Alla En El Rancho Grande
Friday, April 18, 2008
 III.4.3.
Welcome to "Here and Now."
This issue is a little longer than usual this week, even though I don't have as many poets as I normally present, The difference is a couple of longish and one very long poem. I won't speak to the longish ones, since they are mostly mine, but I will say the very long poem is a masterwork I know you will enjoy.
Now, with things to do, things to do, no preamble this week, I'm just moving right to it.
I mentioned in closing out last week's issue that it seemed tamer than usual, so I'm trying to start off this week with a little more fire.
I'm afraid the best I can do is this poem by Michele Serros from the anthology bum rush the page - a def poetry jam. Maybe it's not so fiery, but it is funny.
Serros is from California and is the author of Chicana Falsea: And Other Stories of Death, Identity & Oxnard, and How to Be a Chicana Role Model.
Mr. BOOM BOOM Man
Here he comes! Distorted bass nearly three blocks away I wait at the mercy of the traffic light waitin n waitin for it to change from red to green so I won't have to deal with him...... Mr. BOOM BOOM Man.
But in my rearview mirror it doesn't lie n pumping his system from my behind I see his calling card baby lavender twinkle lights hugging a chrome-plated license plate five-digit proclamation: Double O Bad coming at me!
A fifty-pound medallion heaving a hickey-stained neck closer to the center of his manhood: his beeper. He pulls up slowly... lowered Nissan mini truck fills the vacancy on my left n the automatic tinted window makes it slow way down, I start to wonder Why, why can't I be like the cool girls and like the cars that go: BOOM BA BOOM...?
Dig the way quarters bounce off vinyl roofs? Funky, fresh and stoopid they say.
But then a flash of gold gilded teeth blinds my thoughts n Mr. BOOM BOOM shouts ut: Hey! Sen-yo-reeeeta! mamacita! You speak English? Hey...YOU I'm talkin to you... aaah, you deaf bitch!
And then I remember.
I wanna yell out, Yeah, I speak English, Pig Latin too so Uckfay Offay Mr. BOOM BOOM Take your fade n f-f-fade away!
But the light has turned green n I don't have the time (or the balls, really) I take off FAST leaving behind Mr. BOOM BOOM Bu-foon

Trying to stay light and funny, I have this piece I wrote a couple of months ago. I don't think I've used it here yet.
the night I got chased out of Mexico
this is a story about the time I got chased out of Mexico by a posse of Mexican taxi cabs
I was a young guy just old enough to get a taxi license and I was driving cab on the Texas side of the border
I picked up a fare outside one of the hotels who wanted to go to Mexico and I said hell yes cause it was about 35 miles and at 35 cents for the first mile and 10 cents a mile thereafter it was a pretty good payoff of which I'd get a third which never was a hell'uv a lot most nights but better for a trip like this
so we headed out down 281 for Matamoros through Brownsville and across the bridge from where I knew how to go two places boys town about which we will speak no more and the central plaza which was close to the mercado and lots of good nightclubs good food music and floor shows with sometimes naked women and that's where the fella I was carrying wanted to go so we went there and I dropped him off at the plaza and while he paid me I noticed all the Mexican cabbies giving me the eye and I noticed when I left some of those Mexican cabs started following behind and then I noticed I had ten to fifteen Mexican cabs riding my back bumper and I said to myself oh shit I screwed up and the way they were following close and honking it looked pretty clear that they were pissed about whatever it was I did so I took off for the bridge as fast as I could trying to remember as I flew which of the many one way streets in Matamoros were going my way and which were going to either get me lost of back to the plaza where more trouble was sure to be waiting and when I reached the bridge I tossed my 8 cents to cross to the Mexican border guard without hardly stopping
when I got back my dispatcher told me the rules - cabs don't cross borders fares are dropped at the bridge where they can walk across and get a local cab so I really felt dumb and never did that again though one time I did pick up a guy at the bridge who had been in jail in Matamoros for three days and was beat all to shit and bleeding and barely conscious
I took him home and dropped him off at the hospital and his friend who had gone to Matamoros to get him out of jail and had ridden back with him gave me a $3 tip which was pretty good for the time

