No Angel Came

Since 1993 somewhere between 600 and 2,000 women (nobody really knows, and nobody is keeping count), mostly young, mostly poor, have been killed or gone missing in Juarez, Mexico.  Tomorrow in Taos an art show titled The Daughters of Juarez will open at Parks Gallery in Taos, New Mexico.  The works and the exhibit are intended to highlight the ongoing deaths and disappearances, and the unwillingness (or inability) of the Mexican authorities to stop the bloodshed, or to bring anyone to justice.  Artists including Amy Cordova, Erin Currier, Deborah Rael-Buckley, Charlie Strong, and Olga Torres-Reed will have works in the exhibition.  Opening is 4:00-6:00 on Saturday the 6th of November.  If you're in Taos, don't miss it, and be sure to check out Deborah's piece Cosecha Amarga (Bitter Harvest): simply stunning.

Last March in Taos, SOMOS sponsored a reading under the same title, The Daughters of Juarez, and local poets and authors read works written about the ongoing events in Juarez.  I was one of the poets asked to read, and as a tribute to the show opening tomorrow, I reproduce that piece below.  It is not comfortable or lyrical, nor are the events to which it graphically bears witness.   Forgive me my trespasses...

  

                  No Angel Came

             (a poem of witness)

Hail Mary, full of grace

…llena eres de gracia…

the mephitic incense

of her charred carcass stains

a blameless desert with its dying flame

air black with buzzards and ravens

pecking at her remains

where no angel came.  

September 5^th, 1995,

name Unknown, 24 years old,

right breast amputated,

left nipple mutilated,

possibly raped then strangled. 

…bendita eres entre todas las mujeres…

and young and provocative deigning

to work or afterwards to go to a bar

“After all, it’s very hard

to go out on the street when it’s raining

and not get wet,” Chihuahua’s

attorney general admonishes us. 

October 23^rd, 2004,

Sandra Rios Salmon, age 15,

autopsy showed that she had been raped,

beaten to death, her neck broken,

found abandoned in a construction site.

…y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre…

women used as punching bags

beaten stabbed and strangled

then left somewhere where no one ever goes

naked or in rotting rags

just dumped their mangled

bodies left carrion for crows. 

December 15^th, 1993,

Yolanda Tapia, 50 years old,

found in her home

with puncture wounds in her skull

and a log in her vagina. 

…ruega por nosotros los pecadores…

where authorities no longer care to see

and no one can hear her muffled plea

in a city plagued by drugs and death

while alone unseen someone’s breath

is beat or throttled out of them

a savage end to a fragile dream.

March 4^th 1999,

Helena Garcia Alvarado, 33 years old,

found in a brick oven,

incinerated,

her arms and legs amputated.

…ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte…

when it’s dust to dust and ash to ash

clotted with blood and fetid flesh

abandoned buried or burned

many unknown and most unmourned

and each senseless vicious death

another minor crucifixion of faith.

March 26^th, 2006,

name Unknown, 20 to 27 years old,

found on a small hill

naked from the waist down

with blood on her feet.  

And no angel came

…amen.  

After the Party - Drinking with Basho

sharing hot sake

the master and I swap lies

no more truth than this

Outside autumn stars dance, and the milky way arcs north to Colorado.  Chill settles into the sage, and the last rumble of departing tires on gravel melts into the background of night without even a coyote bark to disturb a brief private meditation.  But tonight shirtsleeves are not enough; I shiver, come back to the moment, and retreat into Rancho Relaxo. 

After the party is gone, food put up, dishes done and the sink drained, a grudging calm stills the house.  No clink of glasses or dull hum of conversation, no rolling laughter or poetic expostulation.  From the kitchen no wafting reamins of posole on the stovetop, just the slightly acrid background note of wick and wax from the recently extinguished candles on the ofrenda.  Then, subdued but undeniable, the sound of something liquid, and a fleeting nuance of warm sake. 

Against the fainter black of night outside the open shade, between the hanging paper lanterns, below the now dark party lights, I dimly discerned the outline of a slim figure alighted on the table, where Basho's shrine was supposed to be; maybe it was a trick of dark, but I swore it was the honoree.  As my eyes adjusted, my mind's eye imagined the thin trace of a smile, as Basho proferred to me a cup and a cast chinese pot normally reserved for tea.

Sake? he asked, Of course, I said.  He poured and gestured towards a chair, as I took the cup and sat.

I always enjoyed a good party he began, and so regret it when they end.  So I thought I'd make myself comfortable, and savor the night while I finish a bottle.  I hope you don't mind that I borrowed your teapot, but I wanted hot sake and it's all I could find.  No sense to leave the sake sit while night is left to drink it.

