutters to harvest the cane to sweeten your coffee...

Approaching El Paso...

     a roots CD mix
     my son made for me -
     Bela Fleck, Loudon Wainwright III,
     and a woman I don't know
     that I could and did
     listen to for hours


The city long since outgrown its little desert-slash of river green, built now on wastelands and its connecting ribbon of interstate 10 at 5 p.m. a raceway of drivers from two countries and three states hurrying be home first, before the wasteland shits and home falls between the cracks

North 30 miles to Los Cruces, west 59 miles to Demings, 54 miles north again to Silver City, an easy day's drive, two to two and a half hours, not counting the 30 minutes to find my hotel after my GPS confidently and with great precision deposits me on top of a mountain five miles from the city

     green desert all the way,
     a rainy year disguising the stone-hard truth
     below the green

     smudge of mountains against the horizon,
     left and right, front and rear,
     New Mexico, a state of mountains
     and deserts and neither ever very far
     from wherever you might be


In the city - an arts and old downtown district are well-preserved and surprisingly populated for a Tuesday afternoon, students from the university and other interesting people crowd the sidewalk and busy street, two good bookstores and the best coffeehouse since San Antonio, strong WIFI signal, coffee with a kick, all very nice,
but the main attraction to me for coming was I had never been there before, a moot issue now since I am here, so, with the new day, a decision...

The national forest and the Catwalk and the Gila Monument Indian ruins are north - should I go north then return here at the end of the day or should I take and extra day and continue further north to loop around Albuquerque, passing through along the way, not just one, but two mountain ranges and forests...

As a creature subject to the allure of tasty food,
it will probably depend on how good breakfast is 
here this morning

     three horses crossing a green pasture,
     grass high, up to their knees,
     crossing single file, one after the other,
     like carousel horses with somewhere to go


Chasing down a dirt road, pulling a cloud of grey dust behind, looking for a red iron bridge I saw from the highway

Never found it, instead of the bridge, a rabbit on the side of the road

     not one of your cute little bunnies,
     but a big, male hare, three feet tall, two feet,
     not counting his ears standing proud and pink
     and scissor sharp, starts to run when I drive up,
     but stops as I stop, watches as I ease the car forward,
     reaching for my camera, poses as I snap off a couple of pictures



Picture
​
Dissatisfied so far with my drive, not having found the mountains and forest experience I came for, I decide to take a loop that will lead me right through the middle of the Gila Mountains and National Forest


Hwy 159  off 180 - a twisty-turnsy , upsy-downsy road, but well maintained, a two-lane black top

But after three miles it turns to one-lane and becomes
ever more twisty-turnsy, upsy-downsy

Eight miles in I come to the lost little village of Mogollon - originally a mining town, now I think it must be, the boarded up entrance to the mine visible on the side of the road

Federal Witness Protection's prime hide out it seems, for persons wanted by the "Mob" and other forces of evil

     10 to 12 structures
     including an old rock museum
     and several well-maintained houses lining the road,
      nice rustic houses, beautiful gardens


A very strange place, a nice place if you want to get away from it all
​

Picture
A one-lane bridge seperates Mogollon from the National Forest.

The paved road and a Forest Service dirt and rock road begins, very rough. Unsure as to how far the dirt road goes before returning to asphalt, for none of this is on my map, I have to decide, should I go forward or should I turn back. Should I see what comes next, which might be worth the whole trip or should I avoid what might be not so good.

Disinclined by nature to ever back up, I press forward.

The road travels along the bottom of a deep canyon alongside a dry creek. And it is about that time that it begins to rain and I become aware of a large, very black cloud hovering overhead.

I know from experience what happens when hillsides and dry creeks and heavy rain come together, I am relieved when the road starts to rise, leaving the canyon and the dry creek behind.

The higher I climb, the heavier the rain falls, and the slushier and slipperier the road becomes. Finally after an hour of twisting and turning and climbing and sloshing and slipping, the rain stops and the sun comes out and I can see the great gush of muddy water rushing down the hillside, building new channels as it races from the top to the dry creek below that I am no longer driving alongside. Thoughts of mudslides intrude for a moment, until I decide that I'm high enough to slide down the mountain on top of the mud and  not beneath it.

Setting aside mudslides and all other hesitations - it is not further back than forward - I come to a break in the trees and look out and see that I am on a high ridge, above the clouds, churning white and billowy below.

Going down now, still on the dirt-rocky-rough road, a herd of deer cross the road in front of me.

     a very large buck
     and 25 to 30 doe and fawns,
     fluty white and brown stub-tails flicking as they run,
     all together, as a group coming down the mountain
     in great bounds, then back up the other side of the road,
     like winged creatures
     who through fate or folly lost their wings
     but still try to fly,
     almost succeeding with each great leap

     passing trough a burned out portion of the forest,
     pine and aspen, tall and limbless, black as the coal
     they have become, while they reach for the sky

     I stop and listen to the wind, all around deep-forest quiet
     but for the wind through these poor, standing-dead

​     ghost whispers.....

​
Picture
Writing today from Santa Fe, I update current journey to yesterday.

Our original plan was to do over six hundred miles on the first day of travel. After five hours of driving, we decided our initial plan was too ambitious, so, instead of going on to Los Cruces as planned we spent the night in Van Horn, a couple hundred miles from our original plan.

But it was an enjoyable stop, spending the night at a hotel  where we have stayed often in the past, the El Capitan, one of a number of hotels an architect rescued from ruin and restored to their former glory in the 1930's. There are three in Texas. We have stayed at two, the El Capitan. an old cattle and oil baron hangout, and the Gage in Marathon, a traditional railroad hotel. The third is in Marfa, the largest, where we have not stayed.

Up early yester day and did the four hundred and something miles to Santa Fe where it's 33 degrees and sunny with a fierce north wind. Today will be spend walking around the plaza and watching other tourists discover the city.

Tomorrow we will be off to Durango, Colorado, where we will spend three days before heading home, with a night on the way in Albuquerque and another night in Van Horn.

​
Folllowing a very busy day in Santa Fe...

​
Picture

​I return to the past and a trip we made to Denver, Colorado.

My wife and I have different travel preferences. I like to drive, she prefers to fly. So I usually head out a couple of days before her and we meet at our agreed destination. 

My dog, Reba, and I traveled 35 states together before she died, and she was with me on this one, riding along in the back, or, if she thought I needed help, alongside me in the front seat. She was a good travel companion

Since the first day of any trip west involves the many miles need to get out of the state, I start, from the book, on the second day.


A quiet Sunday morning, just like in the movies. Another 500 miles and I'm getting started a little later than I'd like.

But there's plenty of time.

     after about 40 miles 
     I look behind,
     a long straight road, gradually rising


The wind is blowing hard again and, like most of yesterday, it's blowing hard against me.

     little twisters cross brown fields
     on both sides of the highway,
     throwing up clouds of dust that move with the wind, 
     but one, a smaller one, forms a perfect funnel
     about 5 feet across, keeping its shape
     for a hunded feet or more above the ground

     a tumbleweed the size of a beach ball
     blows in front of me, seems to pace the car
     for several seconds, then crosses the road


Green fields, perfect circles, planted to fit the path of the irrigation sprinklers that circle, circle, circle, spraying their water like a merry-go-round whose horses spit as they past

The  perfect circles of irrigated green are laid across the landscape of dry and dusty brown, the part that lives or dies dependinhg on the rain.

Passing through the little derelict towns that break the tedium of grey highway behind and ahead, with brown fields on either side.

The fate off small rural towns in America, death and decay as agriculture becomes too big for little family farmers and ranchers and the little towns that sustained them.

One little wide spot in the road, I don't remember the name, had fifteen structures visible from the highway. All were abandoned, collapsing hulks. Nothing left of the town but the sign on the highway.

As I pass through Las Vegas, New Mexico, I see the first snow-topped mountains making the bowl that holds Santa Fe to the west.

     further north, as we cross into Colorado,
     the winter grass is almost white, the almost white
     of sand on gulf beaches, the white broken here and there
     by red barns like red umbrellas on a vast beach
     that has no sea


Just past Pueblo, I turn on the radio and hear my first news of the severe winter storm that's on the way

     as I approach Colorado Springs, I see black storm clouds
     pouring over the mountain crests

     I enter the front of the storm, 
     rain, sleet, snow, and fog, all at once
     in alternating bursts


     traffic slows down and I fall in line,
     an inexperienced driver in snow,
     I am pleased with the slow-down


Traffic conditions improve slightly and I begin the long, slow crawl through Denver, find my hotel, register, walk Reba in the rain.

​

​

​

     

​

Picture
I abandoned this post about half way through our most recent journey, after days of driving 500 to 600 miles a day, too exhausted to even take my  laptop out of it's bag.

Home now, I'm tying to get back in the flow, having learned a couple of lessons.

First, travel is much easier for the young than for the old. 

Second, going back too often to those places once held dear, means that those places become as worn and uninteresting as those who held them dear. This is our last trip, we decided, is our last to Santa Fe and Durango. Next time, we go north and east.

Third, COVID has been a disaster for for service industries, especially for hotels and restaurants. 

Hotels are bad, but worse for me was restaurants. I am a traveler who enjoys new eating places and new food. 

We discovered in the last week and a half that restaurants, when you can find one open is understaffed, with limited menus, the food haphazardly prepared. This disappointment applied to several place where we dined often in the past and were looking forward to dining again.

The exception was a Mexican restaurant in Cuba, New Mexico. El Bruno's easy to miss and not promising from the highway, but offering friendly and eager servers and the best Mexican food I remember ever eating, including both New Mexican style and TexMex. We had stopped there before and made a point of taking the route through Cuba that would give us a chance to stop again. El Bruno's was the sole exception to disappointment elsewhere.


​

​Setting aside our most recent, mostly disappointing, journey, this next story from Places and Spaces is about a trip East, aiming for a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  It was a long drive for me and my dog, Reba, with a side stop in Columbus, Ohio to pick up Dee at the airport there before continuing on together.

​The trip, going and coming back in late autumn, is mainly through the southern states, so I titled the story, On the Cusp of Confederate Winter
.

The first day is 545 miles through Dallas and East Texas to Little Rock, Arkansas, A lot of traffic on I-35, the first shovel of asphalt "Ike we Like" laid out in 1950-someting, but otherwise mostly boring.

     a pick-up puling a horse trailer,
     alone in the back, one horse,
     a palomino, 
     golden mane and tail and eyelashes flaring 
     in the wind

     a hawk slips slowly from the air
     to land on a fence post,
     watches,
     sees all with yellow eyes that view
     all that moves as potential prey


Through Dallas where snotty right-wingers go to get even snottier, whiter and even more right wing.

     exurbs follow I-30 to the northeast,
     a paved-over world,
     the only grass that survives
     struggles in the cracks in the concrete


After Waxahachie...

I like Waxahachie because the name makes my mouth feel good and the only reason to say it is when you're passing through it..


     orange sky like mist
     through a forest of orange leaves


Then Texarkana, where a line down the the middle of the downtown street divides one state from the other.

     lakes and small ponds and waterfowl,
     a crane passes over the road,
     low, long neck outstretched,
     wings spread like a dark shadow
     against a nearly dark sky


     red sky in my rearview,
     the road like a tunnel
     through the dark,
     tall thick forest on either side


Unlike a previous night in Little Rock years ago, in the only hotel I could find, a dark and dingy, a sleazy, rundown dump in a slummy-looking neighborhood where, if I was the kind to carry a handgun,  I would have slept with it under my pillow. This night, a clear, bug-free night in a well-lit neighborhood.

Reba quickly asleep on her little bed in the corner. Eleven hours on the road, I would join her but for the woman singing badly in the next room over.

The second day, Nashville, bringing the trip's total so far to 940 miles.

     I wanted to write about the forest,
     the colors, yellow and gold, and the red-brown color
     the Crayola people used to call Indian Red or Indian Brown


     and in the middle of all that gold and yellow and red-brown                               Indian whatever, some low bush that's scattered among the                             trees like little fires burning in the woods

     and I wanted to write about the flock of ducks
     that flew over in perfect V formation,
     near enough to the ground that each duck could be seen
     and counted as an individual, close enough to the ground
     that I could hear the flapping of their wings
     and the mutter-quacks among the rank


     and I wanted to write about the hills,
     reminding me of the hill country at home,
     but soft hills, none of the hard face of caliche and cactus
     and mesquite, just soft, soft forested hills,
     trunks climbing close together

     and I wanted to write about the sun in the morning
     and how it lit the colors of the trees
     and covered the sky from mid-afternoon,
     bring shadow and mystery and darker colors of the night

But for two days, through two states, I have been unable to find a national newspaper.


Leaving Nashville behind...

     the colors now
     are mostly shades of red and brown

     on a hill surrounded on four sides by forest
     a horse enjoys a pasture all his own


     in a dell, green as spring,
     a small church,
     white clapboard with a white, wooden steeple
     rising twice the church's height


     on a hill behind the church,
     rows of tombstones in rank and file,
     climbing he hillside like steps to an afterlife that,
     if we are all lucky, will look exactly like this little green dell
     with its little white church


Losing an hour and running an hour behind...

