What You Never Expect

“I am working a masterpiece,” the cocky stranger said, the ball of his foot tapping the carpet,

the sound of his morel grey ponytail against the rocker back like a branch in the breeze,

chatting up the man behind the cash register.  Must be friends, I noted, shivering

from downtown Seattle drizzle,  having just ducked into the Globe, 218 1st Ave,

for a few minutes refuge in this book sanctuary, the smell of book, the book rows

of story on story wrapping me warmly against the blade of the day’s bane,

expected, even though I had never been there before.

“I am a pioneer,” he turned to me to say, “called to play

a piano dropped by a helicopter from 25 stories, the ruined soundboard

still with a few frail strings clinging to it, a performance booked to last

2 ½ minutes.” “How in the world?!  What notes will you have to fiddle with?”

I asked, curiosity vibrating close to 440 hertz.  “I wouldn’t call them notes,” he said,

“more like sounds.”  I left the store with a story and a 1966 Wind in the Willows.

A stranger in shorts outside on the street caught my eye, cocked, and threw me a football.

---

This poem is another experiment in chiasm. Chiasm is a device where the center of the writing is placed squarely in the middle of the piece, and the lines before and afterwards correspond to one another in an inverted pattern, where the first line corresponds to the last line, the second line corresponds to the second-to-last line, the third line corresponds to the third-to-last line, and so on. By correspond I mean that the corresponding lines contain certain same or similar sounding words, rhyming words, similar sound patterns, similar or contrasting images or references. In the reading of the poem these connections go unnoticed, but when you examine any two corresponding lines, it is fun to see all the intentional relations. I have put the corresponding line pairs below so that you can more easily see the anatomy of the poem. After reading the lines below and noting all the connections, return and read the original poem above one more time, noting now how the details disappear into the story, but now enrich it in an almost unconscious way.

The point of chiastic poetry is to place the primary meaning of the poem in the center. In this case, the two middle lines form the meaning center:

expected, even though I had never been there before.

 “I am a pioneer,” he turned to me to say, “called to play

Here the idea of entering a space where one has not been before is a way of embodying the idea of “pioneer.” A pioneer forges into unknown territory, but with an expectation of something. Hearkening back to the title What You Never Expect, this poem allows us to experience a wonderfully quirky moment in my life (this actually happened) as a way of reminding us all that life is meant to be lived embracing and welcoming the unexpected twists and turns that are always coming our way. To expect this is to live the lives of pioneers on the frontier of the ordinary and the familiar. To wake to a day with an attitude of expectancy is to get ready to play whatever is put before us, whether that be a ruined piano, an old classic book, or a game of football.

---

Pairings Observed

l.1   “I am working a masterpiece,” the cocky stranger said, the ball of his foot tapping the carpet,

l.14   A stranger in shorts outside on the street caught my eye, cocked, and threw me a football.

l.2     the sound of his morel grey ponytail against the rocker back like a branch in the breeze,

l.13   “more like sounds.”  I left the store with a story and a 1966 Wind in the Willows.

l.3     chatting up the man behind the cash register.  Must be friends, I noted, shivering

l.12   I asked, curiosity vibrating close to 440 hertz.  “I wouldn’t call them notes,” he said,

l.4     from downtown Seattle drizzle,  having just ducked into the Globe, 218 1st Ave,

l.11   2 ½  minutes.”  “How in the world?!  What notes will you have to fiddle with?”

l.5     for a few minutes refuge in this book sanctuary, the smell of book, the book rows

l.10   still with a few frail strings clinging to it, a performance booked to last

l.6    of story on story wrapping me warmly against the blade of the day’s bane,

l.9    a piano dropped by a helicopter from 25 stories, the ruined soundboard

l.7    expected, even though I had never been there before.

l.8    “I am a pioneer,” he turned to me to say, “called to play

---

Photo Credit: Michael Gaida, Pixabay.com: CCO License, no attribution required.