So we let the stars drift, engrossed in talk, and quietly laughed at dog snores from the other room, and critiqued the night's events.  Of all he heard, and he heard it all, he was most surprised to hear haiku, and found the form strange in a foreign language.  I liked it though, he finally said.  After three hundred years the form might as easily been dead.

He talked of Nippon and ages gone, and of places like Ueno, Kyoto, and Edo.  I admire your mountain, it reminds me of home, and of stars hung with cloud, on cold nights like this one.  But there there was water, always an incessant motion moving towards something new.  Having lived near the ocean, I felt a familiar susurration, but I told him wind in the sage was now my constant reminder, and fragrant as well when the wind blew up a gale, or in the morning after rain, or an afternoon hail.

And he spoke of young love, and his companion Yoshitada, and how he wept when Yoshitada died, and knew that only poetry could ever take his place.  And of my lovely bride, sleeping amid perfumed sheets in an adjoining room, he questioned the mathematics of more love and fewer poems.  No regrets, said I.  In the long dark my lines would have been thin comfort.  I knew I could not write the sound of one hand clapping.

And so we sat and drank and drank and sat, and solved no problems that I know, settled in like starlight letting the silence grow.  At length he said to me, The bottle is empty, and the sky tilts towards dawn.  Time to put away the night and follow the long path into a different day.  I stretched and yawned, and his apparition faded away.

So off to bed, to greet my wife warm sheets.

But I'll keep a bottle always against the time, when a poet comes again to share his night with mine.

Love and The Last Station

Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

- 1 Corinthians, 4-7

Watching the Movie "The Last Station" the other night, I thought of the above quote, a staple of wedding ceremonies and Hallmark sentiments, and my reaction (to the quote not the movie) was, "what a crock."  Let me be more expansive.  Love, capital L as  Platonic ideal, may be comfortable with "always," but relationships exist in a world akin to Plato's cave, where all that is seen is shadow play on the walls, not the thing in itself (das Sein in Heidegger-speak).  Love has to survive equivocations and mitigations, hard-edged truths and comfortable lies.  But somehow, it does.

"The Last Station" is a period piece, set largely on Tolstoy's country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the early years of the Twentieth Century, before the onset of the Great War (they didn't know then to number them) and upheaval of the Bolshevik revolution.  Disguised as a historical drama, what we get is really an extended disposition on the meaning of love as demonstrated by the interactions of three couples: Bulgakov and Masha (young love), Totstoy and Sophia (mature love), and Tolstoy and Chekhov (ideal love).  Each flawed in its own way, none of these relationships meets the rigorous test of Corinthians (I love that word, Cor-r-rinthian, always remins me of R-r-ricardo Montalban and his fine cor-r-rinthian leather). 

Bulgakov, Toltstoy's recently arrived secretary, is the foil for much of the action.  Recruited by Chekhov, principal proponent of a tolstoian movement, because of his naive adherence to tolstoian principles and his blushing protection of his virginity.  Not long after his arrival at Yasnaya Polyana he meets, and is tenderly seduced by, Masha, a young and attractive feminist and free love proponent.  I could almost feel the fluttering in my chest as they got naked together for the first time, the continual confusion with roles and expectations, the forthright giddiness in his first professions of love.  Boy meets girl, boy falls in love.  Im' leaving.  Oh no! Come with me.  I can't.  Separation and reunification.  Been there, done that, zip your fly and get to work.  Not much is added to our understanding. 

Much more complex, however, is the fiery interaction between Tolstoy and his wife of many years, Sophia.  Through her we see Tolstoy at his youthful and playful best, crowing like a rooster (You are my little bird!  You are my big cock!).  We also see him at his worst as they argue about private property which Tolstoy no longer believed in (very anti-tolstoian), paricularly the copyrights to his published works (Anna Karenina, War and Peace, we're talking big money here) that Sophia cared deeply about both for herself and for her children. Sophia finally drove Tolstoy to an incapacitating despair (I can't live with her, I can't kill her); those flaring arguments provide some of the truly satisfying dramatic moments in the film, and lead eventually to Tolstoy's secretive nighttime flight from his estate, and Sophia's subsequent unsuccessful suicide attempt. 

Most complex of all is the interplay between Tolstoy and the stalwart of his movement, Chekhov (not a bad writer in his own rite).  What we are shown is mostly Chekhov's angling to get Tolstoy to change his will to put his copyrights in the public domain for the Russian people.  Hard to ever get a good read on Chekhov; they give us nothing overt to make us distrust him, but maybe it's his intense focus on the copyrights that makes those more cynical of us think it's somehow all about the money.  But then I can't figure out how Chekhov gains from it all, so maybe he is truly a believer in the tolstoian ideal, hoping to do away with private property, and promote universal (if platonic) love (in retrospect very Marxian ideals, ones that would move to the fore in Russia in less than a decade).

