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Autumn Shadows
Friday, October 03, 2008 Despite ten years of retirement, I have retained some of my old management obsessions, particularly things like "performance monitoring" and "benchmarking." So, that bit of manager left in me did a little bit of a jig at the end of September when "Here and Now" surpassed the 18,000 hits in a single month benchmark for the first time. Now, the truth is, I don't have any clue what a "hit" is, but I'm sure 18,000 is better than 18 and the more zeros you add at the end, the better it is. So, for whatever the hell it means, yea! "Here and Now" for getting, making, finding, whatever,18,254 hits in September. Moving on to October, here's what I have for you this week. From my library -- Chiang Shi-Chuan Sun Wan Fan Tseng-Hsiang W. Joe Hoppe Wendy Barker Bob Kaufman Octavio Paz Linda Hogan Mary Swander Jim Carroll Diane Wakoski From friends of 'Here and Now" Gary Blankenship Alex Stolis t rasa Bruce Swanson and me.  My first poems this week are from the anthology Waiting for the Unicorn - Poems and Lyrics of China's Last Dynasty, 1644-1911 edited by Irving Yucheng Lo and William Schultz, published by Indiana University Press in 1990. First, I have two poems by Chiang Shih-Chuan. Born in 1725 he died in 1785. Chiang was born in Nanchang and considered at the time one of the his era's foremost literary men. Though also known as a poet, he was best known as a dramatist. In spite of his literary successes, Chiang did not do well in capital examinations. After a number of attempts, he eventually did well enough to secure several minor positions in the capital. After retiring in 1763 to care for him mother, he returned to government service in 1781. Shortly after that, he came down with a partial paralysis that forced him into a permanent retirement. Both of these poems were translated by Irving Yucheng Lo. An Evening Prospect: City Lights Market torches, boat lanterns: a jumble of fireflies. Grasses and clouds - a trail of black ink - the night long and dark. I imagine myself among the layered clouds, Looking down upon the human world with its galaxy of stars. Expelling Witches Shamans scurrying everywhere propagate ghostly teachings. Alas, they've not yet met a Hsi-men Pao! Cursing at spirits, howling at ghosts, they weep and sigh. The sick are fearful and suspicious when medicine effects no cure. At my eastern neighbor's house, at midnight they strike the shaman's drum, Stirring me from deep sleep, disturbing my dreams. Dressing and going into the moonlight, I ascend my neighbor's hall; Wife and children hold back their tears as the old man lies abed. An old shamaness shakes her head and mumbles incantations; Holding a dragon's horn, she invokes the White Tiger. Hideous and repulsive, ugly and strange, images are set in rows, Intermixed with pictures of lascivious women, truly detestable. Wooden phoenixes, golden placards are hidden by flags and pennants On high a lamp burns in front of a life-giving tally. I rip up the demon images, put them to the torch, Then trample on the ashes, smash their bows. I blow out the lamps, curse the shamans, and all take flight. Guests and friends, their tongues hanging out, all depart; Spirits and ghosts scatter and flee the place. At break of day the sick man rises to eat rice gruel. Master Hu wrote a poem on expelling witches, And in three days it was chanted in villages and towns. Formerly I heard of a magistrate summoning a shamaness to summon his own spirit. With drums and and music, she was escorted to the temple gate. Alas, who has not heard that demons come from among men? The mention of Hsi-men Po at the beginning of the poem is a reference to a fifth century B.C. magistrate who rid his area of sorcerers and prominent citizens who extorted money from the populace by providing young girls as sacrificial wives to the River God. Born in 1614 in the Shantung province, Sung Wan passed the imperial tests and served in public office in the capital and in a succession of provincial posts until about 1640 when he was implicated in a rebellion in his native province. He was imprisoned for several years before being cleared and returned to office. Although known as a leading poet of his time, Sung Wan was also a dramatist and a calligrapher of high reputation. He died in 1673. His poem was translated by William Schultz. Songs Composed in Prison I A Piece of Rush Matting A grieving heart can't be rolled up like a mat; This mat is good enough for a brief nap. Don't be disgusted because it is cheap, For it could still produce a Fan Sui. *Fan Sui, in the third century B.C., rose to high office after being beaten and thrown into a toilet when taken for dead. II An Earthen K'ang An ivory, bamboo, and kingfisher bed Compared to this is coarse and ugly! The butterfly and Master Chuang-chou, Sir, can you tell them apart? *A k'ang is a raised and heated platform made of bricks *Chuang-Chou was an ancient philosopher. III A Stool with a Broken Leg When the morning warmth enters the window, I bare my back and go to sleep. No telling when the spirit of Poverty will leave me, I invite him to take this seat of honored guests. IV An Earthen Stove A solitary lamp glows in the dark room; My old servant, his head drooping, sleeps. I get up