Wishing Like Fishing   Friday, January 20, 2012





Another random collection of black and white photos this week, some straight, some with a little process thrown in. Actually, I'm looking for the JPEGS for the photos I have hanging at The Foundry in response to an inquiry about them. It seems I have them in onesies and twosies scatter throughout my image files. I decided to use that search to pick up some pictures for this post.

Also, I complete my "Sonyador series" of 30 very short stories, which began two posts ago, with this post. I began the process because I felt I needed a challenge, in this case writing a story a day for 30 days. I found it to be much more difficult than the poem a day I had been doing.

I had no idea where the series would go when I wrote the first one. In fact, at that point I hadn't made the decision to make it a series rather than just 30 unrelated stories. But I liked the little boy character I created in the first story and decided to do a series centered around him. I named the boy "Sonyador" - Spanish for "dreamer." By about the third story, it came to me that "dreamer" is not just something one is, it also describes something one does. From that it came to me that the narrative would make more sense if its driven by the dreamer's dreams. With that in mind, I wrote the last story while working on the fourth, figuring out along the way each story as a movement to the end.

Anyway, it was an interesting challenge and I am very please, perhaps inordinately, but then I wasn't convinced when I started that I could write a story a day for 30 days. And they even turned out Okay.

In addition to the stories, I also have some poems from my second eBook, Goes Around,Comes Around.

And, of course, my regular posse of fine poets from my library

Here's all I have this week


Deborah Slicer
I Love the Black Cat
Bitterroot Valley Nocturne
Thinking of Kierkegaard

Me
it’s a fine day today

Jose Marti
Errant Love

Me
Spider Bite (Sonyador series)

Richard Sale
Eva Mae’s Daughter
Lyrics for a Woman’s Voice

Me
admiring the dark

Mairym Cruz-Bernal
The Light of the Moon
A Taste of Irony
Black Sun”

Me
The Birds (Sonyador series)

B. H. Fairchild
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
Hearing Parker for the First Time
The Passing of Jesus Freaks from the College Classroom
A Starlit Night

Me
day 24,387 and counting

Kay Ryan
Flamingo Watching
Vacation

Me
Wishing Like Fishing (Sonyador series)

Margaret Randall
Left Handed

Me
habits of mercy

Rainer Maria Rilke
From The Sonnets to Orpheus
sonnets “XXI” “XXIII” “XIII” and “IX”

Me
Slip-Sliding Away (Sonyador series)

James Richardson
Northwest Passage
Classic Bar Scenes

Me
somewhere out there

Paul Muldoon
Moy Sand and Gravel
The Braggart
The Breather
An Old Pit Pony

Me
Flying (Sonyador series)

Ron Slate
Krushchev’s Foot

Me
the Hawaiian shirt plan

Me
Sasha (Sonyador series)

Me
the liberal godless socialist media will never tell you this…

Me
Even Dreams Must Someday End (Sonyador series)









I start the week with poems by Deborah Slicer. The poems are from her book The White Calf Kicks, published in 2003 by Autumn House Press.

Slicer earned a PhD and an MFA at the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She taught at the University of Montana and the Hawthorne School, and currently lives near Missoula where she has been involved with the Missoula Writing Collaborative.



I Loved the Black Cat

Who stayed in the woodshed with me
During sudden summer thunderstorms late at night.

I miss the man who stayed in our house
Afraid, but I think I did not love him

So much as I loved that cat.
Darkness came undone at seams of lightning.
Black cat sat. Still.

You know how wind leaps on top of a bull pine's back, rides it nearly to the ground?

Well, cat just flared his leather nose a little,
Paws Buddha-tucked.
Watched on.

When thunder cracked it's thirty knuckles,helved its three ffree fists, when rain spat
   at us -

Cat snuffed - Pfsss -
So what?

Some storms were so sudden and spectacularly
Terrible,I'd run half-dressed to the woodshed from our house,

Where I'd find my black cat
Staring down my terrible,
When the man inside the house could not.


Bitterroot Valley Nocturne

Late this afternoon Lasko's old white watchdog,neglected
for centuries, walked away from the sheep she'd been keeping.
While their muzzles were deep in hay drifts
she pressed her head against the barbed wire, as I whispered:
puppy, puppy, unmatting the frozen hair over her blue eyes,
so she could finally
close them.

And under my feet I felt the taut skin of the earth
go slack.

^^^^^^^^^^

In early winter these brittle brown foothills of the Sapphire Mountains
remind me off the little sleep scabs
I wanted to brush, gently with my middle finger,
from a friend's eyelashes as he talked about how he'd follow his estranged wife
anywhere to hold his just nursed daughter at bedtime,
the weight of her like a sack of loose pearls.
For him she is the nearest neighbor's light I look for over at Laughing,
three miles east across these blueing late-day fields,
and in white-outs when the west wind throws whole horse pastures of snow
   overhead,
wishing it were young again.

^^^^^^^

At five it's nearly dark in the direction of the Sapphire Mountains.
Someone bends over our hemisphere to see that we're all right,
blocking the light,
who could it be?


Thinking of Kierkegaard

I've never told you that you talk in your sleep,
how I steal poetry from you
as you dream.
I never told you about the woman who calls each evening,
how strained her soft voice is,
that I'm writing a story
imagining your infidelity.

Your shoes are two dark holes
I would never step into,
though I might whisper into that abyss
now and then.
Trust is a very high trestle.

You walk it on a dare
in front of an audience,
and it's the idiot who does not tremble, even though
the sky is the most innocent blue,
and there is just wind, your hair, a brid calling into the gorge.





Photo by Dora Ramirez-Itz




I decided this week I would use some of the poems from my second eBook, Goes Around, Comes Around, published last year.

This is my first selection.



it's a fine day today

it's a fine day
today

the sun shines
on all of us, children
of the bright...

it's a fine day,
today

three pages
of dead people in the paper -
only five younger than me
and one of those
i think
was lying...

a fine day
today,
three pages of dead people
in the paper

and none of them was
me...





(My father and mother, a couple of years before I was born, photographer unknown)




My next poem is from a new (to me) book I bought at the half-priced bookstore this week. The book is Ismaelillo by 19th century revolutionary JOse Marti. My copy of the book, written by Marti for his three year son, was published in 2007 by Wings Press of San Antonio. The original edition of the book was published in Spanish in 1882 in New York. My book is a bilingual edition, with Spanish and English text on facing pages, translated by Tyler Fisher.

Marti was born in 1853 and was killed in battle in 1895. He continues to be a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. He was also a part of the Cuban Freemasons. Through his writings and political activity, he became a symbol for Cuba's bid for independence against Spain in the 19th century, and is referred to as the "Apostle of Cuban Independence." He also fought against the threat of United States expansionism into Cuba. From adolescence, he dedicated his life to the promotion of liberty, political independence for Cuba and intellectual independence for all Spanish Americans; his death was used as a cry for Cuban independence from Spain by both the Cuban revolutionaries and those Cubans previously reluctant to start a revolt.



Errant Love

In search of you
I cross the seas:
My son, the good waves
Take me to you.
Cooling breezes
Cleanse my flesh
Of maggots
From the cities;
But I am sad,
for I can shed
My blood for none
Upon the seas.
Then what to me
Are waves unvaried,
Windswept clouds
Like flying jewels,
The gentle antics
Of the air,
The wrathful voice
Of Hurricane?
The mind was made
To master these!
to tame the wanton,
Fleeting kiss
Of pleasant, little breezes -
My bloodless cheeks
Forever crave
An endless kiss!
And who is sought
With eager panting
By the angel
Pale and white,
That spreads his wings
Upon my chest
And feeds and shelters
Weary ones?
And who is wrapped
Within his wings,
My errant love's soft,
Cloud-like wings?
The skies and seas
Are free of slaves,
And I can shed
My blood for none.

Thus weeps the angel
Pale and white:
He weeps for envy
Of the sky
That covers all
With mottled clouds!
He gathers up
His snowy wings
To shield his anguished
Face within: -
And in the fragrant,
Confused world
That opens in
The deepest shade,
In solemn silence
Bloom colossal
Flowers everlasting,
And on the backs
Of giant birds
Awaken kisses
Never-ending -
There another
Angel rises,
Smiling and alive.








Here's the first Sonyador story for the week, number 24 in the series.



Spider Bite

Dad died when Sonny was 15 years old.

Out chopping cedar for fence posts, a spider bite, a big, black, spot of dead flesh on his leg in three hours, and dead himself in two days.

Dad had a lot of friends, packing the funeral parlor then the church’s gathering room for food after the burying.

Mom and Conch and Sonny were by themselves. Tug had quit his job and left his wife and baby six months ago, went off to Nashville to try to be a country singer. Said he'd be back, but so far, the family hadn’t heard from him, nothing at all to his wife, to Sonny or Conch or even Mom. No one knew where he was; had no way to contact him and tell him about Dad.

So it was up to Sonny.

And he did his best, helping Mom through the service and after. Greeting all Dads’ friends, accepting their condolences; those friends a great help to him. Dad was friends with a lot of people and was admired most who knew him. They all came to pay their respects, tell stories about the times they had with Dad, about the times Dad helped them when were down and need of a couple of dollars or a favor or a sympathetic ear. They wanted to make sure Mom knew they were there to help if help was needed.

“Just a call,” they all said, each in their own way. “Just call us for anything and we’ll be here before you can put down the phone.”

Dad had life insurance with the company where he worked, so even though money would be tight for the family, it wouldn’t be desperate. And Sonny and Conch could both help out. Conch had Sonny’s old job at the Pretts’ grocery store and Sonny had two grocery store jobs, a job every afternoon as a cashier at a bigger grocery store on Main Street and a Saturday job as a bag boy at a supermarket in the town next over. And he also had his own business doing yard work for folks around town.

The family never had really good times, and the times from then on weren't going to be that much worse than they had been before.

It was hard for everyone, special hard for Sonny, not just because he missed his Dad, but also because, even with the three jobs, he was determined to stay in school.

And he did, worked his jobs and worked his school, good enough, at least to make it to the end. And he figured at fifteen that if he could do that at his little high school, he could do it in college as well.

And no one bet against him, cause everyone knew, Sonny had a knack for work and a knack for finishing what he started.








I have two poems now by Richard Sale from another book I picked up at the half-price book store. The book, The Tortilla of Heaven, was published by the University of North Texas Press in 1990. A dedication to the initial purchaser of the book by the poet suggests the two might have been close, which would account for the almost "fresh off the press" condition of the book more than 20 years after publication.

I can find no current information on the poet, but, at the time of publication of this book (his third), he was Professor of English at the University of North Texas, where he had taught since since 1965. After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Civilization and Literature in Morocco in 1963-64. He was the first Director of UNT's Creative Writing Program (1989-1990 edited the journal Texas Books in Review. He was the founding editor-publisher of the Trilobite Press and wrote text for musical compositions in addition to his poetry.



Eva Mae's Daughter

After she had braved the cold hardwood floors,
had perked the coffee and done her exercises,
while I lay in guilty half-sleep, so slowly unswelling,
wanting the cigarette a short arm's length away,
lying in bed again,
Eva Mae's daughter said,
Who do all children hate hot cereal?

Well, I tell you, my heart leaped up at that.
She said, I ask those kids at the art school
if they like hot cereal and they always say no.
My heart leaped up some more.
She said, But they never take it from there,
they don't want to know why.

