A Notebook – Since 2007
In the morning, when the sun comes up
In the morning, when the sun comes up
In the morning, when the sun comes up
Give thanks for this cup of coffee.
In the evening, when the sun goes down
In the evening, when the sun goes down
In the evening, when the sun goes down
Ballyhoo this cold glass of beer.
At midnight, when the moon comes out
At midnight, when the moon comes out
At midnight, when the moon comes out
Laud, laud the light.
These awkward weedy notes of summer, they steal
water from the subtle artful crafty ones, the ones
crammed with food and hose drenched, and yes,
fruit-bearing they’ll be, and well spent.
The mollycoddle promises a bumper crop this year,
but what will be done with it all?
They can can the coddle, bottle the molly,
boil the gruel for ballet to improve posture,
post this and that here and there without
regard for the rules of a bygone garden.
The cooing of pigeons so quiet,
the stained glass raw golds
color the little nook with amber light.
No words in nature to suffer these weeds,
still birds align in lines that make sense,
the washerwoman counting syllables
come morning the clothes inside out.
And the slug slowing has something to say,
heading under the clinker cool brick.
These appellations June dropped,
in the day squirrels gnaw them,
at night possums come and grab,
and raccoons, and very early
in the morning, just before sunup
now, the coyotes looking for cats up.
Give us the weeds our daily words,
and forgive us our arrears,
for we are hard on hearing,
and we don’t really need
words, anyway.
We might want words, why,
I’m not sure, but we need
water, weeds and all, and you,
you have all the words,
more than you need.
Catnap back to wind-sun rush
kick in the eye fire-worked over
street cools quiet hush
Grace comes with natural light
patches of prayer breezes
in the hither and thither
of dry leaves palms up
elbows open
frazzled knees
and a calico cat in green
sky white bells crawls
over out
door cot jumps
through square
of rusted wire fence
Summer dawns
mind full of weeds
with long roots and
the body takes pleasure
in walking the mind
nowhere
“Raise high” red & orange sun umbrellas
blow out the blue balloon ballroom
ceiling for the doff dance
“Pick up order here!
…olives, pepperochini!
pale ale from Hop House!”
Ten knuckle blues
cats breaking the rules
notes bent brittle thin cast iron
fat slides & tempting trombones Pop
go the contradictions contraindications
spinning bombos bouncing in the street.
Run now down the dreary drowning droning
cheers of summer under yellow umbrellas
American baseball under rain
A last blue light in the little lilac
and raspberries wandering and falling
spray of pop flies
Sun slips between clouds squeeze play
cat sitting on cedar deck
gives backward glance
White stone paper cup empty beer
jangle of green grass fills
sun and cat and clouds
Fans all napping
sun crosses bird feathers
field and stands empty nest.
Spring s
lowly sprung the environs plush with dawdle walks and doodle weeds, tweets and posts poking up in the usual spaces, out of concrete poetry cracks, but in the midst of this year’s annual rush for life we were learning to breathe. Spring is just such the perfect answer to winter, one wonders shouldn’t one’s writing change, from Irony back to Romance? Never mind; summer will remind us there is no keener irony, no sharper disappointment, than romance. “Beware of all enterprises,” Thoreau said, “that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” Advice which is everywhere ignored with regard to romance, not to mention writing. Poetry persists in prolonging winter while at the same time putting out the basil too early in spring. The doodle upper-right depicts a new striped shirt.
Spring is the enterprise the clothing ads have been predicting since the Christmas ornaments were boxed for the basement. In the liturgical calendar, Lent accentuates the anticipation, slowing the heartbeat to the rhythm of nature. Pope Francis this year clarified that giving things up for Lent misses the point, unless what we give up we give to another. I was thinking of giving up clothes for Lent, but alas, the approaching Spring was simply too wet and cool. To the right we see the doodle remnant of an unseasonably hot spring day, when I broke out the shorts and Susan the muumuu.
Each season puts a special pressure on the breath. In winter, the air 
inside is stuffy with recirculated dust. You go outside for a breath of fresh air, and there is Cassini taking pics of the ice rings around your heart. The winter cold constricts. The spring cold giggles. Summer laughs. Fall chokes and coughs. One might hold a romantic view of winter, the emptiness, the sleeping squirrels in the sleeping tree hollows, the squirrels quiet for the night in the roof eves. Snow falls from the fir limbs like the down from the mattress when your body is easily the hottest object in the house. Come spring you’ll be dancing in the rain, you sing. But all you do is slip and fall on the mossy deck, the bruise on your leg like a storm on Jupiter.
Jokes mock truth, but as the season moves, truth mocks the joke. On Facebook, we posted a couple of Public Service Announcements (PSA). In one, we reminded friends to be cautious with their ear, eye, and nose drops. We were at the pharmacy, picking up some new off the shelf eye-drops, for the eye floaters, and stopped just short of purchasing instead a box of ear drops. It’s not just that we forgot our reading glasses, nor that our attention span is now the flight of a mosquito. We are simply not paying attention, spaced out, always spaced out, anticipating the next batch of Cassini pics to brighten our day. In the second PSA, we mix the good news that baby wipes can be used by adults to soothe hemorrhoids with the caution not to pull out the bleach wipe by mistake.