Mountain Man

On the balcony of the Lorraine Motel

you fell backward, your cheek shattered,

and all that mattered in the world

mattered most in that mad moment

where love again met its inevitable end

standing at 6:01 PM behind the cold rails.

History fails to hold its heroes as high

as hiding the reasons the heroes first sang out.

A Remington rifle bullet rang out

across the dirty Memphis street

and completed your final speech

with its exclamation and point in red.

You had been, you said, to the mountaintop.

You had seen ahead to the Promised Land,

man like Moses, fate like his too,

to see from far away what all your life

had been the stage to view—

to be cut down now by a coward’s crouch,

your necktie flung into the air

where your words still hung, growing louder there,

“Mountaintop. Promised Land.”

The promise from the mountain man

whose eyes had seen the coming glory

of the sun as only mountain climbers can.

Here is final part of the speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave the night before he was assassinated:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. [applause] And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! [applause] And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

The Song of You

Kiss and sing the Song of You.

Here the merriment begins

as the will o’ the wisp turns whirlwind

bringing near what you’ve long hoped true!

So kiss and sing the Song of You.

Shed the cumbersome coat and dance!

Fancy footwork, hands outstretched!

Follow the kings who both undressed

for the joy of laying down a groove.

So strip-down dance the Song of You!

Clap hands! Drum the thunderous roll

with mallets leaping off the mule skin,

castanets, and the quick tambourine

in an intricate rhythm with nothing to lose!

Come, drum the wonderful Song of You.

Pluck the strings that sweetly ring you.

Strum the music to swirl and swell!

Don’t forget to play just as well

the jarring clash and the dissonance too

in this many-layered Song of You.

Kiss, and everyday sing it out new

for the good of all that lies beyond

what you can see. Go!  Sing your song!

Dance it! Drum it! Strum it through

to the final measure of the Song of You.

---

Last week, Thursday, January 10, I had the great privilege of officiating the wedding for my son Forrest and his beautiful bride, Zahara Williams. Having written a poem on the occasion of my first son’s wedding, I continued the tradition by writing a poem for Forrest and Zahara too! (And this means I’ll be writing a poem for Randi and Jake’s wedding in May!)

Photo Credit: Proud Mama Susan.

Somewhere Phantoms

There is somewhere an aged stone well

in a lonely grove of tangled trees,

faded in the shade,

distilling in the eucalyptus smell

a whisper-scent of cave,

where some little curious boy

has found the ancient well a toy,

dropping bombs with sound effects--

tiny stones, bark chips, shards of glass,

and any other splashables that he can find.  

He stands on tip-toe, single-minded,

furrowed brows aimed at the depths.

His wide eyes strain to catch a faint glimpse

of the plume of the down-deep splash;

but the dark remains impenetrable.

At least his ears are fast tuned in

to lasso in the cheery rings,

the echoing, the ripples slapping up against

the cold stone slippery sides until it stops

and flinching silence waits again a drop.

Over above this scene I sit myself

to see myself seeking then what now I have become.

Never once could I have guessed

through the thousand twists and turns

how the way would lead and how

the stones and shards would fall;

how the splash would coat the mossy ledge;

how the crumbling mortar on the edge

would flake into the damp abyss

somewhere drifting down to silt

to form a ground that I would help

to shape but never see.

The phantoms then were lines and specks

upon the eye against the dark

with no relation to the phantoms now

upon the dark against the eye

that I can see against my wish,

splashes reaching well beyond the well’s rough lip

with a startling cold, the shock of it

the familiar ghosts I know so well

still catching me by surprise.

---

This is the current draft of a revised and expanded version of a poem I wrote back in the early 90’s called Somewhere a Well. This poem is being rewritten with my current chapbook project Somewhere Phantoms in mind as a candidate for the title poem. The chapbook means to explore memory, childhood, and identity. This particular poem evolved into an exploration of the difference between the opaqueness of a child’s imaginative view of the future, and the visceral nature of memory looking back, especially in the bitterness of regret.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com. Creative Commons License.