     I stop at a park just across the  state line
     so Reba can walk and pee


     just across the highway
     three cows line a ridge, dark cutouts
     against the sky


Climbing now...

     the road rises in front of me
     bordered, as always, by red and brown forests

     at the top.
     a silver-dollar moon on a pale blue sky


Skipping ahead, we enter Virginia.

 
    a white house on a hill,
     surrounded by leaf-bare trees,
     and behind them, mountains
     showing bits and pieces through the fog
 

     on the road, short, thick-foliaged pines stand
     crowded side by side, like spectators
     standing shoulder to shoulder watching
     a passing parade

     or, I think of the hundred of clay soldiers
     lined in rank after rank
     buried with their Chinese emperor


     and on the road,  fog drifts between the trees,
     and in the shifting fog, the soldiers seem to move,
     gray-coated soldiers coming alive while their rebel cause
     lies in bloody dust

     
  

This post is already too long and would be even much longer if I continue with the last half of this story which took us down the Blue Ridge Parkway and several Southern states as we drove home.

Instead, if you have enjoyed the abbreviated stories posted here, you might consider buying the book at Amazon or anywhere else where eBooks are sold. The price at Amazon, and probably everywhere else, is $3.99. The book includes the complete version of the three trip posted here in abbreviated form, as well as two trips I did not cover here, including a short journey to Ruidoso, New Mexico, and a much longer trip to Lake Tahoe, Nevada in the middle of winter.

What I learned in my recent journey is that long highway trips like this are unlikely to happen again now that I'm fifteen years older than when we made these trips.

​

Picture
And, in the end, well done

there is pleasure in travel
but comfort
in routine and the everyday

so
I'm back

second table from the rear,
by the window, back to the river,
looking out on the corner of Martin and Soledad,
San Antonio, Texas

life
in the slow lane,
looking for a poem
in all the old familiar places

1 Comment

10/19/21 - Dispatches from the Big House

10/8/2021

1 Comment

 

​
​​​


​I've been sentenced to a 30-day term in Facebook jail, so, having nothing else to do, this could turn out to be a long post.

My offense this time was calling a dumbass a dumbass. Of course I called the dumbass a dumbass a number of  times, determined by the Facebook Bot who rules us all, to be "bullying." My defense - reiteration is necessary when trying to communicate with the stupid, as in this case.

But the real dumbass is Facebook with their censorship by computerized keyword. All of my previous incidents of being blocked would have been recognized by any mentally competent human being as satire or parody. Facebook's little program doesn't allow any such humor or plain old human review. 

And perhaps that's the scariest part of it, censoship by computer, worse than "1984" which at least had human oppressors who could be overthrown, censorship beamed from the sky, untouched  human hands, even the oppressors oppressed along with the rest of us. Computer systems enforcing self-fulling prophesies.

Which is my second source of peevishness, there being no recourse to such misplaced censorship. The big Facebook in the sky says what it says and no questioning is allowed or acknowledged.

Which leads me to this...




Pimple-brained, nut-cake, nitwitted, thieving, sourball licking, witch-sucking, loony politic other guys


hark!

the blue open sky,
the trees,
the gentle -falling leaves
the sparrows hip-hopping
branch to branch
the church-clothed-clot-herd folk
walking bible in hand,
childen skip skipping so Sunday School prayers

now I sit me down to eat
and if I choke before I swallow
Heimlich me quick
and don't you tarry
cause I'd rather walk than be carried on a stretcher
on this autumn-bright autumn Sunday morn
in the southern provinces of you esse way

but politics swallows my brain today,
but trying to walk lightly slightly brightly
around the subject
because I hate political poison poems
and I know if I get to talking about all those
pimple-brained
nut-caked
nitwitted
thieving
sourball-licking
witch-sucking
lunatic political other guys
I'll never stop

but

hark!!
I say to myself

it is a beautiful open-sky Sunday autumn day
that shouldn't be spoiled by such thinking about
writing about
reading about
downtown downers
as politi-chips  and unsalted pretzel brains

look to the sky instead,
to the birds,
to the trees and the leaves
drop-dropping
to the ground of many colors

it is Sunday after all

let us pray-prey on happy happy day-thoughts
and be joyful to the sun and the mountains
and rivers and hills and streams -

all legal
now
and tax deductible in London and surround environs
from Sherwood flats
to Sherwood meadows
to Sherwood forest where the King's deer
now roam safe & unhooded

hark!
hark! hark!

goddamn it I said
​hark!


​
​

​
Picture
I wanted to write something outrageous today

but it's still too close to the election
and my outrage gauge is hung on empty

so I thought I'd write something serious
instead,
a serious consideration
of the nation's and the world's
condition, but that only ignites panic attacks
and howling hysterical laughter

then I was thinking I'd write about sex,
but I'm getting kind of old
and my memory isn't as good as it used to be,
not so stiffly resistant to the lassitude of time

so maybe I could write about love,
no one's ever too old for love they say,
but that's the problem,
poets young and old have been writing about love
for ten thousand years, longer than that
if you believe the drawings on the walls
in the caves of Poontanghia,
so how could I possibly compete,
what new is there to be said about love,
except that I caught it and, unlike a three-day cold,
it has stayed with me, fevers morning and nights
for 47 years, resistant through the liquid flow of time
to all natural or super-natual events
that might deny and discourage it

or I could write about my lover's legs
and the amazing way they join at the hip,
but I don't want to get too graphic this morning
because that would be outrageous
in this august company
and I'm completely out of outrage
since the last election


​
Selling my jams and jellies
Picture
Picture
Naked rolling, parts rubbing

a slow Sunday afternoon
and we were trying to decide what to do

and I suggested
we get naked and roll around
on the grass in the backyard,
rubbing
body parts togedther
fiercely

but there's a chill in the air,
probably too much chill
to be rolling around outside naked
no matter how fiercely
we rubbed ourselves
together

so I was thinking, well,
we could go down to the art museum
and take a look at the impressionist exhibitin,
settle down naked
in front of the Monet
and give him a real impression,
rolling around on the carpet
rubbing body parts together
impressionistically -
that might make the old guy
forget all about water lilies...

but they have these guards down there
that follow us around from room to room
and I don't know why,
except maybe they can read minds
and don't abide with people rubbing naked parts 
together
in front of their Monet -

maybe if we moved over in front of the Duchamp,
he did a lot of his own naked rubbing-around,
as I understand it, and what's that nude going to do
after decending the staircase
but some parts-rubbing
cause why else go downstairs
naked as a jaybird
if there weren't some parts-rubbing intentions...

but the guards are guardedly attentive
so the museum is out
and I was thinking we might take a drive
in the hill country - the way the leaves are changing
in our backyard, there must be piles of red and orange 
and yellow and gold lying on the ground
under some of those big hill country oak trees,
ripe for some good old rustic
naked parts-rubbng and rolling around,
but it is even colder in the hills
than it is here
so there's the chill factor to consider,
plus all those rattlesnakes
who love to hide in leaf piles
on these chilly days,
or  maybe up in the oak trees to sleep
through the winter -
and I think they might now welcome
people waking them up,
rolling around naked in the leaves,
rubbing parts together with sylvan abandon,
despite the fact it was a snake in a tree
that started all this naked rolling about
and parts-rubbing in the first place...

or we might just do what we always do
on lazy Sunday afternoons, could just
take a Sunday afternoon nap
you, in the easy chair
and me on the 
couch

just
like we
always do


​
Santa Fe Afternoon
Picture
Here are two poems by my poet friend Gary Blankenship, taken from his book The Poetic States, and a drop of sunshine. His book is a collection of short poems inspired by each of the fifty states and Washington D.C. The two poems I selected to use here are, first, Texas, my home state, and second, New Mexico, which, since my first visit in 1963, has held in my mind as the place I ought to be.


Texas

Larger than a Breadbox

You are too huge to be captured
in verse written by a minor poet
who knows it takes two days
to cross you no matter where the start.

And  you raised two modern presidents -
one mostly good, the other a bit less,
though they both seemed all to fond
of guerilla wars that couldn't be won.

Nothing more needs to be mentioned
in a short poem, but Dick's Riverwalk,
the perfect place for tequila shots
and buckets of boiled crawdads

as we forget which war explodes now
and the humidity blowing in from the Gulf.


New Mexico

Trinity's Hour

A new sun bloomed out of the desert
defying Sol to roast white powder
glazed like broken pottery in a kiln

The light separated from the dark
to illuminate playas taauarned to stream,
clouds the sudden color of hell,
gypsum dunes and salt flats

It shone on chaparral forest,
creatures that crawled,
burrowed and fell from the sky,
seeds and fish awaiting spring,
beasts that hunted beasts
and those that hid from the hunters

It lit a sheepherder in his hogan,
Alamogordo, Carlsbad, old Santa Fe,
lovers eloping from Las Cruces,
jingle dancer waking in her pueblo.
truth and it's consequences,
the blood of a Spanish Crist

Its flash found a vendor on Honshu,
pineapple farmer on Oahu,
ballet dancer in Stalingrad,
soldier dying in a Pacific jungle,
rabbinical student at the Wailing Wall,
man of independence

as time shifts to five minures

before the last midnight

​


It l
Picture

A good way to start, is all I'm saying

it's chilly,
that's what I'm saying


went out to feed the critters
and froze my jelly-belly
near
fa-telly


but the sun's 
arising
like an old man's hoosit,
when memories strike
with tentpole dreams
of that pretty girl from 1954,
all bobby-socked and whooshy skirted
rising all the way to her holymoses
when she twirled
to the beat of her rocker-roll feet
like Hermione Gingold
peddling her pettifogs
through the roses of 
Sangre de Chevalier...

but I was saying,
it's a chill-bill day
but the sun's arising in an all-together
encouraging way,
I'm saying,
​to kick-off the day



Picture

Rules suck - a libertarian manifesto

rules suck,
that's my conviction

except for those that protect me
from bank robbers and serial killers
and international assassins
and incompetent motor vehicle operators
and rogue cops
and Islamic terrorists
and Communist terrorists
and Lutheran terrorists
and Mormon terrorists
and Zen terrorists
And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
terrorists
and Pat Boone fan club terriorists

and illegal Mexican aliens who want to behead people
and smuggle drugs
and steal my job picking grapes for 89 cents an hour

and cemetery plot salesmen
and term life insurance salesmen
and poison spinach...

wait,
I don't eat spinach, poisoned or otherwise,
so that rule sucks too, but the rule
that protects me from poison peas and corn,
and poison pork chops - that's another story

and the rule that says my employer has to pay me
when I work
and that my landlord has to fix my plumbing
when it leaks
and that I can take my AK-47 to church
to protect myself against international assassins
and terrorists and devil worshipers
and homosexual hippies from Harvard Square
and California surfer boys
and Lebanese switchboard operators
and gangsta' rappers
and Chinese tongs
and those damn Mexican narco-terrorists
and other nasty nabobs of nefarious negativity it's just the wa it is

rules suck,
that's my conviction


mostly

​
Picture
Twit about town

30 degrees
bright
sun
squirrels
shivering in the trees
and that's the weather report for this morning

but I have more important things
on my mind -

the whole naming thing,
my insistence on assigning naming rights
to creators

so, for example, I drive a RAV 4, so named
by the Toyota automobile company,
so named, I'm guessing, by the creator of the company,
Charlie Toyota

this principle is the source of my right
to name these little thing I write "Poems"
and I don't care what anyone else thinks
or wants to call them,
just like Charlie Toyota doesn't care
many think he should have named his company
Oldsmobile
or Tinkerpot
or Btristlebull;
or Upyourass
or anything else

I drive a Toyota because
Charlie says so

and I write poems beause
I say so

and it raises the question
of how a lion came to be called a lion
and a snail a snail
and a jackrabbit a jackrabbit
and me a man and you a woman
if you are one and if you're not,
I'm not saying anythng about the depths of your
masculinity, just saying that, for example,
if you're a woman how did you come to be called that...
assuming I'm correct that the creator gets to name
his creations,
then God the creator must have named me man
and you woman, if you... ectetera etcetera

but wait!
Genesis says God delegated naming rights to Adam,
who, presumably, named himself, and, face it,
Adam doesn't seem to have been the smartest dude
in the garden, even though, disregarding Eve's
sometimes bossy tendencies. he's the only dude in the garden...
he's basically dumb as the thing he sits on
and later called "rock" which is probably a good thing,
since if Adam had any brains he might have also have
had a sense of humor, a frequent affliction of those witih brains,
and the whole naming thing could have turned into a joke,
like the Abbot and Costello who's on first bit and,
who knows, I might now be known as the
Twit of the Hour or
the Twit about Town,
or in some cases Da Twit,
​
and who knows, my gosh,
what you might be today if Adam had a sense of humor
​
Shadrach In The Fiery Pit
Picture



​


​

Picture



Zulabulaland

9 a.m. and I heading for my new coffee house,
den of ocassional creations of a poetic nature,
one of those Presbotarianist places
where you get a blessing with each cup of coffee
and an invitation to donate to their mission
in Zulabuland, with nice art on the walls
and old furnitue and chairs upon which
a person of my substantial substance
can find adventure in intermittent creaks and groans

and I was driving to this place of ocassional poetic creation
when two yuppie-puppie vans raced right through a red light
in front of me and if I hadn't slowed down two blocks earlier
to get a better look at a house I'm going to buy
after I win the lottery tonight, they would have creamed me
as we used to say, havng nothing to do with cows or
milking machines, or haystacks, or sylvan pastures of green,
just plain run right over me, leaving me in a bloody twist
of metal and flesh formerly known as me,
pretty bad for the flesh formerly known as me
but not so bad for the wife of the flesh formerly known as me,
said flesh worth more in such mangled and dead condition
than unmangled and alive, making it possible for her
to move into that house I was looking at without counting
on lottery winnings...