Now more than awake and hugging the hot coffee mug
like a bowl os steaming porridge,
I said, I am well pleased.
And you should be well pleased, too,
just for digging up that universal.
And then I said, to hide my heart leaping up,
Please, ma'am, can I have some more coffee?

She knew that it was good again and said,
Say: Earth Mother, may I?


Lyrics for a Woman's Voice

    1. Wishes Pour Across the Water

Wishes pour across the water
As sequins of the sun.
the green bay flashes jumping fish.
The clear sky stretches past tomorrow.
You might think it beautiful:
It is the loneliest sight in the world.

    2. Flesh Trap

My body aches with body,
This heaviness pulls me down,
Pulls me down past the lower angels,
Down past the heart and spirit,
Pulls me down to the bottom circle,
Down to body, down to heavy flesh.

    3. The Other Side of Absurdity

In the rain and this barren country,
It is all right today.
Everything is exactly right.
I've already finished my dinner of truth,
and everything is exactly right
On this false, this perfect, happy day.

    4. Circe's Song

Easy, take it easy, manny,
Got the wine, got the sun.
What's the work that's calling, manny?
Got the wine, got the sun.
Early morning's shining fancy
(Morning's not the only one).
Easy, take it easy, manny,
Got the wine, got the sun.

    5. Ballad

My father was a pretty man,
My mother kind and brave.
My father's in another land,
My mother's in the grave.

My lover's like a turtle-dove;
My lover's brave and kind.
My lover's found another love,
And I read my mother's mind.








Here's a second poem from my book, Goes Around, Comes Around.



admiring the dark

the dark is
staying dark
longer every night

as July
heads for the back door
and August

impatiently
taps its fiery little feet
our front, waiting...

I enjoy
the dark in the morning,
eating breakfast

by the big window,
looking out to the dark
of night waning,

watching
the new day gathering
in the east

just a hint
a bare little shadow of light
remembered

almost lost in the ambient glow
of clouds softly-lit
from below

by the city's night
illuminations,
clouds always glowing

from below
in a city of a million and a half people
fearful of the dark -

porch lights
lit all night, motion lights
flashing bright

with every rustle of leaves
by the wind,
every twitter of a bird -

street lights,
security lights, night lights
that let us sleep

in semi-dark, certain
that whatever evil lurks
outside the luminance we wrap

around our sleeping body
will be as frightened
by the light as we are by the dark

since
fire-tenders
maintained the flames

that kept us safe at night
from the earliest history
of our kind...

meanwhile,
sitting in my well-lit cafe,
typing in the glow of computer electrons,

I admire the beauty of the night
while looking past the dark
to each pool of light around me

calculating the distance between pools, clocking
how quickly I could race in the dark from
one bright pool to the next

if I had
to








Here's a poem by Mairym Cruz-Bernal, from her book,Oh He Face the Light of La Luna, published by Provincetown Arts Press in 1997.

A Puerto Rican poet, translator, and essayist, Cruz-Bernal was born in 1963. She has a BA in Psychology from Loyola University and an MFA from the writing program at Vermont college. Since this book she has published other books, all them translated in numerous languages.

Though she normally writes in both Spanish and English, this was her first book where all the poems (except two) were written originally in English. The other two were written in Spanish and translated to English by the poet.

I begin with the book's title poem.



The Light of the Moon

The little girl crawls to the glass.
She sees and image and laughs and says titi.
That primitive language communicates her wholly.
She looks at the portrait of the baby
hanging on the wall across from the mirror
and laughs and says titti.
She doesn't know that both are her,
that she is someone.
What is reflected in the mirror
is enough for her to laugh and play,
but she knows that the one in the mirror
is the same as the one in the portrait.
She feels I am important to her.
Whenever a stranger comes she hugs my legs,
hiding, until she gets used to the image
of a new human or animal. Everything that moves is the same.
The other night I showed her la luna,
unmoving, round, among all the little lights.
She learned what la luna is.
She goes outside, when it's night,
and with her finger pointing up
she looks at me and smiles and stays still.
On her face the light of la luna.
Now when I want to calm here,even in daytime,
I say la luna and she looks at me. I tell her,
yes, it's there, but the very light of the sun
keeps it from us, but yes it's there,
look, somewhere in the sky.


A Taste of Irony

Since this morning I have a feeling you could taste,
a bitterness on the sides of your mouth.
I woke up from a dream I can't remember.

I have had my hair cut short and a perm to curl it.
I had a striped short dress with no bra on. I hated bras.
I still do. That sensation of feeling the clothes
pressed to my fourteen-year-old nude breasts felt good
and satisfying. Standing in the kitchen, preparing lunch,
he came in and saw me with my new look,
you are so ugly I doubt very much you will ever marry.
I don't think anyone will fall in love with you
Suffering alone, I felt stripped by invisible hands,
defense after defense, garment after garment,
until I was stark naked.
I had to put my lunch inside the refrigerator.

This scene was lived again a month after I met the man
who was to be my husband. I was still in that trance
of hypnotic stare, in love, where things turn blurry.
He came into the house, That man, such an important person,
what would he want from you, you have nothing to offer him,
not a woman enough to be with a man like that.

But I knew the taste of that instant.


Black Sun

I am left alone
to clean the dishes,
to fix the bed
and take the dirt out of this place.

Left on this rainy morning of September,
to think out loud of my whereabouts
and drink some coffee with my soul.

I am alone with this black sun
in a solo piece of music with the rain.
Entirely for myself, to play with my old dolls.
I empty my face of all human reminders
to learn to be a part of the larger farce.








More Sonyador, number 25 of 30.



The Birds

Sonyador, seven last month, sits in the grass in front of his house as the sun begins to fall, in front of the old barrack his dad rebuilt, drinking chocolate milk, his before bed treat for the night, and watches the grackles gather in the tree by the street. Hundreds of the birds, flying in, finding a place on a branch, cackling and shrilling and crawing in disharmony. Then, all at once, as one, flying up from the tree, a black cloud of birds, cackling, rising up, then all together, swarming left, swarming right, then alighting again, all as one, the tree covered in a black feather blanket of birds.

And Sonyador looks at this and wonders, how is it possible for all of them to do all this at once, rise up, turn like a black wave left, then right, then down again.

There must be a boss bird, he thinks, a leader bird that tells all the other birds what to do, when to do it, so they’re always all as one, the one of all the hundreds, the leader who takes them where, somewhere he knows in his brain like he knows when to rise, knowing when, some second clicking clock in black head knowing when to rise, when to turn, and passes it on to all the other birds who do as he says, do as he thinks.

Sonyador thinks it might be good to be the boss bird.








Next, I have three poems by B.H.Fairchild, from his book Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, published in 2003 by W.W. Norton.

Fairchild was born in Houston and grew up in small towns in the oil fields of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, later working through high school and college for his father, a lathe machinist. He taught English and Creative Writing at California State University, San Bernardino and Claremont Graduate University.

As of 2011, it has been announced that Fairchild will teach at The University of North Texas.

I start with the book's title poem.



Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father's Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road,
this road. Roustabouts shouting form the crow's nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky,cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford's blue hood. Blue, this blue.

Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time's dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.


Hearing Parker the First Time

The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wires in tones less strange than the bird songs

of Charlie Parker. I played high school tenor sax the way,
I thought, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young might have
if they were like me, untalented and white, but Ornithology
came winding up from the dark delta of blues and dixieland

into my room on the treeless and hymn-ridden high plains
like a dust devil spinning me into the Eleusinian mysteries
of the jazz gods though later I would learn that his long
apprenticeship in Kansas City and an eremite's devotion

to the hard rule of craft gave him the hands that held
the reins of the white horse that carried him to New York
and 52nd street, farther form wheat fields and dry creek beds
than I would ever travel, and then carried him away.


On the Passing of Jesus Freaks from the College Classroom

They seemed to come in armies, whole platoons
uniformed in headbands, cut-off jeans,
butt-long hair that fell down in festoons,
and their grins were the ends that justified the means.

But one was different. And alone. His wrist tattoo
cried FATHER on a severed heart that bled.
His arms hung limp as vines, his nails were blue,
his silence was the chorus of the dead.

"Are you saved?" they asked. "Saved from what," I said.
"The flames of hell, your rotten sinful past,
your thing for Desdemona," for we had read
the tragedies, and Othello was the last.

"What's Iago's motive? Was he just sinful?
They thought they knew but waited for a hint.
He raised his hands and wept, "Evil, fucking Evil."
And he meant it. And he knew what he meant.


This fella's voice makes me feel like home. I'm going to do another poem, even though I had only planned to do three.


A Starlit Night

All over America at this hour men are standing
by and open closet door, slacks slung over one arm,
staring at wire hangers, thinking of taxes
or a broken faucet or their first sex: the smell
of back-seat Naugahyde, the hush of a maize field
like breathing, the stars rushing, rushing away.

And a woman lies in an unmade bed watching
the man she has known twenty-one, no,
could it be? twenty-two years, and she is listening
to the polonaise climbing up through radio static
from the kitchen were dishes are piled
and the linoleum floor is a great, gray sea.

It's an A-flat polonaise she practiced endlessly,
never quite getting it right, though her father,
calling from the darkened TV room, always said,
"Beautiful, kiddo!" and the moon would slid across
the lacquered piano top as if it were something
that lived underwater, something from far below.

they both came from houses with photographs,
the smell of camphor in closets, board games
with missing pieces, sunburst clocks in the kitchen
that made them, each morning, a little sad.
they didn't know what they wanted, every night,
every starlit night of their lives, and now they have it.





(My father before his death in 1980, photographer unknown)




One must always look to the sunnyside. This, another poem from my eBook published last year, Goes Around, Comes Around.



day 24,387 and counting

another
day
another
dollar,
a million
days,
a million
dollars...

that's what the fella
down at the Happy Valley Home
told me...

and, depending
on your capacity for
long term planning,
that view can be very
encouraging,
even coming from the
Happy Valley Home cohort
who, if you choose,
can be seen as
not out of touch with reality
but living instead
in a greater reality
closed to the more prosaic
of us -

or not

as for me
I'm a believer in reality,
but only in romantic affairs -

when it comes to money,
I settle
for no less than the
wildest
fantasies

which is why
I am sure
I'm on the road to riches
every day

and while I may not get
the days I need
to get there all the way,
being on the road
to something good
is better
than being stuck
in the weeds
like a back-roads vagabond
with a flat tire
and no spare in the trunk

I'm a human being
of the American
persuasion
after all -

and, like my kind,
want to get
everything there is to et...

and expect, by god,
to get it! -

day 24,387
and counting







Made another trip to the used bookstore this afternoon, found six good poetry books for under $4 a piece.

The next couple of poems are from one of them, Flamingo Watching,published in 1994 by Copper Beech Press.

The poet is Kay Ryan and American poet and educator.

Ryan was born in San Jose, California, and was raised in several areas of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. After attending Antelope Valley College, she received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County, California, and has taught English part-time at the College of Marin in Kentfield.

She has published seven volumes of poetry and was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate, from 2008 to 2010. In 2011, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Again, I start with the book's title poem.