to heart some water in the pot And put my underpants on upside down. Fan Tseng-Hsiang was born in 1846 and died in 1931. He was a prolific poet with a reputation as an excellent magistrate in Shensi province, even though he was not known as an important player in the politics and cultural affairs of his time. This poem was translated by J.P. Seaton (from)Random Verses from a Boat II My good wife was born in the Capital: She's never seen the finest of boats or oars. Come South, to see the misty waters, Her eyes , a sparkle like the eddying waves. Water creatures, fishing gear - One by one, she asks about their names. A little afraid as the wind in the sails heels the boat, But joyous to hear the soft music of the sculling oar. Reed shoots supply a pretty dish; Mallow leaves make a fragrant soup. In the groves hard by, nets set in the sun to dry; Along the dikes, occasional weirs, At last begin to understand the ancients' paintings That depict the true joys of fishermen. How I wish to sail off to the Five Lakes: In a boat light as a white gull. Writing table, mirror stand, All year long will be put away. The brewing of tea is what I've long been accustomed to; I would have no need to buy my own Fuelwood Green. *Fuelwood Green - a pun. You had to be there.  Here's a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago. i dreamed last night i dreamed last night i was a kid again fifteen tolerating school sacking groceries on saturdays mowing yards during the week making a little money where i could working hardest at containing my inner dork sure the rest of my life stretched before me each day just like the one i was trying so hard to get through with some sense of self struggling to break through mostly losing to the here's-your-life rules of the time and place i lived in bravado substituting for the real person i wasn't and wouldn't be for some years yet bittersweet years in retrospect only in real time mostly years of scared shitless day to day hunkering behind self delusion  Born in 1961, W. Joe Hoppe has published about a dozen chapbooks and his poems have appeared in a number of periodicals. He also has a poetry video $5200 MSTA that has been shown several underground film festivals in Texas as well as at VideoEx in Zurich. From photos included in the book, it seems he probably has more tattoos than any other cowboy, poet or cowboy-poet in Texas. The next poem is from his book, Galvanized,published by Dalton Publishing of Austin in 2007. Red Rustoleum August Texas heat resonates with the blood behind my eyeballs in the notes of the cicadas the tip of each blade of grass the very leaves of the trees I'm partially sheltered beneath inside this red '68 GMC with its seat torn out rust steel wooled down to orange dust the stamped metal gutters wiped clean no longer hidden beneath black rubber mats waiting for my thick red river The truck's secret places lie exposed earth and oil and metal odor brings me back to Michigan in my dad's mother's cars my sister and i the only ones ever to ride in the back seat of Gram's Satellite our backsides wiped the blue vinyl toward clean but the black and blue and brown rubbed rubber floor held galaxies of detritus My Gram rides with me in old cars without carpets the sweet smelling ink of blue-capped Bic pens brown plastic medicine vials full of pennies The red paint soaks into pitted steel over rivets and around threaded holes Metal my mother's father knew about as a lathe-man, royalty in the tool & die shop where metal gouged and drilled and sawed and ground everything spinning in full on precision and no thing stood un-joined. As the red glides over the farm truck's insides Grand-dad's after Sunday dinner tales of Texas flow like the book of fishes big one he saw strung up along the banks of the Rio Grande tied by the tail being drained of oil rotting on ropes and oh the smell all to be made into paint just like I'm using in the heat of a Texas my Grand-dad never returned to where red Rustoleum runs from my brush  Next I have poems by "Here and Now's" good friend, Gary Blankenship. The poems are from a series Gary wrote about the various states of the United States, ending up with fifty poems, or a poem for each state. Gary is a master at doing that sort of thing. If I tried it, I'd get to maybe the fifth or sixth state and dry up like a bone in the desert. Here are three of the fifty. Poetic States VII - Texas Larger than a Breadbox You are too huge to be captured in verse written by a minor poet who knows that it takes two days to cross you no matter where the start. and you raised two modern presidents - one mostly good, the other a bit less, though they both seemed all too fond of guerilla wars that couldn't be won. Nothing more needs to be mentioned in a short poem but Dick's Riverwalk, the perfect place for tequila shots and buckets of boiled crawdads as we forget which war explodes now and the humidity blowing from the Gulf. Poetic States XLIII - Oklahoma American Idol Auditions, Houston I never met a man I didn't like. - Will Rogers With nothing more than a rope, grin and prickly pear wit, he starts his act with a joke about a county judge and jackass, "though that may be the same thing." The producer, sharp as a horned toad, turned his back and mumbled, "Where does this clown think he