such are the economics of life and death

`````

another sign of the craziness all about,
these yuppie-puppie moms in their yuppie-puppie vans
driving like Bonnie and Clyde running from the poooooolice
after a bank job - I'm telling you there is no safe place
for us sane people when yuppie-puppie moms
are driving their yuppie-puppie vans through
yiuppie-puppie neighborhoods, like Steve McQueen
chasing bad guys through the hills of San Franisco...

too damn many people seeing too many movies
they're not psychologically prepared for
​is what I think is going on
Picture

​This piece is by Stephen Dunn from his book, Different Hours.

Dunn is the author of ten previous collections of poetry, in addition to this book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.



The Reverse Side

                      The reverse side also has a reverse side.
                                                           - A Japanese proverb


It's why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is - the opposite 
of what we said.

And perhaps why we as we fall in love
we're already falling out of it.

It's why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein tings in -
the snapshot, the lie of a frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found outselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.
​



new board

Double Trouble
​
Picture
Picture
As I mentioned before, I quit writing poetry several months ago. Most of the poems I've posted here and elsewhere for the past several weeks, came from this book, Goes Around Comes Around, my third book, second eBook. I've provided my own covers for all of my eBooks except this one. In this case, the cover is from a photo by Thomas Costales, an amatuer photographer I met at a book store. Thomas, suffering from insomnia, has created a wonderful collection of night photos such as this one. He also created a very good collection of portraits. I used both his night picures and his portraits in the old Here and Now.

I haven't had any contact with Thomas in years. I hope he's still taking his pictures.

As I've been reading the poems from Goes Around Comes Around that I haven't read in years, I'm impressed by my own work. The poems are loose and unpretentious and, often, humerous. It seems to me my work in later books tightened up and lost the free flow that I maintained in this book, as if I became to regard my self too seriously, losing the spontainity that made the poems here so pleasing to me.

My recent problem, and the reason I no longer write poetry, is I've lost the words and the free spirit. 

As an old man, 77 going on 78, I'm facing the problem of losing the right word. Most of my readers are writers as well, and I'm sure they know what I'm talking about. There are the "right words" in a poem, usually a familiar word that just won't come to mind, requiring substitution of that word with a second or third choice that flattens the poem and drains the fun of writing it.

So that's the reason you're seeing only old poems from me, old poems or new poems that end up as prose.

For example, a friend of mine died died last year, a friend of 60 years who I met in 1965 in Air Force basic training. 

We completed basic traing then went together to almost a year of Russian language traing at Indiana University. After that, another three months of of equipment training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Anglo, Texas. After completing this year of training, we were both assigned to the same post in Gemany, traveling together throughout Germany for a year. After that we were assigned different post, he in Turkey and me to the Pakistanni frontier. 

Following military service, we continued to see each other for all the years, every year or two, meeting for a drink or coffee or a meal, despite living over 1,000 miles apart. As the years pass our own lives each went the normal way of lives, leaving us always something to talk about. 

Now, following his death, I remember the years of memories that we alone shared but that are now mine alone.

​And thus, this void is left, there being no one left who remembers it all as I do, no one left to talk about as we did.

This is a poem I would liked to have written. But this prose rememberences is what I have instead.

​
Picture
It's a fine day today

it's a fine day todaiy,

the sun shines 
on all of us, children
of the bright...

it's a fine day today,

three pages of dead people in the paper-
only five younger than me
and one of those
I think
was lying

a fine day today,
three pages of dead people in the paper,
and none of them
was me...

Picture
Picture
Day 24,387 and counting

another
day,

another
dollar,

a million
days,

a million dollars...

that's what the fella
down at the Happy Valley Home told me...

and, depending on your capacity
for long-term planning,
that view can be very encouraging,
even cominf from the Happy Valley cohort,
who, if you choose, can be seen
as not out of touch with reality,
living instead
in a greater reality closed 
to the ore prosaic of us -

or not

as for me,
I'm a believer in reality,
but only in romantic affairs...

when it comes to money,
I settle for no less 
than the wildest fantasies

which is why I am sure
I'm on the road to riches every day

and while I may not get all the days
I need to get there all the way,
being on to something good
is better than being stuck in the weeds
like a back-road vagabond with a flat tire
and no spare in the trunk...

I'm a human being of the American persuasion
after all,
and, like my kind, want to get
everything there is to get
and expect, by god, to get it...

day 24,387
and counting

​
Picture
Thinking of the state of the world, as well as my country and even my state, I think of this poem. It's an old poem, one that I've probably posted here before, but it's a rarity for me, a "message" poem. But I think it's a good message worth repeating.


Habits of mercy

I was thinking this morning 
about what I want to do with the rest of my life,
and decide it's the same thing
I want to do with the rest of my day -

kiss my wife
at least once or twice

eat some good food

write some good poems

sleep a nice nap

communicate with my better nature

& forgive myself
for all recent sins, known,
as well as those secret, even to me

easier for some
then for others, 

those with no true love
to kiss

no food to eat

no bed to sleep in

no poetry for their soul - those with no key
to unlock the door to self, their
true self as unknown to them
as a stranger passing dark on the street -

and most difficult of all for those 
who can't find withing themselves
forgiveness of themselves...

poor miserable, ego-obsessed creatures that we are,
sinners almost from our first thoughts,
if we cannot forgive ourselves,
how will we ever learn to forgive others

and if we cannot forgive others,
how can we ever live in this world
that needs cleansed hearts
as much as we need clean air and water

habits of mercy
are what will save this world;
human sins forgiven
by human sinners

​
Picture

​A minor poet explains it all

I'm eating breakfast north-faced
today,
unusual,
because normally I sit at the booth on the other end,
the one next to the electric plug where I face south as I eat

this morning, that booth was taken
by another south-faced keyboard clicking diner,
leave me at this end, in the only other booth
next to an electric plug
where I now eat breakfast facing north

I'm not sure what effect this will have
on the gastro-dynamics of my egg-over-easy
and super-extra-crispy bacon
but it does present a subtly different view,
which could have far-reaching psychological effects on
those like me, normally eat breakfast facing toward the south,
facing the oncoming traffic on the interstate
as well as those like me, today, who eat breakfast
facing north, facing interstate traffic going away,
this different orientation  the reason, I believe,
why south-facing diners are usually highly motivated people
with the supreme confidence required to write 
meaningless, totally trivial, poetry,
while north-facing diners
often suffer from abandoment issues
and are frequent victims
​of depresssion
​
Lost Jigger of Gin
Picture
The Hawaiian shirt plan

it's a kind of orange/yellow thing
with palm trees and some kind of liquor bottle
with sailing ships on the label,
it's one of seven Hawaiian shirts I bought
a couple of weeks ago -
the one I have on today
part of my new strategy for facing
South Texas Summer - embrace it!

no more hiding in my air conditioned house
for four months, tasting unprocessed outside air
only for the time it takes to get from my air conditioned house
to my air conditioned car

instead,
I will sweat
as one's supposed to when it's 100 degrees in 85% humidity

I will wear my salt-stained Hawaiian shirts daily;

I will work at least one hour each day in my backyard
in the cinder-toasting sun as lightly dressed
as allowed by law,
my fish-white belly and butt
will be brown like the  pecans that fall from the tree,
my feet will become summer rough again,
my hands black and bruised from digging in the dark soil
and sharp chaliche rocks

I will be like the ancient peoples who made their hard lives here
among the cactus and hills, and rocky meadows,
in the summer heat and north winds of winter

I will be seven years old again, when summer
was my friend

I will be summer
​again
​
My town, from my neighborhood
Picture
My town, round and about downtown

​
i heard a new song on the radio yesterday.

The line is, "I like Austin, but I love San Antone."

That's true for me except, while I like Austin in the late 60s early 70s, my son lives there now and I never want to live there again. In fact, I've spent time in all the major cities in Texas and the only one I'd live in is where I live now, San Antonio, a city of a million and a half people, including a massive influx of people from all over the country, that still has managed to maintain it's own unique culture.




Notes from slower regions of the universe

the first time
we made love
I carried you
to my bed, like
a leaf on a high
hot tide

````

Sunday afternoon 
in the apartment on Santa Fe,
lying in bed, watching it rain
through a damp window screen

watching the rain advance
in soft sheets across the gray waters
of the bay

`````

the house on G street

open ceiling, rain on the roof
pattering, banana plant
by the window weaving
green pataterns in the wind

like sleeping dry
in the rain

~~~~~

the first night home
from the agency

crib at the foot
of our bed,
we sleep lightly,
listen in our sleep 
for his beathing

~~~~~

we slip into sleep
flesh to flesh,
spooned,
soft skin
on soft skin,
my rough hands
cupping your small breasts

`````

I sleep,
my leg between yours,
your arm across my chest

the fire banked,
the embers still glow


1 Comment

10-07-21 - SWIMMING UPSTREAM IN A DOWNSTREAM WORLD

9/29/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
SAME BULL, DIFFERENT CHUTE

I was just finishing up
my biscuits and sausage gravy
when two Leon Valley police officers 
walked in, both kind of pear-shaped,
as Leon Valley, being a small suburb of the ciy,
has not nearly the pay scale or physical job requirements
of the city within which it is subsumed

they sat at the table to the right of me,
all jingly with all the tools of their trade
hung up on their utility belt...

from a table to the left of me,
a tall, granite-faced fella with a sweat-stained cowboy hat
and a basso-profondo voice that seemed to come
from some deep, dark cavern beneath his boots,
said, "Howdy, boys"

the officers said howdy back and asked,
"What's up?"
and the tall man said, in his voice from the center of the earth,
"Same bull, different chute"

and I was thinking, first, how goddamn cool is that,
and then, by god, there must be no more than ten people
in the whole damn state of Texas who can say that
and not sound stupid, and here I sit, 
next to one of them

I started listening then to the tall man and the two other fellas,
wanting to hear more of that great voice
saying cool things, but, mostly, he talked
about the goddamn newspaper and the stupid reporters
and how he called them and threatened
to cancel his subscription if they didn't quit
all their commie reporting, and talk such as that

seems he only had one good line

how disappointing!

but then, later, I stopped at the supermarket
on my way to our Sunday morning 
newspaper reading marathon
and I notice a fat-assed man and a fat-assed woman
walking in front of me, noticing the tender way
the man put his hand on the woman's butt, 
stroking it and patting it as they walked

and I was thinking, damn, ain't it great
when people get what they want in life, and
​appreciate it


​
Picture
This poem is by Wanda Coleman, taken from her book, Heavy Daughter Blues. The book was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1991.

Born and raised in the Watts section of Los Angles, Coleman, even as a welfare mother, continued her struggle to be a writer. She broke into the profession through writing screenplays, eventually earning an Emmy for a teleplay. Author of four books of poetry, Coleman works as a medical secretary/transcriptionist while continuing to write and publish.




I.S. In the Purple Felt Hat (3)

                                     street of wine house of thrill

walnut corridors & double dead-bolted doors/a
dingy hoover avenue hideout
eyes/having had me have to have me
come across me at a local ink spot

          "I want it again"

i can barely balance the tray of drinks
under his scorchinig scrutiny

danger in ebony skin and ebony moustache
the purple felt fedora and daring ebony leather /criminal of the 
     spirit
stalks the cconer pocket (cunt musk)

          "I never expected to see you again"

i collect the dollar tip, tuck it into my bra
he hangs until closing. we leave together
i will quit this waitress tomorrow - leave no trail
tonight I'm out to get -even/repay a debt in flesh
(a thigh for a thigh - a truth for a truth)

         "how man other women have you raped"
         "a few - but you are something special"

a part-time pimp
he withholds copulaton - use it the way corporate execs
use perks/seduction into social slavery -
he goes against his nature enough to change his
modus operandi

i'm fifty below zero having got my got he's mine -
mine always. sobs my name

begs. pleads




Flight of the California Condor (3)

over ham & eggs they jaw about how it was
before the Dodgers hit town in '58
the old downtown hang-outs
and the 10 cent mug of java
the old white men of L.A. tip their hat
say, "so long"
and move further west


​



I
Picture
Admiring the Dark

dark is staying dark longer every night
as July heads for the back door
and August 
impatientely taps its fiery little feet
out front...
waiting

I enjoy the dark morning,
eating breakfast
by the big window
looking out to the dark
of night waning

watching the new day
gathering in the east,
just a hint,
a bare little shadow
of light remembered,
almost lost in the ambient glow
of clouds softly lit from below
by the city's night illuminations,
clouds always glowing  from below
in a city of a million of a half people
fearful of the dark -

porch lights lit all night,
motion lights flashing bright
with every rustly of leaves by the wind,
every twitter of a bird, street lights,
security lights, night lights
that let us sleep in semi-darkness,
certain that whatever evil
lurks outside the luminance we wrap
around our sleeping body
will be as frightened by the light
as we are by the dark
and will stay away 

it is the way we have lived
with the dark since fire-tenders
maintained the flames
that kept us safe at night
from the earliest history
of our kind...

menwhile,
sitting in my well-lit cafe,
typing in the glow of computer electrons,
I admire the beauty of the night,
while looking past the dark
to each pool of light around,
calculating the distance between pools,
clocking how quickly I could race the dark
from one bright pool to the next

if I had
​to
eith 
Picture
A little shout-out to the paranoids among us.


