The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Fall

  • Yardscraper

    Susan came down to say it’s raining and did I want to bring in the cushions. I hadn’t heard the rain, though I’ve got the doors and windows wide open, but I knew it wouldn’t last long, a trace only had been predicted, but I also knew she’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t hop up and go grab the cushions, and in the moment she waited to see if I was going to go out or continue thinking at my laptop for how I wanted to say something about Benjamin Wood’s novel “Seascraper,” I pictured her dashing out and snatching the cushions herself from the rain in her nightgown and slippers.

    I stood at the edge of the porch, cushions safely secured from getting wet, watching and listening to the rain, falling harder now than I had expected. Yesterday morning I was in the yard watering when I felt the drops hitting my hat and hands, but it lasted not even one minute, a trace, and I continued with the yard work, and the sun melted another day. But today as I stood at the opening of the porch and began to smell the dry ground oils stirred by the new rain I suddenly felt almost like an epiphany the end of summer.

    Yesterday I harvested the grapes from the pergola I built 35 years ago, the oil of the cedar boards dry and the wood crackling and splitting and fraying like an old T-shirt. I’ve been thinking for a few years of taking it down. By August the grapes are heavy. Scuttling the pergola will be a hard task. Meantime, the dwarf apple tree has overgrown the grape trunk and the Blaze Climbing Rose has reached the stratosphere, entangling its barbed links through the grape vines and the apple branches, a beastly hairdo that winds its way through the aged cedar board barrettes.

    As I had predicted the rain stopped after a minute or two, my epiphany manifesting the end of summer yet another illusion of insight, a pseudo-epiphany, as too often happens. The rain was but a trace. And while I’ve got my copy of “Seascraper” sitting here by my side waiting for me to say something about it, I’ve lost the gumption. I’m going back out to take another look at the pergola; might even have a go at the Blaze.

  • Scrolls and Falls Forever

    View older posts
    Fall farther down
    Icarus’s labyrinth
    Beeswax breezeway
    Ocean view guitar

    London Philharmonic Orchestra
    bananayoshimoto2017
    (see translation)
    A cartoon
    You’re all caught up!

    Instant of the present moment
    Being at hand stare to stand
    Below the falls on the spot
    Alacritous accrual pre-prepared
    Your story then others in a row

    Someone’s studio
    An ad for earwax soap
    Sidewalk pastel painting
    A reel of artificial thought
    Cats lots of cats cast lots

    Brittle surf guitars
    Original audio
    A taste of honey
    Retro television sets
    Tricks and trades

    Someone’s yellow kitchen
    Distant dwarf planet telescoped
    A red fox in a green tree
    Goats in a weedy backyard
    An ad for a pup tent

    A string of Albert Camus quotes
    Architectural roller coaster disasters
    Boats swamped by stupendous waves
    Plastic frogs in tchotchke collection
    Paperback books swathed in scarves

    You’ve seen all new posts from the last 3
    Millenniums
    How to be happy advice
    An advertisement
    Newel posts

    Shadow of a flamingo over lake water
    Zinnias dried straw flowers
    How to make peach pancakes
    A hippo eating a pumpkin
    Original audio played on spoons

    Scrolling stones
    Giant Hercules beetle
    Video clips of once famous people
    A baseball triple play
    A ping pong game

    Fall colors
    Orange tomatoes on a blue plate
    Benches covered by dry grass
    Palm trees at Refugio
    Swings in a park

    Pink orange sunsets over Santa Monica Bay
    Moons rising down side streets and alleys
    Bicycles parked near improvised food carts
    A 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air turquoise and white
    A park full of empty green tennis courts

    Strangers on vacations in faraway lands
    Children walking in the Louvre in Paris
    Newsreel from a war zone 60’s hippies
    dressed in flowers Cell phone battery
    dangerously low or this might never end

  • Momentarily

    If as you see this
    in a trice & begin
    fleet to wander
    anon trolley sails
    of moment flows
    on bæc and fill
    this pause will
    catch you up
    in a jiffy wink.

    Hissy fits of sun
    spots the rains
    come fall here
    spring there we
    climb the roof
    of being float
    waters down
    in two shakes.

    That’s all for now
    there may be false
    springs but there
    is no false fall.

    Note: For cartoons sans much lingo, visit Laconic Cartoons.