My next poem is by Daniel Donaghy from his book Street Fighting Poems, published by BkMk Press in 2005.
Donaghy holds a B.A. from Kutztown University, an M.A. from Hollins College, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell University. At the time the book was published he was working on a Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester.
Ann's Corner Store
Ann Russell worked the nigh shift, listened to Phils' games with the sound low so her husband wouldn't hear it upstairs, so her son wouldn't wake into the pain he'd become from cancer, skin sliding from bone, teeth gone, gauze hiding the scalp once crusty from a slicked-back wave. The boy's mitt waited by the register while Ann bagged my candy ad gum, her chapped lips a line of worry while Kalas called the play-by-play, whispering into the radio for a sign that the Phils would pull it out, get by the Dodgers into the Series, that the store wouldn't get robbed again or her daughter pregnant by a corner boy, that her son would get better and back onto Lighthouse Field, owning short and third, hitting cleanup, or else die soon and get it over with, Ann gone those tight minutes before she came back with my change, flipping coins into the air, pulling one from behind her ear before she slid them into my cupped hands.

And now, the latest from our friend, Alice Folkart, caught in mid-loll on the beaches of Hawaii.
Sometime in July with Jude
"Hey Jude, don't be afraid, take a sad song and make it better...." That was the sound track of my own backpack-Europe Movie the summer of '69, and I was the star. It seemed to be playing in every the sidewalk cafe and youth hostel dormitory from Oslo to Ostia, Vienna to Varrenes.
It penetrated through the hashish haze, the wine wonderment, the pot ponderings, the ale addledness , because it was in English, the blessed, beloved English that I yearned for.
I didn't hear much English that summer, never read a paper, except laboriously in my crumpled French. No TV, no radio, just the sound track on the train, in the cafe. The greater world off the trail meant nothing to me. Only my world was real, only experience mattered.
On a mid-July evening in Amsterdam, or San Sebastian, or Venice, I heard that there were men dying, our men, their men, women and children, all for what someone thought was a good enough reason - Vietnam.
But the Beatles told me what I could do:
"....don't be afraid, take a sad song and make it better."
I tried. I'm still trying.

I mentioned in the last issue that I was going to try to begin a new, occasional music review and commentary feature. We begin that feature this week with suggestions from Big G on getting out of a musical rut to cultivate an appreciation of different kinds of music than you're accustomed to.
Two things I can tell you about Gary - first, he really is big and, second, after years of listening closely to all kinds of music, he has developed an ear and a taste worth paying attention to.
Here's what he's got to say about broadening your musical horizon.
Music Seen
Hello my name is Gary and I live in San Antonio, Texas. I'm a somewhat obsessive music fan who has been collecting CDs for nearly three decades. During that time I have seen many genres of music come and go as well found great respect for music done well. However, a couple of years ago I wondered if I was becoming too locked in to a specific type of music. This often leads to a musical experience that wakes nostalgic or awaits the new arrival of some movement that will repeat that experience. I decided to explore other types of music I had not paid attention to. The rise of metal particularly in Europe caught my attention.
I had been exposed to this area somewhat by my friend John through bands like Helloween, Gamma Ray, and SymphonyX. The influence of classical music on the complexity of the music and the thought provoking lyrics was intriguing. How far down that road toward more extreme metal could I go? It was time for a journey.
I began with three albums - Natural Born Chaos by Soilwork, ReRoute to Remain by In Flames, and Blackwater Panic by Opeth. I tapped into a stream of music that forced me to listen not just hear. The lyrics provoked thought and perspective. The voices ranged from powerfully melodic to visceral growling that drew me in. I was listening instead of hearing or anticipating what I had heard before. Sometimes I felt the need to interpret what was going on. The more I expanded my view the more I realized so many great bands I had missed by restricting my taste.
The albums I mentioned are the examples I used but others may suit your taste as well. Even if the journey only goes a short way it is worth every minute. You may not go as far as the bombastic brilliance of Dimmi Borgir or the guttural musings of Six Feet Under but at least you may expand the territory you have seen. You Can't Hear What You Have Not Seen Big G

