Traveling with Crows

Gathering the Stones

Small rocks on the beach, palm-heft

blackened under seawater, aged under foot

the long walk to the freshwater lagoon

where the river comes in

handfuls of rock held close under waves

washed clean in sunny saltwater

stones for prayers, one for each spot

on the horizon I want as mine

horizon so near like a hair’s breadth

sand between my ready toes

horizon of all worlds—your gentle hands

holding mine

return to shore, waves lapping my calves

echo triumph of the walking in

against the mark of tide into you

where we barefoot meet, where beach

finds asphalt, the inevitable road,

handfuls of rock, the long drive

seagulls

buffeting wind

the healing we all wish for.

Medicine Path

Calling the darkness, overcoming stubbornness,

getting over it, the more you receive, the higher

you rise into the trees in the bitter cold and dark.

What medicine you take, your immunity can know,

form defensive mechanisms.  Hardening the arteries

against compassion, the medicine does not get through.

You need to nurture, use.  You receive and forget

to practice, to fold the t-shirt, to pay attention as you walk;

leaning into the antidote, ego becomes

immune.  Emotions take over, develop resistance.

These are the days of stone cold rain coming.

The dirt upon my grave is coming.

The face of my own demise is coming.

I have to think this, I have to think.  I cannot live long.

My dreams reach me and I falter, consider

Could this be true?  Must I gather the wood of the past?

Lean into the shadow, bare bicep there, the fingers

of the left hand ever poised, moving in.

Who is there I can offer?

Who is there I can serve?

Who is there I can suffer?

All these will help me cook my egg.

I am ready to do it.

Deluge and the Great Horned

Walking back with the dog in the dark, under the haze of night streetlights in rain that just wouldn't quit, I saw a Great Horned Owl in a tree just overhead, right there, almost within reach, sifting its feathers and waiting out the storm.  We watched each other, and I realized, with the whole field under water and me in my waders, the dog rushing by my side, there is probably not one mouse out here anywhere.  I wondered if the owl might take a cat tonight, just might.  They are legendary for so doing.  This owl was rather small, though, not hearty like the owls I saw in the trees in Arkansas.

No break from the rain.  Soon more would come in a great gush, and I would go off to bed thinking about the owl in the tree at the edge of the Sequoia Middle School track, just off the tennis courts, just right there.  Maybe the owl lives in a garage or barn close by.  I hope so.  The Great Horned Owls in Ashland, Oregon live under the eaves of the Elizabethan theatre.  I remember watching them swoop off in the middle of the fabricated thunder and lightning of a late King Lear.

After all this rain, I cannot remember my name, nor where it is I come from.  Like the owl, I am lost from the wrenching burst, acting just out of range.  The knee-high waders rest in a dark corner of the room; my child sleeps in his bed; the night is dry and chill; the streetlights seem unnervingly bright when I go out to stand in wonder by the garbage cans, peering down the street at the tree where the Great Horned perched to wait out the rain.

Bullhead and Balboa

Standing in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, looking down the long reflecting pool near the museum populated by artists and photographers, jugglers and musicians, I feel I am in some version of paradise, California style. Open sky above me is constantly blue, or rainy for what seems like a few minutes, and the only troubling aspect is the parking lot. Here, finally, I have arrived in a controlled universe where the muck of life is held at bay within the walls of the Shakespeare theatre. I walked the length of the pool, looking at the large koi, pondering their life among tossed coins. Then I stopped, shocked. There, below me, not three feet away, was a bullhead.

Nothing beautiful about a bullhead. This ratty catfish resident of swamp waters comes from my hometown in the Delaware River Valley, Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania. Bullhead is native to brackish ooze, littered with rotting leaves, bullfrogs, and rich, cold blackwater. The Delaware River has swift, unpredictable currents that fold into layers of shale and have sucked many a good swimmer down under. The current is legendary. I lived in fear of the underwater demons of mud, of dying down there with those bottom feeders.

“They make a good chowder,” I remarked to my friend. You don’t want to eat a whole slab of bullhead. Too muddy-tasting. But in a soup with plenty of butter and salt, you can stomach the bony flesh. I could not help but remember then Abbie Hoffman’s last stand, the Point Pleasant Pumping Station, the brainchild of the misnamed Neshaminy Water Resources Authority. Hoffman joined the protest to “Dump the Pump,” an attempt to save the environment. The water would be sucked up from the river bottom and pumped to draught-suffering areas of Bucks and Montgomery Counties, and to the Limerick Power Plant in Philadelphia. The protest was eventually lost when company appeals took the case to the state level, where politicians were wined and dined handsomely. The grassroots movement, blocking the roadway on my drive to work in 1983 with shouting protestors bitter with Pennsylvania cold, died, as did Hoffman, of suicide. In Balboa Park in January, wearing a light jacket, this memory seems biblical. Something mythic that determined the fate of everything that followed. Eye to eye with a bullhead in a reflecting pool in Balboa Park.