SMALL DREAMS PASS BY UNNOTICED

don't
dream
too large
tonight

they know
who
the dreamers
are
​

and
they are
watching
​

TRUE ROMANCE
Picture
Picture
I'm thinking soft this morning

I'm thinking soft this morning
soft autumn breeze on sun-warmed skin,
the soft middle of fresh-baked bread,
the soft fur behind a kitten's ear
and under its chin,
the fresh smell of soft sheets
on a wedding bed,
the soft squeeze of a woman,
the velvet slide down her back
to the rounded slope of her rear,
the rise of her breasts,
breathing
in
out
rising
falling
on the soft edge of sleep,
the moist center of her calling,
and the damp cheeks of my son at four,
eyes wet from a bully's taunts
as I held him close,
"you are a good person," I tell him,
my voice a soft whisper in his ear,
"and a strong, brave boy
whose mom and dad love him."

`````

I'm thinking soft this morning,
remembering...
missing the touch of days brighter
and softer than today
DEN OF INIQUITY
Picture
Picture
What I'm supposed to be doing

this is the time of day
when I usually demonstrate my bonafides
as a poet
by pontificating on cue
and the problem today is I can't remember
if a cue is a nudge and a wink
or the long striker stick
used to reposition colored and numbered balls
on a green felt table
in a brisk game of pocket billards -
pocket pool I would have said
but that construction is often construed
to denote another game
entirely -
or vice-versey,
which complicates things
since i'm not sure now
if I should start writing
or amble over to Fat Annie's for a pick-up game
of eight-ball

which reminds me of several good
pool-playing stories
I could write about if I knew that's
what I'm suppsed to be doing
at this exact moment

but since I don't know for sure,
I won't write anything,
but that's okay since  I didn't want to write
a poem this morning
anyway

instead,
if Fat Annie's is open this early
I might resolve the question
by connoting that's what I'm supposed to be doing...

`````

meanwhile
there is a moon hang pale
like a sliver of shaved soap
in the dark, night-tide sky
that cares nothing about my poem
or any lack thereof
and
Annie's cooler is full of ice-cold
Orange Crush and Grapette
that would suit me much more
than than a hostage poem
so that' where I'm gonna
​be


Picture

​Next I have three short poems by Guillaume Apollinair, taken from his book Alcools, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995. The poems were translated by Donald Revell. It is a bilingual book, with the original French and English translation on facing pages. 

Apollinair was an infuential poet, playwright and critic in the late 19th-early 20th century. Like his contemporary, Blaise Cendrars (the inspiration for my own book, Places and Spaces, of travel poems), Apollinair was a world traveler and wrote many travel poems.



Annie

On the coast of Texas
Between Mobile and Galveston there is
A big garden filled with roses
There is also a mansion
It is one big rose

A woman walks there often
Alone in the garden
When I cross the lime-tree road
We are face to race

Because she is a Mennonite
Here roses and her clothing have no buttons
My jacket is missing two buttons

The lady and I are almost one religion



The Gypsy

The gypsy foretold
Our two lives thwarted by the nights
We told her goodbye
And Hopefulness sprang from holes in the ground

Heavy as a circus bear
Love danced when we commanded
The blubird lost its featehrs
Mendicant friars lost their prayers

A person knows damn well he's damed
But hope of loving along the way
Compels us to consider hand in hand
The words the gypsy meant to say



Autumn

In the fog the knock-kneed peasant and his ox
Go slowly through the autumn fog
That hides the villages and all their ugliness

The peasant keeps on walking humming
A song about love and deception
A song about a ring and a heart of fire

Oh autumn the autumn ambushed the summer
In the fog I saw two shadows go


Picture
Career counseling

the Saturday morning crowd

at the coffeehouse,
though large,
is not conducive
to poetic exploration
so I fall back
to yonder years when
at sixteen
I shot a 45-caliber pistol
at a turtle
in the Arroyo Colorado
about six miles from my house
the turtle was a tiny green-shelled
reptile floating provocatively
on the surface of the water
which in those days
before herbicide runoff
was not a harbinger of death
to creatures large and small
except fish which would be a harbinger
of death to you if you are ever ate one
a place where in the old days
I learned to swim in the murky green
currents and never died
even once
in those days being a harbinger
of death to numerous bottles and cans
with my 22-caliber rifle and pistol
I had never fired a heavy-duty piece
like the 45 which I borrowed
from a friend and wanted to
which I did, firing a volley of hard hitting
slugs which caused a mighty stirring
in the water around the turtle
while the turtle floated away, unimpressed,
in its placid green-back
way
dreams of turtle soup
fading away as I returned the 45
to the friend from whom I had borrowed it
and turned back to the hunt for frogs
at midnight, their pale little
legs delicious when fried and tasting
like small chickens, much better
than turtle soup anyway
content to understand that due to
my incompetence there was no likelihood
of a future for me in sniper alley, or
as a serial killer or fearsome terrorist,
my life as a fearsome bureaucrat
set instead



SWIMMING UPSTREAM IN A DOWNSTREAM WORLD


Picture
Picture
December night in my neighborhood

winter night in the last moment
before dusk falls,
the sky is clear, light blue,
like the "it's a boy" blankets
you get at the hospital
to warm a new-born son,
thin,
almost tansparent blue

moon bright in the soft sky,
not full, flattened a little on one side
like a globe, flattened at the south pole
so it won't roll off your desk,
Antarctica folded in on itself

a chill wind blowing from the top of the hill,
raising a shower of golden leaves
from trees long the creek

light winter-home, taste of chimney smoke
in the air

ten degrees cooler than the numbers
on the thermometer read

​very quiet

​

Picture
CIRCLES

a new year approaches
just a few dawns away


one rotation ending
as another begins,
circles within circles
within circles
within larger circles still

as our moon circles,
bringing dark to light night skies,
bringing day and night


circling our sun,
bringing singing birds of spring,
summer's meadow flowers, tangy taste
of autumn leaves, chill winds that blow in winter


even as our sun
and all its brother-sister stars
turn on the universal axis
of everything we can know,
for now,
but maybe not for always,
as we may someday know of other
cirles, turns, rotations, there now
but that we cannot see


and the All we know will grow again
and we, in our knowing, will grow again,
even as we shrink ever smaller
in the everything there is


circles within circles
within even larger circles still...


"it seems we're just running in circles,"
and how true
and how grand that is

​
Practice Board
Picture
It occurs to me, late as usual, that I have not properly credited my wife, Dora Ramirez Itz, for her help in editing and proofing my blogs. So, thank you, Dee.
0 Comments

09/25/21 - ON THE RIVER

9/13/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
EVEN THE DISBELIEVER SEARCHES FOR BELIEF

the scientist
says
there is no God
the philosopher
says
there is no God,
but do we not, in our search
for all knowledge and final truth
create
an approximation of God,
for
what is God
but the alpha and omega,
the perfect final
of all, including truth.
you search, the philosopher adds,
because you believe
that there is an end to all
knowing -
your belief and your search for the truth
that is all truth
no different than that
of the Hindu holy man sitting
cross-legged on a mountain peak
contemplating his way
to the One at the center of the All,
or, the monk in his cell
flagellating his bloody back
because he thinks pain will clear the pathway
to the presence of God, or,
the Methodist minister who does good works
because he thinks God notices
those who do good
and seeks desperately that notice,
like yours, all of them a search for the God
of final things, like
the Greeks searched for God
through the creation of ideals,
gods like men,
men like gods, the ideal of creation
---
this one
says
there is no God
except the one who exists
as the most basic craving of our humanity,
the one who urges our rational self
to disbelieve so as to protect
the truth of our
soul,
that essence which spirits away
to other realms when our rational self
expires
​
Big Bend National Park, Chisos Mountains, Chisos Basin
The Texas Big Bend, as I recall it in this painting.
Picture
Picture


I WANT A DONUT

I said, I want
a donut
damnit

not a carrot stick
or a celery stalk

not a bowl of moose munch
in rehydrogenated 
goat's milk

no cold little
cauliflower bud

not even a
sugar-free donut

don't want it 
fat free
either

I want a good ol'
suicide-in-the-round
glazed Dixie Cream
capital D
donut
​
with sprinkles

you gotta fight back
or the older you get
the less you get
in living

now,
get me 
my damn
donut
Lost Jigger of gin
Picture





Many readers love him. About the same number hate him. I enjoy reading his dark, bleak, wrong side of life poems because in them, you always know his hero will, like the Dude., abide.

What I most admire about him as a creative artist is that he created a persona he maintained consistently in both his poetry and his fiction, breaking his cover, but only a little, near the end when he know his end was coming. 

Who was Bukowski, really, beneath the persona he created? Maybe his ex-wives knew.

Here are two of his poems, the first as philosopical as I've ever read him, and the second back to his familiar turf. 

Both of these are from his collection Open All Night, published by Harper Collins, in 2003. Like so many of his collections, it was published after his death.




THIS IS A FACT

in the company of fools
we relax upon
ordinary embankments,
enjoy bad food, cheap drinks,
mingle with the men and
ladies from
hell.
in the company of fools
we throw days away like
paper napkins.

in this company
our music is loud and our
laughter
untrue.

we have nothing to lose
but our selves.

join us.
we are now
almost
the entire
world.

God bless
us.
​


THERE'S ONE IN EVERY BAR

the pathetic squirrel drinks Johnny Walker Red
at Stinky's Bar & Grill,
in love with the cocktail waitaares
he watches her body
her eyes
he dreams of her on his sofa
crossing her legs and giggling
he dreams of her drunk in his bedroom
he dreams of victory
of conquest
he leaves her very large tips
he says very little to her.
the pathetic squirrel dislikes
how crude and obvious the other
bar-squirrels are
to her
and he's delighted when
she laughes at them
and says things like
"back off, Marty!"
the pathetic squirrel loves the large bow
on the back of her short dresss.

he leaves each night
intoxicated
knowing he will be sick on the job
the next day.

the pathetic squirrel is in love with the
cocktail waitress
but ask her about him
and she'll confide:
"he makes me sick! he's a complete asshole!"

an she'll be right.
but he still has his dream
and that might be enough in itself
because he doesn't realize that
she'a a complete asshole 
too.




I did not intend to do a third Bukowsky here, but when putting the book back in the shelf, it opened to this piece, Self-appraisal, such a rarity for this poet. But, of course, not as himself, even as he recognizes the end of his life is approaching,  but as the persona the created, his alter ego through out all his poems, Chinaski, who will live far beyond his time, in books published long after his death. Chinaski, not him, but in his mind, I think, more than him.


CHINASKI

parodies himself, romanticizes himself.
he's in a small room again,
always in a small room, closing the door,
closing out the world.
in his 70s he's still trying to over-
come his brutal childhood
and he's never had a real understanding
of women.
his writing is uneven
if powerful
and even at its best there is a feeling
of redundancy,
of nothing new.
he has been imitated by hordes
of writers
who find his simple style
appealing.
he now has a home, a swimming 
pool, a spa, a fine car
and a wife who feeds him 
vitamins.
he is a recluse
and if you apparoach him at the 
racetrack
there is a chance you will be
ignored or insulted.
his only visitors appear to be
movie stars,
film directors and
interviewers.
upon his death
perhaps a small place will be
made for him
in world literature
where he will sulk in the
shadow of Celine, Hemingway, Jeffers
and Henry Miller.
God rest his alcoholic
agnostic 
soul
and now let us go on to
more worthwhile
​things.





Now, A couple of images from the central Texas hills. One, a picture from the road of the legendary longhorn, and the other, from the campus of Texas State University.
​
Picture
Picture
Picture


(a found poem: NewYork Times, Front Page, Januayr 14, 2009)


PRAISE  GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW

a man
on a motorbike
pulled alongside
her
asked
what seemed
an ordinary question

"Are you going to school?"

then he pulled her burqa
from her head
and sprayed her face
with burning acid

17-years-old
and bravely back in school,
she says,
"They want us to be stupid things."

praise God...

in all his cruel and hideous
forms

​amen

​

                                  



Another Practice Board
Picture
Another favorite poet, Polish winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literatrure, Weslawa Szymborska. The piece is from her book View With a Grain of Sand, publishedby Harcourt Brace in 1993. Translation was by Stanislaw Barqanczak and Clare Cavanagh.



UNDER ONE SMALL STAR

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each
     second.

My apologies to past lovers for thinking that the latest is
      the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing my flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from
     the depths.

I apologize to those who wait in railroad stations for being
     asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for lauging from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a
     spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the
     same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attentioin.
Dignity, please be magnanimours.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the
     occasional thread from you train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere
     at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be  each woman and
     each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor  heavily so that athey might seem light.