And speaking of music, I wrote the next piece seven or eight years ago after witnessing an event at a performance by a ska band my son was in at the time. Guitar, bass guitar, drums and three trombones, they brought the house down whatever kind of house they played, whether a bar on West Street, a raggae dive in the hood, a summer punk festival, or a downtown New Year's Eve street party.
On this particular night, they were playing a converted railroad depot near the Alamodome.
The poem is included in my book, Seven Beats a Second, available at select book stores or on-line by clicking on the "back to 7beats" link on the top of the page.
gotta dance
shirt off chest glistening sweat-wet hair long swinging as he dances atop the amp rack twenty feet in the air arms pumping feet pumping skanking lost in the island beat oblivious to the bouncers sweeping across the room like an ebony tide converging on him when he jumps down and breaks for the door smothering him like a black cloud on a sunny day
it's the music he says can't you hear it
gotta dance man gotta dance

I had intended to start this issue with this poem by Rudolfo Anaya from the anthology The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. But, it's very long and I didn't want to lose readers before they even got started.
Rodolfo Anaya was born in 1937, in a rural village in New Mexico, the fifth of seven children. He graduated from the University of New Mexico and worked as a public school teacher in Albuquerque from 1963 to 1970. He worked as the director of counseling for the University of Albuquerque for two years before accepting a position as an associate professor at the University of New Mexico.
His first and best-known work is a novel, Bless Me, Ultima. The novel was rejected by numerous East Coast publishing houses, until finally, in 1972, a group of Chicano publishers accepted his book which went on to win the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol award and is now considered a classic Chicano work.
As I said about this poem, it's a very long piece, much longer than I usually use on "Here and Now." But, in addition to being long, it is also mind-blowingly excellent. I cannot imagine that a finer appreciation of Whitman has ever been written and certainly not another such as this written with a passion to equal to Whitman himself.
Walt Whitman Strides the Llano of New Mexico
I met Walt, kind old father, on the llano, that expanse of land of eagle and cactus Where the Mexicano met the Indio, and both met the tejano, along the Rio Pecos, our River of blood, River of Billy the Kid, River of Fort Sumner where the dine suffered, River of the golden Carp, god of my gods.
He came striding across the open plain, There where the owl calls me to the shrine of my birth, There where Ultima buried my soul-cord, the blood, the afterbirth, my destiny.
His beard, coarse, scraggly, warm, filled with sunlight, like llano grass filled with grasshoppers, grillos, protection for lizards and jackrabbits, rattlesnakes, coyotes, and childhood fears.
"Buenos dias, don Walt!" I called. "I have been waiting for you. I knew you would one day leap across the mississippi! Lap from Manhattas! Leap over Brooklyn Bridge! Leap over slavery! Leap over the technocrats! Leap over atomic waste! Leap over the violence! Madonna! Dead end rappers! Peter Jennings and ungodly nightly news! Leap over your own sex! Leap to embrace la gente de Nuevo Mexico! Leap to miracles!”
I also knew that. I dreamed that.
I knew you would one day find the Mexicanos of my land, the Nuevo Mexicanos who kicked ass with our Indian ancestors, kicked ass with the tejanos, And finally got their ass kicked by politicians! I knew you would find us Chicanos, en la pobreza, Always needing change for a ride or a pint, Pero ricos en el alma! Ricos en nuestra cultura! Ricos con suenos y memoria!
I kept the faith, don Walt, because I always knew you could leap continents! Leap over the squalor! Leap over pain and suffering, and the ash heap we Make of our earth! Leap into my arms.
Let me nestle in your bigote, don Walt, as I once nestled in my abuelo's bigote, don Liborio, Patriarch of the Mares clan, padre de mi mama, Farmer from Puerto de Luna, mestizo de Espana y Mexico, Catolico y Judio, Moro y indio, frances y mountain man, hombre de la tierra!
