The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Author: Joe Linker

  • Get Real

    To make art, to make things
    out of other things, to engage
    in artifice, a confidence game:
    “Get real,” your critics say.
    The earth is a rug
    constantly being pulled
    out from under you.

    The artificial is real: the bread
    and wine camouflage the need
    to sacrifice the poor lost lamb,
    not to mention the virgin,
    created by man made
    design critics to avoid
    her real predicament:

    “Poor and rich belonged to the same world and placed themselves on a common, even sliding scale, but beggars could not. The ptochos was someone who had lost many or all of his family and social ties. He was a wanderer, therefore a foreigner for others, unable to tax for any length of time the resources of a group to which he could contribute very little or nothing at all…a ptochos was a shocking reality for the Greco-Roman world” (272). 1

    “The beatitude of Jesus declared blessed, then, not the poor but the destitute, not poverty but beggary…Jesus spoke of a Kingdom not of the Peasant or Artisan classes but of the Unclean, Degraded, and Expendable classes” (273). 2

    1. Gildas Hamas quoted in John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” (272). 2. Crossan gloss of Gerhard Lenski (273).

    Who then or now could write
    a poem who is not at least poor
    real poor or in spirit or metaphor?
    Yet the beggars make their signs
    and hold up their poems
    along the roadsides,
    the least of publications,
    the yeast of city life.

    “What is needed, then, is not insight into the Kingdom as future but a recognition of the Kingdom as present. For Jesus, a Kingdom of beggars and weeds is a Kingdom of here and now” (Crossan, 283).

    What is real
    will not be
    found staring
    at the universe
    through artificial eyes
    to catch a glimpse
    of dawn’s first light,
    nor descending
    to the bottom
    of the sea
    in rich pods
    to study ancient
    shipwrecks,
    nor in any travel
    nor in any poem.

    But surely we must
    avoid the real
    at all cost
    and become more
    artificial.

  • Leaving Nature

    Let’s go, then, you and AI,
    evenings lined up streaming
    across the screen held upon
    a tablet, let’s go where comma
    dose takes a back seat rigged
    to getting there, being there.
    Let’s take a trip, swishing
    rhyme in time, north by
    northwest, and go climb
    those frabjous rock sculpted
    heads: Granite, Art Stew,
    Gillian Fish holding a glass
    of Golden Wine. Don’t ask,
    don’t ask, let’s just go.

    In the room the crawdads come and go
    singing of a fellow follow afterglow.

    My fall was not sudden chance,
    still crush accident, the collapse
    of dawn cultivation nightly forecast.
    Unlikely I’ll keep track losing
    the harvest, but no turning back
    to nature I did not let go of.
    Nature creeps thru the city where
    cats carry rats into living rooms,
    and not only that but just try
    to find a place to park out at
    the ball-field – let’s go, take me
    out to the brand new ballgame.

    This mural robot painted going
    upcountry where nature seems
    suspect, a solo sober primitive
    guitar in the Valley of the Moon
    played pizzicato inharmonicity.
    An audience of two at a corner
    table in a tavern near the wharf,
    waitress telling her cat proudly
    prancing whiskers wished clean
    a blue-belly lizard into her lucky
    little studio apartment couched
    under the jets along the highway.

    Another trip, a different time
    and place, all the same, still,
    let’s go, not to get it over with –
    we’re out of coffee, and let’s
    pick up some more ice cream
    raspberry and mango sorbet.
    I can’t remember the last time
    I had a box of Cracker Jack,
    but I’m sure the surprise is
    nature’s leaving us alone
    hiding out in the mangrove
    adapting to our own changes
    what we’ve called man made
    night plastic light glowing
    these imitation mermaids
    singing to one another
    while we walk along the beach
    listening and combing one
    another’s hair, nature’s leaves,
    playing games and having fun,
    and we stay leaving nature.