But we find ourselves with Chekhov at the furthest remove from the Corinthian ideal.  We see a love neither patient nor kind, rather self-seeking and rude.  With Sophia we had fault with easily angered and keeping record of wrongs.  With Bulgakov we find love that trusts and hopes, and is disappointed (even if in the end we get the Hollywood hormone stirring reunification).  None of them seems to be able to pass biblical muster.

So here's what I've got, speaking as a man now married for more than thirty years.  Love is hard.  Done correctly love is unremitting work, and requires constant nurture.  It is a daily battle to keep growing together rather than growing apart.  Love can be rude, self-seeking, and quick to anger, but it can as well be patient and kind.  Love holds your hair out of your face when you're hugging the commode after a bout of food poisoning.  Love leaves home and follows you to Chicago, Milwaukee and Brussels.  Love figures out how to fix your wife's kiln when it would rather watch the ballgame.  Love fixes dinner and love figures the taxes, and love watches a sunset  and shares a good bottle of wine that you bought together at a chateau in France.  Love gets teary eyed at An Affair to Remember, and roots against all odds for Rick and Ilsa even after seeing it a hundred times and knowing how it ends. Love reads poetry out loud in bed at night.  And love still gets goosebumps and the fluttering in it's chest when we get naked together.

Tolstoy was probably closer than Mr. One Corinthians when he said:

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.

And after all these years I'm still a sucker for a good love story.

Preparations

autumn night

dashed to bits

in conversation

- Basho

Every year Deborah and I host a party for the Dia de los Muertos, where we bring together friends to drink, eat, and recite verse in honor of a dead poet.  Tomorrow night is the big event, and the honoree will be Basho (died 1694), so haiku is the order of the day (or night), and Deborah and I are already hard at work, okay maybe not hard, and not exactly work, but we are busily preparing for the event.

First order of business is decorations, and the almost incandescent papel picado banners are strung across the living and dining rooms, the dining room table pushed back to the window (make room for dancing), and the rug rolled up and stowed away.  In the living room we have the ofrenda, or altar, in honor of the deceased (see above), which this year is sort of an east meets west melange, Guadalupe and Lao Tzu, calaveras and paper lanterns.  Basho would, I think, have liked it, and if not, oh well.

We'll be drinking sake in his honor anyhow, and he'll have a cermonial cupful in front of his portrait to allow him to partake in the festivities.  For those who can't stomach sake, there will be Japanese beer to wash down the green chile chicken posole, the cashews with cayenne pepper and rosemary, the pistachio encrusted brie drizzled with local honey, and whatever other goodies we dream up between now and then.

Costumes are encouraged, but not required, which is a good thing for me, because I am not so much into the costume thing.  Still, this year we floated the idea to come dressed as the written word, however people decide to interpret that.  For me it'll be a Bukowski t-shirt with a Love is a Dog From Hell sentiment, or something less conspicuously but nonetheless totally uninspired.

It's why we make this a day of the dead party, instead of a Halloween party.  Halloween blew up for me quite young, and I've never seen it in quite the same way since.  When I was in sixth grade, figure eleven years old, I did the local candy crawl around our neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Now I can't help the fact that I was tall for my age, and I know that it was a little unnerving for the neighborhood parents to be looking eye to eye with some oddly dressed thug (like I said, I was never very good at this).  But c'mon.  Eleven years old and people are refusing me candy, and saying things like, "aren't you a little old for this?"  It was my last ride on the merry-go-round.  After that I relegated my Halloween celebrations to taking my kid sister around while she begged; sometimes the householders would give me a Snickers bar out of pity.  But I've never been much into costumes after that.

Anyhow, now one of my favorite parts of the preparations is finding a photo (in this case a portrait, seeing as Basho was about a hundred and fifty years early for a camera), and printing out an eight by ten to use on the ofrenda.  Every year I use the frame that my high school picture came in, with my "could I have ever been that young" portrait still in the frame, but covered over by the year's honoree.  I like the idea of rubbing up against great poets, hoping perhaps, that some inspiration will descend on me for having shared such an intimate space with (in order): Pablo Neruda, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robinson Jeffers, Emily Dickinson, and now, Basho.

But it's high to time to get back on task, brush up on my Basho biographical details, and be ready to give a little historical perspective, as well as deciding which of his thousand or so haiku to share.  Time, as well, to dig up a few of my own.  When the event is over we'll post pictures, and maybe even add a link to some audio files of some of the haiku.  Maybe.

