Goodbye, Lawrence. Hello, Summer.

[Frames / Kaw, May 2010]

[Too Many Books, Two Little Boys, May 2010]

A Two-fer

I.

The future is behind me...

The pulley season is mostly over, the moon is down too soon & the sun peeks up too early to push & pull one another into summer. It's a spring game they play to cut the cold and bring down the pounding rains.

Heading west from town, most often my family still snug in their beds (and if they aren't I stick around there way too long to watch the moon drop or sun leap), I get a view in my rearview mirror of the sun at its most orange, visible & still viewable with the naked eye as it rises up out of trees, or bluff, or in this case Highway 59.

It's funny to me that the sun rises at my back as I drive away. I am no hero riding off into the sunset but some silly pilgrim driving away from the sun & the ones I care about most. 

Today I stopped and took the picture. It isn't well composed (and neither is this description) but it chronicles one of the strange symbolic phenomena of being a commuter who notices things and is just silly enough to try and embed them with significance. It's kind of a curse.  

II.

Let's play three...

I've been sitting here grading final exams. My iPod has been playing background music. Mostly I haven't paid attention to it. However, three songs penetrated the single-minded concentration it takes to conquer the last days of grading. Here they are.

(I'm saving the best for last even though it played first.)

Enjoy:

Oh, it is worth saying that all three of these tunes were first played for me by the same fine person with an ear for great music: the one and only Jeff K.

Thanks, Jeff. Now I am going to drive home too fast listening to "Four Night Rider" over & over & over & over...

Here goes: [Settings: Repeat: One]

A bit of dust...

I don't usually post a poem (or whatever this is) right as I write it, but this time I decided I would. Our youngest son, F., was taking a nap, but E. and I were supposed to watch our nieces and nephews this afternoon, so E. and L. went on over and I stayed here to let F. sleep. I decided to listen to a few records and relax. I chose Hometowns by The Rural Alberta Advantage. The songs on this album are mostly love songs--non-typical love songs--and the album is a continuing narrative. It was a great way to spend an hour of a Saturday afternoon. It made me think about my wife and my family and how being alone, even for a short time, and missing the ones you love can be a helpful experience. The last song on side B of the album is called "In the Summertime". It is a wonderful song. I got up and replayed it several times.  As it ended for the last time, F. woke up and called for me to help him out of bed. The poem came to me at the first pop of dust during track one, but it didn't fully emerge until F.'s cry.
----
Call & Answer

A bit of dust just made the record pop,
a bit of back beat, just behind the bang
& crash.

               Edging the volume
one more notch to hear the clicks
& taps, the sweet impurity of hiss,

careful not to wake the sleeper,
hopeful that the spin stays true--
one more song & back for you.

----
and when we're middle aged,
you tell me i loved you like a renegade
----

The gift of an empty room 

& longed-for sounds:
windows for light, 

drums for heart, 

coupled voices

cut the quiet 

like breeze

through 

heat.

----

our love is strong...

while my heart's still pumping blood.

----

At that last song's last beat, 

the organ's wail or whine dies.

There's one final click & the sound 

of the automatic arm's robotic swing & drop...

The gift of loneliness goes,

no other song will do its service.

But the rising song of a waking son:

Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,...

That call is an answer,

and my answer is  of course.

 

Faith, Hope, & Doubt

Where have you been? / And what have you done? / I've been under the ground / Eating prayers from this old book I found / Under the ground / Saving it up / And spending it all / n moving pictures / Silent films / Moving pictures / Silent films (Tony Dekker (Great Lake Swimmers), “Moving Pictures Silent Films”)

But see, this logical God, I don't like him all that much. Even His voice, He's got this voice that I just can't, I don't know, I can't like. I can understand it, but I don't necessarily like it. He's out of my range. But that's no problem. Plenty of times I haven't liked Him. It's good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse. (Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin 50)

I cannot close my eyes and hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, for me it is impossible, but I do not praise myself on that account. I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a pristine lyrical validity. When it is present to me I am unspeakably happy, when it is absent I yearn for it more intensely than the lover for the beloved; but I do not have faith; this courage I lack. God's love is for me, both in a direct and inverse sense, incommensurable with the whole of reality. I am not coward enough to whimper and moan on that account, but neither am I underhand enough to deny that faith is something far higher. I can very well carry on living in my manner, I am happy and satisfied, but my happiness is not that of faith and compared with that is indeed unhappy. (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: “Prelude from the Heart” 63)

_______________________________________________

Let this stand for the failed poems & the false prayers. 