Fly

The swelling-fading buzz of the fly

circling the family room

spoils the peace as it ropes the air,

playing camouflage among

the shadows and brown furniture,

silent when I lift the swatter,

encore when I lower my hand,

to swoop along the hallway gallery

of family history photographs,

touching down and taking off

on the faces of my relatives,

smiling despite the disrespect.

It lingers on the glass pane over

the immigrant Swedes settling Kansas,

melting into the black and whiteness,

giving heft to the grainy image,

the blurry expressions,

suffering stories of perseverance,

lives I cannot begin to imagine,

making possible my having chance

one day to chase this irksome fly,

which should seem so easy to grab;

how maddening the grabbing.

---

This is the latest addition to my chapbook-in-progress Somewhere Phantoms, a collection that is exploring the nature of memory and the tenuous connectedness to one’s past. I find the fly makes a wonderful metaphor for trying to lock down and hold on to those elusive parts of our past history.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com. Creative Commons License. No attribution required.

Air Quality Index: Hazardous

For the People of Paradise, Lost

Your smoke has settled heavy on my city,

200 miles safe from your shock;

here thick thistledown crowding

our valleys and alleys;

the mask aisles rushed and out of stock.

No matter for I am refusing to wear one.

I will breathe the bones of your invalids,

your wind chimes, your house cats,

your albums with black & white photographs.

I will cough your cough;

I will spit your spit.

And it is the least bit

my lungs can do

to ache your unutterable,

to choke on your erasure,

to gag on the guttural of your ruin,

to sigh a sigh that rivals the wolf’s cry

under an orange moon.

---

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com. Creative Commons License.

Slide Show

Thirty years since he has seen these

fragments from that never fading year of 1968,

phantom shrapnel on our kitchen wall.

I see his old jeep on the pocked road

heading out toward Battery C,

past the gutted buildings where a week before

the Vietcong had held their closest position yet,

the night the Widow Village nearby

emptied on the eve of TET.

Newly mustached with his AK 47

held up for the picture only.

Chaplains weren’t combatants, though

my father might have wished otherwise

sitting in the traffic jam, listening to the mortar rounds

thump into the soggy rice fields just off to his left.

His Chaplain friend stepped on a mine.

His organist drowned in the South China Sea.

He hitched a plane ride to Ankhe

with a pack of jittery wide-eyed boys

who never made it home again

he later learned when he touched down

safe in Saigon to live at least another day.

The white cross on his mud-splashed grill

and on his helmet, maybe stopped a sniper or two,

maybe a hesitation born from years of Catholic

seeding unseen instincts proving

kinder to the moment of a passing crucifix.

His Sunday circuit: headquarters,

the four batteries of Battalion 6,

56th Artillery, and then back to the base again.

Five times the same sermon to the same eyes

in different faces, different skin, all of them

living on the alternating edge of fear and boredom.

Dad was assigned to Air-Defense,

where morale was often low

given a job that was not needed,

shooting down the enemy planes

of an enemy that had none.

They waited twenty-four tense hours a day

for orders that would never come,

though they did shoot rifles once,

when TET brought the war outside their fence.

Some felt strangely better after that.

Their compound looked like high school camp:

a volleyball court and a swimming pool,

bungalows baking in corrugated metal,

bed bunks dripping mosquito nets,

an old rusted tank with sun-heated water

perched above the shower room,

its drizzle cold by ten at night

when my father would take his turn.

He once drummed up from somewhere gravel

to extend the slab of the rickety chapel,

which he transformed into a sanctuary

with the purple curtain sent from home,

the careful angles of the altar rail,

scrapping redwood for sacred touches,

wood chairs replacing sagging benches,

even a pump organ for something like music,

and a large open Bible offering a window—

a look over Jordan to a promised land

away from the sweating edge of Ben-Wha.

He’s forgotten the names of so many now,

but remembers a face, a story, a voice.

The Warrant Officer who married the Vietnamese

woman smiles into the camera like

he wants us to see how he’s turn mud to gold.