Flamingo Watching

Wherever the flamingo goes,
she brings a city's worth
of furbelows. She seems
unnatural by nature -
too vivid and peculiar
a structure to be pretty,
and flexible to the point
of oddity. Perched on
those legs,anything she does
seems like an act. Descending
on her egg or draping her head
along her back,she's
too exact and sinuous
to convince an audience
she's serious. The natural elect,
they think,would be less pink,
less able to relax their necks,
less flamboyant in general.
they privately expect that it's some
poorly jointed bland grey animal
with mitts for hands
whom God protects.


Vacation

It would be pleasant to walk
in Stonehenge or other places
that have rocks arranged on the
basis of a plan, or plans,
inscrutable to modern man;
to wander among grinders
sunk deep in sheep pastures
or simply set on top Peruvian grit;
to gaze up at incisors
no conceivable jaw could fit;
to stretch to be ignorant enough,
scoured to a clean vessel
as pure as the puzzle,vestal
to a mystery involving people,
but without the heat of people.





(My son,after his first over-the-fence home run, photographer unknown)




Sonyador series, poem 26.



Wishing Like Fishing

A year after his dad died, it seemed to Sonny that he was on a hard road with nothing he could see in the future to make it smoother and easier.

His mother was still working at the school cafeteria, full time now, where it had only been a couple of hours a day before Dad died. Tug’s whereabouts still a mystery, nothing heard from him now in nearly two years. His wife and daughter, Sonny’s sister-in-law and his niece gone, moved to California, to San Diego. The word had it that she found another man as was just waiting for her divorce to come through so she could marry him. And Conch, though only twelve, was beginning to show the same kind of wildness defiance that always got Tug in trouble.

And Sonny’s best friend, pretty much his only friend, Bangie had moved back East with his mother after his parents got divorced.

Sonny was sad sometimes, thinking of fishing with Dad, going on trips with Uncle Otto (Oh, how he still missed Uncle Otto and, oh, how he wished he was here to talk to.

But Sony remembered what Uncle Otto told him once, wishing was like fishing without bait, just a waste of time for people who didn’t want to do what needed to be done.





(My younger brother, my older brother, and me, a long time ago, photographer unknown)




It's a conincidence, but after my last library poet, Kay Ryan, with a poem about the mysterious heads on Easter Island, I have poems from a book of photographs and poems devoted entirely to Easter Island and those great rock sculptures.

The book is Their Backs to the Sea, published by Wings Press of San Antonio in 2009, by poet and photographer Margaret Randall.

Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. Born in New York City in 1936, she has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Her travels included shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam. In the 1960s she co-founded and co-edited El Corno Emplumaado/The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal for eight years'. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.

She lived among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, observed first had the Cuban revolution and Cuban culture from 1969-1980, the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project 1980-1984, and visit North Vietnam during the last months of the war in that country, publishing more than 80 books in the meantime.

In 1984, Randall came home to the United States, only to be ordered deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, judging opinions expressed in some of her books to be "against the good order and happiness of the United States." The Center for Constitutional Rights defended her and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She won her case in 1989.



Left-Handed

I

As I watch you, stone-carver ghosts,chipping away
at your mammoth blocks of basalt or tuff,
coaxing prominent noses, pursed lips,
etching decorated ears
and smoothing hollows
where eyes will store and shoot their mana
to a hungry populace,

as I watch you chisel the line of an arm, dropped
to the side, bent slightly forward
to faint shadow of loincloth
fingers reaching for mirrored fingers,
when I observe you,
hammers and polishing-stones in hand,
kneeling in the narrow troughs

whose rock still clings to rock and the giant figure
has yet to free itself,
begin its journey out of the quarry
down rocky slope to the platform
waiting by a vulnerable shore,
the ahu that will be its home
its back to the ferocious sea,

when I dream your rhythms, the focus of your eyes,
weeks or months to a single statue's birth
- long sheets of rain,
heightening the echo of your song,
hundreds working together
or ten or twelve -
I always wonder

if you left hand, like another's left foot
in a distant land
and years into future, or the words
that spill too soon from a troubled mouth
knew what had to be done
and how. Were you left-handed
is my question, one of many.

II

Right hemisphere walks out
across a field of volcanic rock
spewed and settled
before the rising of time.

Bare feet resist daggers
of hardened obsidian,
blood tangles with dry earth
as rhythm dulls pain.

Which side of the brain
designs your palm frond hat,
places a flower
behind your listening ear?





(My niece, recent recipient, the proud uncle must say, of a major league scholarship to a major league university)





This is another poem from my eBook Goes Around, Comes Around.



Habits of Mercy

I was thinking this
morning
about what I want to do
with the rest of my
life

and decided
it's the same thing
I want to do
with the rest of my
day -

kiss
my wife at least once or twice

eat
some good food

write
some good poems

sleep
a nice nap

communicate
with my better nature

& forgive myself
for all recent sins, known, as well as
secret, even to me

easier for some
than for
others, those

with no true love
to kiss -

no food to
eat -

no bed to sleep
in -

no poetry
in their soul -

those
with no key
to unlock the door to self, their
true self as unknown to them as
a stranger passing dark
on the street -

and most difficult of all for
those who can't find within
themselves
forgiveness of themselves

poor
miserable
ego-obsessed creatures that we are,
sinners almost from out first thoughts,
if we cannot forgive ourselves
how will we ever learn to forgive
others

and if we cannot forgive others,
how can we ever live
in this world
that needs cleansed hearts
as much as it needs clean air and water

habits of mercy
are what will save this world;
human sins
forgiven
by human sinners








Next, I have three pieces selected from The Sonnets to Orpheus, the full cycle of 55 poems written by Ranier Maria Rilke "as a grave-monument for Vera Ouckama Knoop," a young woman whose premature death greatly affected Rilke.

This collection was published in 1985 by Simon and Schuster, in the original German with English translation by Stephen Mitchell on the facing page.



XXI

Spring has returned. The earth resembles
a little girl who has memorized
many poems... For all the trouble
of her long learning, she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white
in the old man's beard and shaggy eyebrows.
Now, whatever we ask about
the blue and the green, she knows, she knows!

Earth, overjoyed to be out on vacation,
play with children. We long to catch up,
jubilant Earth. The happiest will win.

What her teacher taught her, the numberless Things,
and what lies hidden in stem and in deep
difficult root, she sings, she sings!


XXIII

Not till the when flight
no longer for its own sake ascends
into the silent heavens
propelled by its self conceit,

so that, in luminous outlines,
as the tool that has come to power,
it can float, caressed by the wings,
streamlined, agile, and sure -

not till a pure destination
outweighs the boyish boast
of how much machines caan do

will, overwhelmed with gain,
one to whom distance is close
be what alone he flew.


XIII

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Be forever dead n Eurydice - more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be - and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of yur own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself and cancel the count.


Once again, in wonderment, I do one more poem than I had intended.


IX

Only he whos bright lyre
has sounded in shadows
may, looking onward, restore
his infinite praise.

Only he who has eaten
poppies with the dead
will not lose ever again
the gentlest chord.

Though the image upon the pool
often grows dim;
Know and be still.

Inside the Double World
all voices become
eternally mild.








Story 27 in the Sonyador series of stories.



Slip-Siding Away

Sonny watches a young mother cuddle her baby, kiss its forehead, whisper, “love you, love you, love you,” blow softly on its belly.

He thinks of how warm and whole the baby must feel in its world of love and care and attention, and was jealous, wishes he could remember a time when he could remember such feelings. He knows his mother loved him, and his father had too, in his way, and thought they must have cuddled and kissed him the way the young mother enfolds her baby in unconditional love. He knows there must have been such times for him, thinking there might not have been was too terrible to think of. But he wishes he could remember.

But there was no cuddling, no loving now, a hot summer, a fourth job, working as a busboy and dishwasher at a hotel in the next town, three nights a week, 11 to 7. Then a couple of hours sleep, then summer school, then work until 7 at the grocery store downtown, except for Saturday when he worked all day at the supermarket down the street from the hotel where he worked on week nights, plus whatever time he could find to take care of his customers’ yardwork.

His algebra teacher told him he needed to learn how to work with a slide rule and though he doubted that was true (sliding sticks back and forth - what a stupid way to do math problems, he thought, like some kind of African tribe, the middle of the twentieth century, for crying out loud, Sputnik circling over head where you could see it on a clear night, talk of going to the moon - somebody was sure to come up with some better way to do calculations that sliding sticks back and forth).

So there it is two hours a day four days a week, sliding sticks back and forth in summer school, even though he’s sure it’s a waste of time learning how to do something that was probably going to be obsolete before he finished high school, or , at least before he finished college, doing it, wearing his slide rule on his belt like all the math nerds did whenever he was in Mrs. Fastenbinder ‘s class because she told him he ought to and he thought it was his responsibility to do what he ought to, even when he thinks it’s a waste of time.

Spending a lot of time in slide rule class wishing he had a girlfriend he could be with instead.








Next I have poems by James Richardson, from his book, a National Book Award Finalist, By the Numbers. The book was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010.

Richardson has published a number of books and received many poetry honors. He has taught at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Princton and Columbia. For the past 30 years he has lived in New Jersey.



Northwest Passage

That faint line in the dark
might be the shore
of some heretofore unknown
small hour.

The fir-scent on the wind
must be the forests
of the unheard of month
between July and August.


Classic Bar Scenes

1. Apollo at Happy Hour

Shoulders and faint sheen
of lotion, torsion,

loose dress sliding
over flanks of glass,

silks so utterly watery
splashing, as you click along the shine,
on left shin right shin, but alas

the chase is a tired
and tiring metaphor:

let's sit. It is
your Beauty that is omnipotent,

and I the god its constant
victim, automatic

as the keyboard you reach over
accidently typing with a breast
aaaaiiiyyyessssss,

as the copies you press
with a page and another page
that lights again and again your face.

Hear my song:
I will walk out of the 14th floor
and into your ear like a wireless call.

II. Ovidian Deposition

The bull or swan,
face rippling as it changes,
speaks,and for a long, long moment,
you can't tell luck from disaster.

He recited his exploits and cutting-edge features,
all the arts and countries he was lord of.

He was wasted, I think. He walked on the table.
He said his voltage was so out off control.

He said, Relax,what you're feeling is
the great experiences are genetic:
when they happen to you they do not happen to you.

To take the god was to lose the man.
To take the man was to die of the god.
Either might turn me into stone.

I got up For a refill
from the Heliconian well,
and texted from the parking structure
Hadda go...

Pygmalion among the Young

He could tell from their piston shots of laughter,
their bucking and surging
like someone leaning to drive stick,
their pretense and collapse,
their talking on two cells at once,

how they down strange solvents,
their voices sax-raw or helium-high,
how they take each other harshly,
grinding together like stones,
grinding alone like stones, that the young
have statues in them, tall white statues
they must dance out, drink to sleep, outspeed.

Like a finger under a line of type -
O god, slower than that -
their future comes, the party they're late for
where people are saying incredible shit about them
that they have to go to, and say, and say
like how it really is, so they pile in and floor it
till their backs stiffen and their faces change in the wind.

IV. Twilight of a God

That girl who drank from her hands
huge waters of wine,

and his awe,
was it? So that he surfaced,
his head in a little clear spot above the music

and a good bet was
that whatever happened next
wasn't going to happen to him.

Suddenly he wasn't the minor deity,
coat still on, in the corner booth,
smiling benevolently upon his children,

but a guy walking out, head down,
into the cold of an outer borough,
the signs unreadable, the age of Changes over.