Picture
WHO KNEW

I know
what this poem means
and so do you

but it would be so great
if we could get 
together
some rainy afternoon
in a coffeehouse
on a tree-lined boulevardin
in a quiet neighborhood
and talk
and
talk
until you understood 
what I wrote
and I knew what
you read
Clown for hire
Picture
Picture
SCATTERED IN THE WIDE NIGHT SKY

scattered
in the wide night sky
are pinpoints of light
bringing star-heat
to worlds like
our own,
biological stews
pining the universal spark
on some
and on others
life
at its most simple
is cradled,
protected from the 
cosmic storms,
and on a relatively few
creatures who strive
and dream
like you and me

I
know this
like some people
know god, 
such knowledge
a product of longing
in the lonely night
for a companion
worthy
of our best nature

​
Crackpots of the world unite
STRINGBEAN

string
bean
looking fella
in a cowboy 
hat
and shit
kicker
boots
sitting
across
from me
drinking
from a quart
carton
of 
2% milk
reading
some kind of
techincal looking
book with
graphs
and shit
and one hand
looking 
paralyzed fingers
tight 
against his palm
like Bob Dole
'cept this
fella
isn't holding
a pen
in his clenched 
fingers
like Bob Dole
aways
did
good 'ol
guy
that Bob Dole
might'a been
a fine president
if he hadn't
been
Republican
and 143 years
old -
probably
wouldn't
a'been
fucking around
with no
chubby
interns any
way
what is it
with politicians
and their dicks
anyway
like just another 
one
this week
scewing around
love me
love
me
love me
they're all 
saying
all the time
waving
their dicks
around
starting wars
or 
screwing
women 
either
too  young
or too married
for any man
with 
good sense
to mess with
I mean
put your dicks
back in your
pants
and 
grow up
for christ's sake
you're
supposed to be
running
the country
fool
not running 
around
on your dearly 
beloved
who ought to be
whopping
you
across the head
three of four
times
a day
till
you get it on
straight

fool


​


Picture
A funny story before the poem.

During the last years of my professional career, I had offices in about 15 cities in South Texas, including Del Rio. I visited each office at least once a quarter so that local staff could know me and know I was interested in what they were doing. eating breakfast every morning at a cafe next to my hotel, I noticed I was getting extaordinary service with every meal.
Kenny Rogers was filming a movie near the city at the time of one of my quartely visits. At the time, my hair and beard were considerably longer and grayer. I learned later that one of the staffr at the cafe had become certain and had convinced the rest of the staff that I was Kenny Rogers.
not the only time I was mistaken for rogers, none of the other times led to such excellent breakfasts.

Now the poem.


ON THE RIVER

two eggs,
one pancake,
and four sausage links -
five dollars, ninety-eight cents
4:30
in the very early morning
early breakfast
in Del Rio, Texas,
County Seat, Val Verde County,
on the river, 150 miles west of San Antonio
400
southeast of E Paso,
with a population of about 45,000,
largest collection of Texas bodies and souls
between the two, not counting Cuidad Acuna
on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande,
where the lights in Boy's Town
make cigarettes glow a sparkly,
shimmering gold
and a slender, young whore
dances naked in a dim-lit courtyard
among scattered tables
with 16-year-old boys, college carousers,
oil-tattooed roughnecks, leather-faced cowboys
and fat businessmen belching beer
and three-dollar cigar smoke, watching
ever slow, sweat-oiled move,
every one of them, man and boy,
looking for something at a place
where they're sure to never
find it
look, but don't touch
for touching costs more
than the price of a bottle of Mexican beer...

but not a lot more





Finishing with another practicve board.
Picture
0 Comments

09/03/21 - The Disappearing Self

9/3/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
PATH TO ENLIGHTMENT

I
intend to put my brain
on a leash this
morning
because I'm thinking
I want to be taken seriously
as a poet and adult human being
of the masculine persuasion
and nobody takes nobody serious
who's always running off at the brain
like I'm prone to do,
chasing every little bushy-tailed squirrel
that happens to cross my path
to enlightment

meaning
making it hard to get to the end of that path,
difficult to find the enlightment
that one naturally assumes of a human being
of the masculine persuasion,
and a poet to boot...

never even close
chasing squirrels instead...

but, second-guessinig myself,
something us chasing-every-squirrel types
rarely do, and never without good cause,
I'm reconsidering my decision
to adopt the leash-constrained mode,
thinking to abandon the chase
for the mantle of seriosity expected of poets
and adult human beings
of the masculine persuasion
because there are advantages
to the chase-every-squirrel state of mind,
like flushing out a bird bath,
getting rid of all the leaves and algae
and bird poop that collects
in the presence of birds and shallow water,
giving it a good flush, a good scraping out,
leaving behind clear water, water free
of entrenched distraction, water renown
for its clear thinking, water that knows its own mind -
and I'm thinking that is a clear advantage
for the chasing-every-squirrel state of mind

because
how is one to find enlightment
when the path is strewn with leaves and algae
and philosophical bird poop?

just won't work...

if you want to find enlightment,
you have to clear the path, flush the pump
like you flush a bird bath and that's what
a chasing-every-squirrel state of mind,
freed from the leash and on the chase,
is good for, stirring up such a frenzy,
a regular misdirection that blows
all the extraneous crap out of the way,
leaving a clear path,
enlightment
just over the next rise...
​

seriously...
​
Another practice board
Picture
A REAL LOSS T0 POETRY

it was a golden night,
no moon,
stars buried
behind thick, low clouds
reflecting back to the ground
and streets and houses,
the golden light of the city,
never sleeping golden light
filtering through the trees
like spun gold gold, orange shadows
in the golden night,
and down at the creek
water flowed in golden bubbles of light
while the crickets cricked
and the frogs farted
and, oh crap,
haven't I done this before
and who cares,
anyway

poetry is serious business
and ought to be about serious things
like, how about that helium?

if I ate a ham and helium sandwich,
would I rise to the ceiling
like those balloons they give to kids
at the supermarket who let go of the balloon
and the balloon rises to the ceiling
which is lined with balloons given to kids
who let the balloons go,, red, blue, green,
what a bunch of colors lining
the supermarket ceiling

and what if I ate two ham and helium sandwiches,
or maybe even three,
would I float away into the sky if outside
where there is no supermarked ceiling to keep me safe,
would this be a new mode of transportation,
great airplanes guided through the sky
by teams of pilots gorging on ham and helium sandwiches

and what about the porpoise, Einstein of the sea,
Aristotle with fins, Plato with a snout and a jolly smile
and what do you call more than one porpoise -
is it porpiees, maybe, and what about a gathering
of porpiees, not a school, because that's fish
and porpiees are not fish, and not a herd
because that's cows and horses and sheep,
and porpiees are none of those and not a swarm,
cause that's bees, and not a flock
cause that's geese and chickens and not a pod
cause that's whales (which I think is a silly name
for somethng as vastly gargantuan as a congregation
of whales - it would be much better if we called such a gathering
a "tundra" or something else equally as vastly gargantuan,
but that's just me) and at least whales are mammals
like porpiees and not fish, even though, like whales,
porpiees like the water and frolic all about in it, at least
the porpiees I saw at Seaworld like to frolic all about
in the water, so maybe a group of porpiees
who travel together might be called a "frolic".
but that's just a suggestion...

and anyway, I could go on and on because
there's lots and lots of important things
poetry should deal with instead
of getting stuck in frou-frou poems
about golden nights and cloudy skies
and absent stars and vanished moons
and crickets and frogs...
and what about those frogs and the way they mate
like a honkytonk in Amarillo, has anyone ever written
a poem about that - well, in fact, I did, but no one else
and that's a real loss to poetry...

I'm telling you, a real loss

​
Showing off several of my boards and my new haircut (even though, actually and on purpose, it looks exactly like my old haircut)
​
Picture
Picture
I wrote this at the request of a very good friend who had just experienced a terrible and unexpected loss.


FOR KATIE'S NANA

Remembering Katherine
4/3/1998 - 6/22/2010
​

a child
like a star
is born and brightly
burns
through the darkest
nights,
then, flickers
in the universal winds
and fades,
its alloted time
compete
and all the constellations
that burned with it
dim in a fellowship
of lose...
until grief fades,
consumed by memories
forever closely kept...
for what more
can we ask of a child
than to be a star


​
Picture
LIFE IS

life is 
like a duck hunt

every time
you really begin to fly

some asshole
in the weeds

shoots your fuzzy butt
right out of the sky


art by Vincent Martinez


These poems are fom One Hundred Poems From the Chinese, collected by Kenneth Rextoth. The book was published by New Directions in 1971.

No translator is credited for any of the poems.


The first two poems are by Tu Fu, one of the greatest of the Chinese poets.


Loneliness

A hawk hovers in air.
Two white gulls float on the stream.
Soaring with the winds, it is easy
To drop and seize
Birds who foolishly drift with the current.
Where the dew sparkles in the grass,
The spider's web waits for its prey.
The processes of nature resemble the business of men.

I stand alone with ten thousand sorrows.



New Moon

The bright, thin, new moon appears,
Tipped askew in the heavens.
It no sooner shines over
The ruined fortress than the
Evening clouds overwhelm it.
The Milky Way shines unchanging
Over the freezng mountains
Of the border. White frost covers
The garden. The chrysanatahemums
Clot and freeze in the night







Picture
Written a couple of years back, before routine became my preferred way to spend my day.


the source of my problem

routine,
that's my problem,
too much of it...

I haven't seen an Albanian gypsy
in years,
or heard the plaintive cry
of a river flattapotumus
or smelled the acrid stench
of burning filagabbit feathers...

looking around me in this restaurant
I see not a single Grenadian pirate
or Singhalese soul-snatacher,
just plain old moms and dads
and grandmas and grandpas
and little kids
with chocolate milk mustaches,
and the old guy in the corner,
typing on his computer, dripping grits
in his beard, muttering to himself about things
conspicuously unhinged...

just another Sunday morning...

how is one to find a poem in a life
so unadventurously

confined

​
Picture
A personal reckoning of the day

We went to my brother’s funeral today.

In Victoria, in the Golden Crescent, center of the state’s Rice Belt, 178 miles either way. A short jaunt for Texas travel, but a difficult one going, late, racing time on small country roads.

We arrived near the end of the service, plenty of time for the essentials of funeral, time to comfort the living and learn the lessons offered by the dead. In my case, as we filed past the coffin to see my little brother, for the last time, in his box, to learn the tricks of time and its tides, the tricks that put him, the younger, in the box where I should be. He, who should have been last, leaving before me, making me the last.

And what of the last? What is to be made of my last?

I thought of the two of us and our lives as brothers. The four-year difference in ages meant that when we were young, it was rare for the two of us, outside home, to be at the same place at the same time. Meaning we grew up on different life tracks. His life led to a life of personal comfort. Comfort that, on my life track, I have never found.

I still, in the time left, I seek it, never expecting to find it. Seems I have always been a step behind satisfaction and comfort with where I am and what I’ve done. In my old age, I am a man of strict routine, routine that cushions me against the desperation and depression I expect to find around every corner.

And my routine has been broken now for two weeks, leaving me exhausted and on the edge of a quiet despair. My life, interrupted, focused almost exclusive around the inadequacy themes of my poetry, which I no longer write, and my art which I doubt will ever be as appreciated as the pleasure I take in it Too big, too unrestrained to ever fit on anyone wall, needing a large, pale wall in need of the color I can add to it, a mansion, perhaps Bill Gates has such a place, or something institutional, a university or a bank or an office building needing to bring life to their walls. But I don’t know Bill Gates or any institution interested in the work of a past-due amateur.

But I paint them anyway because of the pleasure each new piece brings me.

And the poetry – that is over, I think. Perhaps this prose is as close as I come. Never again for me, I’m afraid, the thrill of a mind running free and frantic to find new joy in old words and old ideas to jolt back to life.

And so this is it, not the poem I hoped to find in the day, but a report and a reflection of myself; gone to morn and comfort, finding also, as is almost always the case, variations on the stories of oneself.


Addendum:

The poem is self-explanatory as to the purpose of writing, my effort to find some truth in myself as final survivor of a family of five. 

I hoped to be honest, but in one aspect, I was not, maybe, honest but incomplete.

I mention the despair and depression that always seems right around the corner,but I was not as specific as I could have been. I didn't name it.

It is a thing perhaps stronger for men of my age and history, growing up in an age of male domination, when it was thought and we males were expected to be in charge. Finding in our late years the shadows of a time coming when we will be in charge of nothing, not even our own bodies and minds.

The names of people know for many years, forgotten, the words, simple and well-known, that disappear (and for a writer, what worse than the lack of words), the fumbling fingers trying to turn the page of the daily newspaper, the car key that are gone from the counter (gone from where I know I last put them), the uncertain gait on a flat sidewalk, the dread of stairs, the ocassional explosive rage that comes and goes over trivial inconveniences.  

These simple things, the first signs, we fear, of a time that might be coming. Assuming another five, maybe ever ten, years of life. For how many of those years will I be present and accounted for. 

It is the word men of my age don't like to think about.

​Dementia, the disappearing self.
Picture
the very proper lady in the black Sunday dress

the very proper lady
in the black Sunday dress
and jeweled necklace
and dangly earrings
blows her nose
into a tiny lace hindkerchief

and her eyes bulge
like a bug's  or maybe
like a big spotted frog
caught wide awake on her lily pad at midnight
thinking silverfish thoughts,
and her ears, I swear, are flapping
and I'm tiinking, "holy shit"
her head's gonna explode like the bad guy's head
at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie

and I don't know if I should watch
or shield my eyes from the sight,
so I compromise and peek through my fingers
and watch as the pressure slowly eases
and her head shrinks back to regular size
and her ears lie supine at rest against her head
and her eyes slink back into mean little slits
like when she came, only I didn't notice then
like I do now...

that is one evil woman,
in her proper black dress and jewelry
and hanging earrings and, by gosh,
I'm glad she didn't blow up
or I'd probably have evil debris gunk
dripping all over me...

a pretty scary experience for this early in the morning,
but it is one of the reasons
I like to have breakfast here -

you meet the most interesting people,
and other creatures one can't be 
entirely sure of


Art by Vincent Martinez
​
​
Picture


This is another piece from One Hundred Poems from the Chiniese, this one by Ou Yang Hsiu.