Snow on my Morning Walk

Shelter of the house, chipping away at the housecleaning, the damp cold licking in between the panes.  Slow going.  The laundry too, though I am anxious to get the dryer drum turning, the hum and warmth from behind the door keeping snow at bay.  Before long, it is falling in great thick flakes outside, and I am bound to find myself in it.  I turn into the weather with the dog, watching the accumulation along her back.  In January, maybe because of the lined rubber shoes and the extra waterproof layer, walking requires labor.  I say the word hibernate silently to myself without wanting to.  An inevitable sore throat crops up, and after the walk, I will find myself in a steamy bath.  The pressure of achievement meets the need for a nap then.  I will wait until the sunny day comes when I will mop my kitchen tiles again, windows open.  I look to the Canada geese at the canal.  The snow does not stick to their backs.  They must be radiant heat of a kind I could not imagine.  Their voices tune the humor of sudden snow.  The dog takes off at top speed, running beneath them as they fly into the flakes, rising against the deluge easily, coloring the sky with their contrasting wings.  Black and white photograph, the dog, the snow, the geese, the buffeting clouds. 

Later, my son with his Legos on his floor, comfortable on the wall-to-wall carpet, the heater blowing on him, says, "How are we going to keep on?"  I tune in from the next room.  His Lego guys are having a conversation.  They seem to be saying the word hibernate, too, over and over to each other.  "How did we ever get to this place?  Did we fly?" the Lego guy in the left hand asks the Lego guy in the right hand.  And I will break this rhythm, read a story.  I wish I had Jack London on my bookshelf.  Just for tonight. 

I'm not there.

Cold for the central valley, we waited in line behind the National Treasure junkies lined out to the parking lot for our tickets to the Dylan show.  There were four others in the theatre, though down the hallway PS I Love You was rocking and body heat was tumbling merciless from the doorway to National Treasure.  We moved toward our doorway at the end of the long hall, quiet and serene.  Surely, we would know all the songs.  What we discovered is hard to say, though I ended up thinking more about war than about Dylan.  You could say about Dylan that he takes a few good shots to the ribs in these multiplicitous depictions.  A parody with biting wit, a satire, a straight shooter, this film moved in ways hard to describe, inspiring debate.  Kate Blanchett was really good, her excellent self.  But what was the meaning in her reverential lap-barfing, compared to the other actors' depictions?  I wish I knew.  I did get one certain theme: the film was saying that Dylan was wrapped by his time into a miasma of world events that didn't make sense even to him.  Vietnam.  The world and Vietnam did not make sense, so it's hard to have a take on Dylan, because he was there, he wore the world on his being. 

Afterward, I thought about every American soldier, wearing these wars.  They give us purpose.  But to contemplate their meaning from the outside, to look into what sense there is in war, that leaves useless carvings in the heart.  Tripping through a universe such as it is, wondering when the soldiers will come home from Iraq, I try to imagine what songs will be written to drive their story home.  They must write their own songs.  They have no poets or prophets to guide them.  What do we have?  Like the movies, there are fantasy fictions and there are love songs.  It's hard to find a true voice.  The high will become low, and the low will be raised up.

I'm not particularly cynical this Christmas Eve, just wondering.  Hillary Clinton promised tonight the soldiers would be home in 2008.  What exactly will we do with our warriors then?  How shall we receive them, and whose voice will turn them on at night, when they are driving some desolate interstate, radio tuned to the hum of their radial tires?  At least they have Bruce Springsteen, and they do still have old Dylan.  I feel like I know Dylan, splitting apart inside when Bush says the word "oil," when the return salmon count is measurably low, when a storm snuffs through Chicago with 90 mph winds.  Dylan finally seems pretentious, but only because he avoided being carrion.

Outside the movie theatre, we found my Toyota Camry parked next to a Toyota Camry in the bright neon lights of stores open late for last-minute shoppers.  Trains moved through the movie.  Just off I-5 along the corridor of track that connected SoCal to all points north, I could hear the next train coming up through the farmland just over the freeway.  In the dark shadows beyond the glare, the northbound locomotive gathered speed for the rise into the Pacific Northwest.  Bound for Canada.

Love Notes

A man leans into the keyboard across a hazy bar

in the midsummer heat, open bar to the open street,

but close by in her world, an ancient message

shimmers, gone to the other shore.  He’s beastly

at the piano, pounding too hard on the keys,

sweat forming riverbands around the back of

his ribs, and she’s got the rhythm of freeway

upon her.  Why not go?  For days now, she’s listened

to beautiful streams, held hands cold with sorrow,

listened to them in their solitude crying out

for recognition like streetlights careening through

rain.  Fortress within her, pride, the long walk back

to the fallen car, down beside the creek.

All these memories blend and she can’t tell

whether it might be time to move on.  Always

the glittering roadway, the sense of movement,

the mosquito on her sleeve.

He’s told her no again and he’s busy leaning

into the shade of forever stock, listless. 

There should be ancient rhymes for him, weary

like the moon.  Carved out music.  He isn’t

weary, exactly, just inside history, where lovely

dark and young, she gives him her thighs.