Where in the hell did I hide that Bukowski t-shirt?

on the Chinese gable

light of the setting sun thins

to evening coolness

- Basho

The Wallet Redux- Life and Times

Joe Buck's an Irish outlaw, an IRA man fine.

He stalks the streets of Belfast town with just one thing in mind:

To oust the English Army and end their dynasty, 

To give Ireland back to the Irish, yes, to set his homeland free.

Not a bad little ditty, if a bit trite; a lot in the style of other Irish Republican songs written either during the times of the Easter Rising in 1916, or the more recent work inspired by the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland.  Only the difference with this one is that I wrote it, in 1972, in response to the Bogside Massacre in Derry, Ireland, in January of 1972.  The event that engendered "Sunday Bloody Sunday," a somewhat more memorable ditty recorded by U2 (but not until 1983).

What inspired a tight-ass middle-class white boy from Massachusetts living in New Mexico to write a song romanticizing the activities of what many would (reasonably) classify as a terrorist organization?  True, I am Irish-American (half French-Canadian-American, but why quibble), and was brought up by me sainted Dad to believe that there were two kinds of people in the world, the Irish, and those that wish they were.  Still I look at my younger self and wonder.  

I don't claim any credentials or vast background in human motivation, just the benefit of age and a substantial amount of navel-gazing, which has led me to certain conclusions.  The first being the obvious: youth.  When I was twenty (or seventeen or twenty-four) most everyone I had ever known was still alive.  Even with the Viet Nam conflict going full bore, I had no family or friends that went or died.  My parents and all my siblings were all still around.  I was invincible, bullet-proof, and at times even able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.  Also, I was unafraid of dying.  Having had no particular association with death it was an interesting idea, but merely a theoretical concept like an omnipotent god, or bad drugs.

At that age, of course, I was trying desperately to cut the ties to my family and their belief structures, and head off in a direction of my own choosing.  I lost my religion and my virginity, flirted with socialism, buddhism, vegetarianism, tried on philosophical stances like new jeans until I found something where I liked the fit, some good old button-fly 501's that made me feel at home.  And whatever I chose, I chose sides, making myself part of a greater whole that necessarily differentiated me from some other.  That other was THEM, as opposed to US.  Which gave me plenty of ways to act out.  I was marching in the streets (against the war, against imperialism, against capitalism, against racism, against sexism), always clear in what I was against, if not so much about what I was for (pretty much sex, drugs and rock & roll, and, somehow, that seemed like enough).

Then there was the hidden benefit, that I can admit with the impunity of age and distance: women, particularly at that age, loved outlaws (I am not making this up).  They may not marry them, but they certainly dated them.  I mean, as I saw it, if you got involved with some fringe group, it gave you a certain cachet, a certain je ne sais quoi.  Talk was fine, but talk of violence was downright sexy.

Important rule: never underestimate the importance of sex to a twenty-year-old man in sexual flower, swept by uncontrolled hormonal fires.  Never.

Because I had shed so much, had given up so much of that protective cocoon in which I had been raised, I longed for a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging.  I wanted to be an identifiable part of a greater whole.  And then, the whole Irish thing, while I was sitting around my dorm room singing protest songs, reading Trinity and learning the words to "The Patriot Game."  Did I go to Ireland and join the IRA?  Hell, I didn't even have a passport.  But it sounded romantic and engaged.  Instead I wrote lyrics.

Just a tight-ass middle-class white boy from Massachusetts trying to get laid.  Who eventually went to Ireland as a tourist for his fiftieth birthday.

The Wallet

Hodgin Hall is the oldest building on the campus of the University of New Mexico, having gone into service on September 1st, 1892, and is currently undergoing some much-needed renovation.  In the fall of 1972, I had a class in Hodgin Hall, Geography 471.  Therein is the germ for this story.

The class itself is not important to the story, although it did once almost cost me my then girlfriend.  One day I cut the class, as I was often wont to do in those days of youthful exuberance, but Ms. Jaq, good student that she was did not, and therefore got to watch the movie that was shown that day.  I did not.  A couple of weeks later, on an exam, the essay question dealt specifically with our reactions to a movie I had not seen.  But, not to be deterred, I made up my own version of the movie in my head based on the title  (given in the essay question), and pontificated upon my fictional creation.  And when we got the exam results, I got full credit for the essay, and Ms. Jaq had a few points deducted for whatever subjective reasons the professor chose.  She was understandably pissed, and I was (doubtless) insufferably smug.

But that's not the point of the story.   Fast-forward thirty-eight years, to last week in fact, and I will get to the point, which was the phone call I received from the University of New Mexico.  Seems that during the renovations to Hodgin Hall, a workman found a wallet under a stair that they were disassembling.  He turned it in to the University, and among the random remains were my old student ID,  a schedule of classes, and my Massachusetts driver's license.  From those clues UNM was able to track me down, find my cellphone number, and contact me.

