On the backs of seahorses' eyes
Page 18
these thoughts must be too transient for caring
in another one hundred years,
or ten thousand years,
by someone reading this poem,
(if someone should read this poem,
by luck or accident or merit).
Yet the seasons, coming and going,
the spinning of the earth,
the snow falling and the wind blowing,
the roses in my garden bent and broken with ice,
these things, these earthly things,
they go on and on.
Of this beautiful life-forming earth,
I see no end in sight,
until,
if we're still here,
the sun—our heavenly star—
explodes into supernova and blows us
and all that remains—our great cities,
our grand philosophies, our boiling kettle
of religions, our drug wars, our racial differences,
our porno sites, our man-made monuments
and the natural wonders of this world
—blows all these things to kingdom come.
But that is not my concern,
not my concern at all.
This coming new year:
year 2009 C.E,
the Oregon rains will come again,
the earth will spring forth life.
How beautiful this spring will be!
As I look out my kitchen window
Image a little girl bundled in winter clothes,
dancing on a small, green hillside,
dancing in a graveyard—
a hillside of plots called "Baby Land"—
this little girl dancing on a cold January day,
waving her arms in excitement to her younger sister,
who's just down the hillside, racing towards her.
As I look out my kitchen window,
across the street from this cemetery,
I see these scenes and ponder our beginnings
and our endings in time.
Luckily, these two girls have bypassed "Baby Land"
but neither they nor I nor you
shall avoid those other grownup passages,
those on the other hillsides—
below the ground or up in smoke.
That is, as far as these bodies go.
And how far do these bodies go?
How far did they come?
And shall they rise again someday?
I think not.
For, as we were here before time,
before these bodies, so shall we be again.
We exist now and shall always be.
No, not in a void of nothingness have we emerged,
embodying this shroud of dust like a treasure,
like our closest friend or a spouse or a lover,
this evolutionary body with its head and face,
its arms and legs, its organs and hormones.
I believe, without proof or psychic knowledge,
we, you and I, have hurled ourselves into time,
through a dynamics of consciousness
into this ever-changing, ever-passing world
before our senses,
emerging through earth, in ice and wind and fire,
in blood and bone,
nurtured by the soul and the human heart,
that which we truly are but that which neither you nor I
nor those little girls dancing over graves
can rightly name.
The Dusty Traveler
I sing this moment
I'm sitting on a tall, wooden stool
in the island of our kitchen—
the cemetery across the street
on view through the window box
above the kitchen sink—
and I begin, for the first time,
to read a book of poems by the Polish poet
Adam Zagajewski, a book called
Mysticism for Beginners.
How clear and beautiful his language!
So this is mysticism, more than magical,
the human dark streaked with burnt and burning
stars, crowded streets made of terrifying shadows,
dreams, light; as breathtaking as the sight
of that young deer appearing out of nowhere
in the cemetery across the street on a cold morning
many moons ago.
I am no mystic, no prophet,
but simply a man sitting at his kitchen window
on this January day, a few days
after the inauguration of my country's
first African-American president,
following more than two hundred years
of domination of one color over another,
of slavery, lynchings—
"There is no lavender word for lynch,"
wrote Langston Hughes—
segregation, discrimination, Jim Crow laws.
I grew up in the South and witnessed
without understanding, I was just a kid,
those white devils in whiter sheets
with blind holes for eyes that could not see
as they drove by on Hwy 78
in their terrorist procession of fear and hate.
Now, this day, this week, like Whitman before me,
like Langston Hughes, I, too, sing America.
I sing these United States, the possibility, the promise,
for America has always been a dusty traveler on the road,
a spark of consciousness, twisted
hither and thither in the winds of ambition,
arrogance, greed, pride, and fear;
but a spark, nevertheless,
that must light up our human hearts,
if ever we are to journey onward to being free
in this political, this passing world.
Or else, perhaps, we shall all perish.
I sing this moment, this bridge, this opening,
between colors, between our earthly home
and the distant stars,
between people, animals, trees, rocks;
between you and me, whoever you are,
as we travel together through darkness
and the shadows that would scare us to death
in this world on this jewel of a planet earth.