  • Bananas in the Morning

    Again the clouds descend
    to remind me why I’m here
    I must have deeply sinned
    to deserve yellow weather.

    Maybe I tried but not hard
    enough to relax easy blue
    now all the current trends
    suggest the forecast true.

    I begin my day as always
    a cup of coffee and a poem
    upon a tray and climb
    the creak stairs up to you.

    Maybe it was wrong to eat
    a banana every morning
    just cause I was a bad son
    leaving home no warning.

    Your wet summer kisses
    the dark stoop outside
    your alley door the knob
    now turned to nugatory gold.

  • Apple’s Tale

    I could have been applesauce. Or a French apple tart. Or a Viennese strudel, dessert following an outdoor Oktoberfest Mozart concert. Something fit for a queen. Instead, some two-bit squirrel is eyeing me for a quick bite of fodder. I could have been a hard cider. I suppose I still might be.

    They say we don’t fall far from our tree, but if your tree is on a steep hill and you get squeezed out early by self-thinning siblings and you hit the ground bouncing and spinning, you might end up, as I did, in a patch of dry grass on the edge of a grade school playground.

    We live to be eaten. And it’s what we want. It’s complicated, and I don’t pretend to understand it all, but ever since I was awoken by the bees, those giant furry honey bees, and the little masons, the breeze also stirring my imagination – anything seemed possible on that early Spring morning when we got our first taste of sunshine and our petals felt like wings and we thought we might fly with the bees through the trees.

    My tree was planted as part of an orchard up on the hillside sometime in the late 1800’s. There are not too many of those early trees still around. They watched the city grow slowly from across the river and up the Eastside slope – growth that took out a lot of trees.

    Funny how things grow and move around and live off one another. It takes cooperation for life to thrive.

    I was hoping to be part of a bushel full of my siblings that might make its way to some outdoor market. That was fantasy. My old tree is lucky to produce a single peck these days. And it’s been a hard go since that day awhile back the temperature reached 117 degrees. We prefer the chill side, but still, we’re not all that picky. We start off cold, slumber in the warm shade of summer, and finish cool. Life is not bad being an apple. And there are, contrary to idiom, no bad apples, just poor storage.

    But a crop of boys one decade used the apples for their backyard baseball games. Wooden hardball bats. Talk about applesauce. The old tree was happy to see the boys grow up and move on. Another family took exceptional care of the tree. Every year careful pruning, watering, thinning, picking – and storage in their cool, dry basement. They made applesauces, cobblers and crisps, and prize ribbon-winning pies. But that family also moved on. An older couple that spent most of their time travelling abroad moved in and let my tree grow wild, apples falling and rotting, fermenting, covered with wasps in the fall. Those years the yard was full of birds. One year there were skunks. Raccoons were common. And a family of possums took up residence under the back porch, though they mainly fed off the slugs and bugs and tiny rodents attracted by the fallen apples.

    All this and more my tree passes on to its apples, how to open to the coming of the bees, the loss of petals, the June drops, our capricious caretakers – the humans who covet us. We know our past, and fancy we know something of the present, but guessing our future is tricky.

    One day, hidden in the schoolyard grass, I was found by a dog chasing a ball, and I was picked up by a boy and put in his jacket pocket, and I went for a walk with the boy and his dog around the playground. Over a fence I was tossed, into the back of a nursery, in among the rose bushes potted for sale.

    I got picked up again, looked at closely and felt all over, and put in a paper sack with an assortment of other apples. We were weighed and paid for and carried out of the nursery and walked off, winding our way up the side streets of the hillside.

    An old woman received us at the door and carried us through the house, out a kitchen door, and onto a back porch where she took us out of the bag and placed us one by one upon a table. A murmur of softening filled the air. 

    And there I saw my tree, out in the yard, looking as old, no – much older – than the old woman standing on the porch next to us, picking us up one by one, smelling, feeling, softly rubbing, looking closely. I don’t know what she’s going to do with us. She looks like she could be a fritter type. I’m hoping for a good old-fashioned apple pie. A la mode.

  • Hand Harvest

    Trees and vines tired yield fatty fruit apples grapes figs pears and plums tried of a risible sun they surmised (if plants could) they’d never leave home tied to secret crawling roots.