is, at an audition for a new Hee-Haw?" The bass player compared him to Jimmy Dean, another sausage maker who made a fortune talking his way through one song that can't be sung. The singer looked at his costume and tried to think of something nice to say settling for "Are we back in Seattle or did we land in Dogpatch." He never set foot on a stage again, though in Rogers County, he wowed the boys at the VFW with rope, smile, and "Well, there was this one time..." Poetic States IV - Arkansas Over the River, through the Woods When we arrived at Ben's at the edge of the Ozarks, his family left their meal to prepare ours - ham, chicken, potatoes, fresh strawberries - all grown on their farm - as Ben told us about raising hogs in the hills and dealing with government men. In Jerusalem, we sat on the porch of Aunt Rose's unpainted house as gravel trucks rumbled by. She told us stories of how the town changed in the 75 years since she'd married after the first war, and fed us strawberry shortcake from the supermarket. We tried to avoid turtles on the road back from Ben's, but we could not.  Wendy Barker has published four full-length collections of poetry, including Poems from Paradise in 2005, Way of Whiteness in 2000, Let the Ice Speak in 1991, and Winter Chickens and other poems by by Corona Publishing of San Antonio in 1990. She has also published autobiographical essays as well as works of translation. Her poems and translations have also appeared in numerous magazines, including Poetry, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Stand, Partisan Review, and Antioch. Barker has read her poetry at dozens of universities, bookstores, festivals, and conferences in the United States, Europe, and in India, and her work is frequently anthologized. As a scholar, she is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor as well as coeditor of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone. A Fulbright senior lecturer in Bulgaria during the fall of 2000, she is Poet in Residence and professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. This poem is from her first book Winter Chickens and other poems. Scanno Goat fleece dries on iron railings, white against black. Cheeses swell like udders, hang in pairs from braided rope, a mortadella is as big as a man's head. Old women hide their hair under scarves, knit in doorways, look straight through you, don't drop a stitch. Their needles move faster than children's feet running after balls on the church steps. Houses are stone, streets are stone, the mountain against which they pitch their lives is hard white rock, and it goes straight up, lines unblurred by any leaves , even in summer.  I seem to be having more than my share of encounters with squirrels who might illustrate a point, like this, a couple of weeks ago. watching a squirrel hide his nut it's 9:30 still cool and breezy on the porch at Casa Chiapas i was thinking about my morning poem something about Dave Brubeck who i saw last week at Travis Park when a squirrel walked by with a very large pecan in his mouth he stopped very quickly as squirrels do looked at me then went on again very quickly as squirrels do to a little patch of grass by the sidewalk did some sniffing a little tentative digging then on to more sniffing and more tentative digging looking obviously for a suitable place to hide his nut on his fifth try he stood up straight watching out for spies who might raid his cache if they see where he digs it then bends back down and places his nut gently into the little hole he had scratched in the dirt stood up straight again checked once more for spies then scampered across the street as squirrels scamper looking very disjointed legs going every which a way but moving very fast never the less jumping on the picket fence in front of the bright red roses in the garden of the little limestone house across the street perhaps there is something of Brubeck in this poem after all the unique scamper of the squirrel like the unique way Brubeck played with time signatures 5/4 6/4 7/4 even 9/8 in "Blue Rondo a la Turk" stuff that like the scampering squirrel seems like it ought not work but does and the whole experimentation of jazz like the squirrel sniffing and digging sniffing and digging until just the right elements come together for new sounds in unexplored territory and that is why... oh,wait, the squirrel is back with another nut two nuts one squirrel a very successful squirrel indeed  It's been a while since I've used anything from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, so, here is Bob Kaufman from that anthology. Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 and died in 1986. When he was thirteen years old, Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at New York's The New School. He moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. Kaufman usually didn't write down his poems and much of his published work survives by way of his wife, Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them. Like many beat writers, Kaufman became a Buddhist. Along with poets Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, A. D. Winans, and William Margolis, he was one of the founders of Beatitude magazine. He appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" four times in 1970-1971. An improvisational performance poet, Kaufman was greatly influenced by jazz, making use in the creation and performance of jazz syncopation and meter. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud." Bagel Shop Jazz Shadow people, projected on coffee-shop walls. Memory formed echoes of a generation past Beating into now. Nightfall creatures, eating each other Over a noisy cup of coffee. Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings, Smelling vaguely of mint jelly and last night's bongo drummer. Making profound remarks on the shapes of navels, Wondering how the short Sunset week Became the long Grant Avenue night, Love tinted, beat angels, Doomed to see their coffee dreams Crushed on the floors of time, As they fling their arrow legs To the heavens, Losing their doubts in the beat. Turtle-necked angel guys, black-haired dungaree guys, Caesar-jawed, with synagogue eyes, World travelers on the forty-one bus, Mixing jazz with the pait talk, High rent, Bartok, classical murders, The pot shortage and last night's bust. Lost in a dream world, Where time is told with the beat. Coffee-faced Ivy Leaguers, in California Whose personal Harvard was a Filmore district Weighted down with conga drums, The ancestral cross, the Othello-laid curse, Talking of Bird and Diz and Miles, The secret terrible hurts, wrapped in cool hipster smiles, Telling themselves, under the talk, This shot must be the end, Hoping the beat is the truth. The guilty police arrive. Brief, beautiful shadows, burned on walls of night.  My next poem is by "Here and Now" friend Alex Stolis. I had emailed Alex and ask him to send some of his new work. He sent me a handful of poems including these. In his email sending these poems, and others, to me, he explained the project he is working on. He said, "It is a chapbook length manuscript that i am currently working on. I am using "The Replacement's" catalogue as a template (cult band from the eighties, not real well known but highly influential). Sorry ma, forgot to take out the trash, is the name of the album i am starting with. The poem titles are taken from the song names. As the group progressed and matured their sound went from punk to more sophisticated, controlled and focused arrangements. The arc of the chapbook will be the same. The initial poems will be ( i hope anyway) more noir/punk like and then progress from there. I have in mind about thirty poems total and maybe the whole idea will flop. I think that because "The Replacements'" are not commercially well known I may run into trouble in publishing the whole but I figure it is cooler than doing the same thing with The Rolling Stones or someone as famous as that." I wish it was in me to start something this structured and ambitious. Kick your door down if anybody said it was going to be easy they don't know a thing about the past, the way it creeps inside your drink and forces you to wash down the words stuck in your throat one, two, onetwothree it's two a.m., we're laid out flat and the last way home has left us with our backs screwed to the wall thatsitenoughisenoughalready cantyoutellwerebored so let's blow it all away and watch the last friend standing crawl out the door then lock it behind them. Shiftless when idle someone pumps lost change in the jukebox there's a roll and click the sound of quarters tumbling always alone, a whir then wait: the next song 0A will hit the floor will seem familiar like a sheet being pulled over skin it will become the moment you realize you've been living at the movies and when it’s time to put out the lights it's still too early to call it a day but way too late to go home Bozo the clown is dead Dick remembered it as a black and blue summer - Kennedy wasn't dead yet and a six pack could help you get to third base and brave enough to steal home. There was poor, not working -class poor but the kind of poor that leaves the taste of soot in your mouth. Some days it tasted like orange - when the palm of his hand was sticky from pulp, when the spinning, triangular tiles on the floor became stained dark brown from grounds. There weren't many rewards going out but thousands coming back20 so Jane said it was best to slice up his dreams into pieces that could be easily reassembled to fit into a break-apart world.  Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz was born in 1914. His family was opposed to the Diaz regime and were public supporters during the revolution of Emiliano Zapata and were forced into exile after Zapata's assassination. They served their exile in the United States. As a teenager in 1931 Paz published his first poems. Two years later, at the age of 19, he published his first collection of poems, Wild Moon. In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal. In 1937, Paz abandoned his law studies and began his life as a full-time poet and activist. In 1962 he was named Mexico's ambassador to India and, in 1968, resigned from the diplomatic corps after the governments oppression during the student uprising that same year. He sought refuge in Paris for a while and returned to Mexico in 1969. From 1970 to 1974, he taught at Harvard University in Cambridge. He continued writing and as editor of his journal Vuelta until his death in 1998 from cancer. His awards include the 1977 Jerusalem Prize for literature on the theme of individual freedom. In 1980 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and in 1982 he won the Neustadt Prize. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. I have several short poems this week from the bookThe Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 published in 1998 by New Directions. The book names a whole list of translators, but doesn't specify which poem was translated by which translator. On The Wing Orange Little sun silent on the table, permanent noon. It lacks something: night. Dawn On the sand, bird-writing: the memoirs of the wind Stars And Cricket The sky's big. Up there, worlds scatter. Persistent, unfazed by so much night a cricket: brace and bit. Non-Vision Barren hour, reservoir where my thoughts drink themselves. For one enormous moment I forgot my name. Little by little I was unborn, diaphanous arrival. Calm Sand-clock moon: the night empties out, the hour is lit.  Here's another of my coffee shop observational pieces. You can find mystery as well as revelation all around. All you have to do is look. morning mystery theater huddled together they talk in near whispers black woman in a black dress white woman blond dressed for the sun in white bright eyes flash from black face like a beacon on storm-darkened seas white hands clench tight together morning mystery to flavor my coffee  From Totems to Hip-Hop, A multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 edited by novelist and poet Ishmael Reed. The book was published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 2003. It's an interesting book, including a wide range of poets from Nobel laureates to students in Reed's writing classes. The poem I selected for this week is by Linda Hogan. Hogan, born in 1947, is a Chickasaw poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She grew up in a military family and therefore moved often, with most of her childhood spent in Oklahoma and Colorado. She has a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of Colorado and, for a time, supported herself with odd jobs and freelance writing. By 1980, her success as a writer led to her appointment as writer-in-residence for the states of Colorado and Oklahoma. In 1982 she became an assistant professor in the TRIBES program at Colorado College, Colorado Springs. She then became associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota moving later to the University of Colorado as a professor in the English Department. She left that position to write full time a few years ago. Hogan served on the National Endowment for the Arts poetry panel for two years and has been involved in wildlife rehabilitation as a volunteer. Tiva's Tapestry: La Llorona For Tiva Trujillo, 1979 White-haired woman of winter, la Llorona with the river's black unraveling drowned children from her hands. At night frozen leaves rustle the sound of her skirt. Listen and wind comes spinning her song from the burning eyes of animals from the owl whose eyes look straight ahead. She comes dragging the dark river a ghost on fire for children she held under water. Stars are embroidered on the dark. Long shadows, long like rivers I am sewing shut the doors filling the windows in with light. This needle pierces a thousand kisses and rage the shape of a woman I light this house, sprinkle salt on my sleeping child so dreams won't fly her into the night. These fingers have sewn darkness and flying away on the white hair growing on the awful tapestry of sky just one of the mothers among the downward circling stars.  *A note about this photo: The piece of road art shown was located on the Interstate 35 access road passing through San Marcos, Texas. The San Marcos City Council recemtly ruled that it came under the city's derelict car ordinance and must be removed. I haven't been by there since, but I assume it is gone. Boo San Marcos City Council. Next, I have a poem from friend of "Here and Now," t rasa, who describes himself as - "...a 60ish semi-hermit who grew up in a mythical place called the Wild West, leaving home in the Sixties to see the world. After forty years of seeing, he says he decided the "world" was pretty much the same everywhere and returned to the mythical place to read poetry and listen to blues and jazz (and Stevie Nicks) for the rest of his life. He says he tries, occasionally, to write the kind of poetry he likes to read, but his main goal in life is still to brew the perfect cup of dark-roast coffee." Drag Racing in Antarctica Why whiskey should be classified a vegetable. Felix Catt flew through aether as television's first image. We all knew it was conspiracy. We are so hard to foolhardy to fool, so geologically fresh. As Americans, we can stare anyone down. I think I've lived here forever, dancing on Charon's raft where everyone deserves an Oscar despite papal edicts for the baptized and blessed. I shall opt for Excursion du Lethe, watch the sharks as they wiggle the water fat-finned earning frequent swimmer miles while Vienna's bakers listen for larksong and tunneling Turks, shape croissants as scimitars. What relief to know we are all aristocrats spurning Procrustus' spare palette. We are, with biblical pedigree, symbols of power. Captains quite capable of disdaining lesser mammals and starvation's Mozarts no matter that from here on the raft, reflected in this quantum pool, we see through our edifice of anthems.  