  • After Paterson

    Every night all
    the words fall
    into the water
    and tho they try
    to swim upstream
    good fish they are
    the current is too strong
    and they tire and float
    backwards and fall
    over the falls
    into the deep purple
    pool below

    And in the morning
    somehow I don’t know
    how they climb flashing
    aluminum fish ladders
    back upstream
    and swim around
    rocks and thru pools
    and workout and brag
    in running rapids
    rest in eddies
    and nicely nibble
    at flies and worms
    dangling dangerously
    from sharp hooks

    Until once again
    they all frazzle
    and drowse
    one after another
    slip and wiggle
    upsidedown and sideways
    and drift over the falls
    in the middle
    of the river
    they fall

    And I wonder
    what if we could be
    only one word
    (what word would you choose?)
    probably
    I would want
    to swim

  • Storybooks

    Sitting outside in the morning lull from our summer heat wave when I look up to see a coyote jogging by in the street. She looks at me but continues running up the hill. I get up and walk to the street and see her now at the top of the hill in the middle of the next intersection, paused, looking right and left, then crosses, continuing north. It’s not unheard of to see coyotes in our neighborhood, but it’s 9:30 – usually the reports we hear of a coyote sighting are from someone up at dawn, out jogging or heading off to work.

    Sitting outside with a stack of Little Golden Books: What Lily Goose Found; The Bunny Book; The Taxi That Hurried. The line of books for young readers began in 1942. I wonder if there was ever one about coyotes, Google it, and find Dale Evans and the Coyote, 1956. I’m not going to tell you here what Lily Goose found, nor am I going to tell you what Helen found, in her husband Edgar’s attic laboratory, in Rachel Ingalls’s In the Act (1987, ND 2023), one of the eight titles in the new New Directions series called Storybook ND, curated by Gini Alhadeff.

    Does the content of the eight Storybook ND titles change when packaged within the iconic Little Golden Books form? It’s a masterful marketing ploy, packaging modern adult stories in the universally recognized and often nostalgically referenced children’s book format. Anyway, I fell for the ploy, buying all eight in a discounted package deal directly from New Directions, answering an email offer, postage included.

    The first book I can remember reading alone, self-astonished at my knowing the words and being able to run them together – reading – was a Curious George book. I don’t remember which one. But the Curious George books were not Little Golden Books. But similar. I remember holding the book, looking at the page, turning the pages. It was a bit like your first bike ride without training wheels. Suddenly you were up and off and riding away. Where you were going was hardly the point. Or why. It was all about how. And movement, flow. But it wasn’t long after that I borrowed a wooden clothespin from my mom and with an old playing card attached to the rear fork of the bike, so that it flapped noisily in the wheel spokes, was now riding a motorcycle. What made it a motorcycle was the sound. That you were actually riding a metaphor was hardly the point. To metaphor is to carry forward.

    And I was astonished too reading my first Storybook ND, picked randomly from the stack of eight, the Rachel Ingalls In the Act. Part of the marketing pitch talks about reading a complete book in one afternoon in a single sitting – like you would a Little Golden Book. I’m not a fast reader, so I doubted this would apply to me, but In the Act, at 61 pages and moving at the speed of sound, proved irresistible. It’s a domestic story, husband and wife relationship, that if I were to summarize, might sound like a Coen Brothers film. Edgar Allan Poe with a sense of humor. The setting, the dialog, the motives, the turning points, the buildup and resolution – every word counts and the flow is like riding a bike. You don’t want to put it down, and you want the afternoon to last.

  • Keeping Cool

    Heat rises its long reach from molten core
    squeezed under kitchen table pressures.

    The grasses and weeds in the yard yellow
    naturally gone dry for late summer days.

    Long hours, short nights of slow heat and
    little sleep, but the cars are street discreet.

    A wet rag wringed and wrapped around
    the back of your neck under your hair.

    The artificial breeze of the electric fan,
    the whirring windows open all night.

    Shades closed the room this darkened
    cave where the laptop glows cool blue.

    The cat nice asks that you not lap so near,
    her fur matted where she prefers to nap.

    All the weather apps say the same thing:
    “Where have all the flowers gone, long…”

    The cows and bulls a hard beating breath
    sucked under ranch rugs, deep keen heat.

    Artificial air, ice pops, ice cream, sorbets,
    thongs, cutoffs, old truck windows down,

    toxic blooms, wildfire smoke-drift, fresh
    red hot chili peppers, snow melt rivers,

    ice-cold beer, County Fair watermelon,
    under maple tree the guitar gone dulce.

    And your sweet cool voice breezes down
    the evening as we open the stuffy house

    and listen to a baseball game on radio
    players far off dance on a hot diamond.

    And hence to bed where we do not sleep
    in this weepy whimpering August dust.

  • The Urge of the Soft Vowel

    In high degree heat one seeks
    the short vowel, the cool rest
    not beat range high voltage –
    slip as the diphthong under
    the cloud of unfastened nude
    words none want to look up.