After asking me if I remembered having lost my wallet (I did not), and assuring me that the wallet contained no cash (probably never did, those days being the early part of my suffering for art period), they took my address, and promised to send me my wallet.

Which they did.  I received it in the mail on Monday, and it contained:
        
          - aforementioned Driver's License, Schedule and Student ID

          - Social Security Card (original, issued in 1965)
          - Selective Service Registration Certificate (the draft, Viet Nam, et al)
          - Selective Service Classification (1-A, yoiks, that's cannon fodder baby)

          - picture of my kid sister Kathleen
          - picture of my previous girlfriend, and her Athletic ID Card
          - scrap from a faux short story about Tom and previous girlfriend
          - miscellaneous business cards, and memberships
          - receipt for a repair to my Empire turntable
          - receipt for a pair of hiking boots
          - telephone numbers, with word game entries scribbled on the back

And all that detritus serves is to bring back memories of times that are now relegated to history books.  The Viet Nam War (student bayonetted during protest on UNM campus the previous summer).  George McGovern (about to get his clock cleaned by Dick Nixon, winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia).  Watergate (two years to resignation).  Cambodia.  Earth Day.  The Civil Rights Movement.  The Women's Movement.  Viva la Raza.  Ceasar Chavez.  The Godfather.  The American Poetry Review.  All of those disparate things that somehow came together as a life.  Infinite quantum decisions that once made could never have been any other way.  Decisions that define who I became.  

And who I did not.

But what is most striking, really, is how mundane the contents of my wallet could be, even after all these years. No cash, no credit cards (of course nobody had them in those days), no ATM card.  The photos are a hoot, a jarring reminder of how young I once was and am now not.  But most of the rest of it could have remained under a staircase in Hodgin Hall for another thirty-eight years without being missed.

Just an old wallet, once lost, now found.

Road Trip

Sometimes you've just got to get the hell out of dodge, when the weight of the quotidian threatens to overwhelm, and no amount of bad coffee or good wine can stem the tide of ennui.  Time to load up the pickup truck with snacks and tasty beverages, assorted adventure gear (hiking boots, walking sticks, water bottles, et al), enough changes of clothes to last a few days, and a few essential toiletries, abandon the dogs (bye Neruda, bye Banshee) to the care of a friend, and head for the open road.

Every time we hit the road I am somehow exhilarated, even if it's just for a day trip.  Backing out of the driveway, the adventure begins,  the safe island of home left behind, and the ocean of potentiality opens up before us.  Today, with fall still clinging to the aspens in the mountains, we head north through Taos, stopping off with Greg for an extra large four shot latte (rrrrrrrmmmmmmm), then left at the old blinking light (which is a full stoplight now, and hasn't blinked in years, but that's still how the locals think of it) motoring north and west, past crowds already milling at the Rio Grande Gorge (damn, Martha, it's a gorge), then settling comfortably into fifth gear as we blast across the mesa (wave at Jane as we go by) to Tres Piedras.

Here's where the landscape begins to change rapidly, as we motor into the hills and curves, sage giving way to pinon and juniper, transitioning into broad ponderosa pines, and finally climbing into aspen and spruce.  Groves of aspen line the winding macadam, some sadly passed, but many blazing gold that almost hurts your eyes in the strong October sun.  Stop to gawk at the Brazos Cliffs, then back on that pony and ride, sliding down the west side of the mountain into Tierra Amarilla (yellow earth, yes it is), north to Chama, where the hunters are out in force, and the local businesses advertise taxidermy and wild game processing, for those who want meat and trophies without getting too familiar with what's inside, or what that elk ate for breakfast.

Then north and west into Colorado, all the way constantly reminded of the failure of the real estate economy, signs old and derelict "60 Acres Prime for Development", and shiny new and optimistic "36 Acre Horse Property with River Frontage."  None of it is selling, so the realtors are suffering.  As are the contractors who did all the fancy upgrades.  And the surveyors, carpenters, well drillers, title companies, mortgage brokers, and a whole host of tradesmen and laborers suddenly adrift, wondering when it turns, because it always turns, but this time it could be a long wait.

Cruise past Bayfield, just by the southern tip of Durango, and swing west, skirting the south end of the San Juan range.  Then at Mancos we head north along the Dolores (sorrows) River, past Stoner (gotta love it) and Rico, then climbing hard and long, fourth gear, then third, my six cylinder Tundra straining against the grade, and the mountains bleed iron oxide red above the tree line. We top out on Ophir pass, then drop precipitously down the switchbacked highway, and finally a hard right as we move into the local traffic pulling into Telluride.