Let me nestle in your bigote, don Walt, like I once nestled in the grass of the llano, on summer days, a child lost in the wide expanse, brother to lagarto, jackrabbit, rattlesnake, vulture and hawk. I lay sleeping in the grama grass, feeling the groan of the earth beneath me, tierra sagrada! Around me, grasshoppers chuffing, mockingbird calling , meadowlark singing, owl warning, rabbit humping, flies buzzing, worms turning, vulture and hawk riding air currents, brujo spirits moving across my back and raising the hair of my neck, golden fish of my ponds tempting me to believe in the gods of the earth, water air and fire. Oriente, poniente, norte, sur, y yo! Dark earth groaning beneath me, sperm flowing sky turning orange and red, nighthawks dart, bats flitter, the mourning call of La Llorona filling the night wind as the presence of the river stirred, called my name: "Hijo!Hiiiii-jo!"
And I fled, fled for the safety of my mother's arms.
You know the locura of childhood, don Walt - That's why I welcome you to the llano, my llano, My Nuevo Mexico! Tierra sagrada! Tierra sangrada
Hold me in the safety of your arms, wise poet, old poet, Abuelo de todos, Your fingers stir my memory.
The high school teachers didn’t believe in the magic ot the Chicano heart. They fed me palabras sin sabor when it was your flesh I yearned for. Your soul. They teased us with "Oh, Capitan, My Capitan" Read silently so as to arouse no passion, no tears, no erections, no bubbling love for poetry.
Que desgracia! What a disgrace! To give my soul only one poem in four years when you were a universe!
Que desgracia! To give us only your name, when you were Cosmos, and our brown faces yearned for the safety of your bigote, your arms!
Que desgracia! That you have to leap from your grave, Now in this begetting time, to kick ass with this country which is so slow to learn that we are the magic in the soul! We are the dream of Aztlan!
Que desgracia! That my parents didn't even know your name! Didn't know that in your Leaves of Grass there was salvation for the child. I hear my mother’s lament: "They gave me no education!" I understand my father's stupor: "They took mi honor, mi orlgullo, me palabra."
Pobreza de mi gente! I strike back now! I bring you don Walt to help gird our loins! Este viejo es guerrillero por la gente! Guerrillero por los pobres! Los de abajo!
Save our children now! I shout. Put Leaves of Grass in their lunch boxes! In the tacos and tamales! Let them call him Abuelo! As I call him Abuelo!
Chicano poets of the revolution! Let him fly with you As your squadrons of words fill the air over Aztlan! Mujeres chicanas! Pull his bigote as you Would tug at friendly abuelo! His manhood is ours! Together we are one!
Pobreza! Child wandering the streets of Alburque! Broken by the splash of water, elm seed ghost, lost and by winds of spring mourned, by La Llorona of the Rio Grande mourned, outcast, soul-seed, blasted by the wind of the universe, soul-wind, scorched by the Grandfather Sun, Lady Luna, insanity, grubs scratching at broken limbs, fragmented soul.
I died and was buried and years later I awoke from the dead and limped up the hill where your Leaves of Grass lay buried in library stacks.
"Chicano Child Enters University" the papers cried. Miracle child! Strange child! Dark child! Speaks Spanish Child! Has Accent Child! Needs Lots of Help Child! Has No Money Child! Needs a Job Child! Barrio Child! Poor People Child! Gente Child! Drop Out Child! "I’ll show you," I sobbed, entering the labyrinth of loneliness, dark shadows of library, cold white classrooms.
You saved me don Walt, you and my familia which held me up, like a crutch holding the one-leg man, Like armor holding the lover, Like kiss holding the flame of Love.
You spoke to me of your Manhattas, working men and women,
miracle of democracy, freedom of the soul, the suffering of the great war, the death of Lincoln, the lilacs' last bloom, the pantheism of the Cosmos, the miracle of Word.
Your words caressed my soul, soul meeting soul, You opened my mouth and forced me to speak! Like a cricket placed on dumb tongue, Like the curandera's healing herbs and Touch which taught me to see beauty, Your fingers poked and found my words! You drew my stories out. You believed in the Child of the Llano.
I fell asleep on Leaves of Grass, covering myself with your bigote, dreaming my ancestors, my healers, the cuentos of their past, dreams and memories.
I fell asleep in your love, and woke to my mother's tortillas on the comal, my father's cough, my familia's way to work, the vast love which was an ocean in a small house.
I woke to write my Leaves of Llano Grass, the cuentos of the llano, tierra sagrada! I thank the wise teacher who said, "Dark Child, read this book! You are grass and to grass you shall return."
"Gracias don Walt! Enjoy your stay. Come again. Come Every day. Our ninos need you, as they need Our own poets. Maybe you'll write a book in Spanish, I'll write one in Chinese. All of poetry is One."