Though aren't those still his angels
at the gold bar of Heaven
who lift glass trumpets to their lips?

V. Orpheus at Last Call

One of those dreams: you struggle and fail
for years
to dial a number, read a page, remember
not to look back...

(her hand confused in mine, soft struggle of a bird)

I've drunk so much
it rises in me: something like soft roots
parts softly
and my head sweeps down the singing river singing...

Apollo in Age

Spring,

        I am no good with pain.

Stop,

        I'll tell you anything.








There are lots of things in the world that could stand some serious rethinking. I ennumrate some of them in this poem from my eBook, Goes Around, Comes Around.



somewhere out there

this is serious business

somewhere
out there
interstellar star systems
are colliding

somewhere
out there
an alien race
of whoozidoozits
is going extinct as their
methane atmosphere
is slowly replaced
by megaterlagon oxygen farts

somewhere
out there
a spaceship full of
Baptist
is approaching
the water-planet
Abosion XII
for full-emersion
baptism

somewhere
out there
Pat Boone is thinking about
a comeback tour

somewhere
out there
a Republican
is suffering from delusions
of competency

somewhere
out there
a bunch of foreigners who don't
even speak English
are bouncing balls off their heads
and calling it
football

I mean
this is no damn time
for jokes
and silly faces








My next poems are by Paul Muldoon, from his book Moy Sand and Gravel. The book was published in 2002 byh Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Muldoon, an Irish poet, was born in 1951 He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 - 2004. At Princeton University he is both the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities and chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He is also the president of the Poetry Society of the U.K. and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.

Once again (it seems to be a habit this week) I begin with the book's title poem.



Moy Sand and Gravel

To come out of the Olympic Cinema and be taken aback
by how, in the time it took a dolly to travel
along its little track
to the point where two movie stars' heads
had come together smackety-smack
and their kiss filled the whole screen,

those two great towers directly across the road
at Moy Sand and Gravel
had already washed, at least once, what had flowed
or been dredged from the Blackwater's bed
and were washing it again, load by load,
as if washing might make it clean.


The Braggart

He sucked, he'll have you know,
the telltale sixth toe
of a woman who looked like a young Marilyn Monroe,

he hubby getting a little stroppy
when he found them there in the back of that old jalopy.
Other papers please copy.


The Breather

Think of this gravestone
as a long,low chair
strategically placed
at a turn in the stair.


An Old Pit Pony

An old pit pony walks
its chalks
across a blasted heath.

Its coat is a cloud hung on a line.

It sighs
for the pit-propped skies
of that world beneath.

Its coat is a cloud hung on a line.








Closing in on the end of my 30 days - 30 stories challenge. This is number 28.



Flying

Sonyador rides his bike faster and faster on the sandy road, the wind on his face blowing stronger and stronger and he feels like he might fly, might takeoff into the blue summer sky like a giant two-wheeled bird.

He feels like he could fly.








The last poet from my library this week is Ron Slate. His poem is from his book The Great Wave, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009.

Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. He received an MA in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973. His earlier collection The Incentive of the Maggot, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the Bakeless Poetry Prize and was a winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Slate has worked as a corporate speechwriter and as vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation.



Krushchev's Foot

Looming before us is the pale, tender,
childlike foot of Nikita Krushchev.
Size 7 or 8, "like a boy's" according
to Sergei, his son, on the lecture circuit.

A shoe meant a lot to a Russian foot,
something you'd tug off a frozen corpse.
A shoe meant a lot to a British head of state,
to tap a shoe on the rostrum in Parliament
expressed the highest degree of obstruction.

So when Khruschev slammed his shoe on a desk
in the U.N., it meant megatons to us
but just a parliamentary flourish to him,
designed to make P.M. Macmillan, orating
unmenorably, feel at home.

Such a delicate foot, veined and moist -
it makes me want to reveal a secret,
and expendable one, declassified.

One night when I was seven years old,
my father woke me at three A.M.
to scan the sky for the coming
of the satellite, Kruschev's star.
There was nothing to impede the view,
not a wisp of cloud. So small and sharp,
bristling with speed, and gone -

It was then I knew I wanted to be
something to admire. Maybe to fear.
Of course, the massing of mistrust
between father and son,
our standoff in the Divided City
had something to do with it.

Disclosed: the Premier told his aides
to place a shoe under his desk.
A single American penny loafer.
Agrarian reformer on a hot day in May,
he had walked into the General Assembly
wearing socks and sandals.

If a person's nature is harsh
and resolute, may it also keep us
vigilant and entertained.
Years later, the child may explain
exactly what the father meant to say.







It was a very hot summer last summer, as described in this poem from my book, Goes Around, Comes Around, published if I remember right in the middle of it.



the Hawaiian shirt plan

it's a kind of an
orange/yellow thing
with palm trees
and some kind of
liquor bottle
with sailing ships
o the label -

it's one of seven
Hawaiian shirts I bought
a couple of weeks ago -
the one I have on today

part of my new
strategy for facing
south Texas summer -

embrace it!

no more hiding
in my air conditioned house
for four months, tasting
unprocessed outside air
only for the time it takes
to get from my air conditioned
house to my air conditioned car...

instead
i will sweat, just
as one's supposed to
when it's 100 degrees
in 85 percent humidity

i will wear my salt-stained
Hawaiian shirts daily,
i will work at leas one hour
per day in my backyard
in the cinder-roasting sun
as lightly dressed as allowed
by law, my fish-white belly
will be brown like the pecans
that fall from the tree, my
feet will become summer rough
again, my hands black & bruised
from digging in the dark soil
and sharp caliche rock

I will be like the ancient people
who made their hard lives here,
among the cactus and hills,
rocky meadows, summer heat,
and north winds of winter

I will be seven years old again
when summer was my friend

i will be summer








And now, Sonyador story number 29. One more to go.



Sasha

Sonny sleeps and he dreams of the people he’s known.

But he stirs, comes slowly awake, realizes there’s someone in the room with him, someone standing beside his bed.

It's Sasha!

“Sasha,” he cries out.

“No sir,” she says. “I’m Gloria. I’m your nurse.”








Here's a last poem for this week from my eBook, Goes Around, Comes Around, available at lots of places, cheap, too.

A suitable piece for this political season of bumblers and fools.



the liberal godless socialist media will never tell you this...

the liberal, godless socialist media
will never tell you
this...

Barack Obama was born in a hospital
and has five toes
on each foot

Nancy Pelosi
brushes her teeth with
Pepsodent

Harry Reed
grew up in a Nevada desert
with sand
in his underpants

Hilary Clinton
was a Presbyterian
in her youth and while
in the White House
was very close to a number of
self-confessed
thespians

many Democrats
are white men who can't
dance

many other Democrats
are black people in possession of natural
rhythm
and great recipes for sweet-potato pie

some Democrat women
wear underpants and some
do not - unlike Harry Reed, none
of the Democrat women
who wear underpants have sand
in them

Ted Kennedy was
mortal - unlike Ronald
Reagan who will live forever
in the right-thinking minds of our viewers
who know that we, here at the
Squirrel Network,
report all the news, including
the important secret stuff
the regular
liberal
godless
socialist media
will never let you
know






Here it is, the end of thirty stories in thirty days.



Even Dreams Must Someday End

Sonyador, the dreamer, dreams.

And the dreams seem more real than anything else; more real than the bed he lies in, the machine by his bed going blip, blip, blip, night and day, the infections, the nurses and the doctors, more real, even, than the catheter they inserted in his penis that hurt so much when they did it. That pain a shadow now, barely noticed among all the other shadows behind his dreams.

He is confused, a woman who said she was his wife came today, but he did not know her, did not know her name, did not know he had wife.

He has no wife in his dreams, all those years past, alive again in his sleep. His father long dead, victim of outrageous fortune, his mother, happily mindless in her nursing home until one night, when the truth of all things befell her, Tug, the brother he loved and idolized, gone so long ago, if not dead now, very, very old, Conch, his younger brother, lost in a faraway jungle in 1969, never found, presumed dead, Uncle Otto, another wrong death, Sasha, the mystery, the ever-sustaining myth of his life, and all the other people who walked upon the stage of his life, his teachers, and the boy who tried to push him around and Mr. and Mrs. Pretts, all back again, alive again, but only for as long as he can dream.

He had a knack for work, it was always said, and a knack for money, as it turned out. Though rich he became because he had a knack for work and acquisition, never rich enough to make up for lack of the knack for friends. No knack for friendship like his father had, no knack for friends who would be with him in this sterile, dismal place.

In the end, like everyone, like you and me, he becomes a victim of who he was. And he dreams of all those who might have made him different. His life, a product of all he ever was and all those who were in his time with him, in the end all before him again in sweet dreams of times before he became he who lies dreaming.

He weeps in his sleep because even in his sleep, maybe only in his sleep, he knows the dreams are just dreams, not real, all those people are not real. And he weeps, because he knows he is but a dream as well, a long dream ending soon.

Sonyador has grown so accustomed to the blip,blip,blip of the monitor beside his bed that he doesn’t hear it anymore.

Until it stops.

The dreamer who grew alone now dreams alone, until he dreams no more.

And all the dreams end, fading, as does he.








That's it. Everything belongs to those who created it. My stuff is free, if your properly credit me and "Here and Now."

I'm allen itz, owner and producer of this blog.

And this is what I've been up to:



Available for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony eBookstore and Appple ibookstore -


"Always to the Light"




"Goes Around, Comes Around"




"Pushing Clouds Against the Wind"




And
For those of a print-bent, available on Amazon


"Seven Beats a Second"
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Adventures in the Ink Trade   Friday, January 13, 2012





My photos this week, just some random black and white pics I found stored away in my digital closet. As usual, good stuff from my poetry library. Also, poems from my first eBook, Pushing Clouds Against the Wind and my Sonyador stories (with this post, only seven more to go to complete my story-a-day-for-thirty-days self-inflicted-challenge).

In other words, an oeeydokee post for an okeeydokee week.

Here's the crew.


Me
Little Rabbit with Great Long Ears (Sonyador series)

Neils
Come experience
See you later
Not for rent
All in the philosophy

Me
fast times in birdland

Rengetsu
When People Tease Me About My Constant Change of Residence
Heart
Incense Burner
Spring Rain
March Third
Upon Hearing the Bells at Yoshimizu
A Trip During Cherry Blossom Season

Me
Boca Chica Beach (Sonyador series)

Francisco X. Alarcon
Chicome-Coatl/Seven Snake
Martin de Luna
Day and Night
Yolloxochitl/Heart Flower
Ololiuhqui

Me
post-it notes

Naomi Guttman
Amphibian
Autoportrait

Me
Barbershop Haircut (Sonyador series)

Richard Eberhart
A Ship Burning and a Comet All in One Day

Me
jeez

Eugenio de Andrade
It's a place in the south, a place where...
You lean your face on sorrow, don't even...
Just the horse, just those wide...
No longer can I see the wheat...
The reasons of the world...