The radar crew who retaliate incoming

mortar are laughing. We ask what was funny.

Too particular. He doesn’t remember.

The marketplace bustles with pans of fish

and roots and unrecognizable delicacies.

There’s a prophetess with long curled fingernails,

years upon years of fragile coiling,

offering the camera her grave divinations

in tandem with the hum of three refrigerators.

A soldier stumbles out of a brothel,

arm around a girl with vacant eyes,

freezing at the sight of the chaplain’s lapel

and runs away awkwardly, buttoning his shirt.

An anonymous peasant lies dead in the street

underneath a mangled bicycle

breaking the current in the crowded street.

The palace of Saigon, guarded, pristine,

stands aloof and sanitized white

like the spotless dress of the woman side-saddled

on the motorbike swimming the chaos of traffic.

And here a picture of a family at a table

in a well-swept courtyard beside a thatched hut,

eating their dinner is what I am guessing.

They take no notice of the jeep rumbling by,

the GI chaplain in the passenger seat

with a camera pressed next to his squinted eye,

leaning way out to snatch a sacred

moment of their very ordinary lives:

dinner served with laughing and stories,

and then would come the evening chores,

the settling down with the settling light

to the sweetness of dreams, a boy getting lost

with the pretty girl in that magical place

pictured on the faded tourist brochure

flailing against the barbed wire fence

in the pull of the army jeep’s dark exhaust.

---

I just returned from a trip to SE Asia where our last stop in a three country swing was the beautiful land of Laos. My friend Randy Fischback and I took a boat ride on the Mekong River. While motoring up the river it was natural for me to try and imagine my father’s year-long tour in Vietnam in 1968. One evening in the early nineties Dad pulled out his slides from that year and showed them to us. In response to that evening I wrote the first draft of this poem, and that was over twenty years ago. Lately I’ve been playing with it, readying its inclusion in my current chapbook project “Somewhere Phantoms.” I am glad to post this in honor of my dad, Lt. Colonel Chaplain John Reed, on this Veteran’s Day, 2018.

Growing Up Army

Growing Up Army

was good.

It was great.

But mostly it was grapes,

moving from place to place

every next erasing last

with a fresh green skin, or crimson, or purple,

growing up a series, growing up pieces,

a cluster of worlds with thin borders

and wildly varying geographies

hooked by the hangers of providence

to the crooked stem of my narrative,

and the life I live I have lived with this sense;

remembering now as best as I can

with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in my hand:

Arizona honeysuckle.

Toy dump trucks under wide bleached skies.

Swimming ivy in California.

Crossing with crayons the calendar boxes

until dad’s return from Vietnam.

Collecting glittering rocks in El Paso,

their shine disappearing in the wet of the hose.

Mysterious trails through the dark woods of Germany.

Cigarette smoke at the little league diamond.

Brooklyn bricks.  Cockroaches scurrying.

The Verrazano Narrows stretched into fog.

Fire-ringed parade field in northern Virginia.

The stone-faced MPs guarding the gate.

Rows of camouflaged transport trucks

silent along the Puget Sound shoreline.

Smokestacks and honey trucks marinate the air

above the green taxis swarming Pusan.

Growing up Army was Thompson,

was Lemberger, was Concord and Valiant,

Moon Drops, and Riesling, and Fry Muscadine

mixing into an ephemeral mist.

And when I insist on these fragments of memory

creating a fusion of all of the pieces,

it feels like intrusion into the life of somebody else,

a tempting thesis I almost believe

were it not for this wine—

the warmth in each swallow

burrowing its way through my crowded chest

to touch the vine that still remains

to give a name to all of these moments

as really having happened in time,

and maybe now raisins,

and maybe now phantoms,

but for all of them grateful,

  all of them mine.

---

I am working on a chapbook (a small themed collection of poems) called Somewhere Phantoms. These poems are exploring the tenuous connection to one’s past through memory. Having moved around a lot as an army brat, my memories of childhood are somewhat fragmented and often feel illusory. It was meaningful to explore my childhood through this poem.