What the blue behind the black, the flickering of lights, the unrecognized face in the mirror attempt to locate and dream, memory, imagination, and discourse fail to make whole is the age-old struggle between faith & hope & doubt & resignation.

Writing a poem is as much an act of faith as it is an act of will. The electronic posting of a poem, especially, is a pitiable type of prayer. To pray is to be hopeful. Yet the problem remains: prayers are never answered in predictable ways. Sometimes the voices remain silent; other voices respond with too much kindness; still others speak the words poets fear most, the truth about the lack. And the poet’s own voice always hints at its own phoniness.

What the poet pours over in books, scratches out in paper, taps out piano-like on keys is the connection that links what is already lost, is beginning to fade, or never materialized.

Poems pray to birds, speak to the dead & reinvent the voices of both.

I      In the swamp in secluded recesses,

A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary the thrush,

The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,

Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,

Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,

If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)

Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

What is this if it is not the sincerity of prayer?

Poems beg forgiveness, plead for help, praise, thank, and damn…all at one time.  And they nearly always fail. But in failing, poets breathe easier, hedging their bets against doubt, if only for the minutes & hours of invention, savoring a little death, in the hope of stealing a little extra time.

for it is not so much to know the self   

as to know it as it is known

   by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it:

A. R. Ammons, “Gravelly Run”

Hope & doubt settle near one another; happiness was not the only quality born a twin. One holds on as faithfully as it can, and the other does its best to settle for resignation. The product of this labor is art; the more faithful the more absurd, or so the Dane would have us believe.

What I’m wrestling with in writing this is what I already know before I finish the poem: it will never become what it was when it arrived as idea. The prayer will not find its answer. The voice will never match the hopefulness. Resignation is not faith, and doubt is not bread.

But we will not resign ourselves to anything but continuing to pray out lines, one failure at a time.

The Illusion of Darkness

(Thanks to Melissa for the jump-start)


A night flash of electricity
somewhere to the north
brightens, temporarily,
the blue behind the black.

Though the sky is paler than we
remember from the light of day,
it is somehow brighter for its
lack of shine & glare & burn.

The green of grass sheens
without shadow, the tableau tree
stands still, its head of translucent leaves,
nearly neon in temporary gloaming.

A hill rises, brown lines
slanting upwards without
regard to the horizon &
their own perpendicularity.

A white farm house, red-roofed,
with a sloped porch, a sleeping yellow
dog— perhaps just awakened now
by the cannon fire that shakes me too.

All of this half-remembered,
half-dreamed, when a friend flicks
the lights of a poem off & on
in the middle of a drifty day.

Somewhere a mirror shows
another version of the artist,
younger, more or less confident,
considering whether or not to shave.

When the lights flash off & on,
he does not recognize the reflection
in the mirror, doesn’t know the date,
the hour, or the details of room he’s in.

Just as quickly, off & on again,
and it is now. Out the front window,
looking north: a white farm house,
a clouded sky, blue & birded.

Tonight, the blue will still be,
with or without the yellow flash.
In the morning, shaving under an uneven light,
I'll wait a little longer for recognition.

[It's not fixed, but I'm done with it for now.]

On Receiving an Electronic Rejection Slip

“We're not going to be able to keep anything from this submission, we're sorry to say. Thank you, though, for letting us have a chance with your work.”

Delusions of grandeur long since

dissolved, it still smarts when the

slip arrives, especially after long

pondering, then sending & after

forgetfulness settles. And then,

perhaps more, when it arrives ink-

less, gracious & yet inhumane.