Old Age

In the Sprintime I am always
Sorry, the nights are so short.
My lamp is burning out, the flame
Is low. Flying insects circle
About it. I am sick. My eyes 
Are dry and dull. If I sit
Too long in one position,
All my bones ache. Chance thoughts from
I don't know where crowd upon me.
When I get to the end of a 
Train of thought, I have forgotten
The beginning. For one thing
I retain I forget ten.
When I was young I liked to read.
Now I am too old to make
The effort. Then, too, if I come
Across something interesting
I have no one to talk to
About it. Sad and alone,
I sigh with self pity.

​Another practice board
Picture
Picture
Over the course of a 30-year professional career I attended, often convened, many such meetings as this one. 


business breakfast

there is a large crowd,
ten diners,
on several tables
pushed together

a business breakfast meeting it seems,
for a congregation of insurance agents
(my guess, they look like insurance people)
mostly men in dress shirts and ties
and a couple of women frantically
over-compensating for lack of male genitalia...

at the head of the table, 
a large red-faced man who appears to be the boss,
pontificating,
with the assurance of a person genetically in the dark,
telling sleep-deprived staff all about the Shinola
he don't know shit from, and beside him,
a mid-thirties blond, well-put-together, who
has a 17-year-old daughter at home
who's driving her nuts with skimpy dresses
and good-for-nothing boyfriends,
all this exposed to the world before the meeting began,
and now that it has, reveals herself to be
the boss's carry-on brain, taking over his Shinola punditry
to bring the meeting to order, providing such business
as there was scheduled to be 
at this early morning business meeting

apparently
other eight at the table know
who knows what needs to be known
because their droopy-eyed attention to the boss's Shinola
is immediately replaced by edge-of-their-chair attention
when she starts talking, chewing reduced from a roat
to petite and silent chomp-chomps
as eggs and bacon slide quietly and respectfully 
down alerllt and thoughtful gullets

I have been to, often convenec such meetings,
sat at the head of many such tables
spouting my own Shinola, killing time
until my right-hand brain finishes her poached egg
and fat-free milk and sets herself to take care of business,
​while I relax, my job done for the day 


​

This is an old board, but I don't remember ever posting it here.


​
Cortez Discovers Mexico

​
Picture


Poor little Pumpkin

little
Pumpkin,
Texas,
hiding out
among the trees

KoKo's Gas-n-Grub

Faith
​Evergreen
Baptist Church

poor little
Pumpkin

population
43



0 Comments

8/23/21 - But What Does It Mean?

8/23/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​
like soft hands

like soft hands
stroking

sweet-breath
summer breezes

midnight lover
​

Transitions
Shadrach in the Fiery Pit
Picture
This poem is by Cynthia Zarin, from her first book, The Swordfish Tooth, published by Knopf in 1989.



Snail

In the breeze of the propped-open green door
I lay my head against your leg
and tasted salt.

And in the last light I felt myself
close kin to the snail you found.
Amber, primordial,

lossed from the lettuce tongues
it crawled across your palm,
its searching head a sure

iambic bob, then quivering -
shining breast wheel
turned pull-toy, dragooned

by a lucid, creeping milky finger.
All week, my mind interior,

I watched the snail
lit by its whorl
traveling along your sun-tanned hand;

cartographer of the myserious
male life,
its loping, upward arching line.
​


Autumn light
Picture
MOONWALK

walking
under a full November moon,
a bright, shadow-casting moon,
the stone steps down to the creek
shining liquid white
as I step from stone to stone
carefully, barefoot,
conscious of the caution to diabetics,
"watch you feet, always guard your feet
"

but the moon is too full,
the night too bright to watch anywhere but up,
neck-stretching , to the bright disc,
gleaming in the sky like a silver dime in the sky,
passing as I walk beneath the bottom side of tree branches
gasping black against the glare of the moon

bright moon eclipsing the stars
as I open the creaking gate
to walk beside the creek...

it's 4 a.m. - the frogs and birds still sleeping,
the water stumbles over limestone rocks,
tremnbles as it flows through the grassy creek...

I stand, showered in moon-shine,
turn, climb back up the hill
on the gleaming white stones,
back to bed,
having drunk my fill of November night
and moonglow

​

Picture

Best friend's best friend


adrift in cold storage
I'm looking
for a poem
this morning
but can't find it
because of all the
other crap
cluttering my head
that I don't want
to write about

it's like trying
to listen
to a Chopin etude
in a thin-walled apartment
while your neighbor
is pushing Metallica to the max
but perhaps it's possible
to push tiny balloons
between the prickly bushes
without getting pricked

`````
cold morning,
a fur-bundle of huddled cats
at my doorstep,
winter-fat cats demand food
every time they see me

`````
dark all day,
winter vistas gray
and dreary

`````
trees
skeletal
against roiling sky -
bony limbs over-reaching

`````
birds outside my window -
their winter song,
"turn up the heat"{
"turn up the heat"

`````
ice on the birdbath -
no skating allowed

`````
search the drawer
for winter socks...
big toe arctic explorer
poking out

`````
dog scratches at the back door,
wants out,
but not for long

`````
man walking dog,
bundled-wrapped
with hat and gloves
dog lover in winter-
best friend's
best friend

`````
with snow,
beauty in the mornng -
without,
just cold and bare
​
`````
chill winds
blow shivers and sneezes -
better still
than August or July

​

Picture
THE BEGINNING OF THE END OR THE END OF THE BEGINNING OR JUST ANOTHER DAMN DAY IN THE LIFE OF BEGINNINGS-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 who are 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 okey dokey
pass the smokeys while the world burns
with the riders of the apocalypse going eehaw
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 chickety cluck

and eeehaw we ride, they say
our grim teeth gnashing and you run
your white ass flashing in the light
of the dying moon

you had your chances, they say,
now it's our time to ride,
gnashing
eeehawing
in the light of the dying moon,
we are the riders of you inconsequential doom

you betcha

and I've gone old and my damn coffee's gone cold
and my left foot's gone sleepy,
twitching like jello in a junk-jar from jiom-jam jarheads,
and I 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, junk this jerky poem
and write a new one about blue birds
and puffy-fluffy clouds
and shit like

that

​
Picture
​From 2017/18 , in the midst of the Trumpian attack on everything decent and wise. I was thinking the photo above of the greedy winged beach rats was appropriate illustration.

JUST BECAUSE THIS POEM IS ABOUT IDIOTS DOESN'T NECESSARILY MEAN IT'S A POLITICAL POEM THOUGH I ADMIT IT DOES MAKE IT MORE LIKELY

trying to write a poem this morning,
maybe something
about how the wind is blowing,
shaking up the trees,
snapping the flag over at USAA
(I bet if I was outside I could hear it pop in the wind)
and the possibility of thunderstorms,
welcome rain, and if it does come, a good strong rain,
I'll be out in my backyard, naked,
stomping and sliding in the mud when the first raindrop falls,
flapping and rolling in the grass
like a bird chasing worms,
and the biscuit and gravy I had for breakfast
was especially good this morning...

but politics continue to invade, steady against the wind,
not the national stuff about which I have given up in despair,
resigned to waiting for the next election,
retaining some hope that all those insane fucks
from the last election will be sent packing back
to whatever hole they crawled out of...

no, not talking about those national intellectual
and moral abominations, but the more local type,
the Texas Legislature winding up
its bi-annual 180 day session, dominated
by Republicans, the same kind of slime-sucking snakes
brought to us nationally by the last election,
ending one of the most dishonorable sessions since secession

like yesterday, heading into the las frantic days of the session,
three pieces of last minute skullduggery -

the "let's go-shoot-our-professors" guns in classroom bill,
and the "too-damn-many-poor-democrats" voter ID bill,
and the "let's-send-all-them-damn-meskins-back-to-Arizona"
sanctuary cities bill

and the months to the next elections seem to stretch
further and further away every day,
especially when I hear a couple of Democrats
at the table next to me yesterday
about how we shot bin Laden when we should have given him
a party hat and a party horn and brougt him back here
for questioning, like in "Law and Order," but only after
having his rights read to him in seven languages,
including Sign and I'm thinking, holy shit! are these the idiots
who I have to look to to get rid of the other idiots
and, see, that's why I'm tired of thinking about politics
cause it seems all you ever have is a choice of which idiots
you're going to let give you heartburn next...

but then it might rain
and I might go sloshing in it
and I've heard some folks are trying to talk
Tommy Lee Jones into running for Senate

in Texas and that'd be almost as much fun
Picture
THE BEAUTY OF ORIGINAL SIN

"Abyss of Eros,
beauty of original sin."
wrote the Korean poet

think
how exciting
it must have been,
how delectable, delightful,
outright beautiful that first sin,
the original sin, the concept , “sin” unknown
until the thing, the sin, was done…

doesn’t make any difference
what it was…

maybe it was the eating
of forbidden fruit
like the book
says
or maybe it was sex,
or less complicated than that,
maybe it was when he first noticed the curve of her breast,
the round perfection of her ass, and liked it,
or maybe it was her sin, seeing
the arrogance of his massive cock, erect,
so different, she thought, from the little nubbin
that hung so humbly between his legs before,
and she imagined so many uses for it…
or maybe it was something more abstract,
maybe just a random thought, the one or the other
or the both thinking something
that hadn’t been inserted for them to think,
something that they thought up all on their own, maybe
it was just that creativity, impinging on the realm
of he who created all and reserved creation
as a thing only for him…
or maybe it wasn’t that complicated…
it could have been something as simple and small
as putting a slug in a parking meter -
but no difference, a thing large or small, it was wonderful,
it was new, it was the first and it was original,
the first original thing for them, and, thus, by the rules
it was, in its originality, a sin, the original sin, and it was
beautiful…

they may have wondered later if that sin was worth
its consequence, but to no avail, for in their wonder they sinned
again, there was no turning back..

​


My backyard several year back. It was a really good year, no freeze, no drought, and things just grew and grew.
FAST TIMES AT THE FLATONIA FOLLIES
Picture
Picture


BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

sky
hanging low and
heavy
this morning,
clouds dark and deep -
something's up

`````
that's the way
this poem begins
what's next?
what are these
heavy
low
dark and deep
clouds predicting
this morning?

~~~~~

are the
heavy
low
etc.
clouds
a representation
of smoke, the fires of the apocalypse
burning again today,
the first sparks
here in the Texas hill country
of the conflagration
that will sweep the world
in the final throes of
judgement
day,
brimstones
next on the agenda
I know some hardshell
ecclesiasticals
who would buy into that
in a minute,
unquestioning believers
in every chapter,
verse, word, period, comma and colon
of the Word
which says and they agree,
we're due our heavenly smiteance
andy day now
and all these
low
heavy
etc.
clouds prove the time is here

hallelujah, praise be to He who smites


~~~~~

on the other hand
all these etc. clouds could be
sign of the first wave
of alien invasion,
like in that movie,
huge alien spaceships
pushing their broad gray noses
out of the clouds any minute now
aliens
with teeth and tentacles and tiny feet
with twisted talons
come to eat our brains,
rape our women, and
abduct our children for slave labor
in the potato mines
of the barren planet
Bitselboogerish -
aliens
come to cut down our trees,
build massive pulp factories
to turn our trees into cardboard
for cheap tinnis shoes to sell in China
before they eat their brains,
rape their children,
abduct their women
for slave labor in pasta mines
on the other side of Bitselboogerish
where buffalo no long roam
and skies are cloudy all day,
where seldom is heard a discouraging word
since everyone is under ground
digging for potatoes and pasta
and you can't hear them moaning
discouragingly
topside...

I have a brother-in-law
who would buy into that,
a watcher-for-aliens in the night,
discouraged because he's never seen one
except in the movies where they always get it wrong,
waiting every night for his inevitable abduction
for weird alien science
sexual experiments on the average
alien-believing male when awarded conjugal visits
with their Lady Gaga simulation,
plastikiey, but pliable
and open to new ideas as to
more unusual practices of conjugality,
they just want to see how it all works
and he's willing to show them
if they're willing to take him back with them
to their fantastical home planet
of noodle and
noze

~~~~~

or it could just be that the clouds,
all low
and heavy
and dark
and deep
are just the precursor to rain...

but that's just one crazy idea too many...
if I was you, I'd go with the apocalyps or aliens
if you're wanting to bet

with the odds

​
This poem is by Robert Bonazzi and is taken from his book, Maestro of Solitude, published by Wings Press in 2007.

The poem startled me as I read it because it seemed it could be me, about me.



from Unframed Portraits

III

Forgive if I seem to be
talking to myself -

I do not write for an ideal reader
or contemplate a classic muse

Today a fellow poet declared
that I'm not really a poet

Characterizing my efforts as
fragments more or less in
the manner of Pascal

I burst into several meanings of laughter
secretly honored and humbled

Forgive if I seem to be trapped in a monologue -

I belong to a species most endangered:
I do no know my name.