Photo Credit: Bruno on Pixabay.com. CCO: Creative Commons License.

The Shaded Tuck

Up this morning, on a path,

grass beside, trees overhead,

I came upon in sudden turn

a spread of bushes near a fence

canopying a dark cool cove

mostly hidden by the leaves

densely woven as a thatched hut

roof might be in a jungle grove,

or the canvas wrap of an old teepee,

with the leaf-meal mulched soft earth beneath,

and there to me was given straight

a personal and very private

invitation into a space,

an other-dimension enchanted place

with a long wild history all its own,

(different from the history of this world)

with porous memories of pluck and love

playing over and over again

in the whispery air of the shaded tuck.

My heart leapt up as I hunkered down

and my eyes, adjusting, recognized

this hideaway from long before,

from far away across the world,

the old familiar scent the same

as in the summer days of childhood,

building forts in the camouflaged bush

deep within the dangerous wild-wood,

underneath joy-haunted wind.

So rare to find it now, this air

from that maddening just-beyond somewhere

that we all touch when we are not looking,

and cannot, even if we try in the moment

to drive the memory away

by sternly telling to ourselves

the time is late, that we are grown,

the minutes burn, we must return

to the serious business of today.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com. Creative Commons License.

One Rogue Wave

Across the wide play of trough and tip,

boundless plain alive in quiver,

one rogue wave caps,

its smooth back flayed into spray,

lip white with froth and fever

against the force that slaps

back the rebel daring to fold

over, the one believer

pressing past the others’ perhaps.

The Florist to the Telemarketer

You arrange your

words so carefully,

showing off the best

first, the bright colors

and dazzling scent

of whatever it is

you are pedaling. I know

most people hang up.

In between the calls

be sure to take a water

break.  Too much

rejection, like direct sun,

can wither the tender skin

your soul is wrapped up in

and cause black spot infection.

Image from Pixabay.com: Creative Commons License. 

Even Granite is a Failing Floor

 

Even Granite is

1 suspect as a choice of anchor,                                     9 as crumbling cliffs push cold

2 vulnerable to split and tilt                                            8 dust clouds over the tender sprig.

3 by river and ice.  What we take                                  7 Beneath my feet unattached joists

4 for granted as securely solid                                       6 sheer, sheer and buckle, the last

5 seams unwind, once seeming                                      5 seams unwind, once seeming

6 sure and surely nothing lasts                                       4 Atlas-grand. The non sequitur

7 that can be touched or joyed awhile.                           3 of design is to drown, to freeze,

8 See, my fan blows dissected                                        2 dizzy in the spin of free fall,

9 air and cools by being scrambled                                  1 vacant voice suspended over

                                                                                     a Failing Floor

For anyone interested in the mechanics of poetry, I am innovating a structure that I am calling chiastic poetry.  I learned about chiastic structure in studying the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, a common rhetorical tool employed by the Biblical writers.  A chiasm is a literary device in which the text forms a kind of  X in which the first and last lines of a passage correspond to each other, the second and second-to-last lines correspond to each other, etc., and the core meaning of the passage is found in the center of the X, regardless of how many lines are in the passage.  This might make more sense when I describe the structure of Even Granite is a Failing Floor.

The poem above  is 18 lines along, set up in two 9 line columns side by side.  The lay-out is meant to enable the reader to easily see and link the corresponding lines in the poem.  I have also included numbers beside the lines to show the counterparts in the two columns.  The poem is meant to be read as a seamless and comprehensible whole, with all of the chiastic structure built into it without calling obvious attention to itself in the reading.  The lay-out and the numbers are meant to help illuminate the design.  At some point I might shed the lay-out and bury the design in a single column poem, but for now I experiment.

The poem begins with a split title that completes itself at the end of the poem.  The beginning half-title also serves grammatically as the beginning of the first sentence, and the concluding half-title also functions to conclude the final sentence of the poem.  Thus the title does double duty.