Next, I have a poem by Joanna M. Weston.
Joanna has had poetry, reviews, and short stories published in anthologies and journals for twenty years. She has two middle-readers, The Willow Tree Girl and Those Blue Shoes, in print; also A Summer Father, poetry, published by Frontenac House of Calgary.
Wind In Branches
the curve and loop of wind when doors are closed drapes drawn sound of beating wings the dip and rise of them
gusts move fabric pluck leaves by the fistful frittering their colour
sparrows cling to the feeder impervious to the thrust and force against them
wind finds its word in microscopic throats with seeds of meaning blown down channels of song releasing music into the rush of air

For baseball fans we have a treat this week, from O Holy Cow!, the recently discovered poetry of Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop and Yankee game broadcaster for years and years and even more years.
What I have actually are short, live, impromptu snippets from Rizzuto's many years of announcing Yankee games, arranged and formatted by editors Tom Peyer and Hard Seely.
Rizzuto died in 2007, eighty years from his birth.
Reversal of Opinion
And he hits one in the hole They're gona have to hurry. THEY'LL NEVER GET HIM! They got him. How do you like that, Hold cow. I changed my mind before he got there So that doesn't count as an error.
July 10, 1992 Seattle at New York
Dickie Poem Number One
Dickie Thon the batter. Now way way back when he first came Into the big leagues, I mention the fact that I used to play With his grandfather. Baseball. Sandlot baseball. He went away to the minor leagues. And during the service time, He was in Puerto Rico. And he was a very Astute young man. Don't forget, This was way back In the Second World War. Grounder to short, And Velarde just flips To Stankiewicz for the force. And that'll do it. And I'll finish my story later.
April 27, 1992 Texas at New York

I wrote these little pieces a couple of years ago after reading from the Tao Te Ching and freely admit there are no new thoughts or ideas here. My aim was to try to rewrite what I had read in language closer to my own, aiming, in the process, to get a better understanding behind the deceptively simple text.
along the way
i
listen to silence and know a true mystery
whose answer is seen only in darkness complete
ii
beauty is not known in the stars
and water not found in the seas
wet is a thing of deserts searing and dry
and beauty a diamond in the mud
iii
with this mark i rend the universe
with this voice i cry the apocalypse
together, we will defy all eternity
iv
from birth comes death our birthright to die
leaving the unborn to live forever, stay forever, be forever
while we pass in and out of the eternal wake
v
sing softly and let the song become your voice
be at one with the one that encircles all
become the center by letting the center find the one that is you
vi
look at me and see a construct of belief
for i am not until we agree i am
vii
find the value of that which is not
the hole in a cup that makes a bowl
the cut in the wall that opens a door
the empty corner of a heart that awaits the embrace of a love other-than-self
that which is not is the nurture for that which may someday be
viii
the gifts of old can only be seen by those with a gift for seeing anew
the blur of familiarity blinds us
eyes tight shut restores our deeper vision
ix
water flows as it will go
bringing life with the indifference of a pure force true only to its own measure
we can ride its tides but never change them
x
listen
if i say nothing you will hear the truth of all i know
if you hear me speak you hear a lie for the truth cannot be told