​

Picture
Waiting for promised lightning

pumping gas

pumping iron


pumping my fist
upon receiving a $5 coupon
at Bar-B-Que is us

pumping Mary Sue
in the back seat of a '48 Hudson -
oh, how soft those seats
and Mary Sue

(you don't have to read the above,
it's what I call "priming the pump" -
dropping a few irrelevnat words
down the well
with the hope that the addition to the well
of irrelevant
words
will,
through force of the
Heimlich Manuever - or some such sciency word-thing
having to do with one force activating a
counter-vailing force -
will cause good words to rise to the surface,
being irresistibly pushed there by the irrelevant words)
meaning, according to the Heimlich equation,
that an actual poem will start
somewhere
below -

.....patience may be required
being
it's
a process thing
and process things
must
process
else they would be called "miracles"
like Jesus' face of a tortilla,
or Jimmy not cracking corn when the master's gone away,
or my 1906 computer suddenly humming and buzzing
and computing again, or the phone company guy
arriving at 11:59 for a service visit
promised between 8 a.m. and noon,
or me getting a hot date when I was fifteen years old
or next week, whichever comes first


`````

miracles,
you know,
where would we be without them,
the miracle of conception and birth,
the miracle of divining wisdom,
the miracle of Slinkies and Hula Hoops and Rice Crispies
snapping and cracking and popping every time,
the miracle of meteors not crashing into the earth
like last time, except this time making us
the new dinosaurs, converting in the tar pits
into some future form of fuel
for the finally and again ascendant cockroach,
no longer getting squashed in kitchen corners -
that's why cowboy boots have pointy toes, you know -
cockroaches in cowboy boot doing the squashing
this time instead

`````and the little circley thing is circling on a blue screen
which means the aforementined pending poem
is still processing, but not so quickly
so if you have
something else
to do
you should go ahead
and take care
of it
and I'll give you a call
when the processing poem
is processed, arisen, so to speak,
from the depths by the force of the
Heimlich
processing
primal
push
to relevancy in this portion
of the universe

but, maybe, since the phone guy
hasn't come yet, I'll just email you,
or maybe send a tweet
which I almost never do,
fearing being pigeon-holed as just another tweeting
twit
​
waiting for promised lightning

​



Adios
0 Comments

08/16/21 - LIFE AS A NON-ECTOPLASMATIC

8/16/2021

0 Comments

 
I'm Ascaird of Dinosaurs
Picture

Between my second and third retirements, I worked for a company that scored state assesment tests, 4th to 11th grade. 

During my time with the company, I scored tests from easily 15 to 20 states. My speciality was reading and writing and, ocassionally, social studies. Some states did a good job with their tests; some states did awful. There are some Southern states that, if I had kids in school, I wouldn't live in.

I liked the state tests as counseling tools, a way to identify areas where students were not learning the things they needed to become a useful, functioning citizen and, identifying those needs, developing an individually-based curriculum to identify, then address the deficiencies.

It was, and still is, a misuse of the tests to use scores to grade schools and individual teachers, and especially not as an excuse to hold students back from advancing to their next grade. Our school systems continue to operate as if all their students are out working on the farm during the summer. Instead, summers should be used for good old fashioned summer school, three months to address the deficiences in individual students identified by the tests.

There were problems in all states, but a common one I saw in most states was that the people designing and writing the tests had been out of the classroom too long to understand the students they were writing the tests for. Too often I saw questions that I knew many if not most students would reference the world view of the students the test writers knew from 20 or 30 years before, questions that those long ago students would have know easily but that modern students taking the test would misread, misunderstand, and fail, providing a perfectly correct answer in modern context that would be not at all the answer required.;'

A particular question comes to mind, a reading question.  Under instructions of the question, students were to write an essay based on material from the text. 

What the test designer didn't understand was how much current children know about dinosaurs. I have a three year old neice that can name 15 or 20 dinosaurs, using their correct and proper names and even describing some characteristice of each one. The fourth graders taking this test probably know more about dinosaurs that the person writing the test and are proud to share their knowledge in their essay, forgetting all about referencing the text that was the basis of the text. Doing so, despite all their knowledge, they will fail the question.

A Texas issue, though I never scored Texas test, I did proof them, and, as I did that I saw very clear instance of trick question, questions clearly designed to trick students into a wrong answer. I never saw anything like that in any other state.

Scoring a hundred tests a day (especially when they are writing tests and every state teaches the same writing formula of three paragraphs, etc. etc.) can be very boring, like reading the same essay on the same one or two subjects a hundred times a day can be mind numbing. That's why running across a brilliant 8th grade writer, ignoring the rules and writing a piece worth publication anywhere can be invigorating. Also the essay with intentional or unintentional humor can send giggles and sometime loud outbursts of laughter across the room of a hundred readers all reading the same paper.

Such as this, a response to the dinosaur question by a 4th grade boy, not laugh-out-loud funny, but good for a tender smile and a chuckle. The little boy answers the question, ending his answer with, "I'm glad I didn't live when the dinosaurs were around cause...I'm ascaird of dinosaurs."
​
​

​
Another Practice Board
Picture
​CONTINUING MY LIFE AS A NON-ECTOPLASMATIC

my quarterly brush
with mortality today
as I see my doctor for the regular
review of my quarterly labs

the schedule
is pretty well set so I rarely
have to wait long
before she comes in with
her quarterly
declaration
“IT LIVES”
and turns the rest of the session
over to her assistant, Igor,
who finds some reason or other
to give me a shot in the butt
and an appointment for the next
quarterly visit

the fact is, I have pills for everything
so I remain relatively healthy
for a person in my
condition
and the primary purpose
of the regular visit being to confirm
that the meds aren’t killing me
by destroying my liver and good humor
and whatnot

the fact is (again, another
unfortunate fact) I have a lot of dead friends
and a lot of friends presumed dead
through long absence, so, a quarterly stopover
at the doc’s office and a quarterly blood draw
is a welcome confirmation
of my continuing non-ectoplasmatic place in the world
of the not-so-quick but living
​

I feel better just thinking about it
River Views, Downtown


ANOTHER SUNDAY MORNING

moon,
falling toward the
west horizon,
slips behind a lacy morning cloud,
hiding the shadows of its
ancient scars

`````

grackles
on cue,
fly from their nightime nests,
cover the sky,
dark cape of the Phantom of the Morning

`````

strong winds,
warm and wet,
blow smells of the southern sea
across the stark remains of northern winter

`````

light
seeps from a pinched eastern horizon,
the sky not yet ready to open
to a new day

`````

moon shadows fade
as sun shadows grow
toward the retreating night

`````

cat does her mornng stretch -
doubles her length front to back,
legs reaching in both directions,
belly on the ground,
tail straight in the air,
little red anus like lantern light
at the end of a train

`````

dog
stirs in her bed,
too old for morning calisthenics -
eyelids lift up, then down,
enough for now

​




​Catching pieces of news this morning, moved me to write this.
Picture
Today's Sorrow
​

Beautiful green valley
Between stark, treeless mountains,
Mud homes that will wash away
In the first heavy rain
Climb the side of the mountain,
Row after row

A small, busy downtown,
Buildings mostly built of wood
Close to the ground, occasionally
Two or three floors, with wooden
Balconies looking out on the
Busy center of the city, traffic
Bustling with bicycles, donkeys,
Camels, One or two-passenger pedicabs,
Converted golf cart taxies, widely
Decorated, a hundred colors clashing

One tall building,
The Spirazan Hotel,
A place where foreigners
Could drink, a western style
Bar, with a band, a rock and roll
Band from the Philippines,
Elvis, Little Richard, Johnny Cash,
The same band I had heard
At the NCO club on my base
On the Pakistan frontier,
And even earlier, at the NCO club
At the NCO club at the base
Where I was stationed in Germany

in attendance, Russians,
Americans, Europeans, young
Arabs, a place outside their own country,
A place where they could drink
And party western style
Outside view of anyone else

The road from downtown,
paved, unlike most
That connect to it,
Merchants along the road,
Resting their camels, one
Selling hot nan, so tasty
When hot, like ceiling  tile
When cold

Passing the zoo, animals
Mostly ragged, but
A beautiful young girl
Who dropped her veil for just
A second before her parents
Could see

Passing the Russian Embassy,
Entering the Embassy
To buy some maps, dangerous,
As low level American intelligence agents,
A violation of our secrecy rules,
And subject to arrest by the Russians
If they cared…

But, apparently they didn’t care enough
For an international incident

To the USAID house
Where we stayed, a crowd
Of young children passing,
Beautiful brown eyes
and eyes emerald green,
In their school uniform,
Laughing all,
Singing as they marched past

From my room overlooking
A lower floor,
A grey cat slept, stretched
On the roof,
As cats stretch,
Sleeping in the warm
Afternoon…
​
Kabul, Afghanistan,
Easter, 1968/69,
Before the horrors began

​
Picture


​


​Starting a new board this afternoon. Should have it finished in a day or two. In the meantime, here's another practice board.

​

These pieces are by Lalla (born 1320 - died 1392), fourteenth century North Indian mystic who wandered through medieval Kashmir singing her songs. The verses are from the collection, Naked Song, published by Maypop Books in 1992, with translation by ColemanBarks.




When you eat too much,
you forget your truth,

and fasting makes you conceited,
so eat with some discipline,

and consciously. Be
an ordinary human being.

Then the door will open,
and you'll recognize the way.
Lalla, be moderate!

````

Everything is new now for me.
My mind is new, the moon, the sun.
The wholeworld looks rinsed with water,
washed in the rain of I am That.

Lalla leaps and dances iniside the energy
that creates and sustains the universe.



And speaking of Indian poets and mystics, I happened to read by chance today one of my friend and favorite Facebook poets. I used his work a lot on the old Here and Now and now here he is again in the new.

He is a free lance writer in New Delhi and his name is Bharat Shekar. He is also an artist and usually includes a drawing with his poetry. This time, he did not.

The poem was written in 2019.




REMEMBERED RADIANCE (Yearning to wander)

Not to dispel darkness,
but to be its companion and guide,
silver spreads silhouettes in moonbeams.
.
A darting owl scatters silence
inside night
with its feathery flight.
.
Then, every sound
only deepens the quiet-
a creak, a hoot,
the thud of a stone tumbling over grass,
startled 'twit-twit' of a lapwing,
in some forgotten distance
the gurgling mouth of a river making liquid love
to rocks in passing.
.
Heaving with sleeping breath of flowers,
the air turns moist
to drip dew drops
on leaves and blades of grass.
.
In ruins of abandoned houses,
almirahs buckle open
to free themselves
of shadow substances.
.
Across valleys, over hills,
Himalayas loom,
immense, icy, intimate,
holding each others' shoulders
among the twinkle of stars.

​




Picture
I wrote a poem, Up at 4:30, harking back to a time fifty years past when, while at the university after military service, living in a small trailer on the Blanco River, I would stay up all night writing and talking to my dog before getting up to meet a 10 a.m. chemistry, biology, or physics class (three classes I managed to graduate without ever passing.)

I admit now, that fifty years later, my pleasure in watching the sun come up has lessened a  lot.

This might be a sunset campanion to that piece, though written more recently. 
​





Night lays in

night
lays in
with a sigh
like an old woman
pulling bed coverrs
up to her chin

breeze
rustless trees
like feather dusters
brushing the stars, 
frogs come alive in the creek,
nighthawks hunt...

on my patio,
I strip down, lay back in my chair
and join the frog-symphony,
imagine the fresh, cool mud
between a catalogue of reeds
on the rain freshened creek-side,
imagine the blood-tasty mosquito
caught on my long green tongue,
settle, squish, into the singing night
Muffin-making and other activities of the long night
Picture
As the end of night begins

the moon at midnight
is full and bright,
slipping through the trees
like a slow and lonely dancer
drifting as the end of night begins

toward the west
and away from the other side of the sky,
the edge of the world over which
its bigger, brighter sister will soon rise
to claim a new day

high in the cold, cold sky,
near where the domain of all earth creatures end,
icy scudding clouds provide a chill backdrop
to the pale sister's passage

the siblings, never together,
can only nod in passing





Picture
A lot of Texas poets, both pros and amateurs, get lost in the diversity of the state. It's not hard to do. If you spend any time driving around through the varied cultures and vistas of the state, as I have done, it's hard not to want to put it all down on paper.

The many stories and myths of the state are also a draw on any writer's imagination. Elane Carlisle Murry is one such writer, as in this piece from her book, The Law of Tough Mesquite, growing from the myths of the traveling cowboy, the loner who sees it all. Winnerof the W.E. Bard Book Award, the book was published by Eakin Press in 1993.


The Fence Line

At the top of the rise
the rider drew rein
and saw stretched before him
a brush-studded plain.

The soft desert wind
blew the cedar's fresh smell
as his horse stepped with care,
down the steep rocky trail.

At the foot of the hill,
she shifted his weight
and the hoofs of his horse
built a fast steady gait

Behind him the dust rose.
He pounded a track
till his eyes saw a fence line,
narrow and black.

At the sight of the dark strand
he changed his straight course
and veered toward the open
and challenged his horse.

Away into nowhere,
away in a streak,
sweat staining his shoulders
​dust streaking his cheek.

​
PARTY TIME
Picture
her lip trembles

her lip trembles
and I love her for her courage

