Tag Archives: Fall

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.

Current Conditions, Fall Walk on Mount Tabor

For this Fall walk on Mount Tabor, I took the same paths, photographing the same trees and views, as I did on a walk in Spring of last year.

This week’s Rolling Stone magazine sports a good psych-brain article on the difference between fear and anxiety. One difference is that fear appears to be a kind of GPS (Global Positioning System), constantly mapping our current conditions, while anxiety plays out what we’re thinking might happen to us at some point in the future. The angle of the RS article is the effect of so-called fear manipulation infusing the current election campaigns and resulting media coverage.

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too…

Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower“

But I’m not always sure what comes first, the campaign or the media coverage, Dylan’s thief or his joker. It’s not fear but anxiety that’s being manipulated. Fear is immediate, warning and response: take cover; not here, not now, not me; play dead; run for the hills. The problem with anxiety is there is no response, only a warning. We’re incapacitated, not with fear, but with not knowing which way to turn. Fear draws a map; anxiety is a riptide we can feel but can’t see, “no direction home.”

Fall suggests to some only a warning winter is coming. Anxiety prevents us from feeling the truth of our current conditions. That is why in literature, Winter is the season of irony and satire, Fall the season of tragedy (Summer of romance, Spring of comedy). And our current conditions usually change slowly. Yes, the leaves are changing color and falling and Winter is icummen in, but an endless summer is impossible; it will take time to finish the new novel – I’m thinking Spring, 2017, before another book launch, but I’m not anxious about it, and certainly not afraid of it. When I’m writing, I feel no anxiety, like a walk in the park in Fall.