    The soft letter smooth friction-
    less, effortless, moves along
    as the tired tortoise herself
    settles on some plan of action
    in the sand next to the water,
    and all in moon fore hot sun.

    Soft the tortoise within her
    sinless resistance, backward
    hard her glance of solitude,
    of round crepuscular walk
    back to where her eggs live
    under her round wet patterns.

  • The Smell of Music

    How will mash sailors make it to the couch
    if you their bright lighthouse stop talking?
    How will the blue cowboys smell the guitar
    if you stop picking up where you left off?

    You must finish what you begin even
    if you bring it to an end like the swells
    not cresting breaking happily into mush
    waves at high tide too deep to wade.

    Things are happy then sad then happy
    again, like flowers, like the blue bells
    swells rising up and over and falling
    into laughter and rolling in silliness.

    Waves like bells deep and sonorous
    sounds you can smell like seaweed
    drying on barnacled covered rocks
    that’s the half purpose of poetry:

    That you smell what others hear
    that you hear what others taste
    that you taste what others feel
    that you feel what others seal.

    When sense and sound blend
    with your surroundings sitting
    on the couch and you get up
    to adjust a lighthouse throw.

    I’ve opened comments I hope
    you leave one and I’ve included
    a photo which might be easier
    to comment on than the poem.

    Cobble Beach below Yaquina Head Lighthouse, 2019.

    Photo: Cobble Beach, below Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Oregon Coast, 2019, on the way home from trip to Healdsburg.

  • At the Zoo

    At the zoo we saw no Dodo
    nor Didi nor did we receive
    from the Passenger Pigeon
    any messages nor clicks or
    comments from the yellow
    headed Carolina Parakeet.

    One of the Chimpanzees
    taking his rest high up
    in a tree reminded me
    in his grey haired body
    suit of me when daily
    near asleep at a wheel

    I commuted to and fro
    home to work work to
    home set on loop repeat
    restlessly pacing inside
    saber-toothed ingrown
    leaping a great Big Cat.

    And I caught in a stroke
    of the eye suddenly of
    course the epiphany hit
    me comprehensively I
    like a lost Neanderthal
    in line to see the Great

    Auk will someday not
    in a zoo or a zoom but
    in a museum of modern
    science and history be
    cut up and reassembled
    by my descendant anew

    Artificial Intelligence
    who will write on my
    popular display placard:
    “This Poet went extinct
    from habitual loss and
    confusion of meaning.”

  • Beauty and the Spirit

    Only the ugly create, the fallen.
    The beautiful have no need.
    The ugly bleed outside in.
    The beautiful, without sin, 
    wear that elliptical grin 
    viewed in the museum
    by the ugly in line again. 

    And yet the most beautiful
    creature to walk the abyss
    astounds us with a world.

    But, “What ugliness is this
    you’ve allowed to exist?”
    the Spirit shaking
    over the deep waters asks.
    “What version are you on?”

    “I don’t work with numbers,”
    Beauty replies.
    “What comes next?” asks the Spirit.
    “I’ve not made well-nigh yet.
    That will take time.”

  • Morning After Evening Walk

    13.787 ± 0.020 billion years of light
    and the sun also rises out of night.
    “The sun also ariseth, and the sun 
    goeth down, and hasteth
    to his place where he arose.”
    There is no solitude to explain
    people per square mile in this
    expansive can we call universe
    full of the dark energy of poetry.

    In no hurry though the poet arises
    an open window breeze lifts
    the cotton curtain to and fro
    “whirleth about continually”
    and he has nowhere to go
    no one early to see no system
    of cubbyholing days or events
    yet he runs to the sea working
    casting nets over the years.

    Space overgrown now with light
    pleasures itself if selfsame comes
    to be and what appears to be is
    as lazy as the speed of light
    and writ all out of time both
    before and after us as we go
    to answer the telephone
    an almost forgotten fellow
    who calls to say hello.

    And now I’m back to finish this
    flash of universe our walk last
    night under the dark park trees
    along the dimly lit dusty trails
    up and down paths and stairs
    with the personal universal cell
    phone a humble web telescope
    into a past and forecasted future
    where again we’ll recall a now.






  • Where the In is Free

    I too will get up and go
    now first rest nine note
    scale will build acoustic
    not too loud evening is

    while I still have ear to hear
    nor do I want to live alone
    in some open space empty
    from you my love who loves

    my cricket tongue my choice
    voice and together we sing
    our own songs fashioned
    from what we found here