`````

her day begins
in yellow light, 
like lantern light, before
the sun, like an old woman rising
from her dark bed,
crests the eastern mountain ridges...

the basin will be dark
before the sun falls
through the western notch,
the desert floor,
a blaze of reds and yellow and orange...

she stands before the colors far below,
arms stretched wide,
embracing the failing light...

this is the way she wants it to end,
in a glory afire with
completion

​not soft and unsure, the way it began
0 Comments

8/9/21 What was, and won't be again

8/9/2021

1 Comment

 

Once is good enough for me

I know
a volcanic crater
left from ancient days of thunder and fire
that is a meadow now,
broad across, covered in high
yellow grasses
that blow in golden waves under
midday mountain sun
I know a beach covered in stones
rubbed smooth and round
by the rough caress
of rolling tides, ten thousand years
polished, the glow off moonlight,
beacons of passing years
 
---
 
I know these places
and many more because I've seen them,
but I know I'll never see them again
because, like most travelers
who prefer the small and uncharted roads,
I find many beautiful places
I'll never find again
 
you
who travel the main roads
never suffer this loss of beauty
for you always know where you're going
and where you've been,
it's the in-between you lose, a wind-streaked blur
passing
but I've seen these things,
found these other places once,
places you'll never see,
and once for me, to remember
and cherish
is good enough for me

​
anticlimax

so Einstein is proven right again!

gravity comes in waves
like on the
beach,
just like he said…

and so it is now a proven
and, I’m told, mind-blowing
event in the galactic
news feed

but
I’m haven’t figured out yet
what this means
in the imagination of a poet
who builds sand castle fantasies
out of superficial
understanding
of such grand and glorious
revelations

a poet’s mind that gravitates
(in waves, I suppose)
to the more dramatic news
as in two black holes stumbling
in their ordered galactic waltz,
the two colliding
like two heavyweights on a swept-black
dance floor,
creating a “chirp” heard round the universe

the chirp the proof sought for generations,
announced like the cry of a tiny fledgling
sparrow upon its maiden flight…

such sturm and drang, the crashing together
of two gods all-powerful
in their own spaces
contesting
now for a single space -

now that’s the stuff of a poem

but gravitational waves,
all that bring to this poet’s mind
are visions of sand castles
surrendering
to a voracious gravitational tide
eating the beach and all the castles on it

the cataclysmic smashing of gods
in the end leveling
only delicate imagined structures
on sandy playgrounds

anticlimactic
at best, seen better
on TV

Picture
WHO COUNTS AND HOW DO WE KNOW IT

​In the Whitman poem I used in my last post, Walt wrote:

Many sweating, ploughing,thrashing, and then the chaff for
     payment received,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.


So that's one way to know who counts, who gets the shaft (I mean "chaff") and who gets the wheat.

Here's another way, a poem I wrote in 2016.

 
 
newspaper headline this morning

“SUV OVERTURNS, PASTOR’S DAUGHTER KILLED”

the grief of a pastor over the death
of his daughter, real and to be honored

but why is it always a pastor’s daughter
in such headlines, or a banker’s daughter,
or financial analyst’s daughter, or a CEO’s daughter,
the death of such luminaries headlined in the morning paper

but why do we never read headlines noting the death
of the carpenter’s daughter, or the route salesman’s daughter,
or the janitor’s daughter, or the laborer’s daughter,
or the daughter of the
homeless man who lives under the I-35 overpass downtown?

ah, just another way
our values are weighed, to really count in this world
it’s clear your daughter has to get a headline
when she dies…

I wonder who else’s daughters died last night,
unknown and unmentioned,

apparently
no one important
Another practice board
Picture
This poem is by Kevin Pruffer. It is taken from his book National Anthem published by Four Way Books in 2008.


GOTHIC LEAVES

The leaves fell out of the trees
and feathered the grass.
                                              The birds dropped too, all morning
their way-too-human eyes rolled back, then black
and gone -
                     So, stripped and, for once, visible,
the naked twigs -
                                 hob-fingered, tack-fingured.
My mother was a rocking chair: Best clean that up.

***

Don'tdrive through piles of leaves, she said,
children play there.
                               She rocked in her chair. Crick, crick.
Heaps of leaves on the roadside - boys
buried in them, leaves in their brittle hair,
                                                                                 stopping their mouths
so they couldn't speak

***

                                           Leaf rot and bristle -
The mounds of leaves and the bodies inside,
the wind grown chill and mean. Soon, she said,
it'll be winter.
                          Best bring that dead wood in.

The naked branches the window panes,
but never broke them.





BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK​

H
Picture
how did the doornail die and how old was it at the time

Harper Lee is dead
and Umberto Eco and Justice Scalia
and many more, I’m sure,
that I don’t know about, all dead
as the proverbial door
nail
whatever the hell that is
and whatever it is how did it die
and how old was it when the end
came

and Ursula Andress is 79 years old
and that can’t be because
the last time I saw her she was
on a beach coming out of the surf
in a bikini with a knife in a sheath
and long blond hair and a lean, tan
body and there is no way she can be
79 years old and more important
what does that mean for
me

and how did the doornail die
and how old was it
and questions like that especially
about how Ursula Andress
got to be 79 years old
and when is her doornail
due, and what about
mine and
just thinking about all that stuff
gives me a pounding
headache

(maybe that’s how the doornail passed on)

​

Picture
guess they really liked the drummer
​

read last night
at the coffeehouse

not poems,
but from my recent book
of flash fiction

an experiment with drum
accompaniment

worked well
sold
four books

I guess they really liked
the drummer

​

APO NEW YORK
THE THING MOST WORTH THINKING ABOUT

so
to begin, the scientists
who study the science of way-old
things have named the “Iceman” -the mummy
discovered in a melting glacier in the Alps,
as possessing the earliest known
tattoos…
dead for over 5,000 years and preserved
in the ice, it seems he was a hunter-warrior
suffering from many of the same physical ailments as me,
except that he died in his thirties while I’m still
hanging on in my seventies…
also he has some obvious war- wounds that I have
avoided and he also has tattoos
which
I have also avoided -
the tattoos, five on his lower legs and ankle and one
on his wrist, all at bone joints and possibly
a very early attempt at relieving pain -
something like the practice of acupuncture invented
by the Chinese three thousand years after the Iceman
and two thousand years before our own time -
this notice, leading, in the article I read, to an intense
discussion about the effectiveness of acupuncture
as a medical procedure, some declaring reports of
its effectiveness to be poppycock (this being a scholarly
article - such technical language is not unusual) and
others responding by declaring that anything
people do for two thousand years must be effective,
which doesn’t strike as a particularly effective
argument to me since the Iceman had war wounds
and five thousand years later we still have warriors
with war wounds and I don’t see how that proves
the effectiveness of war as a prescription for health
and wealth…
but that’s a whole other argument that I don’t find
so interesting, nor do I find the whole
business of tattoos
pleasing
what is interesting is the wonder of finding
a five thousand year-old corpse
sufficiently preserved
to allow for medical investigation
and the other thing, the big kahuna,
the fact that the glacier that for five thousand
years preserved the body is
melting…
it seems to me that’s the thing about the story
most worth thinking about…

​


​GILLIGAN PLOTS OUR COURSE HOME
Picture
It's not the actual experiences that matter, but what you learn from them.


AN ALMANAC OF LIVED STORIES

I got 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 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, but turning
At times, temporarily rough,
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 a great poets
They might be

​


ON THE COAST
Picture
Story of my Life
I owned a 1952 Cadillac once,
bought it for $100 and had it for 3 months
in 1968 while attending some
advanced military training
at Goodfellow Air Force Base
in San Angelo, Texas...
 
beautiful car,
cherry shape, inside and out,
two-tone factory paint,
cloth seats as soft
as any bed I ever slept in,
but wouldn't go over 45 miles per hour
without overheating
 
gave it away when I left,
to cover a bar tab…
 
car of my dreams…
 
story of my life...
​

Another practice board
Picture
the Wednesday meet-up and talk group
​

the Wednesday Meet Up and Talk group
is arriving here at the coffeehouse in a straggle, so
far, mostly antique women, sitting behind me,
discussing the various ailments of their age, the one
just moved here from Montana, talks about the whatever fire
out there and how she can’t breathe anymore
up there because of the altitude
 
and the others too, every part of the body,
blood, skin, bones, ears,
not to forget eyes, bowels,
 (even hair, according to the lady who brags on her wigs)
at least one medical failure per customer,
several, it seems,
going for quantity over quality, trying a little bit
of everything…
 
no men have shown up so far this week,
so, I have to stop here,
there being no slow, dropping thinking old man to slow the ladies
down, they are talking way faster than I  can transcribe
 
(maybe I’m quitting too soon, the ladies are into allergies,
a subject upon which I can commiserate,
pontificate, even, so
maybe, since there are no other old men in attendance I ought
to turn around and pass on some of my own allergy
wisdom…)


This piece is by Walter McDonald, taken from his book Night Landings, published by Harper and Row in 1989.



Coming Home

At her age, my mother should know
I'd break her heart,tumble downhill
and break my neck. She never learns.
Soapsuds in her eyes, hands

winding themselves dry in her apron,
she hurries to the car and hugs us,
my wife first, at last her arms
choking the grandkids. They disappear

inside her spongy belly, giggling,
clutching and clinging.  For days
she chases them like a nanny,
pots steaming on the store, dinner

for king. My father would have
slipped them peppermint sticks
the way he spoiled his own. Gone,
like the last passenger train

from  the roundhouse. Nights,
while my kids play games in the garden,
I squint to make the stars move
like Pullman windows that winked
on the way to Houston when I was nine,
the year my father died, when I knew
it was never my father's run
but waved anyway at the lights.
This, from me in 2016, a product of reading the New York Times Science Section every Thursday.


the whole of it

could be
the biggest bang since
the big bang, just discovered,
blowing away an unthinkably vast section
of the universe, but so far from us
it is barely a smudge
on our most powerful telescopes

so far away
but still we will feel its effects
in millions of years, just as nothing happens
anywhere that doesn’t or won’t affect us sometime
somewhere - just wait for it, the tide of all things moved
by all the tides of everything, as no man is an island,
no island is alone on even the most vast sea,
like we, up to our armpits
in ourselves, bump through the slip stream
of everyone else…

this makes some people very sad, this oneness, making
them feel inconsequential in their smallness, others,
like me, celebrate the magnificence of being
such an important part of everything…

(as all parts of a whole are important
lest it be not whole)





And here's another of the "deep think" variety, also from 2016.



what we leave behind will define us

all we know about the ancient times
that came before us are fossilized remains,
hints of long before we study and
examine and hope to learn how
the was became the is...

like the imprint of a jungle leaf
on a dry canyon wall, or,
in San Antonio, at the bottom
of another canyon where once
flowed a clear, cool stream
and on the old stream’s sandy
bottom, turned by time to limestone,
and in the stone, frozen
in time, footprints of the great
and cumbersome dinosaurs who once
in eras past drank here, ate from
the flora and fauna that lived
around it, procreated and died
here…

and in the great deserts
of the southwest, fossils of tiny
fish and shrimp and other creatures
unknown in our time, their lives hinted
at only by their flesh turned to rock…

the truth that all that has ever been,
remains in some form, as rock, as chemicals
leached into the rock, as air, the composition
of which altered by the breathing in and out
of it during eons beyond eons…

and now, says those who study, has begun
the new “Anthropocene” era, the time of
human dominance, a time when old fossils
undisturbed for millions of years
are pushed aside by new fossils made
by the hand and mind
of our human kind

so that many epochs ahead, whoever, or whatever,
follows us, curious and studious as we, wanting,
as we want, to understand the past of the earth
upon which they trod, will seek out in the re-
configured planets hints of us in the fossils…

and what will they find?

a fossilized pickle jar, the mysterious symbols
“Vlasic” etched in rock;

the complete fossil of a ’49 Studebaker, lost in 1952
to the bottom of the deepest lake in Wisconsin,
unearthed during some unimaginable construction
project, open to the light of day again a million
years after its disappearance;

a small action figure, Batman, maybe, or GI Joe
or Princes Leia, or some hero or villain
we haven’t created yet;

a baby rattle, a dog collar, a wedding band,
a tuba and a clarinet, a statue of an idealized woman
holding one arm high, stone turned to stone,
at the bottom of a deep and murky
sea;

signs of the times, “Dancing Girls 24 Hours, Lap
Dances, $20” and the new who follow us
will wonder, what dance did they dance and
how did the dance on what is a lap and what
is symbol, number 20 and how much is that;

carbon from our burning and breathing, radiation
from our wars, lead and other heavy metals
from television tubes and compute
detritus, perhaps the fossilized porcelain of my store-
bought teeth some many numbered
levels above the dinosaur footprints
at the bottom of Government
Canyon;

treasures from attics, junk from second-hand stores,
refrigerators, coffee makers, microwave ovens
and margarita makers, things important and
coveted, things lost and never found, things
found and forgotten…

so much we will leave behind, more than even
we know, but all will be there, in some
altered form for the new ones
to find, just as we now find and marvel
at that which was and won’t be again…



1 Comment
<<Previous
Forward>>

    Author

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

    Picture

    Archives

    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly