The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Writing

  • Closed

    The sign on the door read closed
    simply and clearly defied to be
    misunderstood though cryptically
    short did not attempt explanation
    explication or anything of the sort
    as an action word as still as ice
    and as a modifier most unhelpful.

    The door was obviously closed
    yet several skeptical browsers
    rattled the handle the better
    to check and be sure the door
    was not only closed but locked.

    A few others cupped their eyes
    peering through the windows
    research for more information
    the shelves are full they said
    well lit by well placed lights.

    A few loitered outside the shop
    it looked warm inside friendly
    somehow a coffee pot sat
    at the end of a clean counter
    a colorful display with creative
    text menu wide aisles sparkling
    linoleum floors booths of fat
    Naugahyde benches a place
    to dwell and tell and repeat
    stories but Closed it read.

  • Garage Sale

    The garage sale of my mind was well advertised
    signs on telephone poles and online postings
    but no one thought to see what they might find.

    The mind is a dump full of toxic stuff
    tossed flowers blues and greens faded to drab
    food scraps bald birds pick at and hot rats scatter
    as trash trucks dump squandered load after load
    junk heaps smoldering bent metal smashed glass
    furniture akimbo wood and styrofoam blocks
    book pages torn dogeared magazines ripped
    warped vinyl toasted surfboards jelled banners
    all absurd plans unrolled blueprint messes
    colossal architectural collapse
    reductio ad absurdum that’s what
    all effort reduced to brood swat and tricks
    flood the roads in and out the ear brain zaps
    of a blog heap pile to pile one subscribes
    lost in here with no purpose no safe pass
    age strength twisted steel shafts up and down
    leaning precipitously toward the trash
    piles of concrete slush crushed and composted
    the worms finished their work years ago
    today the skies clear ceiling drawn up
    don’t let it drag us under these words
    will all grow back come spring in new jangles
    bright new jungles of fresh piles of junk.

  • Solstice

    We decline down the stairs
    amid icy stares underground
    stay warm huddled with others.

    We refuse the cold’s summit
    but around noon note a bit of
    the bump and we stand still.

    We see ourselves as heavenly
    in the arc of the sun and crouch
    of a close moon and our bodies

    rotate out of hibernal touch
    not to create a paradox
    but the point is opposite

    apogee if that makes you feel
    any warmer the closer you get
    the freeze-dry blue eyes.

    Back in August when we slept
    in the basement to keep cool
    you worried about spiders.

    All fragments yet perfectly
    balanced along hot and cold
    lines our lukewarm garbage

    sustains us through this
    our winter solstice
    when even time stops.

  • Notes on the poem “Summer and Winter”

    Yesterday’s poem, titled “Summer and Winter,” might have reminded readers of a couple of famous poems: Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Spring and Fall” (written in 1880 but not published until 1918), and William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” (the title of a book of poems published in 1923).

    The first poem in “Spring and All” (the poems are numbered, not titled) begins: “By the road to the contagious hospital.” Williams was a doctor (Hopkins was a Jesuit priest). Williams’s poem seems so much more modern than the Hopkins. Note how he has copied his title from Hopkins but has dropped the F – Fall becomes All. For Williams, the fall of man is countered, or balanced, by his ability to visit the sick, while for Hopkins, fall is “the blight man was born for.” Hopkins, of course, concerned with spiritual fall, and Williams with physical fall.

    Williams maintains the serious theme, but somehow manages to forge a more positive, if not hopeful outlook. On the contrary, “Sorrow’s springs are the same,” Hopkins says. That we can’t hold to a present (Hopkins wrote his poem “to a young child”) – it hides a seed of despair even as the happy feeling of spring stirs us to song. We can’t seem to completely enjoy something we know isn’t going to last. One reason the Williams poem might seem so modern is its reminder today of how contagious contagions remain. The Williams poem came from his experience doctoring those sick with the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1920.

    Weather is an outcome of the season (to put it in business plan terms). And we are today reminded of the weather and the season absurdly often, via weather apps, news breaks and warnings, prolific pics of the most recent storm catastrophe. It’s hard to take it easy, roll with the breezes, feel the cold as it feels good to remember just three or four months ago we were crazily cranking the AC units to high modes and the fans in the house sounded like jet airplane engines.

    And the extreme weather conditions are often today attributed to the global warming crisis, about which some say we are now too late to do anything about reversing the trends. No wonder, like Hopkins, we feel the fall so hard and desperate, and, like Williams, we feel infected by the weather, sickened by it, rather than feeling invigorated or simply challenged to meet it head on:

    Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
    You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
    Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
    Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
    Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thun-der,
    Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

    Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Act 3, Scene 2.

    Wouldn’t it be something to hear your nightly television news weather person to wax similarly throughout the forecast.

    What we might often feel, whatever the season, happily warm or shaking cold, is the impermanence of it all. That feeling creates impatience, anxiety and worry, and even depression. Though to stop, to hold still, can mean only one thing. It’s the constant motion we might enjoy, knowing otherwise can only mean to be becalmed, rendered motionless, on the open sea – now that would be cause to feel misery.

    And we do find resilience, hardiness, in every season, and within ourselves, the coping thermostat self-modulates. But we need to recognize the symptoms. Then we know how to dress, how to handle, the cold, the heat, the blowing winds. All around the world we see evidence of our ability to withstand, to make it through, to celebrate the season. The signs of depression, like the signs of impending doom of a gloomy weather forecast, can be met with Lear’s mad outcry – it’s ironic, isn’t it? In any event, if we can sense and identify, we can control and change the temperature of our close environment.

  • Summer and Winter

    the freezing leaves and all this grieving
    since we left and lost the sea the blues
    so far from home why we did roam
    the roses frozen now the pipes broken

    the hats and coats gloves and galoshes
    umbrellas tire chains space heaters
    and as our hearts grow colder winter
    comes a tidal wave of muddy gloop

    wanwood and wormwood show the lies
    we strive to live by never mind spring
    who lives through the endless summer
    cares not when the sun comes or goes

    the sun rises not for us nor sets just
    past our roof where the real mingles
    with mindful reveries of delirious
    waves of unknown origin washing

    we danced across sand dunes
    drifted past coastal goldenbush
    sea dahlias and evening primrose
    and slept in beds of sober poppy

    not to worry not when now my love
    we will come again to this summer
    this cold for now allows us a deep
    sleep a slow dive for full seashells

    so we hear in winter the blue sounds
    of the sea green vibrations upshore
    we grow old and leave behind us
    only one place to have summer fun

  • Wonder of the On-Line Literary World

    This month, Berfrois, the small literary magazine, has closed its virtual doors. For the last 14 years, Berfrois, under intrepid editor Russell Bennetts, an economist out of England, has published daily writing, forming over time an eclectic list of contributors and an audience of intercultural competence. The end of active writing appearing in Berfrois comes 100 years after the closing of the modernist journals period, which ran, according to the Modernist Journals Project, from the 1890’s to the 1920’s, ending in 1922:

    We end at 1922 for two reasons: first, that year has until recently been the public domain cutoff in the United States; second, most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922 with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. We believe the materials in the MJP will show how essential magazines were to the rise and maturation of modernism.

    Modernist Journals Project, About page, retrieved 15 Dec 2022.

    They were mostly referred to, and still are, as small literary magazines, little magazines. Most did not last long. Blast ran just two issues, 1914 and 1915. They were of course hard copy, printed magazines, small publication runs, small format. The most famous now might be The Egoist (1914-1919) and Little Review (1914-1922), which ran installments of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Harriet Monroe’s original Poetry ran from 1912 to 1922 (still alive today as a kind of First Wonder of the Corporate Literary World).

    Is today’s on-line literary world, in 2022, now “fully fledged”? It might be, given the disastrous turn of events surrounding the social media platforms that create, sustain, and destroy – in situ. What can it possibly mean to be on Twitter, for example, with a million followers? Even 100 followers would be impossible to keep up with, even if managing your Twitter feed was all you did. Yet most tweets are never read by anyone. At most, they have the life span of a mosquito, and can be just as viral and vile. We shall be glad to see our current winter of discontent freeze them all in their tracks. For the tracks of tweets carry no real cargo.

    Most poems are never read either, but that’s a different story. And I digress. Some of my own writing appeared in Berfrois. Mostly prose, discursive writing. Berfrois published the academic, the non-academic, and the anti-academic. Its editorial voice appeared often to be one of casual interest. In a sense, Berfrois was a general interest magazine, and sought to publish the best it could find of both the best and the worst – for what is often considered today’s worst of writing ends up being tomorrow’s best.

    One of the most attractive features of Berfrois was the lack of advertising. It sought to be reader funded before its time. It might have found a good home at today’s Substack, where we find everybody that’s anybody cashing in their lotto tickets. “Thousands of paid subscribers.” Sounds lucrative, but a poor warrant to join a new fray.

    A bit of money but a lot of time it takes to run these endeavors. And we run out of both, lose steam, wonder what all the fuss is about, what it might be like to go for a walk down Broadway unnoticed or dismissed, or to wander to and fro with no desire whatsoever to be followed. In the meantime, a heartfelt thanks to Russell Bennetts for his contributions via Berfrois to the life of modern journals.

  • Site Has a Thousand Smiles

    Just what the on-line world needs, another Joe Linker site. But while The Coming of the Toads blogs onward, I continue to doodle, and the results often suggest cartoons. A perfect cartoon is one that needs no words. Thus my new site, titled “Cartoons at Joe’s,” promises: “The less said the better, but there will be captions.” Interested readers, anyone looking for a smile, can find “Cartoons at Joe’s” by clicking here. It’s over at Substack.