The first line in the first column chiastically connects to the final (ninth) line in the second column (18th line of the poem).  The second line in the first column connects to the eighth line in the second column (or the 17th line of the poem).  The third line of the first column connects to the seventh line in the second column (or the 16th line of the poem), and so on. The middle lines in both columns (the 5th line and the 14th line) are identical. This constitutes the literal center of the poem ("seams unwind, once seeming").

When I say a line connects to its counterpart, I mean it in the following ways: the lines connect by 1) similar sound patterns, 2) actual rhymes, 3) similar images expressed in different ways, 4) an extension of an idea from one line to its counterpart.

For example, line 1 "suspect as a choice of anchor" connects to line 18 "vacant voice is suspended over" in the following ways:  "choice" rhymes with "voice", "anchor" and "vacant" employ similar sounds, as do "suspect" and "suspended".

Another example, "river and ice" in line 3 connects to "drown and freeze" in line 16.  

Another example, see how similar "sure and surely nothing lasts" (line 6) is to its counterpart "sheer, sheer and buckle, the last." (line 13).

It is a fun exercise to follow each of the counterparts and explore the ways the two lines are linked and what meanings those connections create.

If you are still reading after all of this technical babble, the poem itself is a lament about the tenuous nature of things "under the sun" as the Bible book of Ecclesiastes puts it. The poem is a longing cry for that which actually is long-lasting, which resists the rust of rain and the gnawing moth and the insatiable law of entropy.  A longing which Jesus spoke to eloquently with promises of durability and solidity and long-lastingness which defy the imagination trained by disappointment. 

Photo credit: Pixabay.com. Creative Commons License. 

The Animal Control Operator to the Opera Singer

The coyote raids

 on suburban streets

 are not so subtle

anymore, the way

they snatch cats

off sleepy porches

in brazen acts, howling

shrill cries over the

 still audience of night,

impossible vocalizations

of hunger and lust, hunters

unchallenged and bored,

 dangling prey like Carmen

 playing with Don Jose

white-knuckling his sword.

---

Here is another "estuarial" encounter--overhearing part of an imagined conversation between two people from wildly disparate worlds.  And as far apart as two worlds can be, there is always a way for the symbols and stories in each world to inform and make sense of the other.  I have been thinking of coyotes, having seen a pair of them up close at a wildlife refuge park in Colorado a few weeks back.  And while I have never seen the opera Carmen, I read its story line to discover its tragic ending hinted at in the ending of the poem.  

Photo credit: Skeeze on Pixabay.com:  Creative Commons License.

The Stockbroker to the Truck Driver

As you pass slowly

 the even slower truck

 and watch the growing line

of impatient cars

lengthening behind,

do you take interest

in the building tension?

Or after all these years

is the risk of moving

over over-rated?

The little people will surely

soon resume and then some,

 and finally make it home

 despite the irritation

of some lost momentum.

---

Last week we have driven nearly a couple thousand miles to Colorado and then up to Washington.  We passed a lot of trucks.  One night as a poetic exercise  I began to imagine a stockbroker asking questions of a truck driver, using the language and  categories of his or her own experience and assumptions. Who would have thought that these two widely disparate fields of endeavor could share so much?

Photo Credit: janeb13 at Pixabay.com. Creative Commons License.

To Know Joy Not as a Fleeting Moment but as a Moment by Moment Flood

All of the to-be-had-joy—

crammed like scribbled prayers

into every crevice of the

effervescent ever newlywed world—

can all be known

(every last and little bit of it)

in one tick of the second hand—

the entire tank of cosmic joy

flushed in one rush through a soul

wholly open to seeing the being one is,

one is in, from within it, as one is,

and there is no other joy than this.

All else is imitation,

shards of the imagination.

Gladly this download,

this dam break,

loud down cataract,

this sheer fact of the

onslaught of inexhaustible joy

can be repeated, second by second,

converging miniscule in the blink of an open eye

at magnitudes only saints seem to beckon,

only fools keep telling us to try.