The road part is over, but the trip is just beginning.

Quotidian be damned.

The Sofa

Yesterday we cashed in on a Craig's List find, and brought a new sofa home from Santa Fe.  Lightly used, and an elegant cognac leather, it is a fitting replacement to the green leather monster that we have been living with since the mid-90s in Milwaukee.  Worn and somewhat stained, our old sofa maintained however that classic Taos shabby chic, as Deborah likes to phrase it.  But it was tired.  It was time.

I remember when it was new, bought (on sale of course) at the Boston Store, as a replacement for the first ever sofa we had bought together when we were living in Chicago.  What is now a soft mellow green color was at the time evergreen, with tan trim that bordered on gold.  When the movers were carrying it into the house, up to the second floor TV room, they were all like, hey, Paaackers colors, cooool.  Almost enough to convince me to send it back, but I ignored the cheesehead adoration and moved on.

How many nights on that sofa, the year that Deborah did the summer abroad in Italy, pouring bronze and throwing clay while I did the corporate thing back home in Wisconsin?  Of course I had the cat, Diva, to keep me company, and a few years later Deborah and I would be sitting on that same sofa when Diva had a stroke and started literally chasing her own tail.  She had to be put down, and we came home and cried on the sofa, but the sofa probably doesn't remember that.

Then there were the evenings and weekends spent reading while Deborah was at university finishing her MFA.  Likewise for her all the nights when my corporate gig had me on the road a hundred thousand miles a year or more.  Maybe that was when the newness began to fade a little, the green began to mellow, the first stains and a cat scratch or two arrived, especially after Diva was followed by two new cats, Io and Vega, rescued from a Brookfield, Wisconsin shelter.

Both the cats and the sofa made the trip across the pond to Belgium with us, the cats learning to speak both French (le mieu) and Flemish (het meouw).  And the sofa comforted me as my dad was back in the US dying of cancer, and wrapped me in its cushions when he was gone and my sleep seemed to have left with him.  And then of course the sofa was where we sat and watched the horror that was 9/11, four thousand miles from home, and our embassy surrounded by razor wire and tanks, and all the comings and goings at the Belgian Foreign Ministry down the block from our apartment.  The world changed then, but it would be a while before we all knew how much.

And when I quit the corporate gig and we moved to Taos, the sofa came with us, anchored us in our new space, welcomed the familiar cats, and then our first dog, Banshee, who was too scared for two years to get on the sofa with us, and two years later her playmate, Neruda, who took the sofa over like he owned the place.  And the sofa was where we watched the progression of the 2008 campaign, and where we sat with fifteen of our friends (okay not all of us were on the damned sofa but you get the idea) when the election was called for Obama and all fifteen of us wept and cheered and swayed in front of the TV.

That's a lot of life for a sofa.  Any sofa.  Like a good friend, I will be sad to see it go.  But another friend is going to take it, so we know it will have a good home, and may even get to visit with it from time to time and reminisce.

Because it was time.  But, oh, what a time it was.

Ciao Colombo

In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue...

And the rest, as they say, is history.  A history, however, that has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and has been reinterpreted by many in a less than favorable light.  Not that there isn't adequate room for a reassessment of the blind adulation that was proffered in my youth, Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, flat world, over the edge, sea monsters, and all the regalia of myth.  From the perspective of the First Peoples, I can understand how "Columbus Invades America" is not exactly a headline that makes you want to fire up the barbie and toss back a few tall frosties.  Sort of like celebrating the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Twin Towers.  But then this is the year Two Thousand and Ten.

So let's take a trip with Mr. Peabody in the way-back machine, to Nineteen Hundred and and Sixty.  That's right Sherman, it's fifty years ago, and a bald ex-general named Eisenhower is in the White House, nattering on about the dangers of the military-industrial complex (indeed it was he who coined the term).  Ironic that a military man who led the might of battleship America against the evil that was fascism, a Republican to boot, should have raised the frightening specter of the nexus between corporate money and foreign policy, but there it is.  Still, I digress.  We were in the waning days of a presidential campaign between the sitting Vice-president (before he became Tricky) and an upstart Senator from Massachusetts (before he became Camelot).

And I would have been in third grade, Mrs. Carney's class, at Tatnuck Elementary in Worcester, Massachusetts (which should give you a good idea of my cheering interests in the presidential campaign).  Public school.   Those were the days when, after the pledge of allegiance was still pledged every morning with the "under god" prominently displayed (actually under god was only added on June 14, 1954, as blow back against those godless commies), Mrs. Carney would read to us from the Bible (the King James Version, as it turns out, as she explained to me after I was particularly moved by her reading of the Twenty-third Psalm).  Yessir, god and country and Columbus, nearly as big a hero as the Pilgirms, good anglo-saxon stock who happened to land in my state which made them eminently cooler than a bunch of ex-cons under an Italian captain bankrolled by a Spanish queen, but, yet again, I digress.