    The set up for “Cartoons at Joe’s” is minimalist, the writing sparse. And the readers few – so far 3 subscribers. Subscriptions are free, but at the cost of yet another email in your inbox. But the reward of a smile hopefully defrays that cost. But you can also check out “Cartoons at Joe’s” anytime you want with a Google bar search, or by saving the link, or a thousand other ways well paid programmers have come up with. I’ll be sitting at the bar, where there’s no wait.

    You might have seen a few of the cartoons before, elsewhere, here, in fact, maybe. That’s ok. Watching reruns of classics is a perfectly acceptable use of your time. And I’ll always be doodling for new cartoons.

  • Taking Off and Landing

    Taking off and landing are functions of style. Once aloft we don’t stop until we reach our destination. If you think writing is all about following rules on how to stop and go, you’re not flying.

    The old open cockpit planes were good for your health. Today’s jets are claustrophobic and the air that circulates within the cabin is not fresh. Recent studies suggest old drafty houses are also better for one’s health than the hermetically sealed structures whose designs aim at uniform temperature and locked-in air flow. We should get as much outside air flowing through our inside environments as possible.

    Driving a car isn’t about stop signs. Likewise, air fresheners pollute. That’s why Henry Miller titled his book, “The Air Conditioned Nightmare,” even though his 1932 Buick sedan was not airtight, and his destination was the open road across the US.

    When we wake up we take off, but our destination is not back to bed, sleep again. When we go to sleep, we land. All day long we are airborne. We wake up, take off – which doesn’t require a destination. But our first thoughts might be for love and sharing, for avoiding conflicts. Slip into our shoes as selfless as the crab out of its shell. Our first act upon awakening ought to be to go outside, or at least to open a window. To awake is to breathe again new air. So too when we write, we don’t want to sing the same old songs in the same old way, following the rules of yesterday.

    There’s a mentality constantly on the lookout for conspiracy, as if to uncover the duplicitous explains everything, and then we must punish those who have broken the rules, the comma splicers and the run-ons looking to get away like California stops. Always smug, that mentality, always looking for what’s really going on, behind the scenes, and self-vindication is their reward, though nobody else gives a poop about the guy on the corner who has lied on his handwritten cardboard sign that he’s a sick vet and can’t work. His enterprise is capitalistic, same as most corporations and non-profits, for that matter. Your money is going to go somewhere; why not to him? Always in fear of being taken advantage of, of paying too much for something, of being lied to. The birds of the air and the fish of the sea live more freely, though they too are part of a food chain.

    When I worked at the Ross Island Center of Portland Community College, in the late 70’s, early 80’s, the building echoed freshly, three stories with humongous basement and boiler – H shaped, its corridors, with spacious rooms with large double-hung windows that opened without screens to the city. The rooms were hot in the summer, cold in the winter. But the air was always fresh. Then I made a career change and found myself locked into a modern air-conditioned (and heated) nightmare. In my new building, one could not just walk over and open a window – there were ample windows, and lovely views, but the windows did not open. In a sense, they were virtual windows only, like the windows of a jet airplane. The old PCC building is still there, at the west end of the Ross Island Bridge, repurposed now as part of the National College of Natural Medicine, but still bears its original name, the Joshua Failing School, built in 1912. And the corporate building I spent time in, built in 1982, also three stories, but no basement, was repurposed around twenty years ago for use by a state agency.

    May your day be filled with windows open, doors freely swinging, and writing, writing that awakes and flies through open windows and unlocked doors and breathes fresh air, though having said all that, the stale air of the evening pub, table sticky from spilled beer, sawdust floor that soaks up the spit, also still attracts the writer, but not necessarily the reader – and there’s the real rub, the real conspiracy, the wake-up call, the epiphany that equalizes.

  • A clear cold morning

    The coffee cups crack in the cold
    The cat questions the catastrophe
    The café down the hill as empty
    As any church of barefooted nuns
    When He says, “Please be settled.”
    The coffeehouse is more than a cup
    Accouterments of sugar, cream, style
    Off the beam customers each with
    Phone, space, and prayer, and me,
    I have half a cup and 10% battery
    Warning morning this mourning this
    Coffee cat cafe of Supreme indifference.

  • Twenty Love Poems: 1

    Soma of woman submerged
    soldier crosses surrendered
    pearl hills thighs pearl
    eyes of a girl plunged.

    At 19 Neruda at 69 Pablo
    spoke wrote and moved
    you here where with rough
    words I try to revive you.

    But the hour of age fails
    agape we came through
    the tunnel of waterfalls
    eyes of a woman bearing.

    The squirrel rubs the plum
    with his nose and licks the
    dropped pears you sit up
    slow on haunched hams.

    I am tired but not sleepy
    I punctuate my days
    with thoughts of you
    clammed up eyes closed

    strong legs stretched
    you carry the sand
    dunes of a world gone
    to seed and memory.

  • 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.