Me
Drinking at the Blue Glass Moon (Sonyador series)

Anne Sexton
The Wall

Me
Three barku

Renny Golden
Guatemala,Nunca Mas

Me
blue
yellow
lull
sunset
red grill
red
winter postcard

Me
happy eyes

Paul Auster
Song of Degrees
Fire Speech
Late Summer

Me
Adventures in the Ink Trade (Sonyador series)

From The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry
Andrew Schelling
A haibun
Mike O’Connor
Sakura
Michael McClure
From THE HUMMINGBIRD SANGHA (FOUR POEMS, 34, 465, 98, 99)

Me
this old bed

Jane Kenyon
Frost Flowers
The Sandy Hole

Me
In for the Long-Haul (Sonyador series)









I start this week with another Sonyador story.



Little Rabbit with Great Long Ears

Sonyador had a little rabbit he carved with Uncle Otto, a little rabbit with great long ears, just like the one Uncle Otto carved.

Not as good, of course. No one could whittle and carve like Uncle Otto, not Sonyador, for sure, and no one else either.

Sonyado had wanted to give the little rabbit to Uncle Otto at his funeral, but his mother said no.

“Keep it for yourself, Sonyador,” she said, “keep it to remember him. Keep it, and every time you look at it you’ll think of him and remember the good times you had together.”

“In fact,” she said, “why don’t you make one for me too.” (Uncle Otto was her older brother, her only brother.) “I’d like to have something to remember all the good times with him, just like you.”

So Sonyador made another little rabbit with great long ears for him mom. It was better than his, in fact, and for a while he thought about keeping the new one for himself and giving the old one to her.

But in the end he decided his mom had known Uncle Otto a whole lot longer than he did and deserved the best one.

And so for a year he had kept his first little rabbit, if it wasn’t in his pocket it was on the little table by his bed where he could pick it up and look at it at night before he went to sleep.

It was all polished now from handling, smooth and shiny, the wood dark stained from sweat and oil from his hands. Looking at it reminded him of the little airplane his dad gave him when he was really small.

This was when his dad worked late every night, usually until midnight when the boy was fast asleep. He remembered one night when he woke up just as his dad got home from work. He had brought Sonyador a small, carved wooden airplane. He had meant to give it to the boy the next morning, but since he was up his dad gave it to him right away. And the plane too, became smooth and polished from handling.

Thinking of the airplane, in the attic now with his old toys and Little Golden Books, and the little carved rabbit, both so beautiful from handling, looking as alive with beauty now as they did when they were part of a tree, Sonyador thinks, maybe the tree never dies. Maybe as long as it’s wood is cherished and cared for the tree is, in a way, still alive.

A big thought for a little boy, but a comfort to him, thinking that if the tree lived as long as he held and cherished the things that came from the tree, the tree itself might, in a tree way, live, and if the tree lived through the cherishing of things made from it, so might Uncle Otto live in the tree and the beautiful things he made from its wooden heart.

A big thought to a little boy, and maybe a foolish thought to the grownups around him, but it was his and it coomforted him in a way the grown-ups never could, never would.

Life continuing through the passing from hand to hand of love.








I have this little book of poems given to me by one of my fellow coffeeholics. The book, Blood Red, was published in 1994 by Three Feather Books.

The poet goes by the single name Neils. The person who gave me the book knows nothing about the poet and I could find nothing on the web. I suspect he (I assume he from the poems) was a student at one of the colleges or universities here in San Antonio.

It seems pretty certain to me that this was a first book of what were probably fist-time poems, making me wonder what has happened to the poet in the sixteen years since its publication. Was this book a one-time think, or did he continue to write?



Come experience

Come experience
The excitement
And contrast
Of various styles

The romance
And Seriousness
Of seek help
Not Seik Heil

Living awaits you
Under the stars
We're as near
As you believe we are

Laugh cry and read
Find the missing link
Go completely blank
Or actually even sleep

Make room for your life
Get out of the house
It's worth the extra effort
To not let the flame be doused

We're for the young
We're for the old
We're for the shy
We're for the bold

We're for the thrift stores
We're for the brand new
We stand for freedom
And the love inside of you


See you later

See you later
Emasculator
After a while
Necrophile

   No nasty words
   And then go home
   And watch it
   On HBO

      Middle of the road
      Riders
      Who in private
      Claim to know

      The value of free speech
      And think it's
      Like
      Riding a bike

      But when they
      Get in public
      Only do
      What certain people like

      And lean on
      The ones
      Already carrying
      The heaviest load

      Momentum Monopolizers
      That when
      The going got rough
      Climbed inside and...rode


Not for rent

And I'd gun down young poets
Who say aren't you the one
Who said you wouldn't perform
On a compromised stage

   And I'd learn to speak slowly
   Distinctly with perfect diction
   giving off an air of dignity
   Contained in wisdom and age

   My consideration would flow
   I'd pick and choose every word
   Read only those works selected
   Specifically for the event

   Money changers don't want
   To take over the temple
   It's just something
   They want to rent

   It's been told for centuries
   And I'd thought by now you'd know it
   You can buy the poems
   but you can't buy the poet


All the philosophy

All the philosophy
You can step in
All the bull
You can ride

All the swallows
You can capistrano
Not to mention
Your...pride

All the holy ways
Being weaseled in
All the tales
You could possibly spin

All the country clubs
Morning papers being read
All the warning signs
And institutional beds

All the answers...
Right in front of our face
The things we push aside
Trying to keep up the pace








This is the first poem in my first eBook, Pushing Clouds Against the Wind, selected poems from 2006 to 2007, published early last year by BookBaby.



fast times in birdland

i hit a bird this morning

ran right over him
when he flew too low
and too slow

dumbass bird

i drove on

stuck in my Cadillac's
checkerboard grill
beak forward
feathers
around his black bb eyes
ruffling in the wind,
he dies

thinking,
goddamn, look at me go

I'm the fastest bird
in this whole freaking town








At the age of thirty-three, Otagaki Nobu, who was born in 1791 and died in 1875, renounced the world after the death of two husbands and three infant children and was ordained a Buddhist nun, taking the name Rengetsu, meaning "Lotus Moon." In 1832 she began to make pottery, which she inscribed with her own waka (31-syllable classic poetry) that she sold to support herself.

I have some of her waka, this week, from the collection of her work, Lotus Moon - The Poetry of Rengetsu, published in 2005 by White Pines Press, which has put out a very fine illustrated series of Chinese and Japanese masters.

The poems were translated by John Stevens.



When People Tease Me About My Constant Change of Residence

A floating cloud
Drifting about
Playfully
Here and there
Not wanting to fade away.



Heart

Coming and going
Without beginning or end,
Like ever changing
White clouds:
The heart of things.


Incense Burner

A single line of
Fragrant smoke
From the incense stick
Trails off without a trace:
One's heart, as well?


Spring Rain

Random thoughts
And loneliness trouble me
But I am soothed by the
Anticipation of cherry blossoms
And spring rain falling on my hut.


March Third

As an offering today
To this lord and lady:
Freshly opened peach blossoms.
The joy of countless springs
Is once again ours.


Upon Hearing the Bells at Yoshimizu

The echo of the bell
At Yoshimizu -
I am here, too,
In a black robe
Set against the white mist.


A Trip During Cherry Blossom Season

No place at the inn
But I find consolation
Sleeping beneath the
Hazy moon and the
Cherry blossoms.








Here's another Sonyador story - number 19, 11 more to go.



On Boca Chica Beach

The shark lay on the sand on Boca Chica beach, several yards from the low-rolling Gulf surf. It was about six and a half feet long, lying still in the sand, but still alive, gills still pulsing. Sonyador, at about four and a half feet tall, could have ridden it like a horse, which he was not in any manner likely to try to do.

Sonyador’s cousin, Philimon, caught the fish while surf fishing. It was unusual for a shark this size to be feeding this close to the beach which probably meant it was a very hungry fish, making Phil, to Sonyador’s way of thinking, pretty lucky to have caught the fish instead of the fish catching him.

Boca Chica, at the mouth of the Rio Grande River, was a primitive and usually deserted beach in those days, especially after a bridge was built across the Laguna Madre from Port Isabel to Padre Island. Washington Beach across the river in Mexico, was a busier place, with campsites, and a lot of Americans used to go there before the bridge to Padre Island, but Dad preferred the more primitive Boca Chica.

Sonyador had heard his dad talk about Boca Chica as the place where soldiers from the North had crossed into Mexico chasing Confederates and the place, a couple miles up the river, nearer Brownsville, where the last battle of the Civil War was fought weeks after General Robert E. Lee had already surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia.

Phil and the Sunyador’s dad came to Boca Chica a couple of times a year for a weekend of fishing, staying on the beach at night in a little canvas lean-to, growing their beards, drinking whiskey, fishing as the sun came up in the morning, then cooking what they caught for breakfast over an open fire. Uncle Otto often went with them, but since he died, they had been going alone. Phil was Uncle Otto’s son and had been coming to the beach with his dad and Sonyador’s dad since he was a teenager.

This was Sonyador’s first time to go along (Dad and Phil finally decided he was old enough, as long as he promised to stay out of the way). He did his best, doing a little fishing himself, playing in the sand dunes, building sand castles with yards of fortifications all around them, watching, as wall after wall was washed away by the rising tide. He liked to chase the little crabs that popped out of holes in the wet sand, then ran on their little scuttling legs down the beach and to dig themselves another little hole to hide in faster, almost, than you could watch them. He wished his little dog Bitsy was here with him to help chase down the crabs.

But what he liked best, was sitting around the campfire at night, eating pork and beans and fried fish, watching Dad and Phil and other fishermen from nearby camps drink their whiskey and talk about all sorts of things, about the fish they caught that day, about what their wives were doing at home, about the work they did when they couldn’t stay at the beach (a couple of the men lived on the beach full time), and sometimes about things that maybe Sonyado shouldn’t hear at his age. His dad would stop them; warn them, “Watch the boy,” he’d say, “let’s keep it clean.”

It was a weekend that Sonyador would never forget, even though it was only that once. Since Uncle Otto had died, Cousin Phil had begun to thinking he didn’t need to stay around anymore, thinking a man with ambition should go somewhere where some money could be made, not hang around in this poor part of the country, working full time for next to nothing.

So he headed off to Michigan to work in a Studerbaker plant and Dad didn’t go fishing so much anymore and when he did, it was usually with some of the rough men he worked with who he didn’t think Sonyador should be around until he was a lot older.

For about ten years after, Sonyador used a big shell he’d found on the beach as a doorstop for the bedroom. It was a conch shell, his mother told him, and he kidded his little brother, Concho, about being named for a big seashell.








Next I have some short pieces from Snake Poems, an Aztec Invocation by Francisco X. Alarcon. The book was published in 1992 by Chronicle Books.

I've told the story about the priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, a Catholic parish priest from Atenango, a small town in the the present state of Guerrero, Mexico who was given the charge of identifying Aztec chants, stories, and rituals so that church authorities could know when the conquered and "converted" Aztecs were secretly incorporating their own beliefs into approved Catholic ritual. Ironically, the project completed by Father Alarcon and published in 1649, became the most complete recording we have today of Aztec religious practices.

The poet,Francisco Alarcon, went to this earliseven Snakeer texts and used it to inspire his own poetry, considering as he did, that he might be completing the work of an early ancestor.



Chicome-Coatl/Seven Snake

cornstalks
are upright
snakes

corn ears
rattle
in the wind


Martin de Luna

Martin de Luna
110 years old
was arrested
and imprisoned

for having used
incantations
before laying down
on his petate:

"tla cuel
nocelopetlatzine
in nauhcampa
ticamachalohtoc...