---

As I was sitting on the shore of Lake Chabot today reading Christian Wiman's beautiful new collection of poems about joy, I suddenly desired to enter into the conversation with a poem of my own.  It struck me, watching the beauty of the wind on the lake, that joy can only and ever be experienced in the present moment, and that by being present to it.  If joy can only known in the present moment, it follows that all the joy there is to be had must be available in the flash of that one moment.  It follows that sensations of joy from memories or from hoped for things turn out to be echoes of joy, but not joy itself.  The stunning thought that follows is that all the joy I can ever hope to experience is theoretically available to me right NOW as I type these words, as you read these words, as you and I get up to go engage that next act of being in line for us.  Is that possible? And if it is, why are we prone to live lives of such diminished joy?

Photo Credit: HSchmider at Pixabay.com: CCO Common Creative License

Eye of the Whale

Isn’t it a grace that the faces

of the flailing plankton can’t be seen

by the Baleen whales driven by their strong tails

swallowing whole swarms clean for dinner?

I swear if their terror could be detected

it might be some whales voluntarily select to

forego the whole meal out of a feeling of genuine empathy.

And then where would they be?

Kindness literally starving them to death

beneath a suddenly calmer compassionate sea.

Please don’t mention this to me.

I refuse to think about the six-pack rings

of unsnipped plastic that I just threw away,

or the other day how I left my towel

in a crumple on a hotel bathroom floor just to get a couple more,

not to mention the man I passed an hour before

without so much as a friendly glance,

hurrying home as I was  to my hoard, change my pants,

pay the piper for the chance to get this whale off my chest,

my reward for my work, here’s a bottle of wine

and a shrimp appetizer and some peppy TV time.

---

Eye of the Whale continues my series of poems inspired by various iconic arches with National Arches Monument in Moab, Utah.  Each poem explores some dimension of human becoming, just as each arch is formed by the long action of wind and water on the sandstone.  This poem explores the idea that we blithely continue in many of our actions because we do not take the time to see possible long term consequences of things that are apparently innocuous.  This poem was written primarily with the ear, playing with rhythms over a steady beat.  Read it out loud and see how the rhythms play on your tongue.  Listen to my recording below and you'll hear how I was hearing them play out. 

Photo credit: unknown.

The Fiery Furnace

In this sandstone labyrinth

wind insists on

bending my senses

into impotence.

Inches might as well be miles

as I pretend to swim

the space I am in

all the while drowning.

O for an aisle out to the green sloping lands

stretching open under lazy sky.

Might You descend, lend a hand,

send hope, a  life-rope lead

out of this maze to end

my senseless floundering?

I pass a point

I swear I’ve passed before

a dozen times and more absurd

will every cycle grind

unless I find the wind turned word,

the air turned breath,

the shadow become walking man,

the hollow space a wake that I can follow in,

a whisper I can hold on to with fumbling fingers

and finally understand.

---

This poem continues my series of poems that explore human becoming through the metaphor device of iconic sandstone formations in Utah's Arches National Monument.  

This is how the National Park Foundation describes the The Fiery Furnace hike:  One of the most popular and most challenging hikes in Arches National Park, Fiery Furnace spans a roughly 2-mile route between towering, maze-like canyon walls. Exploring it is a spectacular, otherworldly experience not without its challenges. Unlike many hiking trails, which feature steep climbs and high elevations, Fiery Furnace tests your ability to keep your bearings and find solid footing in a disorienting place. There are no trail signs or markers, and GPS units have a tendency to fail among the lofty sandstone walls. Navigating the difficult passages takes stamina, agility, and acute attention to detail.

The Fiery Furnace offers up a rich metaphor for the common condition of human lostness and disorientation. In the poem I inch toward the solution that we cannot untangle our own lostness and that we need divine intervention--but not some  abstract intangible intervention from on high.  Rather we need a divine guide to come in flesh (shadow become walking man)Whom we can actually follow and hold on to even with our fumbling fingers.