My point is, if I have to have one, is that not everybody figured the world was flat, even in 1492.  Although there are outliers who still cleave to this theory (and others who believe dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time as man, but that's another story), Eratosthenes, a Cyrene living in Ptolemaic Egypt, not only understood the world was round, but in 240 BCE calculated the circumference within a 1% error.  Columbus had trouble in Italy raising money for his maritime adventurism, because the Pope had his own problems.  So, he convinced Queen Isabella of Spain, who was feeling flush having just reunited her country, and expelled both the Muslims and the Jews, to pony up the cash for a classic money grab, looking to shortcut the sea route to the spice islands of the Indies.  What the hell: three ships and some token crews; not too bad a bet against a lifetime supply of cinnamon and cardamom.

And Columbus, clear on the round earth notion, but a little off on his estimate of the circumference (should of talked to Eratosthenes, but he'd already been dead for seventeen hundred years) ran smack into the new world.  He of course didn't know it was a new world.  And the First Peoples who he found here (found, not discovered - they knew they were here, but weren't so clear about where he came from), had not been adequately apprised of all the benefits about to be bestowed upon them (forced conversion and disease come readily to mind) or they might've helped him across the Central American isthmus (how in the hell did Amerigo Vespucci get his name on two continents, and Columbus gets DC?) and hurried him on his way towards China.

Anyhow the point is Columbus got it wrong, but ended up being a hero.  Then still a hero, but not so much.  And then not a hero at all to some, but still a hero to others.  Fifty years ago we had an entirely different (and less nuanced) view of the man and his accomplishments.  We also had different views about school prayer, racism, sexism, space flight, and the odds on the Boston Red Sox ever winning another World Series (finally happened in 2004 for those of you keeping score at home).  When I was a kid I idolized the Lone Ranger, who had his own very ambiguous relationship with the First Peoples.  Didn't make me a bad kid, or the Lone Ranger a bad man.  We were products of our times, as Columbus was of his.

Which makes any judgements we render today subject to review and revision.  We pays our nickel and takes our chances.  Even W could end up a hero in somebody else's story.

The Definite Article

To cover the ground from tree to tree

an infinity of words to move from a to the.

Imagine a tree.  Any tree.  Better yet plop yourself down in the yard next to some glorious specimen or some pathetic twig.  Now describe it.  Maybe it's sort of like those charts that we used in grade school for classifying trees: evergreen or deciduous, pinnate or foliate, rounded leaves or pointed, green or red.  Ah, got it: Japanese Maple.  But even with that the intent was never to identify a specific tree, only a type, a family.

Like classifying your neighbor as homo sapiens when what we are really trying to relate is Bob, the plumber, the guy with a wife who makes the best blueberry pie in three counties, and an only child who struggles in school but he hopes it's because of some as yet undefined learning disability, but nothing has been found not yet, and he can't really afford the tests they want to do because he's a couple of weeks late already on the mortgage since his business slowed down, and he got a bad review on Angie's List when he lost the clutch in his truck and showed up late at that rich widow's house and then he thought she was coming on to him but he ignored her because he'd never cheated on his wife in seventeen years of marriage, had never even been tempted, well maybe a little bit, a couple of times maybe.  What was I saying?

As a poet, I struggle mightily with the definite article, the attempt to take something from the general to the specific.  The trouble with getting specific is figuring out what is enough, when I have given sufficient information, without venturing over the line into too much.  Beating the dead horse, as it were.

See, I cheated there, lacking something clear and fresh, I used a cliched phrase as shorthand, something that we have all agreed on as having a generally understood meaning, even though very few of us have horses anymore, fewer still have ever beat one, live or dead.

This for me is one of the fundamental breakdowns of language: the inability to allow some other to understand what I am thinking, what I am feeling, or even what I am seeing.  If we are standing together in some sun-drenched field on a late fall afternoon, with a single aspen quaking golden in the soft breeze with just a hint of a moisture and decay in the air, and a thin layer of lavender from somewhere unseen, then we can agree on the tree.  That one.  The one in front of us quaking.  But how do I make you understand that tree from a remove, through the intermediary of language?

Which is why at times to overcome the remove of language, we have to lose the words and experience the tree in all its treeness.  No amount of words can bridge that existential gulf, so give it up.  Sit there and  let the tree be, and take that in.  If you define it, you lose it.

Now, that's I what I want to capture on the page, the thingness of things being what they are.  Being is not intrasitive, it is active.  Being does not "is" being bes, every molecule and spinning electron dancing its necessary dance.