"take me
jaguar mat into
the four mouths
of your corners..."

(take me now
from this cell
and lose me
in the darkness


Day and Night

I bleed
in silence
all alone

Martin
Mariana
Domingo

in fields
in streets
in cells

my fists
hit
walls

whips
undress
my ribs

from
my mouth
come out

broken teeth
blood
butterflies


Yolloxochitl/Heart Flower

it was you
sister
your voice
a seagull
holding u[
the breeze

it was you
sister
your breath
forming
tiny tears
on windows

it was you
your ways
to climb down
crosses
turn things
around

it was you
your hands
that healed
mended
the sick
the needy

it was you
sister
your blood
your wounds


Ololiuhqui

    to Barbara Garcia

seeds
of wisdom
divine eyes
of serpents

teach us
to read
again
the sky

buttons of
the infinite
skirt
of stars

turn us
into
hummingbirds
kissing flowers

lead us
back
to the lap
of our Mother








I have a series of short poems scattered through Pushing Clouds Against the Wind, all with the same generic title.

I'll put a couple of them together here.



post-it notes

___

i love
you
in little
yellow
flashes of
sticky note
passion

___

small dogs
nip
at heels
with tiny
yips
&
yaps
and sharp little teeth
white

___

crowd murmurs
in a large room
hundreds
of stories
shattered
into random
word pieces









Next, I have two poems by NaomiGuttman, from her book, Reasons for Winter, published by Brick Books in 1991.

Guttman, born in Montreal in 1860, graduated from Concordia University and received her M.F.A. from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Southern California. Her first book, Reasons for Winter, won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry in Quebec, and her second, Wet Apples, White Blood, won the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts

She has served on the faculty of Hamilton (a college in New York founded in 1812 and named after Alexander Hamilton) since 1996.



Amphibian

When did I discover my talent for floating?
People say it's the sign I was born under:
the crab. Always a spidery child
growing too fast, water was the only place
I always felt the same.

Breast-stroke,side-stroke. "Pick an apple
and put it in the basket," said my aunt.
She taught me in Lac des Castors before
they discovered the pollution.
Games my cousins and I played: mermaids
pirates,orphaned twins on desert islands.

And now I swim with the neighbor women
in a public bath where we share
a ritual: small poolings on the tiles, slap, slap
against my long stride.


Autoportrait

Mondrian, only from your portrait
can you look at me as you would
a woman you love.We speak at right angles -
not facing each other, or even the audience
we know is listening. Under layers of paint

your olive skin impermeable as leaves.
So open, the perfectly lit gallery
of your eyes, those great black eyes acquainted
with abstraction. When you look at me this hard
you undo me to my bones, my thin white bones

rearranged on a black canvas. I share
your great love of trees,so come down to me,
embrace me as you would an errant friend.
Let's tell each other the gross details
of our lives,the wakes and weddings,

children and debts, not forgetting
vast insignificances - a lost ring,
the paintings we adore, the smell
of our mother's closet. In the crowd's clamor
we sit,not venturing inside

to see the great masters, the satisfying
din of language, women confident
as diamonds, their scent burying us.

We sit, not speaking or holding hands though
our knees might sometimes graze as if by chance.








Here's Sonyador story number 20.



Barbershop Haircuts

Haircut day, buzz-cut by a friend of Sonyador’s mom.

Every year when it warms up enough to expose naked ears to nature.

This friend, mother of eight boys, considered the expense of eight paid haircuts an unnecessary drain on limited family resources, so she bought hair clippers and became her family’s barber, skinning the heads of all eight every month from Easter to Halloween.

Generous to a fault with her limited gifts, Sonyador and his little brother Conch became a part of the monthly mix. Not a problem for Sonyador when he was just a kid, but now that he’s twelve he thinks he’s ready for a real store-bought Saturday afternoon haircut down at the real barber shop where Dad goes, with a ballgame and on the radio and the magazines and the apron they put over you (not a bathroom towel) and the barber who talks all the time and snips his scissors and keeps his combs in a bottle of what looks like water. (But Sonyador thinks it’s probably something else, probably some kind of secret barber poison that kills cooties and such.)

And the brush at the end and the powder and a little dab of Brylcreem rubbed into your hair and the barber’s careful combing, one hand on the comb, little finger held high, and the other hand smoothing behind the comb, that little finger held high too, both little fingers held high like there was something in the barber code about fingers touching hair or something like that.

That’s what the boy wants, the whole barber experience, and he thinks at twelve years old he ought to get it. No more head skinning, especially that he’s old now and can see how his ears stick out and how funny it looks and how probably everyone he knows at school is probably laughing at him because of his skinned head and poked-out ears like some kind of floppy-eared dog.

Sonyador is very conscious of how he looks now, and it’s not as if his flour-sack shirts aren’t bad enough - add the poke-out ears to that and you have this really dumb looking kid that everyone laughs at, he’s sure of it, they’re laughing even if they don’t show it.

He’d be laughing if he was someone else and he saw himself as that someone else with stupid homemade shirts and stupid homemade haircut. He was sure of it.

But his mom was really mad when he told her he didn’t want another stupid haircut by her stupid friend and said that he was making fun of her best friend and would probably hurt her feelings if he didn’t let her cut his hair and besides, a barbershop haircut cost fifty cents, which would buy two loaves of bread and did he want the family to have no bread on the table and how would he feel if his little brother had to go to school without a sandwich because she paid for a haircut for Sonyador instead of buying bread and she didn’t understand how he could be so ungrateful.

“I just don’t understand how you could be so ungrateful, “she said.

And so Sonyador got his skinned-head, ears poking out haircut, just like he did every year.

Next year, he was thinking while his mom’s friend was cutting, “Next year I’m gonna get a barbershop haircut, I don’t care what,” he’s thinking.








Here is a poem by Richard Eberhart, from his collection Selected Poems, 1930-1965, a New Directions paperback published in 1965.

Eberhart was born in 1904 and died in 2005. He was a widely honored and published American poet with more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. He received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this book, Selected Poems: 1930-1965 and a National Book Award in 1977 for Collected Poems: 1930-1976.



A Ship Burning and a Comet All in One Day

When the tide was out
And the sea was quiet,
We hauled the boat to the edge,
On a fair day in August,
As who, all believing,
Would give decent burial
To the life of a used boat,
Not leave the corpse on the ground.

And some, setting fires
On the old and broken deck,
Poured on the kerosene
With a stately quietude,
Measuring out our departure,
And others brought libations
In red glasses to the sea's edge,
and all held one in hand.

Then the captain arose
And poured spirit over the prow
And the sparks flew upward
And consigned her with fierce
Cry and fervent prayer
To immortal transubstantiation.
And the pure nature of air
Received her grace and charm.

And evening came on the sea
As the whole company
Sat upon the harsh rocks
Watching the tide come in
And take the last debris,
And when it became dark
A great comet appeared in the sky
With a star in its nether tail.








Here's another poem from the first eBook, Pushing Clouds Against the Wind.



jeez

ok
i'm getting
really really
bored with myself
again

thought about
getting rid of the beard
and shaving my head
but then i'd be
just another
bald beardless bored guy

not much of an improvement

thought about joining the Marines
but think they might not want me now
and back when i was of Marine age
i did everything i could to avoid
all Marinish ways
except for drinking
and carousing
and i'm too old to do that now
too
thought about
driving down to the coast
to take sailing lessons
but i get seasick
if i fill the bathtub too full
so my guess is
that won't work either

could have a deep romantic affair
with a beautiful
dark-haired
woman
but already did that
and after 32 years, thought
it is
the joy
and comfort of my life,
it is not the
wild
shoot the moon adventure
that by the blandness
of my nature
i would most certainly
run
from
anyway

maybe
the beautiful
dark-haired
woman
and i
could have a romantic interlude
on a mountaintop
somewhere

but,wait,
i climbed a mountain
once
and it wasn't boring
but it scared the crap out of me
and scared crapless
is even worse
than
bored

i could write
a truly great poem
i suppose
but it has come to me
as i edit my poems for my next book
that they are entirely about me,
like transcripts from inside my head,
which, sad to say,
is much like
being inside the head
of the guy ahead of you in the grocery line,
preoccupied with what he's forgetting,
thinking,
jeez, i should'a made a list

jeez








Now, I have several short poems by Portuguese poet Eugenio de Andrade, from Forbidden Words, Selected Poems. The collection, including nearly sixty years of de Andrade's poetry, was first published by New Directions in 2003. It is a bilingual book, Portuguese and English on facing pages, with translation by Alexis Levitin.

Andrade was the pseudonym of José Fontinhas. He born in Póvoa de Atalaia, Fundao, in 1923, and is revered in his country as one of the leading names in contemporary Portuguese poetry. He died in Porto in 2005.



It's a place in the south, a place where...

It's a place in the south, a place where
whiteness
gone wild stares you in the eye.
Where you lived. Where sometimes in sleep

you are living still. The name heavy with water
drips from your mouth.
Along goat paths you dropped
to the beach, the sea pounding

those stones, these syllables.
Eves lost themselves, drowned
in the dazzle
of the last or the very first day.

Perfection.


You lean your face on sorrow, don't even...

You lean your face on sorrow, don't even
hear the nightingale. Or is it lark?
The air is hard for you to take, you, torn
between the faithfulness you owe

your mother's earth and that bleached
blueness where birds disappear.
Music, let's call it that,
was always your wound, but also

it was exaltation in the dunes.
Do not listen to the nightingale. Or to the lark.
It is within
that all music turns to bird.


Just the horse, just those wide...

Just the horse, just those wide
child's eyes, that
profusion of silk,that's all I miss.
Not the dark river

voice I always listened to,
nor the cool waist,
the first I laid my hand upon,
knowing love;

it's that gaze that comes, night after night,
along some bypath from afar,
and steals my sleep,
and will not spare my heart.

My heart, a prairie covered in dew.


No longer can I see the wheat...

No longer can I see the wheat,
the languid undulation of the hills,
I cannot say it went with you,
you only took that childlike

way of jumping the wall,
of lifting to your mouth
a fistful of black cherries,
of hiding a smile in your pocket,

a certain way of whistling to the doves
or asking for a glass of water,
and sleeping curled like a ball of yarn,
as only cats can sleep.

All this you were, and stained with mulberries.


The reasons of the world...

The reasons of the world
are not exactly your reasons.
To live with burning hands isn't easy,
to live is to illuminate

with a skimming light the thickness of the body,
the blindness of the wall.
That taste of blood
which brought the spring, if spring there was,

doe not lead to a crown of flame.
Black sheets of water,
the excrement of cormorants,
compose your suffering.

It is a smell of semen
that the tidal breezes always bring.








Sonyador, number 21.



Drinking at the Blue Glass Moon

Until he lost his job, Sonyador’s dad stopped at the Blue Glass Moon ever day for a beer before going home for dinner - just one beer, never more - and sometimes Sonyador met him there. He would sit at the bar with his dad and the other men, drink a Coke or a Seven-Up or a Dr. Pepper, put salt in it just like the men so he could watch it foam up to the brim, just like the salt did in a glass of beer.

He listened to the men talk, usually about sports, baseball, football, whatever the season was, about their last fishing trip, stories about what they did back when - tall tales, according to my dad. (“Never believe anything you hear in a bar,” he said. “Man or woman telling, it’s probably a lie. A man is never as tough as he says he is in his stories, and a woman is never as young.”