The name Fiery Furnace itself is an allusion to a story in the Old Testament of the Bible (in the book of Daniel) where three devout followers of God, thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship an idol, experience God come and join them in person in their peril, the result of which was that not even a hair on their heads was singed.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.Com:  Creative Commons License.

Let Me Be Born

Let me be born

morning-light against

this starless settling;

unbind me from barren

carriages;  set me down

barefoot on grass

at dawn when the dew

passes anew over

each bowed head,

where red butterflies surge

in and out about

the flowered mound,

unbound and dancing

free, far beyond

the tattered chrysalis.

Listen to this!—the song

of never-having-born-

weight-wings promises

fair scenes impossible

to see from where

I long have stood statue

in old weathered boots

nailed through the soles

to the cold ground

at the brow of the hill

where the wolf and the moon

hold the night like

a knife to a throat, like

an airless tomb, like

a spoon in a spoon in a spoon.

This poem is a revision of a poem posted some months ago.  I recently found the first draft of this poem and was drawn to it, over and above the revised poem I posted.  I had the privilege of giving a short homily at the beginning of the Good Friday Stations of the Cross last week at Christ the King Church in Pleasant Hill, and in my talk I explored  ways Jesus invites us "to come and die" with Him.  One of the ways we are invited to die is to name and cast off our various false selves -- false identities that we, over time, have adopted to cope with our various fears, shames, and angers.  I ended up reading a version of this poem as the ending to the homily.  The version I am posting here has further edits still. This might be one of those poems that never gets finished--which would be quite congruent with its subject matter, seeing how elusive it is to uncover and reject all of our various, subtle, and hard-to-part-with false-self layers.

Photo by Robert K. Hall.  https://www.smoothphoto.com.

Brave Side of Wild

The saints here are lightning,

incisive slash across the grey keep,

flash of faith in the face of the tightening noose

wrenched loose and flung away

in the name of the coming New Day.

At every blow there is strong stand-up:

defiance of wrong, long reliance on the little

to whittle down the mountain, to forge

the treacherous pass at last,

and two swords is enough.

For the addict, human touch.

For heavy red earth, rusted

wheelbarrows.  For tumbling plastic

in the street, soil and seed.

For the Asperger child, a seat and a name.

For the rain, fire. For the fire, fuel.  

The pinnacle reached by rule of descent,

leaving skin behind on the barbed wire.

The saints here are lightning

on the brave side of wild,

a net for the discarded to form

a net for the discarded to form

a mosaic of the unheralded,

masterpiece of the absurd

poised aside the crowded roadways,

stretching along the lonely beaches

singing into the gusty wind

a song that cannot but be heard.

Having just returned from an inspiring week in the Dominican Republic learning from church and community leaders, I write this poem as a tribute to these unsung heroes--in particular, Ernesto and Altagracia Bathermy, pastors of Vision Celestial in Los Alcarrizos, and Rafael Hernandez, pastor of Iglesia Communitaria Cristiana in the colonial city of Santo Domingo.

Duke (2003-2018)

His motor was so loud

the vet couldn’t get

a read on his heart

for his annual chart.

I hope you know that

you did this to him.

Your soul affection

drew him like music

to knead on your blanket

and bask in your  Dolittle

kindness.   You were able

without even trying

to ignite in this tabby

the purr of a lion.

---

With tears and heavy hearts we had to say goodbye to Duke last week.  He was an incredibly affectionate cat, restless at heart, with a peculiar meow that sounded more human than feline.  Duke originally belonged to Susan's father.  When he passed away, we adopted Duke.  Duke must have had an ability to sense genetic vibes because he developed a very special attachment to Susan.  They were great snuggle-buddies.  This poem is a tribute to Duke, but even more, a tribute to Susan and her sweet love for him.

Photo Credit:  Randi Lynn, (Duke's other favorite family member) took this photo.