James Laughlin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He founded the publishing house of New Directions in 1936, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. His own first book of poems, Some Named Things, appeared nine years later. He published his Collected Poems in 1994, then published The Country Road in 1995 and The Secret Room in 1997.
This poem is from The Secret Room.
The Truth Teller
As I was walking along the sidewalk Of 14th Street I encountered a mad- Woman who, without pause, was talking To herself in a loud voice, making Wild gestures as she went along. I Turned around to follow her, thinking She might have a message from, some- Thing I ought to know about. Perhaps She was in her fifties, a dumpy Little person, her hair all in Unkempt tangles. She was wearing A bright red dress which must have Been given her by the Salvation Army. Her high sneakers were filthy.
Although I got close to her, she Was hard to understand. At times Her voice rose to a shout. Was it Yiddish, Polish, Italian she was Speaking? None of those that I Could recognize. Was she echolalic? Probably she had been let out of A mental hospital as harmless. Then I got it: she was cursing God in very rough language. "You've Made a fucking mess out of this Fucking world. No place for us Poor people to live, nothing to Eat unless we beg for it. Only The fucking rich people have Anything and they don't give a Shit about us. And the fucking Police rousting us out of the Good begging streets, fucking Bastards the lot of them."
That was the message, and it It was the truth, a true message. When we stopped for the lights At Eight Avenue I reached for My wallet and gave her all the Bills I had. She didn't thank Me, didn't even look at me. She Just stuffed the money into the Neck of her dress and ran across The avenue, still shouting and Swearing. "Fucking world you've Made, all shit, fucking shit."

The next poem is by Laurel Lamperd.
Laurel says she lives within sight of the Southern Ocean on the south coast of Western Australia. She writes novels and short stories as well as poetry. With a friend, she published The Ink Drinkers, a poetry and short story anthology of their work.
Apricots
Confucius taught his disciples under an apricot tree. They ate the juicy fruit and listened to his words of wisdom.
She whispered Confucian tenets to her lover caressed his brow his mouth.
Thumbnail bits of white of the apricot flower drifted down settled on her lips.
He kissed them away gave her ripe apricots made promises.
The knot faces in the tree reminders of the ancient sage did not tell her the fruit would be the tart bitter feelings of regret.

The next poem is by Paula Rankin from her book Augers published by the Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1981.
I couldn't find much of a biography on Rankin, other than that she was born in Virginia in 1944, lived in Tennessee when the book Augers was published and has written at least one more book since.
Poem for Miners
Does everyone wake up one day to find his vocation is looping Texas interstate,odd country where, no matter what pre-Neanderthal cell his family began in, there is a counterpart, - ocean, forest, rock, tumbleweed, boom towns still on the map of everyone's desert,
as if, with luck, a man might accidentally veer down a ramp and stake a claim on a family plot passed down to him in a will burned before America?
Does everyone sooner or later wake as I do now, inside so man other bodies, sifting genes like a prospector panning for gold?
All I have of my Texas father is a snapshot staring through credit cards, through the cracked seam in my wallet towards anything I pretend is the object of his attention. Father, I am low on luck, so forgive me if I walk you up and down the tracks of the Santa Fe, as if it will help you lose weight, improve your circulation, stoke coals into the failed furnace of your heart. Is there anything here I can hammer like a spike into railroad ties, something so true I can finish the unfinishable novel about me who walk off and keep walking and never look back except through eyes flattened to fit inside wallets?
If I say I stand in Sweetwater, Texas, asking this, I man it as any town where no Alamo overshadows other defeats - one man going down at a time one descendant mining for the least geiger count transmitted in the unreasoning hope he will know how to pass it down