Caffeine and Sun in the Third House

I've been reading about the benefits of caffeine, omega-3s, and sex.  Meditation is next on the list.  Thinking about the benefit of others never makes the list.  I go to astro.com to check in, and the sun is in the third house.  Be wary of give, give, give.  Don't forget to listen!  What I want is something to listen TO.  Do I set the bar too high?

I pour a glass of Fetzer merlot and think about the piano.  My fingers are actually sore from washing the dishes, something I rarely do.  The morning's paper urges me to combat obesity by walking a half hour a day, especially to work.  That way, I cut automobile emissions, too.  Truth be told, I usually walk a couple of hours a day, and I'm easy on emissions.  I tend to turn up the heat too high, and I imbibe coffee that is not always Fair Trade.  Just hanging around my house, I'm trapped into the reality of too much consumption.  I also rented the last of the Sopranos.  I guess I am proud to say that I am HD but not satellite or cable.  I get only PBS and DVD.  So I was late getting around to Tony's near-demise. 

What struck me most was AJ.  There he was, obsessed with the world at war, thinking he had to do something.  He felt relieved when his SUV went up in flames overtop a pile of dry leaves.  (Do leaves ever get dry in Jersey?  I guess global warming allows for some drought conditions.)  The useless information download was getting to him, along with a certain familial, lethal script.  That he puts a plastic bag over his head and jumps into the swimming pool is the ultimate.  We have so much in middle class America that is luxurious and could kill us.  He doesn't succeed, and continues on with Lexipro, valium, and crying jags.  A young blonde helps him, of course.  He tells his parents off, "Food isn't the answer to every problem."  But you wouldn't know that.  Even Paulie reminds us that he probably ingested too much mercury with his fish.

Back to my sun sign in the third house.  It's a good month for communication with neighbors, relatives, and business associates.  My neighbors are my coworkers; my relatives own businesses I invest in; I spend all my free time communicating with people who are intimately connected to me in a religious community.  The advice is to heighten attention toward the details of the communication with these "casual relationships."  Casual?  Like Tony Soprano, I am uniquely steeped in a reality wherein everything gets mixed together.  I made garlic mashed potatoes this weekend, and I spent much of each day in the woods.  In the morning, I drank un-Fair Trade Coffee with soy milk.  The soy was lumpy.  It's time to polish off the wine and hit the other keyboard.  Within the sun of mindful piano, I'll consult the other philosopher, the eccentric medium, me. 

Halloween Antics

I spent the day in Ashland yesterday and could have spent a fortune on costumes.  Dressing up is just the thing, almost like blogging the internet.  Somehow, we mask our features and want to be recognized, too.  When winter is at our door, we most want some aspect of our character to shine through, bring out our true colors.  Over dinner and New Belgium pints, my friend mentioned the tree outside our office window, doing its best to show off, and with that came to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins and a few dozen other poets and pints, including a night many years ago when my friend Pierre read Hopkins out loud quite well, an evening in fall in St. Louis, sometime around midnight.  You see, Halloween, death, and ritual, the making and the masking, all mix for me in this palette.  Did I say pallid bust?  No, I didn't.  Those are not the crows I mean.  I mean the Trinity County crows, their voices peppering the day, their winged dance leaving no trace.   

The morning drive to Ashland began with a black-and-white photograph and the question, "Did you know this guy?"  I have a stack of photographs of Tibetan Buddhist masters, some of them quite fierce-looking, sitting near a window on the way out the door.  "No, but I met his reincarnation.  He was a wild kid then, a kid who liked Chunky Monkey Ben and Jerry's.  Now, he's serious."  My friend, who does not believe in reincarnation, grins.  We let the subject drop and hit the road. 

On the way to Ashland, crossing Lake Shasta at Bridge Bay, we listen to the Indigo Girls, "Galileo."  Yep, I am thankful to all those who have gone before me, making Halloween a dream of lifetimes, a mask of wonder unfurling karma.  I'm going as a joker this year, in a sexy dress.  Mixed metaphor.  That's what this is.

Why I Don't Wear Pantyhose

Almost                                     naked               in my livingroom chair

                        by                    the window                               heightened by tall open

                                    fissures, glass                etched                          Venetian blinds

            rayon dress                   matching floral socks                 Mary Janes all await with

composure                nearby              (See

                        how                  lifeless              all                     this comfort can be

                                    how many hours have I given

to shaving                                 toothbrushing                                        armpits             ?)

the little Kay-tee (my uncle could not say –th)   wore patent Mary Janes

                                                at         Easter

            white socks                              once                 lacy underwear once

she ate at the table and used the directed fork

                                                then skittered into the wooded loam of

Pennsylvania

                        swamp                         country

            finding root-holes                                  of wood frogs                           mayapple

                                                umbrellas                      shading toads

            a drainage         pond                near the pig farm                       chocked with teeming

                        jellies                                        wriggling           with      tadpoles

                        because

                                                the mud

                                                                        sucked

                                                                                                off her boots

                                                                                                            with bucket in hand

barefoot

                        she navigated the known bogs

            brackish                       ooze                             up to her                       knees.