The Universe is useless without us and these songs and poems the sober calm voice of a turtle the trills of the song sparrow the sweeping tones of the blue whale tunneling through the sea.
When are we going home, our space suits covered with dark matter and such truck one picks up living on the road, sleeping in train depot motels out along the Milky Way walking, waiting.
The Universe is nothing outside thumbs hitchhiking backwards what we see when we look out into the light switches on and off and all along the potholed road ramshackled machines sit idle.
I live in a river town, know my way around, walk here and there and won’t be nobbled, neither bounder nor leaper, foot after foot forge forward, as need be.
Someone offers me a lift, and forgetful I get in, but befogged where this drifter gets his directions, mindful then I alight and walk home.
I’ve yet to learn to keep quiet, tho no longer tip the cup, and what books I wrote won’t remain, my purpose no longer easily to entertain.
Moonlight spills on streets silent rivers of summer heat cool night but rivers don’t sleep and walkers walk to avoid being driven to despair with no air.
This is not a myth I am with you all the way, each stream wiggles down to the big rivers, the sound of the water breezes thru dry brush.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Photo: Cobble Beach, below Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Oregon Coast, 2019, on the way home from trip to Healdsburg.
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.”
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.”
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.
The Coming of the Toads 