    Birds bees and woe wacky wasps buff yellowjackets give peppery ear to where teeny seeds well watered sprout and flume into chalice gold tomatoes peppers gourds hot yams.

    Sockets and bracelets ankled deep and wristed waisted random gloved catch the yawning blue moon lured by lovers deep smell a wet garbage vinegar a hand harvest work party.

    Purple night suckered us here dilly dally by the sap empty sugar shack waiting by the swelled bushels sour jobs lasting summer into sweet fall and to think we happily volunteered.

  • A Hard Fall

    A hard fall separate and divided
    the returns bags of bottles
    and illuminated cans
    set lists of dying songs
    and a guy in a brown study
    disquieted over how much
    everyone paid coprophagous
    possum grin pocket change
    and beer in his beard.

    Heard not smelt nor sniped
    learning to relax and unblame
    to understand every Tom
    Dick and Harry and Sue
    Jane and Mary their woes
    worries whys and wherefors
    until the body oak cask aged
    slows to a broken bicycle crawl
    drink from a cold army canteen.

    In fall when worry turns
    to gold and rust the lorry
    covered with lurry tarps
    and no leary ear longing trips
    by the river down the valley
    to the coast faraway swells
    ocean crossed turn to waves
    everything that ever came
    breaks in this only moment.

  • Zest

    Writing poems, you want to focus
    on what to leave out; for example,
    leave out phrases like for example,
    one of the academics on a jaunt.

    The leaves fall; for example,
    consider the maple.

    The maple tree green
    red-orange
    suddenly bare.

    Another academic wishing
    he was a real poet
    and not just another drunk
    in a bar after his night class.

    Leave out articles, too (the, a, an).
    And add detail with specificity.

    The maple tree lime green in
    spring turns to fall and rust.

    Use a dictionary to make sure
    you’ve got the best verb
    for the occasion:
    turns might become (now or later)
    lathe, which suggests circular motion:

    Lime green leaves
    limbs on lathe
    leaves shaved
    disposition zest.

    Also important to think
    about when to leave
    the poem
    alone
    go home.

    But new ideas will arrive.
    The place gets crowded,
    maybe noisy:

    The poet bartender
    adds a piece of zest
    to drinks she prepares,
    which twists what
    is said, lips pucker
    distastefully sour –
    better just have one more
    and then get on home.

    At the Spinning Lathe Bar
    on each stool sits
    a ball of yarn
    she looms back and forth
    warp and weft
    she sheds, picks, and beats
    takes up and lets off
    replenishing drinks
    replacing fresh pints.

    Midnight and she wants
    to go pee and go home
    leaves cover the way
    streetlights smolder
    black branches wet
    she approaches the stairs
    of the Metro and falls
    amidst the rusted leaves
    still wearing her bar
    stained apron.

    She undresses in front
    of the backlit window
    her breasts are orange
    tipped her yellow hair
    in the streetlamp light
    flooding her bedroom.

    She climbs into bed
    thinking Spring is
    a seemingly happy
    drunk Fall often sobers.

  • Autumn Us

    In the evening the sun is placed
    over 60th and Belmont walking
    down the middle of the street
    into the powdery scene I snap
    a few pics with my phone cam:

    Autumn Equinox 2022 from SE Belmont and 68th

    Earlier in yard I cut feather grass
    as dry as a lint trap and the spent summer
    daisies cringed crinkled into dust as
    I yanked on the stiff stems like the barber
    at my gone to seed hair a mess she said.

    Looking west over downtown to West Hills from SE 68th and Stark

    End summer evenings still too hot
    to walk but coming of Fall equinox
    portable air conditioner quiet fan
    spins cooler nights tiny blue eyes
    charge to pay to keep cool to sleep.

    A day later, a bit cooler, orange to blue, Morrison and 68th

    So it goes Vonnegut said so it goes
    around and around on old vinyl the needle
    finishes its drive toward the center the turntable
    still spinning the needle clicking back
    and forth wanting to stop but caught in the groove.

    Caught in the groove walking around and around

    No one understands Universe least of all physicists
    who must talk a taught tongue while the rest of us
    find rhymes and rhythms as we dance around and around
    until the moon goes down as Chuck Berry said around and
    around until the sun goes down and the moon comes up.