“That’s the best advice, I’ve got, boy,” he said. “Remember it.”

And Sonyador promised he would.

Most of the men were like Dad, just having a beer and conversation after work, before going home for dinner. But there was always a couple of men, and sometimes a woman, who wouldn’t have just dropped in for a beer before dinner. The women were always alone, always all made up, long, red fingernails, red or blond hair tightly permed, trying to turn back the clock more years than they’d ever admit - hard women, trying to find again the softness of youth, a battle long ago lost.

These men and the woman (not always the same woman but always alone) hadn’t just dropped in, they had been at the bar since it opened at 11, coming in right after breakfast for a” wake-me-up,” followed by endless rounds of “keep-me-up,” until five or five thirty in the afternoon they were just a couple of drinks away from falling off their barstool, or sleeping with their head on the bar, or picking a fight, or sometimes crying in their beer, sloppy drunks, sloppy, drooly crying.

Or the few who would drink all day and half the night and never show it, coming in in the morning in pressed jeans and freshly ironed shirt, hair oiled and perfectly combed, with the scent of after shave, Old Spice or Aqua Velva most often, and look and smell exactly the same when they left the bar at 2 a.m.

“These are ones already dead,” Sonyador’s dad said. “The ones that fight or cry or puke, you know they’re still alive and maybe someday will find a way out of the swill they’ve fallen into. But the others, the ones that never show nothing, the ones with alcohol in their veins, they’re the dead ones. “

“They’re the walking dead,” he said, “who’ve found their place in hell while they’re still breathing.”

“I want you to look at them, boy,” he said, “and remember them every time, after you’re grown up, you take a drink of alcohol. This is what the drink will do, if you let it.”

And Sonyado looked and said he would never forget.








Next, I have a poem by Anne Sexton, from her book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, published in 1975 by Houghton Mifflin.



The Wall

Nature is full of teeth
that come in one by one, then
decay,
fall out.
In nature nothing is stable,
all is change, bears, dogs,peas, the willow,
all disappear. Only to be reborn.
Rocks crumble, make new forms,
oceans move the continents,
mountains rise up and down like ghosts
yet all is natural, all is change.

As I write this sentence
about one hundred and four generations
since Christ, nothing has changed
except knowledge, the test tube.
Man still falls into the dirt
and is covered.
As I write this sentence one thousand are going
and one thousand are coming.
It is like the well that never dries up.
It is like the sea which is the kitchen of God.

We are all earthworms,
digging into our wrinkles.
We live beneath the ground
and if Christ should come in the form of a plow
and dig a furrow and push us into the day
we earthworms would be blinded by the sudden light
and writhe in our distress.
As I write this sentence I too writhe.

For all you who are going,
and there are many who are climbing their pain,
many who will be painted out in black ink
suddenly and before it is time,
for those many I say,
awkwardly, clumsily,
take off your life like trousers,
your shoes, your underwear,
then take off your flesh,
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God.








Some years ago I invented a poetic form that, for a while, took on an independent life of its own.

I called the form a "barku" - so named because I invented it while sitting at a bar trying to write a poem, necessarily short, on a bar napkin.

Being somewhat simple myself, it is a simple form with simple rules, 10 words on 6 lines, hopefully in the spirit of a haiku.

As with the post-it note poems,I scattered little barkus throughout Pushing Clouds Against the Wind. Here are several on them, pulled together in one place.



___

conversations
in twos
and threes
i listen
while
i write

___

whale song
ripples
the deep
navy sonar
roils
the tide

___

lonely whistle
in the dark
lost
little bird
call
home









I have a poem by Renny Golden from her book, The Hour of the Furnaces, published in 2000 by Mid-List Press. The book is a collection of poems about individuals, from peasants to priests, murdered by the Salvadorian and Guatemalan military (supported by the United States) during their campaign to eliminate the Mayan people.

Golden describes herself with these words:

am a writer, professor emerita, poet, and social justice activist. My books reflect concerns for those made voiceless or marginalized. I grew up in Chicago on the Southeast side influenced by an Irish grandfather who co-founded Local 399 (originally the ‘Micks’ who shoveled coal into furnaces) and an Irish grandmother who was a seanchai (story-teller). The poem below reflects three of my most formative influences: Irish grandparents, paternal and maternal, all from County Kerry; being a Dominican Sister for 8 years; co-founding the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America and going to El Salvador during the war years.

This is not precisely the poem she refers to above, but it is emblematic of her work. It concerns the murder of Bishop Juan Geradi Condera, who, in the 1980s closed his diocese because of the number of priests and congregates being murdered. His despair at having to do this led him to initiate the Recovery of Historic Memory project, which was completed in 1998. Over a two year period, almost seven thousand people, mostly Mayan, reported what had occurred in their villages during the worst times of the war.

Two days after the report was made public, Gerardi was killed, his head smashed by concrete slabs. So vicious was his murder that he could only be identified by his Bishop's ring.



Guatemala,Nunca Mas

I am the most gigantic of the dead who will never close his eyes until I see you saved - Julia de Burgos

the Bishop speaks into a blind wind
that stabs its knife bone deep.
Here, in the antiplano he hears Mayan children,
ghosts singing in the rocks.
"What is a shepherd?" he asks the dead.
He knows one thing:seminary dictums
are parrots repeating a parrot's gospel.
The Bishop pulls back, the way a flower
rises up in the hands of the wind.
"What is a shepherd here
in el Quiche?" he asks no one, recounting
the month's murders.

He closes down the diocese of El Quiche
as if it were a condemned building, because the church
he believed would protect them is marked, quemada.
What can he ask the nuncio
who sips wine with bishops?
"Brother, will you come here
where the dust is caked
with dark clots the color of sherry?"

Alone, he seeks the people,
wants cornfields without
a subterrain of skeletons,
wants a church with the imagination
of ordinary peasants.

Years after the dead covered the highlands
with a tattoo of Mayan bones,
years after Bishop Juan Gerardi can do
little more than cry, repeating
Let me stay with you,my suffering friend,"
the Guatemalan earth answers back,
opening like a body to tell of the Maya in the 1980s:
the moist sack of earth with its trove of bones.

"Dig here," the Bishop says, "dig here."
The terrible witness of ribs, bashed skulls,
tiny femurs, and the frail wings of shoulder blades
speak of the Kabiles.

In the nineties,like a rain seen across a field,
survivors come down from the mountains to testify
because a Bishop who though he was useless asked them,
a Bishop who gives back to them their words,
a terrible witness of fire in a book that opened
the last door of the blackened house.
It is a book written by peasants whose
words tear open windows in the sealed walls.
"This path," the Bishop says, "is full of risks."

His last.








I have a small series of "color" poems scattered through Pushing Clouds Against, my first eBook. Here they are, in one place.

I admit to a serious case of William Carlos Williams envy here.



blue

blue eyes
under clear
skies
ice
on cut
crystal


yellow

lemons
overflow
a pewter
bowl
roll across the floor
crying
caution...caution


lull

black man
with
your silver flute
sing us
soft
a song
to sleep


sunset

sun lies low
behind scrub branches

orange jigsaw

puzzle
at end of day


red grill

red grill
on a field
of brown leaves

autumn come
and almost gone with
summer

red
grill
begins
the long wait
for spring


red

blood
on white paper
bright red
like an apple
on a bed of
snow


winter postcard

white horse
on a white field
enclosed by a white fence

i am blinded
by the
light









Here's another poem from my book Pushing Clouds Against the Wind.



happy eyes

happy eyes
and a hint of a smile
light the day
clear away the rubble
from
a long slow night

sky is blue again
and clouds are
pillow white

cool
breeze
clears the air

if
there were birds
in the trees
they would
sing
this morning









Next,I have several poems by Paul Auster from his Collected Poems, published by the Overlook Press in 2007.

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey[5] and graduated from Columbia High School in adjoining Maplewood. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers.

He has won many literary awards in both the United States and France.



Song of Degrees

In the vacant lots
of solstice. In the light
you wagered for the rubble
of awe. Sand heaps:
retched into prayer - the distance
bought
in your name.

You. And then
you again. A footstep
gives ground: what is more
is not more: nothing
has ever been
enough. Tents,
pitched and struck:a ladder
propped
on a pillow of stone: the sheer
aureola rungs
of fire. You,
and then we. The earth
does not ask
for anyone.

So
be it. So much
the better - so many
words,
raked and murmured along
by your bedouin knees, will not
conjure you home. Even
if you crawled from the skin
of your brother,
you would not go beyond
what you breathe:no
angel can cure you
of your name.

Minima. Memory
and mirage. In each place
you stop for air,
we will build a city around you. Though the star-
mortared wall
that rises in our night, your soul
will not pass
again.


Fire Speech

You veer out. You crumble in.
You stand.

Cradled
by the hour-gong
that beat through the holly
twelve times
more silent than you,something,let
loose by someone,
rescues your name from coal.

You stand
there again, breathing
in the phantom sun
between ice and reverie.

I have come so far for you,
the voice
that echoes back to me
is no longer my own.


Late Summer

Borealis flood, and all of night, unleashed
at the eye's diluvian hour. Our bone-
broken will, countering the flow
of stones within our blood: vertigo
from the helium heights
of language

tomorrow: a mountain road
lined with gorse. Sunlight
in the fissures of rock. Lessness.
As if we could hold a single breath
to the limit breath.

There is no promised land.








Ah, the challenges of ink - another Sonyador story.



Adventures in the Ink Trade

Learning to write cursive was hard enough, but Sonyador’s fourth grade teacher, Miss Hardapardy, wanted them to do it in ink.

Ink!

Meaning a little Shaeffer ink bottle in their desk, and a fountain pen, with a little lever you pull to suck up ink after you stick the tip of the pen in the ink bottle.

Miss Hardapardy was a young teacher, barely out of college, full of new ideas of how to teach kids she learned in teacher school, talking about some new kind of math when most of her kids were still trying to learn arithmetic, most of them still struggling with 8 X 8 and 4 apples divided by 2 apples and if a train goes 5 miles in 10 minutes how far will it go in 20 minutes. Stuff like that.

And she was always telling the principal that school was too easy, that school wasn’t teaching the kids to work hard enough to learn all the things they needed to learn in the world. “We need to push them, “she would say. “Make them think.”

This at a time when half the kids were still working on getting their left shoe on their left foot and their right shoe on their right foot, while the numeric potty break code was still a problem for some.

These were mostly country kids, mostly poor country kids who didn't wear shoes most of the time, who peed in the bushes and pooped in the outhouse - no code required.

They knew about ducks and chickens and horses and cows and billy goats and didn’t have at home more than 5 of anything except brothers and sisters, which was their parent’s business, so they didn’t see the need for higher math such as 6 and above.

Most of them could milk a cow though, in fact some of them did milk a cow every morning. Milking a cow is a very complicated matter. Sonyador knew this, having watched a friend milk an old Bossy once. He was sure it was something Miss Hardapardy couldn’t do if her pointy teacher poking stick depended on it. But the farm kids could.

The problem came when the farm kids applied their best cow milking techniques to filling their ink pen - the result almost always squirting blue Shaeffer ink all over themselves and anyone else nearby.