January 2009
Once upon a time,
A love story
of timeless and personal proportions
Or,
in the words of Emily Dickinson,
"a route of evanescence"
Traveler, you must set forth
At dawn
I promise marvels of the holy hour…
—Wole Soyinka, The Road
I come from everywhere,
To everywhere I'm bound….
—José Martí, Simple Verses
It was a long road here—a difficult road.
The road is yours now. You hold it
the way you hold your friend's hand and count his pulse
on this scar left by the handcuffs.
A normal pulse. A sure hand. A sure road.
—Yannis Ritsos, "The Blackened Pot"
This is not the first time...
and may not be the last.
—David Pendarus
The road, any road, away from childhood,
kudzu forts, Baptist churches, rock fights,
BB battles in the oak and pine tree woods,
honeysuckles and wild plums in the hollow,
chiggers in the blackberries, itching like crazy,
homemade scuppernong wine, swinging
like Tarzan across the creek
on muscadine vines,
(eyes wide open for cottonmouths),
and those damn red old hills of Georgia.
A beautiful girl, my age, 17 years,
orange blossoms in the scent of her young body,
she enters my heart like a sharp knife.
I hitchhik
e 500 miles to see her,
Atlanta to Tampa;
turn around,
and hitchhike back the next day.
In our innocence, we mistake this distance
for the 12th of Never.
Books: an escape, a promise, a passion.
Like Jack Kerouac, I crisscross these states,
my thumb out ,
all the way to the Great Northwest
and the Seattle World's Fair.
I do not have a beatific vision,
I see only a strange and wondrous land
and a few good people, and some not so much.
Along comes the Bay of Pigs.
I'm in college in central Florida and we're all holding
our breath and waiting...waiting.
President Kennedy is murdered in Dallas;
Martin Luther King in Memphis.
Marilyn Monroe...there are questions.
A Jewish girl in love with T. S. Eliot
and F. Scott Fitzgerald,
a Jewish girl from New York City,
playing hide-and-seek,
brown hair in a Southern wind,
brown hair blowing over her mouth,
confused and torn and bewitching.
My best college bud.
We will always be friends.
Oh, look!
In the middle of the garden, a stone,
a stone in the middle of the garden!
*****
My best friend from high school dies in a hospital;
at the same time, in another hospital, in Atlanta,
his wife, gives birth to their first child.
The following spring, 1966,
my oldest brother kills himself in a parked car,
leaving a wife and 5 kids.
Meanwhile...back in the jungle...
My other brother, Jack the storyteller,
two-tour USMC hero, and a natural warrior
fights an unseen enemy in the napalmed trees
of Viet Nam and Cambodia.
Meanwhile...back in the States...
I'm on the other side, a natural peacemaker,
marching for peace in Eugene, Oregon.
A dead bird covered with ants…
a lover's nest in any tree, sounds good
to me, as long as your spirit comes along.
Drugs, sure, if they'll help us see,
get me through the darkness,
make me laugh,
and show me who you are, really.
A piano player, blonde keys in the wind
on the intersection of High Street
and University Avenue…
another man's wife...stolen moments...
listening for her footsteps coming up the stairs...
blonde legs under and over mind.
Oh, god, you are so beautiful.
A spiritual revelation in her arms.
A kiss vanishing on the lips.
Even God must be lonely at night.
An artist, a painter, her face morphing
into an illumination; "she comes
in colors
everywhere";
street riots and psychedelic
hang men in the flowers of San Francisco.
Come and see the smoke in the streets.
Come and see
the smoke in the streets.
Come and see the smoke in the streets!
Doug Blazek's old tabletop letterpress,
a handful of words, printed and bound…
myself: inside out.
As Lew Welch says in "Words to That Effect":
"how
can you write a
poem except from the
inside out?"
Letters ripped from a Bellevue bed.
Convolution hides from the truth.
On my wallpaper the flowers are dying.
Always on the sunny side, like Henry Miller.
But a dead angel my watermark.
*****
Thirty years...
stop and go...stop and go.
Like a traffic jam on the freeway.
You say I repeat myself;
very well, I repeat myself.
A man on fire, my heart run amuck.
Saturn returns—
Something has to change!
Who am I?
How can I even answer that question!
Listening to Dylan...thousands of pages
into Carl Jung...my cup overfloweth...