Which season is the setup, which the punchline, we remain uncertain. We feel we are beginning to move backwards. In any case, when is it not a winter of discontent? Surely that is the message returning from Cassini. No sooner the heaters shut down the air conditioners fill the air, but you know it’s not still winter; winter was never so noisy.
Spring’s fill flickers, now on, now off. Now shorts, now long pants. One day, we pull a few yard games out of the basement, badminton and whiffle ball and croquet and we get out the patio umbrella, and we even have a picnic on the lawn. We hug a leafy tree.
We grow as silly as bees as the snow melts and as giddy as Cassini descending through the icy rings of Saturn. We clone around, all shook up. We sit out under a major league baseball pop fly. The ball goes up and up and up; it never does fall back to Earth.
Exhausted with the turning from winter to spring, we cave in to sleep, and dream of books, mothers, lovers, and selfies. And we dream of breath and of breathing. We awake and feel our breath. It’s very relaxing, learning to breathe. Such a perfect breath. I’d like to share it with you.
Sucking on garlic buttery snails, after shooting a Bandersnatch on Crete, drinking a cup of French Alps chestnut-colored wine.
We had just jumped from a small airplane, freefalling in a creeping phlox sky losing petals over the hot green valley evening, landing somewhere in France or Italy – we weren’t sure our exact location. We unpacked and set up camp for the night, and a local farmer who had seen our parachutes hiked up to visit us with a bottle of his wine and a round block of mountain cheese. And Jack had about a dozen dried Mediterranean sardines, and that was dinner.
“Serpent slug sardine?” the winemaker asked, and we all laughed and enjoyed the evening sun, emerald blue behind the disappearing phlox, the air on the ground still as hot as a bull’s back.
It was only a week after we had been skin diving off Fiji where I had touched the snout of a shark.
We came home for a rest and check ups, Jack’s bucket near empty, and that was when they botched the test, and I wound up with a secret surveillance camera permanently installed in my belly.
A friend of mine, still a stranger to gadgets like cell phones and caller ID, recently told me the most exciting part of his day is answering his house phone; because no one ever calls him, he has no idea who or what it will be. He listens as if boarding a train moving in the wrong direction.
The Fiji trip was a cruise plan, the shark a rubber fake. The farmer supplemented his measly income from his grapes with work for the travel agency. He was quite the actor. The wine was good though, and the cheese, and the sky and ground were real enough, but when Jack finally had the guts to tell me about the facades, at a McDonald’s with sidewalk tables in Provence, I said next year we should parachute onto the Matterhorn at Disneyland.
Wasn’t there somewhere on Earth we could go to experience real risk, bare of marketing and sales tourist traps? Yes, of course, and people are dying or worse to escape from those places. You are at risk wherever you are. There is no sanctuary safe from the microbes in your soup.
Deep belly laugh, a bark. The bark repeats through the sleeping night.
There is only one thing, Jack says, in the morning, left for us, not a last adventure, but a true adventure at last. To be still and to relax at the same time. Finally, emerging from our middle ages, without even thinking much about it, we begin to learn to breathe.
no point in pointing to the past
each momentum passes upon
coming
in the space between
arriving & leaving you
learn to breathe
to breathe is
to fall
loose into mattresses
of surf
full of air
bubbles
drift to shore
with the slow tide
as light as moon go
in the sky
and on the sea.
Sitting on the wooden bench under the lilac,
while Chloe plays in the age-old schoolyard,
Papa awaits the second coming, not knowing
what to expect, unable to recall the first coming.
| I will write you a flower every morning to read with your coffee a bright yellow squirt the coffee oily blue green bubbles on top You sleep with a cat whose soft purr gives you pleasure all the joy of color impressions for the day You are soft like warm butter barely melting down a scone topped with a couple of firm red raspberries The butter surrounds the berries a light pigment an open place to play with lips and tongue – wait you didn’t think this was really a flower did you? Here are two flowers the one calls a honey bee the other falls asleep petals lips open blowing softly. |
There is so much silence hear the rustle of ants hustling across the counter for sugar and sweet stuffs see the apple blossoms opening feel the bees approach touch the molten lava freeze it you can but no matter Once we admired use of one another of the now tossed the cast laugh the tassels flipping flopping bouncing from rear view mirrors Now we adhere to a silence that deafens touch asks for oh be dunce I’m sitting in the corner face to the wall wearing the cap. |
The line was long, a slow Monday morning.
They waited patiently, neither taking cuts
nor giving up position. At a table were two
policemen, fully garbed, sipping espressos.
“Raspberry mocha with a peppermint
twist, triple shot with cinnamon sticks,
make it three: Grande, Venti, and Trenta,
and a plate of twelve fresh breadsticks.”
“A jar of pickled pettitoes and a Tall
glass of water, please.”
“I’m sorry, Sir, but you must
stick to the menu.”
“A mushroom latte, then,
hold the whipped cream.”
One of the policemen looked up,
the other did not.
The barista gallant,
tattooed with Galgulta across
her upper chest,
called out the orders with a voice
so young and joyful and beautiful
Jesus wept, and the Buddha smiled.
Jesus and Buddha
stopped for a beer.
“Half pour of IPA
for me, dear,
and for my friend,
a pint of emptiness.”
The Coming of the Toads 