  • The Fall

    Clouds crept over the north beaches and the vintners celebrated the annual crush in fog and rain and wind blowing inland across the coastal ranges and into the interior valleys and bunching up against the big mountains and emptying and running into streams and rivers and lakes as fall developed into a long and wet run-on sentence. Sylvie returned to Central America with her baseball team for fall and winter practice and play. No hard feelings, she said, she had just suddenly come down with an allergic reaction to my company, and when she ran into Pinch who offered her a flight out of Dodge she jumped. That was understandable, my company often giving off toxic pollins venom and dander, and Sylvie loved the sunny outdoors and adventure and felt the fog and fall in the offing, and I left Pinch to his medicine and made my way farther north up the coast and then over into Portland, increasingly hard on the road to maintain any kind of outdoor living or working in the deteriorating weather conditions. I had traded Pinch the yellow Hummer for a more practical and economic wagon I could sleep in and he threw in a bicycle and surfboard and camping and fishing gear to balance out the exchange. The surfboard wasn’t much use in Portland where I took a room in a hostel in the Hawthorne District, but the bicycle was keen and I traded the camping and fishing gear to a couple on their way south for a used Gypsy jazz guitar. And I thought I might kick back and do some writing in the little pocket notebook Sylvie had given me. I joined a workshop at a local writing school, but I wasn’t much interested in plausibility, page turning plots, credibility, memoir type stuff. Still I felt the urge to write, pencil to paper, inky fingers, daily exercise. I was interested in the rules and ways and means of writing only to the extent I could experiment with syntax and grammar and style and, in a word, language. I didn’t have any particular reader in mind, though I hoped Sylvie might be interested in getting her notebook back full of words. And around the same time I started thinking about fate, how Sylvie had said fate is the decisions you make, and about the gods, the old gods, the ones that make mistakes, as humans do too, toys of the gods, lives so full of mistakes and griefs and all the seven deadly sins oozing and piling up like oily rags until spontaneous combustion and rages erupted all around, but it was time to relax, to take it easy, to consider not just the deadly sins but the works of mercy and grace. Easy to say of course for a guy living on an annuity funded by the temporary borrowing of someone else’s capital such that he no longer needs to work, even as work is what, he’s learned in passing, most fulfills him. But the gods these days, one to ten percent of the population, it is estimated, continuing on much as the gods of yesterday, co-mingling with and catching their standard human wannabe-gods unawares in the snares of their own cravings, for attention, for respect, for a nice big piece of the plutocratic prosperous concentric pie, for publication, for a post, for stage time, minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years of fame, terms of fame, concentric circles, and round and round and round we go, and where we stop, nobody knows, amateurs as we all are, for the wages for being human are nil on the open market.

    “The Fall” is episode 76 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Tucson to San Diego

    Fall now ahead, Sylvie’s baseball season over, we drove from Tucson to San Diego, where Sylvie was to attend a three day conference. Not in a hurry, we drove west to Why, then dropped south to the border crossing at Lukeville. Back in old Mexico, we stopped in Sonoyta to eat, dry and hot, folks moving slowly in the heat. After lunch we walked around some, surrounded but ignored by border business as usual. I had drunk a beer with a taco burrito full of red and black steaming beans and hot chilies, and with Sylvie now driving, I fell asleep. When I awoke we were on Mexico Federal Highway 2, driving west along the border. Desert, mesa, flat tan and sandy, rocky hills. We switched seats again and Sylvie slept while I drove and when she awoke she was surprised by crops and greenery reappearing around San Luis Rio Colorado. We crossed the border again at the portmanteau crossing of Mexicali and Calexico, picking up 8 west through chaparral forest to El Cajon and La Mesa, and finally drove into a muted San Diego night, where Sylvie had booked a bungalow near the water in Ocean Beach. We had encountered no gods in the desert, had not felt watched. The desert gods are heavy sleepers, Sylvie said. Now back to the city gods, I said. The beach gods are my favorites, Sylvie said. I should move the team to a beach city next year. You can never be sure about the gods, I said, how they’re going to act, or react. I unpacked the car while Sylvie opened up the bungalow windows to the ocean breeze. We sat out on the front porch facing a narrow road that led down to the beach, and Sylvie poured herself a glass of chardonnay and I drank a beer and then we went to sleep for the night.

    “Tucson to San Diego” is episode 61 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.