Dancing to "Zorba"...Janis Jopin
and Country Joe live at the Fillmore...
Pondering Jane Roberts' The Nature of Personal Reality.
Rumi...Issa...Basho...Kabir...the Chinese poets.
Lorca...Neruda...the French symbolists.
Carlos Castaneda...Krishnamurti.
Ramana Maharshi...Suzki...R. H. Blyth.
Yearning for enlightenment… for the Source.
(The source of all that is.)
We humans love to tell stories.
We love tall tales:
Witness the Greek myths, the Holy Bible, Krishna,
John Henry and Billie the Kid.
Stories mask the great mystery
of who we are and why we do things.
And the poets?
What about the poets you say!
Where are the poems that will open people's hearts?
(I don't give a damn about your manifestos;
your theories of pure poetry.
Or your swans and peacocks, your Muse,
your ancient dragons,
or the worn-out gods you worship.)
The poets—the respectable ones—
the ones who win the rewards
and get books published by respectable publishers—
they hold diplomatic positions or teach
at universities, "to make a living."
A few get christened Poet Laureate of this state,
or that state, or even the nation.
The others: the "underground poets,"
"the living poets," "the outlaw poets,"
mostly they wash your windows,
mow your lawns, deliver your mail; and some go mad,
or, like d.a. levy, they shoot themselves in Cleveland.
Bukowski lives in turmoil, an old man dying in a room.
In L.A., for God's sake!
Snyder takes refuge in a Zen monastery.
T. L. Kryss draws rabbits and moves through
his poems
as quietly as a ghost.
Blazek is everywhere,
but can't seem to get anywhere;
and even I have difficulty understanding his poems,
the way he twists and wrings the language into meaning.
Willie, he's dervish dancing somewhere in India.
Joel Deutsch, Brown Miller, D. R. Wagner,
God knows what they're doing.
In Russia, and a dozen other legal states,
these poets would be shot or thrown in prison.
As for myself,
if I were a poet,
I'd be one of them, thank you.
(At least, I'd aspire to be.)
But that's just the way I am.
On second thought,
can you even be an outlaw poet in the USA?
Perhaps I should have been a ventriloquist.
Or an organic farmer?
Night falls in the rain.
And it rains...and rains.
40 days and nights, perhaps.
I'm not sure.
I have difficulty with time.
For, like you, I'm older than time itself.
Older than the universe.
Not me personally, you understand.
But who I am, beneath this,
beneath all this that you see,
beneath all my talking.
(Or within, if you prefer.)
The rains fall,
fall without ceasing in the Valley.
&nbs
p; I get brain rot; I grow web feet.
Perhaps I even quack like a duck!
The basement's flooded with old crimes.
I'm checking the roof.
I'm looking under the bed.
I'm swearing at the doors and windows,
all stuck tight as the rain continues.
I'm fractured by self-doubts, anger, despair.
Visions arrive in fits and starts and handjobs.
Desires flood mind and body.
Ideas float upon my imagination like seahorses
upon the high seas.
The rain falls, morning and night,
falls without ceasing in the Valley.
I sing in tune with J. J. Cale:
"Ain't no change in the rain, ain't no change in this pain."
There's an old joke about Portland rain.
A woman visiting our fair city for the first time,
umbrella in hand, stops a boy riding his bike
on the sidewalk, and she asks the boy,
"Boy, does it ever stop raining in Portland?"
And the boy answers, "How should I know?
I'm only 6!"
As a boy, I loved the sound of rain
falling on the tin roof of our old farm house,
my brother telling me stories—
but this...this...
wet mornings, wet evening, wet dreams,
everything dissolving in time and water.
Drowning, I think, must be a long way to walk.
Hope.
Hope: the last refuge of an evolving humanity,
stretches ever more before us,
before each of us,
to embrace our unshakable faith
that everything will work out for the best.
Hope.
Hope is...
I don't like definitions—
definitions impose limitations,
here a wall, there a wall—
but here goes,
I'll work within these limitations.
As Carlos Drummond said,
or perhaps Blaze Cendars?
"hemmed in lives grow densest."
Hope is...
that the next bottle of wine you buy
under ten dollars
will surprise and delight you.
(Most of the time,
William Blake couldn't even afford wine.)