Mary Swander has published individual poems, essays, short stories and articles in such places as The Nation, National Gardening Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry magazine. She has won numerous awards including an Iowa Author's Award, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the Literary Arts, two Ingram Merrill Awards (1980, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the Nation-Discovery Award. Swander received her M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She is a professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. The Art of Acupuncture Heart, lung, liver, kidney, spleen, the needle slips in to the wince of pain, then midnight to midday, the wheel spins round, and underneath, we are all flesh, all grass, the weed, the blade, the word. The word is: it hurts at first, then you might feel a tingling, an opening - door of the wind, windows to the sky. And the constellations are scattered across your skin - water of the milky way, dragon breathing fire. Up and down your spine, a planisphere of the northern horizon. Mother and son, fire burns wood and the needle drives into your hand. Mother and son, wood leaves ash, a cross on your forehead, And in order to get better,son leaves mother, a rock rolled up, rolled back. Rock, air, fire, water, wood. Each stab is a dare, a bet, a shake of the dice, so I sing of Pilate and the Roman soldiers, a spear in the side, a thorn in the crown. My God, my God, I sing of moxa and mugwort, of lifting cups, of the Tao and Yellow Emperor, the T'ang and the Ming. I sing of a heaven of eased muscles, greased joints, an earth of full moons, the light, the light to see the way. some say the world will end in fire, the cosmos in chaos, but I sing of the curious points, nameless, of nerve ganglia and meridians, tiny circles of tissue and skin, holding on, holding everything in. I shout of these oddballs, odd ducks, unnoticed halos of hope that neither crow nor coo, but go on in their wobbly way grazing in the yard for a bug and, at night, wings spread, shine in the dark with their faint flicker, their dim flame.  Here's something I wrote last weekend. My son, a newly converted bicyclist, was visiting from Austin and we were talking about the difference between walking and bicycling and he said, jokingly, "walking is so pedestrian," from which, I thought, that's funny, I ought to find a poem in it somewhere. So I went home and wrote this piece about a hitchhiker I picked up many years ago. walking is so pedestrian it was about 40 years ago, the night i picked up the King of Denmark at a gas station in San Marcos Texas i was coming from Austin, heading for Corpus Christi by way of San Antonio I stopped in San Marcos for gas and while pumping noticed this guy looking at me, like he was trying to decide whether he wanted to talk to me or not i topped off my tank went inside to pay the bill and it was only when i came out again to go to my car that he stopped me and ask where i was going he said he was going to El Paso and was looking for a ride i never was one to pick up a hitchhiker, having had some experiences as a hitcher myself that made me wary, but he was a decent looking guy clean clothes seemed sober didn't smell and was polite so i thought what the hell and told him to get in we were only about a mile and a half down the road when he started telling me his story he was the legitimate King of Denmark, snatched at birth from his castle in Copenhagen and brought to the United States where he was sold to a dairy farmer in Kansas who worked him from sun up to sun down, dark to dark, he said, almost from the time he could walk he ran away when he was twelve, he said, and had been looking for a way to get back to Denmark ever since he was getting tired, he said, and was losing hope that he'd ever get home again, but that wasn't the worse part the worse part was he was in constant danger since the pretender to the throne had his assassins looking for him since the day he snuck off from the farm and if they found him he was a dead man for sure it really puts me under a lot of pressure, he said, sometimes i don't know how much longer i can take it by the time he reached this point in his story we were on the outskirts of San Antonio (a much smaller city than it is today) so i told him i was heading south while he wanted to go north and i needed to drop him off he said he wanted to go downtown to the bus station and i said well, i'm not going that way but i can drop you here (the corner of Austin Highway and Broadway) it's a ways i told him, but from here you can walk straight on downtown to the bus station where you can catch a bus to El Paso walk, he said, i can't do that, walking is so pedestrian - no way for a king to make a royal entrance into a city like this i'll just catch a city bus do you have a quarter for the fare?  