Sonyador was advanced in comparison to these kids in lots of areas; well past 8 X 8 in the times tables and the apple and train problems were a cinch to him. But his cursive was like pig doodle and he was as bad with the ink as the worst of the farm kids.

Finally, his mom got tired of washing blue ink out of his shirts and pants and socks and underwear and everything else every day, so she sent him to school with a bib and told the teacher to make him wear it whenever he was supposed to write something.

This really embarrassed Sonyador at first, but it turned out other mom’s found out about and, pretty soon, every kid in Miss Hardapardy’s class was wearing a bib almost from the start of the school day to the end.








I have several poets from The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. The book was published in 2005 by Wisdom Publications.



The first poet is Andrew Schelling.

Born in 1953, Schelling grew up near Boston, then traveled to India and the Nepalese Himalayas in 1973, then settled in Northern California. He received A B.A. from University of California at Santa Cruz, followed by Sanskrit studies at Berkeley. He has published his own work as well as translations from ancient India's poetry. He currently teaches poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University.

His poem is a haibun, a form that includes a combines a prose passage followed by a very brief poem.

_______

Rock is naturalist scripture. The deeper you go the older the story.
Pikas & squirrels scamper over the top, then spiral descent
from gone tooth & twig. Petrified bone sediment myth.
Or psychic fossil? Horsetail & algae glow green again,
come to life in car engines. Fantastic shapes, old as forests.
And now the likelihood we have in the world
as many diverse minds..."as there are
organisms capable of perception."

                Evolution's basic
        job - turning rock
                to green growth.


Mike O'Connor, translator of Chinese literature,is another poet from the anthology. Born and raised on the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington, he spent more than a decade farming in the Dunteness-Sequim River Valley and cedar-logging and tree-planting in the Olympic Mountains. From 1979 to 1995, he lived mostly in the Republic off China,Taiwan, studying Chinese language and culture while working as a journalist for Chinese news organizations.

An M.F.A. graduate of the Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University and a recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Washington.


Sakura

Lingering at the door of the bathhouse,
I watch the woman bundle off children
into light-rain, small-land Kyoto.

Skirt in hand, she glances
my way across the evening lane,
then up the walk after the party
of colored rain boots and umbrellas.

Wet-headed but warm, I'm waiting
for Hui to come out from the public bath,
but can't help thinking of America,
the disquietude strangers there inspire.

Cherry trees are just beginning to break
blossom, here, off Kitqoji-dori, north of town.

Now the woman is crossing the lane,
coming directly toward me. She wants
to give me her open umbrella,
insists that I take it

without knowing where I'm going
or who in the world I am.

I thank her and bow,
and point to my broadbrimmed hat.

Am I sure, she implores, am I sure?

There's hardly a raindrop
in the rain-sweetened air.

She smiles and bows,
returns to the sliding doors of her house.

Kyoto, the old capital,
bursts into blossom in my heart.


My last poem this week from the anthology is by Michael McClure.

Born in Kansas and raised in Seattle, McClure attended the University of Arizona at Tuscon, then settled in San Francisco where he became one of those poets who defined the beat scene and culture. A prolific playwright, he and his casts were subject to frequent police raids in 1960s California for "obscenity" due to scenes in his underrground classic, The Beard. In recent years he has toured, performing his poetry to the accompaniment of Ray Manzarek, former keyboard player for the rock band The Doors.


from Touching the Edge: Dharma Devotions

(FROM THE HUMMINGBIRD SANGHA (FOUR POEMS, 34, 465, 98, 99)

34

TO GIVE IS THE WHITRE HAND
with the long fingers
and the eye in the palm
P
U
T
T
I
N
G
FORTH
what is one,
already arisen,
and long gone.

The squawking of jays
is
a gift in the trees.
BE IN COMFORT CHET BAKER
BE IN COMFORT JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT.

  There are waves
and facets
and overlappings
  and slidings
   of
 chunks
   (and
non-chunks)
slipping
into
the ordinary
E
M
P
T
Y
consciousness.

NOT THERE

46

THE CALICO CAT LIES
on the high ledge
in the darkness
feeling
the huge space,
blinking
at light
in the crack
under the door.
-IT'S JUST
THE SAME
WITH ME;
I
imagine
a shudder of pleasure
and
the sense
of something
beyond self
filling emptiness
among cartons of old books,
a stored
vanity table,
and an antique sewing
machine
HOW
PERFECT
and
Momentary
and
ETERNAL

Remember
pollywogs in cold
spring ponds
and

their
big

dark eyes

98

SILENCE IS A ROAR
with white hands.
NOISE
is born out
of it
distracting me
with the purple arms
of mexican sage.

Sun
slips into this realm
with a psychedelic flash.
I
find a grain
of compassion
and it's polished surface
mirrors my face.
THIS
IS
ME
AS
I AM.

SEE
MY
EYES
AND
MY NOSE
and my mouth

ME
AS
I
AM

reflected from pearl
to pearl
in the crown

99

DARK PATHS ARE THE WAY
to the light
in
the
forest
where the mountain gleams
after rain
and thunder.
S
E
L
F
KNOWLEDGE
flashes like sun
in a downpour.
A
milligram
is
PURE
GOLD
wrapped in actions
and carried to the old boat.
The rustling of leaves
in the yard are songs
of clarity
praising the changing
of forms.

We are the touch of silk
and taste of peaches and steamed beats.

HOW SOLID AND EMPTY.

HOW

SOLID

AND

EMPTY

IS

THIS

DHARMA








This poem is from my first eBook, Pushing Clouds Against the Wind, a collection of poems from 2006-2007.



this old bed

i sleep
on the bed
where my father
was born
nearly a hundred years ago,
second child of Celeste
and August,
amid rocky hills
and pecan and old and
flowing streams
in the little
Texas-German town
of Fredricksburg


i sleep
on the bed
that has slept my family
through two world wars
a cold war
and multiple wars of lesser
scope,
through twenty-tw0 Presidents
of the United States,
some wise,
some not,
some equal
to the needs of their time,
some not,
through musical genres
from ragtime
to hip-hop,
through prohibition
and bathtub gin,
through the gilded age
the jazz ae,
mormalcy,
fire bombing,
atom bombing,
getting bombed
in the suburbs
and getting sober
with AA,
through seven presidential
assassination attempts,
death
in Dallas,
death
on the launch pad,
death
in near earth orbit,
Kitty Hawk
to men on the moon,
the cries of the dead
from famine,
from genocide,
from indifference
of the ruling class,
through Bull Connor
and his police dogs,
through Kin
and his dreams


and his death
on a motel balcony,


to Barack Obama
and the triumph
of dreams,
through the triumph
of good
and the reemergence
of evil,
the cycle played out
over and over again
in the days of yellow
journalism, through
Murrow and Cronkite
and Brinkley and Huntley
on radio and TV
and on the web,
Wikipedia fact
and Wikipedia fancy,
truth swaying
on a tumbling pedestal,
lies flying in the wind,
opinionators,
blowhards,
conspiracists,
plain racists,
and everyday bloody
fools


through it all,
all the cycles of reaping
and sowing,
the bed has calmed the
nights
through three generations
of sleep and passion
and midnight dreams


waiting now
for the final sleep
of this generation
and the lying down
to rest of the next








Last from my library this weekae these two poems by Jane Kenyon. The poems are from her book, The Boat of Quiet Hours, published by Graywolf Press in 1986.

Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. During her lifetime Jane Kenyon published four books of poetry and a book of translation of the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. At the time of her death from leukemia, in 1995, she was New Hampshire's poet laureate.

A fifth collection of Kenyon's poetry, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, was released in 1996 by Graywolf Press.



Frost Flowers

Sap withdraws from the upper reaches
of maples; the squirrel digs deeper
and deeper in the moss
to bury the acorns that fall
all around, distracting him.

I'm out here in the dusk,
tired from a day of teaching and a little drunk,
where the wild asters, last blossoms
of the season, straggle uphill.
Frost flowers, I've heard them called.
The white ones have yellow centers
at first: later they darken
to a rosy cooper. They're mostly done.
Then the blue ones come on. It's blue
all around me now, though the color
has gone with the sun.

My sarcasm wounded a student today.
Afterward I heard him running down the stairs.

There is no one at home but me -
and I'm not at home; I'm up here on the hill,
looking at the dark windows below.
Let them be dark. Some large bird
calls down-mountain - a cry
astonishingly loud, distressing...

I was cruel to him:it is a bitter thing.
The air is damp and cold,
and by now I am a little hungry...
The squirrel is high in the oak,
gone to his nest, and night has silenced
the last loud rupture of the calm.


The Sandy Hole

The infant's coffin no bigger than a flightbag...
The young father steps backward from the sandy hole,
eyes wide and dry, his hand over his mouth.
No one dares to come near him, even to touch his sleeve.








Bringing up the rear, my last story for this week.



In for the Long-Haul

Sonyador’s dad lost his job after the war.

He'd had an eye put out when he was a kid and the army wouldn’t take him when the war started, but they did give him a federal job. Then they took the job back when the war ended and soldiers who had worked there before the war came back to claim what they had left behind.

Dad didn’t complain. It was fair, he thought, and didn’t begrudge the people who took his job. “They earned it,” he said. “It was theirs before they went out to fight, and not that the fight’s over it’s fair that they get it back.”

But it was hard for him.

Hired as a truck mechanic apprentice, he had spent nearly five years doing a whole bunch of different things at the shop where he worked, but not much truck mechanicing, leaving him knowing a little about a lot and not a lot about any one thing.

That, plus all the guys coming home from the war meant he was out of work for nearly six months, a long six months for a man who had worked at one thing or another since he was a kid on the farm, a man always proud to bring a paycheck home for his family. Every week the family got help from county welfare and the farmers all around brought vegetables from their fields and church ladies helped out with other stuff.

It was a shameful thing to him, being out of work, relying on the charity of others.

And when he finally got a new job, it wasn’t as a truck mechanic, but as a truck driver, driving long-haul across the country, home only a couple of days every two weeks. Pick up a load in San Antonio, drop it off in Seattle, then pick up a new load for Philidelphia, and once there, take a load for Tuscon, and maybe then something to haul back to San Antonio or Fort Worth where he could hop a bus for a couple of days at home.

It was tough on Dad; tough on Mom; tough on Sonyador and tough on Tug, though, Tug, being older, took to it easier, giving him something to do, making him responsible to take on some of the Dad place in the house, tamp down a little of his wildness - for a little while, at least.

It was hard for Sonyador; he always counted on Dad being around, always felt safer when Dad came home from work, always knew that if he came into trouble Dad would be there to help him.

Then Dad came into trouble, had to take help from others, until the only way he could help himself was to go away, leave Sonyador behind.

And Sonyador, such a small boy, learned the most important lesson of his life - never count on anyone else, never climb into a hole you can’t climb out of by yourself.

Never go where you can be told to leave.

Sonyador was a small boy, but he had a knack for work and, later, a knack for making money.

Many lessons during that time for Sonyador. And he never, ever forgot his lessons.








That's it. Everything belongs to those who created it. My stuff is free, if your properly credit me and "Here and Now."

I'm allen itz, owner and producer of this blog.

And this is what I've been up to:



Available for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony eBookstore and Appple ibookstore -


"Always to the Light"




"Goes Around, Comes Around"




"Pushing Clouds Against the Wind"




And
For those of a print-bent, available on Amazon


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