(Or is it un-human?) Long past

type-script, manu-script, even

word processed & print-pushed,

just a computerized auto-reply,

voiceless, fingerless, stampless.

A pulse-less thank you, but no chance.

It is difficult to paper the walls with

self-printed rejection. But trouble

is saved in not looking for fingerprints.

They are only mine, and I should

have known better. Better luck next time.

Hope: "Il faut cultiver leur jardin"

Mid-Spring, the lilacs are bred, the rains come, the garden planned or planted. Summer is quick in the mind, the heart fluttering or hiding, preparing for the heat & humidity of Summer's inevitable drought & sudden storms.

But this is still Spring; weather is unpredictable and intermittently beautiful & unforgiving, as a Friday's flag, at half staff, semiotically suggested, making a whiplash turn from soft west to hard south.

That means the home stretch was mostly in head wind.

At the far end of the familiar farm pond, the elusive, saintly heron sat, again, watching my car slow to a stop on the gravel of a siding, but she didn't wait through my mad dash across the almost empty highway. Sensing the threat of being captured and over-pixelated, she flew--west & far & out of sight.

But the real gift was back on the other side of the car: neat, new green rows showing Summer's early work has already begun.

Beyond the beauty of the view, and that beauty was significant to bring me some measure of happiness not only for the weekend, one that would celebrate mothers and children, but to remind me that the hopefulness of Spring is always linked to the hard work of Summer.

Hope & happiness are never far from one another. But what we forget is the labor that it takes to keep the landscape free from obstruction and unavoidable ugliness. This was the lesson that these new rows taught me that a low-flying great blue bird did not.

There is a limit to vision, but still we squint our eyes and look. Hope takes work; it’s time to get our hands dirty.

Sunday Shuffle: Happy Mothers Day

“She’s About A Mover” Sir Douglas Quintet

She strolled on up to me,
Said, "hey, big boy, what's your name?" Hey, hey.
Well, she strolled on up to me,
She said, "hey, big boy, what's your name?"
If you want love and conversation,
Woah, yeah, what I'd say

[Well, it didn’t quite happen that way, but it might as well have!]

“Hold You In My Arms” Ray LaMontagne

When you kissed my lips with my mouth so full of questions
My worried mind that you quiet
Place your hands on my face
Close my eyes and say
That love is a poor man's food
Don't prophesize
I could hold you in my arms
I could hold you forever
And I could hold you in my arms
I could hold you forever

[May my riches never get in the way of my poverty… er, something like that, thanks H. D. T.]

“In the Midnight Hour” Wilson Pickett

I'm gonna wait 'til the stars come out

See them twinkle in your eyes

I'm gonna wait 'til the midnight hour

That's when my love begins to shine

You're the only girl I know

[Maybe not as much now as years ago (work, kids, sleep, etc.), but there will always be midnights (summers, nights out, retirement) until there aren’t anymore. There’s something to keep hope around for.]

Bonus: “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” The Smiths

And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well the pleasure, the privilege is mine

[So, it didn’t come up fourth, but it was within ten! And I just finished a book that used it as muse, so it’s fair play.]

A Premature Nostalgia

“I’m so far from not caring.” (DeYarmond Edison, “Bones”, 2006)

I know that it is only May 5th, but I’m sitting here at this desk and looking out the window and I’m already gone for the year. The song on the little stereo isn’t helping me: “Bones, lying in a trunk at the foot of my bed / they're always open to show me that they're still dead / and everyday it's harder still”.

I’m not sad, not depressed, but there is a dull ache (a mini-melancholy) somewhere near the marrow. I guess it’s been there for years. Most of the time, I’m smilish and have a habit for telling stories—whether the audience wants them or not. Another version of me, one I cultivated for many years is quite quiet, nearly silent (boy, can he brood). He’s still my chauffeur most mornings and afternoons. He stops the car for me to take picture, keeps it running though. Today he must have entered the building, knowing that it’s Wednesday and the extroverted version won’t be needed for hours. But introversion breeds thinkiness and thinkiness breeds loneliness—sometimes.