Several years ago, I had a long disagreement with my son, a musician, who maintained that improvisation was the truest and most pure form of music. I disagreed then, but now, as I try to write, I have begun to see some truth to that idea and have tried to incorporate an improvisational spirit into the way I write. The result is that often I don't have any idea what I'm going to write about when I start a piece and usually, when I think I know, I turn out to be wrong.
Sometimes, for me, at least, it's best to just start riffing, going where the movement of words takes me. But, in doing that I have accept ownership up front for whatever the process produces, for just as a musician can't withdraw his improvisation once it's done, neither can I. I can only hope that somewhere in the process of improvising it has taken me to a poem.
That's what I did here - maybe there's something to it, maybe not. Either way, the result is mine and I'm stuck with it.
just walking
in the spring of 1963, John Kennedy was in the last few months of his life and i was 19 nearing completion of my first year at Southwest Texas State University...
...just a few months after the Cuban missile crisis had me wondering for several days if my first semester in college would be my last, wondering if in the next few days there would even be a university to go to, a scary time, the scare forgotten by the time this story unfolds...
...on a particular evening that was no special particular evening, four of us were at Carson's Restaurant about 7 in the evening, drinking coffee and exchanging bullshit, as we often did, when someone brought up a story in the newspaper about a group of Marines who had walked fifty miles in response to something President Kennedy had said about the importance of fitness and the benefits of long distance hiking...
...none of us knowing at the time that Kennedy's health was such that he could barely walk across a room unless popped full of pills and poked full of injections...
...and someone said...
...and we never absolutely identified which of the four of us it was...
...he said hell, if a bunch of pussy marines can walk fifty miles then surely Air Force ROTC warriors in training can do just as well...
...actually i had quit ROTC the first day when the commander yelled at me and i said, fuck this, and turned in my uniform, but what the heck, this fifty mile walk thing sounded like fun so i was game...
...now Carson's Restaurant...
...still a year away from being desegregated, along with the University, when someone from Washington indicated to powers who were that such a state of affairs was highly embarrassing to it's most famous alumni, the new President of the United States, who was working overtime to enact a most historic piece of civil rights legislation second only to the Emancipation Proclamation in importance in the nations history - I was an innocent in the spring of 1963 and just assumed black people and brown people didn't eat there because they didn't like the food...
...now Carson's Restaurant was located right on Interstate 35 which went right straight on to San Antonio, fifty miles away and home town of one of us, a place where a welcome and breakfast...
...as well as a ride back to our dorm...
...would surely be available
it seemed like a hell'uv a great thing to do so at 7 in the evening we headed out walking on I-35, which, though it is an eight-lane parking lot from Laredo to Dallas these days, it was, in 1963, brand new and lightly traveled
the first twenty miles to New Braunfels were easy, taking us about four hours, a good walking pace
the last thirty miles to San Antonio took twice that long, as each rest stop became longer until we finally quit taking rest stops out of fear that if we stopped we'd never start again
until after twelve hours exactly we arrived, blistered, with leg cramps, but exhilarated, we arrived at the front door of our destination...
...a popular song, played over and over during those twelve hours of walking was a song by the Serendipity Singers a group never heard from again, though several members became well-known as part of other groups like the Mommas and the Poppas and The Loving Spoonful
"Walk right in, Sit yourself down, Baby, Let your mind roll on"
or something like that
and we rolled on and ever since that song has been a part of the soundtrack of my life, playing softly in the back of my mind whenever the road gets rough and the row gets tough to hoe...
...at our destination where a breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes and a hot bath to uncramp the cramps because once we got there and sat down one big cramp is what we were
and a lot of miles stretch out behind me now but I still think of those fifty miles in the spring of 1963 reminding me that there is no reverse gear in life, that the truest thing is once you start, you have to finish, and the deeper the water the harder you have to swim

I end this week with some words of wisdom of A.R. Ammons from the Spring 1997 issue of Poetry East, a poetry journal published twice a year by DePaul University.
Ammons, who died in 2001 at the age pf 75, was a well know poet and translator. He wrote his first poems while serving on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he returned to civilian life where he majored in science at Wake Forest University and later did graduate work in English at the University of California at Berkeley. For a year he served as an elementary school principal on Cape Hatteras, then, for the better part of a decade, he worked at Fedrich & Dimmock as a sales executive in his father-in-law's biological glass company in New Jersey. Later, he became poet in residence at Cornell University, writing his own poetry all the while.
Old Geezer
The quickest way to change
the world is to
like it the way it
is.

Time to tie it all down and move on. Tomorrow will be another day pushing paint brushes and other instruments of sweat and sore muscles at our little money and labor pit in the country, so I'll be trying to get this posted this evening. I hope to hell we get the damn place sold before it kills me.
So, as you struggle with whatever it is that occupies your life, thanks for coming to our little blog and, remember, all of the material contained herein remains the property of its creators. The blog itself is produced by and the property of me...allen itz
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Beautiful poems this week. Enjoyed it all the way through.
Marie Gail
Allen,
Just want to commend you on a fine effort you do with all these H & N. This one no exception, have read a few, will get around to the rest tonight.
Thane
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