Jim Carroll, born in 1950 in New York City, is an author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. He is best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which was made into the 1995 film of the same name with Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll. Here are three poems from his book Void of Course, published by Penguin Books in 1998. Carroll apparently doesn't spend a lot of thinking time on titles for his poems, labeling most of them simple, Poem. Well, he's the poet, so he gets to make the rules about what's his. Poem Crossing 14th St. The sunlight Gentle today as if its fingers Were broken. Yet still The high pitch of Rastas Selling incense and umbrellas Which wake the neurotic orphans Residing in my spine What you told me this morning As you were leaving, I'm afraid To repeat it on paper Speak it out loud Wondering if the words Could ignite the plane on which You're flying home I could concentrate a beast And warm the coil of all hearts and loss I've memorized your feast As if it were a sheet on which I slept Which holds your scent Like a gun to my liver Poem Alright, Buddah gets A backstage pass But his friends have to pay You don't know what it's like at the strangest times your face Pouncing into my mind like a wounded cheetah Gripping your memory so tightly over years It leaves blood on my hands as on your lips It comes and goes might be days or months and with Only the vaguest idea of places you are Have been the way your name Attacks attaches itself to me like lipstick On airplanes, steep hills in San Francisco First St. in the rain, the ache that comes In parabolas of longing I wanted to tell you Because you should know That my greatest nights in California Were nights I spent inside Virginia  Clonony Castle - Cluain Damhna Photo by Bruce Swanson I had an email message from my friend Bruce Swanson last week, outlining his latest travel plans. He and his brother are off to Quito. From there he plans to spend about ten days on a sailing vessel touring the Galápagos. Then he'll head back through Quito and another week in Cuenca, a delightful colonial city, he says, in the southern highlands of Ecuador. The picture above and the four following are photos he sent some weeks ago from earlier travel.  South Fork - Eel River, Miranda, California, USA Photo by Bruce Swanson  Iglesia de La Virgen de Concepcion de Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala Photo by Bruce Swanson  Arco de Santa Catalina - 4a Av. Norte, La Antigua, Guatemala Cuy - Guinea Pig, Arequipa, Peru Photo by Bruce Swanson  Una vista oscura a Machu Picchu - Opaque view at Machu Picchu, El Peru Photo by Bruce Swanson  Speaking of exotic climes and locales, here's a piece about a place I saw on some travels in Texas several months ago. Ding Dong Ding Dong Texas located 50 miles north of Austin in Bell County is not named after Peter Hansborough Bell third governor of Texas for whom Bell County is named but for Zulis Bell and his nephew Bert Bell who opened a trading post there on the Lamapasas River in the early 1930s there are many little towns in Texas easily missed in the blink of a traveler's eye and more than a few like Ding Dong where even the briefiest blink is not required for passage unseen still there are 20 people none named Bell so far as i can tell who at the end of every day stop there just as you might stop somewhere and call it home  Diane Wakoski was born in 1937 in Whittier, California. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over forty books of poetry and is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems." Wakoski teaches creative writing at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan and won the prestigious William Carlos Williams award for her book Emerald Ice. The poem I'm using this week is from her book The Rings of Saturn published by Black Sparrow Press in 1986. Cannon Beach One week of early morning sunshine, like a perfect rose frozen in an ice cube, made us so grateful, we then loved the mist which rolled in and blanketed us for days. When the sun shone, we walked the beach at dawn while most people slept, but on the foggy mornings, we slept too, not even hearing the horns sounding from the rocks. Two thousand miles away, I can only pretend to see the Pacific Ocean no matter how early I rise. The mist that steams up from this autumn ground over pumpkins, the dried dinner-plate sun flowers with bowed heads, the final red tomatoes on the browning vines, a different beauty. It is as if everyone in Cannon Beach is sleeping while I'm awake, everyone, everywhere, different from this landscape sleeping, only I awake, not knowing the images in each head; as we all sleep through others' lives. Only a few even try to imagine what others simultaneously perceive, and then know its futility. An act of faith lets me believe the Pacific Ocean's still there, since I now can't see it. That the sun exists, through the fog entirely covers it today, or in death pass beyond what I know I am.  Now, one last piece from me to close out the week. girl dancing across the stage as she delivers my order of decaf and a scone then back again still dancing still in the music the abandon of dance and rhythm and music and youth elixir a moment of light to an old soul heavy with the weight of the day  End of the line for this week. We'll be back next week; hope you'll be back with us. In the meantime, try to remember this very important passphrase: "All work presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz." There may be a test next week. |
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