But then a friend dropped in and stopped the seclusion. Sensing the mood (and the music?), he confessed to a predilection for “premature nostalgia.” The end being already envisioned, the getting there becomes less important; he explained that this has lead on occasion to a dampening of happiness—or a quickening of its always-eminent departure, but this friend is far from a kill-joy. In fact, he has a talent for making people happier by just showing up, but he’ll also let you wallow if that’s what you need. Today, we broke the wallowing with conversation, only a few minutes, but we broke it well.

Alone in the room again, and soon I’ll get back to the work I’ve been avoiding (and I have, I had to so that I could get to this, I’m not that bad of an employee), I let myself listen to that song one more time. The last verse gets back to the bones: “skin, and it's warm enough to hold you and keep you breathing / but it locks me out and makes me lose my needing / and how long to be alone / how will I carry these bones? // and I'm so far from not caring”.

What I am nostalgic for is both already past and yet always arriving. I have passed decades of Mays and ends of school years; I have felt their relief more often than their wistfulness, but I have felt both, feel both. After all, it was as recent as this January I was ready to hang it all up for good and find that second career, but things, especially mood, always & often change.

This year, I want June. I need June. I’m already mid-way to June in my mind, but I can already feel the end of summer too. All the things that won’t get read, written, cleaned, organized, thrown out, painted, played with, and on and on.

And there are the things of this year that still need to be processed and accounted for or left behind. And maybe this is it. Maybe it’s a nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake I’m feeling. Maybe, sitting by myself in this room—by myself here for the first time in months it seems—I am coming to terms with the changes that have already occurred (that every survived year brings). This year there is much that I haven’t caught up to yet. I have a lot of people to say thank you to. I have a few to let know that though the summer drought is about to begin that I’m not too far to be reached, and not just electronically.

Time is no straight line, but rather, it folds accordion-like back onto itself, separating and coming together. I won’t talk about the music it makes (like it or not), but I will end with that song again:

Pain, I'm good with the ways there are to erase
And I'm pancaked on the floor, you can't see my face
Cuz it's buried like the moon
Sober morning's come too soon


And I’m so far from not caring; and I’m not going anywhere, not yet.

Re-Public

[This is against my better judgement!]


Here's a couple of sad poems this guy (see picture from ~13, 14, 15 years ago) wrote:

Autumn

"I will make a poem of true riches" -W.W.

True riches only found in eyes
And richer still in those that cry
for longing of a dear, true friend
Who, gone too long, will come again
When softer shadows paint this hall--
And new-born leaves find hue and fall.

[23 September 1996]

The above poem was written in response to several things:


1) The Whitman line is from part 12 of "Starting from Paumanok" the poem continues:

I will make the true poem of riches,
To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death;
I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other  [...]

and earlier in that poem (part 9) (and this is the stanza from Whitman that as a high school boy first hooked me) he preaches:

What do you seek so pensive and silent?
What do you need camerado?
Dear son do you think it is love?

Listen dear son--listen America, daughter or son,
It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great,
But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide,
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all.

2) A newly dead dad (17 September 1995)


3) The love of a girl that was "just a friend."
______________________________________

I grew up in one house; in fact, I only ever had one bedroom that I shared with two brothers, then one brother, then none. That house was on Adams Street, 407. In college, I lived with some friends for 1 3/4 years, first on a couch (unofficailly) and then officially in an upstairs bedroom, at 407 Laramie Street.

407's
Twenty-two years old, upstairs bedroom
Of a college house, sounds like bridge night.
Suddenly, ten again, my brothers are out--my
sisters are gone-- I sit, by myself, in a shared room,
listening to women laugh and men move ice-
cubes in small glass tumblers. Now, mason jars
and Jim Beam and the women are still laughing--
and I am still listening, by myself, in a shared room.

Sunday Drive