Which is why a tree is so much less demanding than the tree.  But as a poet I want to get to the.

Rabbit Brush

Rabbit brush in bloom:

pinon yields beneath the axe,

leaves still air perfumed.

After the season of chili roasting that you can taste on the air, the roar of propane flames in every grocery store parking lot, and just before the morning air is smudged with the subtle perfume of pinon fires heaped in hearths against the gathering cold, rabbit brush goes to bloom.  Then I know it is fall, time to get in a load of firewood (we burn around three cords every winter), climb to the roof to play chimney sweep, compost the gardens for the deep sleep ahead.  

Fall has always been my favorite season.  Maybe it's the quality of the light, more suffused with yellow, the hard cut shadows from low-angled sun.  Or perhaps it's the extra layer in the morning, not quite necessary yet, but welcome somehow, particularly for a man never terribly comfortable with his shirt off (hell, I never even liked short sleeves, spending the summer cruising Cape Cod in my '68 Cougar, doing arm presses against the door panel to add badly need heft to my skinny arms).  But mostly just the change of pace as everything slowed a bit around me, and my step moved up-tempo a notch in contra-indication.  

Last night Deborah and I went to an art opening at the Stables in Taos, for a show titled Seed 2.  All of the work is related in some manner to seeds and germination, or at least with a vegetal hint.  But my favorite part was the interactive children's exhibit in the back where all things seed were on display.  They had a grouping of popular products from Quaker Oats to soy sauce, each accompanied by a small pile of the seeds from which they originated (which had the side benefit of highlighting how little food makes it into so much packaging).  On a table were bottles of different seeds to be shaken and listened to for timbre and sonority.  Or the mesh topped containers of ground spices to be smelled and (potentially) identified.  Overall the work this year was high quality and beautifully executed, and it was good to visit with my friend Linda Michel-Cassidy who was invited this year (wish I had brought my camera!).  

Intriguing to me the idea that the dissolution of Fall contains within it the engines of regeneration: the hollyhocks will reincarnate someday along the adobe wall, the mexican hat will find a way back to days of burgundy and saffron waving in the sun, and the last of the marigolds defiant still the against the creeping chill will slumber through the coming snow dreaming of germination.  

Mostly in Fall I remember my days back east, when the sugar maples would explode in orange and red, hillsides glowed in golden rod, and the last of the queen anne's lace cast finely filigreed shadows as they shivered in the stiffening wind.  Or long walks on abandoned Cape Cod beaches, a lone fisherman or two on Craigville Beach still casting for blues, as the afternoon shadows lengthened and a sudden gust carried the scents of seaweed and salt, driving chill sand against the windshield of my car already pitted by so many similar seasons.  And the tides washed away all my sins.  

Morning awaits, as does wood to be stacked, some to be split.  Somewhere nearby I hear a maul calling my name. 

Beginning

More years ago than I would like to contemplate, I came across the poetry of Robinson Jeffers in one of those Sierra Club picture books that were so popular for coffee tables, for those of us who had coffee tables, or anything more than the blocks and boards chic that was at the time so de rigeur.  Whatever the decor, the photographs were, I believe, Weston, the Big Sur coast, and the poetry pure and brutal, unvarnished, an homage to chthonic gods: "The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those / That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant."

Although I then qualified (and most would say still do) in the latter category, a mericiful friend made me a gift of Robinson Jeffers Selected Poems, a small paperback that I would carry with me for years.  Dog-eared and yellowed with age, Jeffers still speaks to me through its pages, the dark voice of the apocalypse; just the right tonic then for a brooding twenty-something, and seems appropriate now to the times in which we find ourselves adrift.

For Jeffers, in his poetry, was not a cheery sort, part Nietzschean ubermensch, part nature worshipper, all bathed in the brooding mists and thundering surf of the pre-Esalen Institute Carmel coast.  In a time of wars  hot and cold, and an overweening national hubris spawned by martial successes, Jeffers offered a counterpoint to popular opinion.  Not necessarily the voice of reason, but reasoned, and principled.

So, as I, effete snob (thank you Spiro) that I am, make a tepid attempt at throwing thoughts into the electronic aether, I return to Jeffers and to his poem "Hurt Hawks," for the title to this incipient blog.  Because I believe that inside each of us is something fierce and noble that we would protect from the "curs of the day" that torment us.  In this space I will talk ideas and books, natter about politics and poetry, but more often than not blather on about the weather outside my window, and the mortal splendors of the passing seasons.

For, as Hugh Prather opined (in Notes to Myself) "Ideas are straight- / but the world is round, and a / messy mortal is my friend. / Come walk with me in the mud. . . . ."

Indeed...